July 7, 2005

The failure of the United Nations ideal.

Yet another terrorist outrage in London will set off the usual train of events. We'll ask Who did this? How did they do it? How could any decent person do this? What can we do to prevent this in the future? Did we cause this in any way? Oh, dear!

Massive resources will be diverted to find the perpetrator. The terror alert level will be raised to dizzying chromatic heights.

And then we'll go back to waiting for the next outrage with the same followup. Basically lots of resources will chase very small groups of people who (1) desperately are in need of a horsewhipping and (2) are able to avail themselves of unlimited support from governments with too much oil revenue or are just simply depraved.

Iran, Syria, Lybia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq,[1] the Sudan, and North Korea have all been actively engaged in terror, harboring terrorists, or paying off terrorists, and all have been

  • firmly in the grip of a murderous, pig ignorant medieval theocracy;
  • hypocritically paying lip service thereto;
  • governing with fascist excess (in part) to control Gooney Bird Islam; or
  • clinging to a dynastic Stalinist joke of a government.
The problem of Islamic terror is not a police problem. Forget the FBI and Scotland Yard.

Terror is a problem of state sponsorship of murder that hides behind skilled clandestine operators able to
  • cross international borders with ease,
  • operate with impunity within immigrant populations in the West,
  • take advantage of western legal and political protections,
  • enjoy the hypocritical acquiescence of western elites, and
  • count on the unwillingness of western populations to fight for their culture.

Face it.

The United Nations is an idea whose usefulness came and went immediately. It was stillborn the moment it opened its doors with the odiferous U.S.S.R. on the Security Council with a veto. "Collective" action in Korea under the putative colors of the U.N. was possible only because of a freak lapse in tactics on the part of the Soviets, never to be repeated.

Today, grotesque governments declaim in the General Assemply upon human rights violations in the U.S. Piss ant diplomats, wafting Old Spice apres bain dabadoo, glide through U.N. Manhattan hallways.

The horror at the slaughter of WWII gave birth to the impossible dream that humans who then knew the bitter fruit of war could unite against war. The dream was, of course, the dream of all idealists whose skewed view of human nature blinded them to the futility of western nations being able to accomplish anything valuable to them by cooperating with monstrous regimes. Not that Alger Hiss, ace communist spy, advisor to President Roosevelt at Yalta, and Secretary General to the founding charter conference of the United Nations thought that the communists were monstrous, or anything.

The place to learn about bug-like regimes is on The Discovery Channel and through traditional diplomacy, not by creating expensive entities like the U.N. -- "Romper Room on the Hudson."

Dollar for dollar, Disney is more entertaining.

The U.N. needs to be scrapped and a limited-membership NATO reconstituted and directed to target outlaw regimes. Terrorist incidents need to be answered with destruction of some military or capital asset of each of the non-democratic states that support or have supported terror.

Escalating sanctions can be devised by two or three Lance Corporals over a few brewskis.

There is simply no need to prove present involvement. Past involvement will do fine, with the burden of proof being on the regime to prove non-sponsorship or that some other dirt bags are responsible for a particular incident.

The whole world is in thrall to regimes that produce no music, no science, no technology, no thinkers, and no Hostess Twinkees or Ho Hos. Their combined non-oil economic output is probably less than Lappland's antler exports.

Yet, these bastard regimes get to partake of the banquet provided by modern cultures just like crazy Uncle Jethro at Thanksgiving. The crucial difference being that Jethro contributed something of value to the family. Just what has come out of Araby in the last 200 years?

Quick. Name one thing.

When are the people of the West going to say, "Enough"?

If the answer is "Never" then a future of dhimmitude is most certainly ours.

Coming soon: legal measures to deal with terror . . . .

Notes
[1] President Bush is acting precisely correctly by ignoring the pussies in Europe and the U.N. and taking care of business in Opiumistan and Iraq. It's like a busload of lawyers at the bottom of the ocean. A damn good start.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dhimmitude: the Islamic system of governing populations conquered by jihad wars, encompassing all of the demographic, ethnic, and religious aspects of the political system. The word "dhimmitude" as a historical concept, was coined by Bat Ye'or in 1983 to describe the legal and social conditions of Jews and Christians subjected to Islamic rule. The word "dhimmitude" comes from dhimmi, an Arabic word meaning "protected". Dhimmi was the name applied by the Arab-Muslim conquerors to indigenous non-Muslim populations who surrendered by a treaty (dhimma) to Muslim domination. Islamic conquests expanded over vast territories in Africa, Europe and Asia, for over a millennium (638-1683). The Muslim empire incorporated numerous varied peoples which had their own religion, culture, language and civilization. For centuries, these indigenous, pre-Islamic peoples constituted the great majority of the population of the Islamic lands. Although these populations differed, they were ruled by the same type of laws, based on the shari'a.

