Tag: Clash of Civilizations

An existential threat

Christianity is being eradicated from the Middle East.

From 1910 to 2010, the number of Christians in the Middle East — in countries like Egypt, Israel, Palestine and Jordan — continued to decline; once 14 percent of the population, Christians now make up roughly 4 percent. (In Iran and Turkey, they’re all but gone.) In Lebanon, the only country in the region where Christians hold significant political power, their numbers have shrunk over the past century, to 34 percent from 78 percent of the population. Low birthrates have contributed to this decline, as well as hostile political environments and economic crisis. Fear is also a driver. The rise of extremist groups, as well as the perception that their communities are vanishing, causes people to leave.

For more than a decade, extremists have targeted Christians and other minorities, who often serve as stand-ins for the West. This was especially true in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, which caused hundreds of thousands to flee. ‘‘Since 2003, we’ve lost priests, bishops and more than 60 churches were bombed,’’ Bashar Warda, the Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Erbil, said. With the fall of Saddam Hussein, Christians began to leave Iraq in large numbers, and the population shrank to less than 500,000 today from as many as 1.5 million in 2003.

The Arab Spring only made things worse. As dictators like Mubarak in Egypt and Qaddafi in Libya were toppled, their longstanding protection of minorities also ended. Now, ISIS is looking to eradicate Christians and other minorities altogether. The group twists the early history of Christians in the region — their subjugation by the sword — to legitimize its millenarian enterprise. Recently, ISIS posted videos delineating the second-class status of Christians in the caliphate. Those unwilling to pay the jizya tax or to convert would be destroyed, the narrator warned, as the videos culminated in the now-­infamous scenes of Egyptian and Ethiopian Christians in Libya being marched onto the beach and beheaded, their blood running into the surf.

The future of Christianity in the region of its birth is now uncertain. ‘‘How much longer can we flee before we and other minorities become a story in a history book?’’ says Nuri Kino, a journalist and founder of the advocacy group Demand for Action. According to a Pew study, more Christians are now faced with religious persecution than at any time since their early history. ‘‘ISIL has put a spotlight on the issue,’’ says Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives, whose parents are from the region and who advocates on behalf of Eastern Christians. ‘‘Christianity is under an existential threat.’’

I expect it won’t be long before the West will return the favor. If you think the mass immigration of the last fifty years can’t be turned around, remember that in Spain, the Ummayads reigned for 700 years before they were driven out. History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes, and the same patterns play over and over and over.

But this is not the end of Christianity in the Middle East. It may only be four percent of the population there now, but there was a time when it was only 11 men. The river of the blood of the martyrs is running high right now, and this is neither the first time nor the last time that has happened. It wasn’t all that long ago that Christianity was supposedly dead in Russia, after all.

Anti-Confederate, pro-Islamic State

Walmart endorses ISIS:

Given the many national chains that stopped selling confederate flags after the Charleston, South Carolina, church massacre, Chuck Netzhammer couldn’t have been too surprised that Walmart denied his request to create a cake bearing the image of the confederate flag.

But a day later, Netzhammer decided to put the store’s convictions to the test.

He said he submitted another cake request to the Walmart in Slidell, Louisiana, on Friday — this time with the Islamic State flag on top.

Surely a no-no for Walmart, yes?

Nope.

To Netzhammer’s shock, Walmart put together the cake with the Islamic State flag.

The USA is obviously well into the “decline” part of “decline-and-fall”.

UPDATE: Walmart regrets being caught out and YouTube tries to help them cover it up:

“Our talented bakery associates take pride in what they create for our customers. It’s unfortunate one customer thought to take advantage of an associate who did not know the flag and its meaning,” said John Forrest Ales, a spokesman for Walmart. “This cake should not have been made, and we apologize for the mistake.”

At 10:15 p.m. ET Monday, the video was removed from YouTube with the statement, “This video has been removed as a violation of YouTube’s policy against spam, scams, and commercially deceptive content.”

Diversity in action

I wonder what Apple and Walmart and Amazon will ban in response to this murderous attack:

A man has been decapitated and dozens more injured at a gas product factory in France by terrorists carrying Islamist banners.

The attack took place at the headquarters of the American owned Air Products, in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, near the city of Lyon, in the south east of the country.

The murder is believed to have been accompanied by several explosions on the site cause by a terrorist igniting small ‘gas bombs’ that injured dozens of factory workers. It is believed the explosions may have intended to blow up the entire factory site but failed.

The murdered man’s head is understood to have been found 30 feet away from his body, hanging on the factory’s fence. The dead man’s head was covered in Arabic ‘inscriptions’ before being placed on the fence, according to local journalists at the scene.

Maybe if the French were nicer to them, they would stop beheading people. And remember, although all white people are responsible for Dylann Roof’s actions, no one should mistakenly blame anyone else besides the actual beheader at Saint-Quentin-Fallavier.

Remember, the positive effects of diversity in communities are well-documented. If
France is to continue to grow and prosper, the French must make it a
more inclusive place.

