04.03.06
Eurabia?
Looking into Neuhaus’ views on religion (his recent book is reviewed in the New Republic this week), I checked out First Things, and found something else, a reference to Fallaci’s recent book.
It is difficult to find a sensible way through the emerging quagmire of hatred, visible in Oriana Fallaci’s controversial, hateful and Islamophic, yet inevitably cogent book. I must denounce the coming hate-mongering on both sides, but the various quotes didn’t do much for my sympathies for the plight of these immigrants. The hate peddlers are not going to help.
This comment here from Neuhaus I find unhelpful also, but OK. Catholicism, and trumpeting Western Civilization, are not the answer, however. In a globalizing world, these situations are a challenge. I see no reason for the kind of panicked tizzy some people are getting into.
We need a way to mediate the status of Islam, neither kowtowing to intimidation, nor succumbing to kneejerk reactions that claim to analyze what they can’t analyze. A major variable, however, is the collapse of much sugary discourse about jihad. The record is being set straight, and there is no use lying about it.
Here’s a question: What happened to the Sufis? Who are they anyway? And as they slink into Eurabia (and America) on the coattails of the mullahs, what is your strategy for self-defense?
Figure this out, and you have the key to a secular moslem culture of Eurabia, able to contribute to the Enlightenment heritage, rather than fighting to destroy it.
In fact, not a single commentator from this group, save the public piety sufis, has produced a contribution to this crisis. So are they all dead? (Sufis who call themselves sufis are usually fakes). Maybe they have washed their hands of the question, off doing their tantric fun and games, or making big bucks on Wall Street. A Lot of them emigrated to the West too, the Moslem world not being a very good medium for their game. You are left with the windbag Mullahs, and tourist attraction whirling dervishes. If you want to find any you will have to assimilate.
Then you have the Gurdjieff types (actually a Christian sufi), who already at the dawn of the twentieth century was plotting the downfall of freedom, autonomy, democracy, in a de Maistrean vein, lukewarm about the abolition of slavery. Along with his sidekick Ouspensky.
Is anyone in the secular world prepared from the occult attacks on Western culture these types have in store?
So there’s one venue for ‘westerners’. Moslems wish to penetrate Europe. Westerners (and everyone else, including Moslems who have been cheated out of their own sufism) can penetrate sufism (not easy, though) and use it in reconstructed form to produce a secularized ‘Islamic Reformation’ fit for European culture. Sufis all god mystics? Bullshit.
There is an equalizer here. Sufism is dead, and sufism corrupt. You know, the founder of the San Francisco Ball was a sufi big shot, carefully hidden. So they do porno too.
They are making too much money to rock the boat.
Moslems deserve an expose of the corruptions of sufism, and all parties might learn something from that tradition for a post-religious secularism that is not so flatfooted as what we see. So come to Eurabia for your ‘sufi’ liberation.
So one way or the other we need to devise a mutually respectful, no bullshit ‘Moslem Reformation’ that might be ‘sharable’ all around.
This situation therefore, contra Neuhaus, has possibilities.
So, in any case, my advice to the Moslems of Eurabia is: Forget these idiot mullahs, and assimilate as soon as possible. You are running out of time. We can offer you a better sufism too, someday.
It is an understatement to say that the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci is controversial. In The Force of Reason, The Rage and the Pride, and other books, she exuberantly smashes the china in the shop of political correctness. Although a fierce free-thinker, she thinks the Catholic Church is the last, best hope in preventing Europe from becoming beyond retrieval the Eurabia that it largely is.
In three decades, Europe has become the home, so to speak, of 20 million Muslims. They have already rearranged the furniture and now are setting the rules for how the other residents must behave, as was evident in, among many other things, Europeans caving to Muslim outrage over those Danish cartoons. In things big and little, the newcomers make no secret of their determination to take over. It may seem a little thing, for instance, that the most popular name for a baby boy in Brussels, of all places, is Mohammed.
Fallaci reminds us of this: “In 1974 [Algerian President] Boumedienne, the man who ousted Ben Bella three years after Algerian independence, spoke before the General Assembly of the United Nations. And without circumlocutions he said: ‘One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.’ â€
I came across a commentary the other day saying that Europe and America are alike in being obsessed with the problem of immigration. It is not the same problem at all. Europe has within its borders millions of declared enemies of almost everything that has historically, culturally, and religiously defined Europe. We have millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, who, with few exceptions, want nothing more than to be participants in what they and we understand to be the American way of life. That is a very big difference.