We’ve Got Our Work Cut Out for Us

It’s hard to believe that it’s been seven years since that awful day when we all sat glued to the TV screen, watching the Twin Towers collapse into the streets of Manhattan.

Everything changed that day, or so we thought, but then somehow it mostly changed back. According to the conventional wisdom, 9-11 became an opportunity for jingoistic exploitation by the Republican Party and a pretext for “George Bush’s war”. With the help of the mainstream media, the national conversation shifted away from the Great Jihad and back to more important topics like health care, education, the minimum wage, gay marriage, etc.

The lights go dim and the music starts, and it’s easy to forget…

In previous years I’ve written memorial posts, and also about the other September 11th. This time I’d like to turn around and look ahead. I want to get an idea of where we’re going.

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Last weekend I had the privilege of traveling through the heart of Tropical Storm Hannah to visit my relatives in Delaware. On the way up I drove through the Eastern Shore of Virginia and Maryland during the torrential downpour that preceded the main body of storm. On the way back the next day I retraced my route as the center of the storm passed a few miles west over the Chesapeake Bay.

On Saturday I hunkered down with my extended family out of the wind and the rain. Mostly we were glued to the Weather Channel, but from time to time the conversation switched to politics and the current election campaign.

A word about my kin: they’re of various political persuasions, some liberal, some conservative, some middle of the road. But none of them is a political junkie like I am, and they don’t pay much attention to the Jihad.

A male relative of my generation — I’ll call him Old Fart — doesn’t care for Barack Obama, and neither does his wife. Mrs. Old Fart mentioned that she’d seen the O-man him on television, and doesn’t believe a word he says.

“So you don’t think much of Barack Hussein Obama, huh?” I asked her.

“Is ‘Hussein’ really his middle name?” she asked in astonishment.
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“Yes, indeed. Barack Hussein.”

“Is he named after his father?”

“Well, it’s from his father’s side. The Arab side of the family.”

“Are you serious?”

“Sure! You really didn’t know?”

“It’s the first I’ve heard about it.”

Old Fart joined the conversation at that point to talk about a Glenn Beck program he’d seen recently. He was scornful of what Beck had to say.

“The guy was saying something about Barack Obama being involved with Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground guy. But that’s crazy! All that stuff happened back in the sixties, when Obama was just a little kid. There’s no way he had anything to do with it.”

“Wait a minute,” I responded. “Glenn Beck is right. He’s not talking about what happened back in the sixties. Ayers was a radical back then, and he’s still a communist. He set off some bombs, went to prison, and when he came out he became a university professor like so many other commies did. That’s when Obama got to know him. They’re associated with one another; it’s well-documented.”

But Old Fart did not seem entirely convinced.

Mrs. O. F. mentioned that she had really been hoping that Hillary would get the nomination. “I’d have voted for her,” she said.

“No thank you!” I said. “She’s got the same Socialist nature as Obama; she just hides it better.”

But I seemed to lose Mrs. Old Fart at that point — I don’t think she’s familiar with the concept of Socialism, or with the Democratic Party’s devotion to it.

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The Weather Channel entered a commercial break, and a John McCain ad came on attacking Obama for his promise to raise taxes. Old Fart was dismissive: “Seems to me it was a member of the other party who was President the last time taxes were reduced.”

Not entirely true, but I let that one slide.

I said, “The Republicans say, ‘We’ll raise taxes, but not as much as the Democrats. We’ll increase government spending, but not as much as the Democrats.’”

A somewhat younger relative — an Army veteran — joined in when he heard this.

“I don’t think people would mind paying more taxes,” he said, “if only they could see the money being spent for a good reason. A health care system, for example, like they have in Europe.”

I spent a while talking to him about the fact that socialized health has been a dismal failure wherever it has been tried. I mentioned Mark Steyn’s quip that there’s a ten-month waiting period for a maternity ward bed in Canada. I talked about conditions under the National Health system in the UK. I said that as far as health care is concerned, the Europeans have been eating their seed corn for the last two generations, and have finally reached the bottom of the silo.

But my heart wasn’t really in it. I could see that I was dealing with people who had no idea what I was talking about.

Besides, the wind had finally died down, and it was time to head home.


My relatives are not stupid people. They’re regular folks, but they’re not dumb. Some are college-educated; some aren’t.

But they aren’t intellectuals, and they’re not voracious readers like Dymphna and I are. They get their political information from a quick glance at the front page of The Baltimore Sun, or from the TV — CNN and ABC News, maybe, but not from C-SPAN or the talking-head shows, and not from the internet.

Running a Counterjihad blog keeps me fairly well-informed. It also allows me to swim in an information pool with a lot of other fish that share the same environment. But it’s important to remember that this is a very small pool.

Most people have no idea about what you and I take for granted. The Koran, the hadith, the sunna, the Caliphate, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Project, the imminent Islamization of Europe, the extensive corruption of American governmental and academic institutions by Saudi money, the looming demographic disaster, the upcoming collapse of the welfare state in all Western societies — they have no idea what these issues are about. I might as well be speaking Patagonian when I bring such topics up.

The Left owns the means of communication in the West. This is why John McCain, David Cameron, Fredrik Reinfeldt, and Nicolas Sarkozy are the best we can hope for. The Gramscians control the media, so these pitiful lukewarm namby-pamby imitations of conservatives are our only choice. They’re the absolute limit when it comes to electable conservative leaders, and they fall laughably short of being good enough. The fact that they are better than Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Mona Sahlin, and Jacques Chirac is scant comfort. When the crunch comes, they’ll be scarcely more help than their leftist counterparts.

Seven years on, and nothing much has changed. Nothing can change as long as the media are in the hands of the enemy.

I first broached this theme two years ago, and there is still no way around it: without a significant Counterjihad voice in the mass media, there is almost no hope that anything substantial can be done. The entire system will simply have to collapse of its own weight. Only after it comes crashing down can change occur.

We’ve got our work cut out for us.