UPDATE: 27 tourists killed in Tunisia hotel attacks:

Gunmen have killed at least 27 people in an attack on two tourist hotels in a Tunisian town popular with British holidaymakers. Tourists fled from the beach in Sousse to take refuge in hotel rooms after guns were fired on the beach. One man said his son saw someone get shot as he raced back to the hotel from the sea. Photographs seen by Sky News show one man in his 60s or 70s lying in a pool of blood in his swimming shorts.

Obviously Tunisia lacked diversity. If only they had been more inclusive, none of this would have happened.

Prediction: collapse by 2040

I think the collapse will begin seven years sooner, myself:

New scientific models supported by the British government’s Foreign Office show that if we don’t change course, in less than three decades industrial civilisation will essentially collapse due to catastrophic food shortages, triggered by a combination of climate change, water scarcity, energy crisis, and political instability.

Before you panic, the good news is that the scientists behind the model don’t believe it’s predictive. The model does not account for the reality that people will react to escalating crises by changing behavior and policies.

But even so, it’s a sobering wake-up call, which shows that business-as-usual guarantees the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it: our current way of life is not sustainable.

“The financial and economic system is exposed to catastrophic short-term risks that the system cannot address in its current form,” Dr. Jones told us.

He described GRO’s use of the Agent-Based Model to capture and simulate the multiple factors that led to the 2011 Arab Spring events.

By successfully modeling the “impact of climate-induced drought on crop failures and the ensuing impact on food prices,” he said, the model can then be recalibrated to “experiment with different scenarios.”

    “We ran the model forward to the year 2040, along a business-as-usual trajectory based on ‘do-nothing’ trends?—?that is, without any feedback loops that would change the underlying trend. The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots. In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption.”

Another steering committee member raised their hand: “So is this going to happen? Is this a forecast?”

“No,” said Jones. “This scenario is based on simply running the model forward. The model is a short-term model. It’s not designed to run this long, as in the real world, trends are always likely to change, whether for better or worse.”

“Okay, but what you’re saying is that if there is no change in current trends, then this is the outcome?” continued the questioner.

Jones nodded with a half-smile. “Yes,” he said quietly.

In other words, simply running the Agent-Based Model forward cannot generate a reliable forecast of the future. For instance, no one anticipated the pace at which solar and wind energy would become cost-competitive with fossil fuels. And the fact that governments and insurers are now beginning to scope such risks, and explore ways of responding, shows how growing awareness of the risks has the potential to trigger change.

Whether that change is big enough to avoid or mitigate the worst is another question. Either way, the model does prove in no uncertain terms that present-day policies are utterly bankrupt.

The two main factors being left out of the equation are mass migration and war, which are essentially the same thing, the latter being a consequence of the former. As Martin van Creveld has repeatedly observed, we are in a post-Trinitarian War environment; neither the Military nor the State is relevant any more. War is no longer State vs State, but Tribe vs Tribe.

These Tribes can be based on ideology, nationality, race, or religion, or any combination therein. They are identity-tribes. The Islamic State is an amalgamation of ideology and religion whereas the Charleston shootings were purely based on race. This is not asymmetric war as it is conventionally understood, but transgeographical, post-Trinitarian identitarian war. Battlefields, lines, and even armies are irrelevant in this new form of warfare, as the identity tribes to which the soldiers are loyal are more self-defined than externally bestowed.

But the fact that the current system of industrial civilization cannot be expected to survive as it is past 2040 is not insignificant. Yes, people will change their behavior in expectation of it, but if history is a reliable guide, most of those changes will increase the instability of the system, not decrease it.

It would be more efficient

It’s a sad day when the parodies are more sensible than the actual policies:

Recognizing the need for a new strategy to fight ISIS, the Pentagon announced today that it would no longer supply the Iraqi Army with American vehicles, artillery and rifles, and instead would supply materiel directly to ISIS.

CENTCOM spokesman Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder says the idea “would be a game changer.”

The plan has its roots in Army Capt. Noel Abelove’s PowerPoint briefing, which was hailed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sources said. Abelove, a supply officer on the Joint Logistics Staff (J-4), realized that cutting out the Iraqi Army middlemen had numerous advantages.

“They taught me at West Point that ‘amateurs talk strategy but professionals talk logistics,’” Abelove told reporters. “The most important advantage is, we only supply about 40 percent of each ISIS requisition.”

Abelove continued: “Before, when we gave the [Iraqi] Army 100 percent, then we had to fly strike missions to destroy a lot of it a week or two later. This way we immediately degrade ISIS by over 60 percent, without having to use our increasingly scarce missiles and JDAMs, and more importantly, without having to put any airmen into harm’s way.”

Other sources indicate that supplying ISIS also reduces the risk of sensitive equipment being passed to Iran by Shiite commanders in the Iraqi Army, or being sold on Craigslist.

“A lot of these guys were piling a lot of cash into banks in Qatar and the Caymans,” according to an analyst who requested anonymity. “Well, screw that. ISIS will literally burn anyone selling our gear.”

Counterinsurgency is difficult enough in the best of circumstances. But it’s even harder when you’re stupid. And that’s the best case scenario. Worst case, “my Muslim faith” wasn’t the inadvertent slip of the tongue everyone, including the interviewer who had to catch and correct him, assumed it to have been.

