ISIS – Progressive pundits in denial

There is a tone – supercilious, world-weary, eye-rolling – certain progressive pundits adopt when addressing what they consider to be conservative fear-mongering that quite sets my teeth on edge.

Here, for example, is a column by Scott Gilmore in the March 30 edition of Maclean’s magazine in which he scolds conservative politicians who not only express alarm at the depredations of ISIS – the murders, tortures, mass rapes, public beheadings and live burning, not to mention obliteration of the past through annihilating acts of vandalism symbolizing the erasure of the pre-Islam past – but have the effrontery to label them “existential threats.” Gilmore assigns the sole motivation of political advantage to these charged words. It does not even occur to him that political advantage and truth-telling are not mutually exclusive.

To Gilmore ISIS is no more than a collection of “desperate men” and “shabby criminals,” who are “on the run and forced to hide in distant deserts.” Such dismissive descriptions are flat-out wrong. The armed forces of many countries do not normally unite to deal with mere criminals, and ISIS, apart from a few tactical retreats, is demonstrably not hiding its light under any desert bushes as itcontinues to spread its bloody tentacles beyond Iraq and Syria under its own name and in collaboration with similarly motivated jihadist groups.

Gilmore’s bemused insouciance is therefore misplaced. And irritating. Why, he teases, more Canadians have drowned in bathtubs than have been killed by terrorists since 9/11. You see by the careless condescension of this irrelevant comparison – as if numbers were the issue (hey, more Americans die in car crashes in a single year than were killed on 9/11, so what’s the big deal?) – what I mean by tone that grates.

Islamism, in Gilmore’s opinion, is nothing to worry about. In fact, “the only thing noteworthy about these crimes is how relatively rare they have become.” He must mean rare in Canada, because deaths linked to Islamic triumphalism elsewhere in the world are high and climbing every hour. And because they are rare in Canada, he implies Islamism will never be a problem for us.

As evidence for this conclusion, Gilmore points out numerous examples in which millions of people died in genocidal massacres far exceeding the tally (so far) of Islamic State, but were no threat to Canada: Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge, Japan’s Rape of Nanking, the Holocaust, Congo and the Turkish genocide of the Armenians.

It is true that in none of those horrendous killing sprees were any Canadian civilians at risk. No Tutsi ever killed a soldier on Parliament Hill; no Turk ever plotted to blow up a VIArail train; Hitler never cajoled a single German-Canadian to ram his car into a random Canadian; the Japanese had no plans for a Rape of Saskatoon; and the Khmer Rouge, to my knowledge, did not make public threats against Canada, nor urge supporters to perform lone acts of terrorism in the name of Pol Pot.

Gilmore completely misses the point about the Islamist triumphalism that is fuelling the present madness in the Middle East. None of the examples he gave – not even Hitler – had as their objective the establishment of a world government in which non-believers must convert or be killed. In every one of his examples, the objectives of the murdering entity were specific and limited to one identifiable group the massacrists considered inferior or subversive. That is not the case with Islamism, which is expansionist, ruthless and irrational, and whose more aggressive adherents perceive all non-Muslims globally, not to mention Muslim apostates, as fair game for forced conversion, dhimmitude or death.

And therefore Islamism is an existential threat to the West in the same way that Communism was. Lenin and Stalin “only” murdered those they deemed political obstacles in their near vicinity. But their ideology’s ultimate goal was world dominion, and to that end their scattered minions – their “useful idiots” – busied themselves with a stealth jihad in western countries. Unlike Stalin’s fifth columns in the West, though, Islamism’s fifth columns are willing to do more than spy and infiltrate government institutions. They are willing to sow terror. Thus potential threats to our security walk, invisible, amongst us. Potential Islamists, vulnerable to the blandishments of recruiters here and abroad are wont to become, unlike Communists, reckless and suicidal.

Even though the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful and trustworthy, a small minority – amounting to millions worldwide, and perhaps hundreds in Canada (a number that logically must rise with increasing immigrant populations from “hot” areas), are even now falling under the spell of some seductive Internet recruiter, even now becoming convinced that they will be rewarded in Paradise, that they will find favour in Allah’s eyes for seeking opportunities to carry out acts of sabotage and murder of innocents. Polls taken after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris found a disconcerting rate of approval amongst young Muslim males in Britain, for example. I wonder what such a poll would reveal in Canada, if anyone here had the nerve to commission one.

The fact that CSIS has disrupted a number of macabre plans for mayhem, and that we have not yet suffered some dreadful incident involving mass casualties does not mean it won’t happen someday. This virulent strain of millenarian Islamism is still in its ascendant phase. From every western country, hot-headed young men and women are streaming toward the action. Some who stay home are equally hot-headed, equally imbued with this resurgent totalitarian fervour. Will we forever remain lucky and untouched by the bloodlust that rages abroad and stokes the romantic imagination of so many warrior-age young men and women at home?

What use is it for Gilmore to remind us in his piece, as he does, that the ravages committed by Tamerlane, the Mongols and the Crusaders were confined to one region, as if this should reassure us in 2015? Tamerlane and the Mongols were not ideologues, they were just territory-acquisitive thugs. They did not have the knowledge or imagination to conceive of world dominion. They are poor examples. And the Crusades were initiated, not to conquer the entire world for Christianity, but in response to specific territories conquered or in danger of conquer by Muslims. Which leads to the obvious lacuna in Gilmore’s list.

The question Gilmore should be posing to himself is: What would a historical conqueror who was a political ideologue have done in 2015? Mohammed, to be precise. What would Mohammed have done if he had the Internet at his disposal; if he had a network of acolytes installed in countries around the world, able and willing to proselytize for violent jihad; if he had sophisticated weaponry, including dirty bombs; if he had access to chemical or biological agents of destruction; if he had a recruitment pool, not of thousands or even millions but of a billion respectful listeners, out of which even one percent who caught the jihadist virus would constitute an army of fearsome proportions, able to constitute an existential threat to every country in which Muslims have settled in numbers?

Oh, but I almost forgot the most problematic weapon of all: What if Mohammed had had the advantage of a western world laying propitious terrain for its own defeat through a policy known as multiculturalism, according to which Mohammed’s decidedly non-pluralist beliefs deserved more respect and accommodation than its own beliefs (such as they were), and according to which it was considered the height of political incorrectness to link jihadist terrorism with Islam itself?

Can Gilmore honestly say that Mohammed and his followers, with all these postmodern factors in his grasp, would not pose an existential threat to Canada? And if Mohammed could have posed such a threat, why not those acting in his name today? The implicit smirk on the face of Scott Gilmore’s column is truly unseemly in the circumstances, and someday in the not too distant future may come back to haunt him.

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Prince Arthur Herald
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