The Lies We're Told

One is amused, albeit not in a good way, by the lead letters in today's National Post (they're unavailable online, alas) averring that "Islam rejects violence."

That's a lot like saying that Justin Trudeau rejects narcissism. Meaning that in both cases, the word "rejects" would have to be replaced with "embraces" for it to be so.

Speaking of things that miss the mark by a longshot, Mark Steyn takes on the pusillanimous unanimity of politicians and media pundits who contend that violent acts of jihad are meant "to sow division," a rupture which we must do our best to resist:

When death stalks the land, make no mistake: He may look like a grim reaper, but he's really a grim sower. An entire sowing bee of experts has so decreed. Indeed, in their warnings about sowing division, our betters are so non-divided that they give off the faintly creepy whiff of fellows all reading off the same cue card helpfully biked round to them by the Central Commissar ten minutes after the "incident" occurred. 

You non-experts might think this a fairly crude sleight of hand - that concerns about "division" is a not so subtle way of suggesting that the real problem isn't guys like Salman Abedi waiting with his nail bomb at the exit to the pop concert, but divisive types like you querying whether it's prudent to keep importing more and more Islam into the western world. Well, screw you: if you disagree that the real danger here is the sowing of division, you're just sowing even more division. 

Pace The Toronto Star, I'm not sure it is "stating the obvious" to say that Monday's attack was meant to "sow division". What's going on in Britain and Europe occurs because division has already been sown. It was sown by a careless political class that insisted there could be no questioning of a reckless demographic experiment. It is being reaped, as the division-sowing pop star Morrissey has divisively noted, by the political class' hapless citizenry.

I'll give the last word here to Kevin D. Williamson, who observes re Islam, violence and the mass immigration of Muslims to the West:

The Venn-diagram overlap between the world’s Muslims and the world’s terrorists may be small, but it is not trivial, and the confrontation between the Islamic world and the West puts a cold light on areas of concern beyond political violence. In the Islamic world itself, we see a heritage of high culture and great civilizational achievements, but a great deal of it looks like Karachi at the high end and rural Yemen at the low end: violent, backward, cruel, and uninterested in progress to the extent that “progress” is synonymous with Westernization — which, multiculturalist pieties notwithstanding, it is. Even if you set aside the propensity of certain Muslim fanatics to bomb pizza shops and to name public plazas in celebration of fanatics who bomb pizza shops, there’s still a lot of real life as lived in Afghanistan or Egypt that just isn’t going to fly in Chicago. In places such as Minneapolis, we have done a fairly poor job integrating the relatively small number of Muslim immigrants we already have. 

And that is of some intense concern in light of the experiences of the many Western European metropolises that are today home to large and poorly assimilated Muslim minority populations, immigrants and the children and grandchildren of immigrants, a non-trivial number of whom are not especially interested in becoming German, Dutch, Swedish, French, or British. It is from among this population that international terrorist networks are able to recruit their local boots on the ground, maladjusted misfits and losers (for once, the president’s penchant for insults is appropriate) such as Omar Mateen and Salman Abedi and the Tsarnaev brothers. It may very well be the case that 99 out of 100 members of Muslim immigrant communities reject jihadism and Islamic supremacism, but the 100th man is Salman Abedi. If you happened to live in a city that does not have a significant, poorly assimilated Muslim minority population on the Malmö model, would you want one? Why? Maybe there is invidious prejudice in that, but that is not all there is to it. 

In the case of many terrorist incidents in the West, immigration and travel to and from Islamist hot spots abroad is a part of the equation: San Bernardino, Manchester, 9/11, Orlando, 7/7. The Trump administration is trying, in its habitually incompetent way, to take that fact into consideration, twice failing to impose travel restrictions that fall well within the president’s statutory powers under U.S. immigration law. If anything, the administration does not go far enough. Anti-terrorism considerations should be a substantial part of our public policy not only where visitors’ visas and the like are concerned, but especially in the matter of immigration. The responsibility of the American government is to the American people, as sympathetic as many of those Syrian refugees might be. We do not seem to have much of a well-developed policy on them at the moment, but the most intelligent and decent one would be seeing to it that they are reasonably well looked after — in Syria, or in one of the bordering countries.