The first to die

But it is very unlikely that Keith Broomfield will be the last American to die fighting the neo-caliphate of the Islamic State:

Hundreds of people turned up in the Kurdish town of Kobani to bid farewell to Keith Broomfield before his body was handed over to family at the Mursitpinar gate, said Idriss Naasan.

Broomfield, from Massachusetts, died on June 3 in battle in a Syrian village near Kobani, making him likely the first U.S. citizen to die fighting alongside Kurds against the Islamic State group.

He had joined the People’s Protection Units known as the YPG on Feb. 24 under the nom de guerre Gelhat Rumet. The YPG are the main Kurdish guerrilla battling the Islamic State group in Syria.

It wasn’t even two years ago when the usual anklebiters were scoffing at the idea of a revived caliphate. And yet, an American has already died fighting it.

No reason to react

There are more reports of ISIS atrocities in Syria:

Islamic State militants have executed at least 400 mostly women and children in Syria’s ancient city of Palmyra. Eye-witnesses have reported the streets are strewn with bodies – the latest victims of the Islamic State’s unrelenting savagery – on the same day photographs of captured Syrian soldiers have emerged.

It follows the killing of nearly 300 pro-government troops two days after they captured the city, now symbolised by a black ISIS flag flying above an ancient citadel.

However, keep in mind that false reports of atrocities have been used to whip up support for war for centuries. That doesn’t mean the reports are inaccurate, particularly in the electronic age when it’s easier to document events, but it’s important not to rush to judgment.

In my opinion, there is no reason to even contemplate military intervention in the Islamic world as long as Muslims reside in the West. This is the third great wave of Islamic expansion of a form that long predates the Westphalian system of nation-states and any policy that is based on Westphalian or post-Westphalian principles is bound to fail. Remember, a significant percentage of Muslims in the West openly sympathize with ISIS, and perhaps more importantly, it was Western governments that made the Caliphate possible:

A declassified secret US government document obtained by the conservative public interest law firm Judicial Watch, shows that Western governments deliberately allied with al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups to topple Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad. The document reveals that in coordination with the Gulf states and Turkey, the West intentionally sponsored violent Islamist groups to destabilize Assad, and that these “supporting powers” desired the emergence of a “Salafist Principality” in Syria to “isolate the Syrian regime.”

Yet another strike against the principle of foreign intervention. The devil you don’t know is often considerably worse than the one you are trying to cast out.

ISIS in America

It seems unlikely that the Texas attack will be the last one. ISIS sends a remarkably specific warning:

We have 71 trained soldiers in 15 different states ready at our word to attack any target we desire. Out of the 71 trained soldiers 23 have signed up for missions like Sunday, We are increasing in number bithnillah. Of the 15 states, 5 we will name… Virginia, Maryland, Illinois, California, and Michigan. The disbelievers who shot our brothers think that you killed someone untrained, nay, they gave you their bodies in plain view because we were watching.

The next six months will be interesting, To our Amir Al Mu’mineen make dua for us and continue your reign, May Allah enoble your face.

Then again, I would have thought they would have more trained soldiers than the Evil Legion of Evil.

Breed to win

The Palestinians understand this. The Israelis understand this. The future belongs to those who show up for it.:

Conservatives, it is not enough to merely produce children or, as so many do, adopt those already here. We must nurture them and teach them properly because liberal society is determined to corrupt them and convert them into eager drones for the Borg Collective that is progressivism. Fight back. If you are religious, teach your children about God. If not, teach them to respect and understand those who are. Teach them about our country and our history – there’s no better way to demonstrate to them, as opposed to indoctrinate them, why America deserves their patriotism….

And teach your kids skills that will help them survive. Teach them to fight, and to shoot. Teach them to be steadfast in the defense of their rights, and to stand up for those being oppressed. My kids have a standing offer – if their school suspends them for justifiably punching a bully they get taken out for ice cream. And demand that your school teaches your kids properly – as Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds often says, sending your kids to public schools is almost parental malpractice.

It’s not “almost parental malpractice” it is parental malpractice. Have at least three children, four is better. Homeschool them. Teach them to anticipate being attacked for who and what they are. Teach them to have pride in who and what they are. Teach them to serve God first and fear God only. Teach them to love the truth and hate the lie.

And don’t live in fear yourself. Don’t fear divorce and the stacked deck. Giving up what you fear potentially losing means you have already lost. Your odds are not the general odds.

War doesn’t care whether you are fighting it or not. You are caught up in the cultural war whether you want to be or not. The only question is if you are an armed soldier or a helpless civilian.

A note to pro-immigrationists

Do you really want this in the West? Because this is exactly what you are enthusiastically importing everywhere from Spain to the USA. And for those of you of the SJW persuation, notice that there isn’t a single straight white male body among them. Who do you think will die first, well-armed white men willing to fight or unarmed liberals in gun-free zones at universities?

“The terrorists raided the university early on Thursday morning…. A total of 148 people were killed in the six-hour siege, with the gunmen
shooting and beheading those who could not recite the Koran.”