A Last Crusade

June 10, 2017 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | HISTORY, LIFE, POLITICS | 0 Comments |

"Siege of Zadar" by Andrea Vicentino

Memo to Christians from a fellow-traveller, an unbelieving, yet sympathetic on-looker:

You’re losing.

You seem to be clueless (although at least not mute at last), about the Islam-O-Nuts.

“Peace to all men” is not cutting it.

“Turning the other cheek” simply tears you a new scar.

And as George VI put it, wars can no longer be confined to the battlefield.

There’s no use warning of the dangers of schism, or pooh-poohing fights over the prophet’s succession (H. G. Wells commented: “To watch this schism creeping across the brave beginnings of Islam is like watching a case of softening of the brain.”*) (You went through something akin to that too, remember? And only struck a peace deal after a whole lot of war.)

Lambs to the slaughter (Image from the Peoples' Crusade by Jean Colombe)

Lambs to the slaughter (Image from the Peoples’ Crusade by Jean Colombe)

Thanks to goodly impulses of good people, the bien pensants, the enemy is ours (rather, are us). The barbarians are in the gate; when we look into our children’s eyes, there lurks medieval nihilism. Irrespective of whether the parents were dragged-up here or dragged themselves in.

Bad apples mean that you have to shake the whole barrel.  So you can forget curbs on immigration, # I’ll Ride With You, snipping the Golden Thread, 2 minute hates, “de-radicalisation” programmes, outreach, and junkets to the holy lands by Yassmin Abdel-Magied.

Forget your targeted lists. This isn’t Minority Report. How can you touch such people before they strike, or get at them after they’ve expired, in their welter of glory? How can you talk about a new Reformation of Islam, when “whatever man was vigorous and unscrupulous enough to snatch and hold the Caliphate…subject to revolts and assassinations, its final law has been that man’s will“**?

You’d best come up with something else, something that works, and soon. Hand-wringing will not do.

Or else they’re could be an extra-judicial solution. Someone, some Body, might decide that 6 civilians = 6 Imams, with their families. And it will escalate from there, if we’re not careful. It’ll be another Battle of Lepanto on dry land, and someone might start at the top and carve downwards. And no one wants to go there. It is bad luck to slice to the bottom of the barrel.

[H.G.Wells, The Outline of History (1920) *p. 617; **p.618.]
Battle of Lepanto (1571) (courtesy Fondazione Cariplo)

Battle of Lepanto (1571) (courtesy Fondazione Cariplo)

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