This similarity, which includes also regional variations, has created a uniform civilization developed throughout the centuries by all non-Muslim indigenous people, who were vanquished by a jihad-war and governed by shari'a law. It is this civilization which is called dhimmitude. It is characterized by the different strategies developed by each dhimmi group to survive as non-Muslim entity in their Islamized countries. Dhimmitude is not exclusively concerned with Muslim history and civilization. Rather it investigates the history of those non-Muslim peoples conquered and colonized by jihad.

Dhimmitude encompasses the relationship of Muslims and non-Muslims at the theological, social, political and economical levels. It also incorporates the relationship between the numerous ethno-religious dhimmi groups and the type of mentality that they have developed out of their particular historical condition which lasted for centuries, even in some Muslim countries, till today.

Dhimmitude is an entire integrated system, based on Islamic theology. It cannot be judged from the circumstantial position of any one community, at a given time and in a given place. Dhimmitude must be appraised according to its laws and customs, irrespectively of circumstances and political contingencies.

Col. B. Bunny said...

Thank you for your thoughtful comment.

My own study of the history and theology of Islam is still superficial but I do not doubt that the experience of dhimmitude by various peoples was varied and complex. I do not know how different the experience of the dhimmi could be in different areas of conquered by Arab and Turkish muslims. No doubt a particular experience of Muslim rule would not be an exact predictor of the experience in other areas.

In fact, even on matters that apply only to the Muslim faithful, I cannot see how there can ever be much uniformity of interpretation, since, as I understand matters, the fatawa of one imam may not be contradicted by another imam. Thus, legal life under the shari’a seems doomed to remain forever at the level of Anglo Saxon justice before the advent of Norman justice and the Court of the Court of Exchequer, the Court of Common Pleas, and the King’s Bench. Norman justice supplanted the justice meted out in the manorial courts and literally became the law common to all of England. As harsh as the early common law could be, it was still a substantial improvement over the local rulings of particular lords. The Normans won substantial allegiance from the conquered Anglo Saxons because of the superiority of their legal system.

Hence, my prediction is that a study of the shari’a will show that it is highly personal, variable, and arbitrary, not subject to exhaustive commentary and analysis as is the law in England and the United States. The web sites of even prominent imams are of uniformly low quality and riven with obvious issues unanswered even now after so many hundreds of years of Muslim life.

Here is the key objection to dhimmitude -- notwithstanding the variety and complexity of the experience of the dhimmi, I think it plain that they were always in a subordinate position vis-a-vis Muslims. Ambitious dhimmi were limited in their career options. All dhimmi paid a special tax. No dhimmi could ride a horse or build a house that placed them physically above a Muslim. I strongly suspect much worse could happen at the hands of ordinary Muslims, without much chance of official redress. I will be happy to be proven wrong on this or any other point.

Robert Spencer has written that Islam has failed to deal adequately with the problem of infidels, women and slaves. In that I believe he is quite correct and I can only conclude that to be an infidel in most areas controlled by Muslims was to be in a very undesirable position indeed. No matter how you slice it, kuffar (infidels) are najis (unclean) according to universal Islamic doctrine. Considering all the things that are najis on the same level as kuffar, to be a kafir is to be in a very base condition indeed. Filth, not to put too fine a point on it.

I think Bat Ye'or has written on the Christian and Jewish depopulation in the Arab world. Once thriving communities are mere shadows of their former selves. To be a Copt in Egypt is simply to be subject to attack. (I have already reported below on the recent experience of an apostate (kafir mrutad) in Egypt which was nothing less than ghastly.)

In my opinion the dhimmi experience is to be avoided at all costs, given the present inability of Muslim countries to break free of what I can only sadly call Muslim obscurantism. If there ever were epochs where enlightened caliphs ruled Dar al-Islam, we are not living in such epoch.

The distinguishing characteristic about dhimmitude as spoken of by Bat Ye’or is that it describes the voluntary adoption of an inferior position vis-à-vis the worst manifestations of Islam today without being physically conquered by Muslims. That is an extraordinary phenomenon in the West, one likely to undermine it fatally. The lack of confidence of the West in its own glorious culture and achievements is at the root of it, probably intimately bound up with the curse of multiculturalism and moral relativism.

Given that large numbers of western elites failed ever to comprehend and admit of the swinish nature and murderous history of communism, it is not surprising to find that the same elites fail to grasp the danger posed by an equally malevolent movement represented by al-Qa’ida and its ilk.