The Grozny Option

In a recent article entitled “The Age of Middle East Atonement”, Victor Davis Hanson analyzes Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo in order to highlight the absurdities of our government’s policies towards the Muslim Middle East.

In his address to the “Muslim World”, Mr. Obama used the classic rhetorical tactic of false equivalence. To him, the West and Islam are roughly the same — “They launch terror attacks against us, but we launched the Crusades against them.” This device places the two camps on an equal but opposite footing, and their antagonisms must thus be surmounted by deft compromises negotiated by a skilled mediator such as — surprise! — Barack Hussein Obama.

In his deconstruction of the Obama Doctrine, Dr. Hanson points out the futility of any attempt to placate Islam. The countries that refuse compromise and act in the most brutal fashion towards Muslims are those that suffer the least from Islamic terrorism:

Today, Russia and China are much harder on Muslims than is the West. (Consider Russia’s actions in Chechnya and China’s treatment of the Uighurs.) Neither country pays any attention to Muslims’ grievances, and therefore Muslims respect and fear Russia and China far more than they do the United States.

What’s more, the geopolitical positions of the West and Islam are not symmetrical. If such comparisons were not “judgmental” — and therefore off-limits — it would be easy to demonstrate that Western Civilization is superior to Islam politically, socially, culturally, and scientifically. But in our hyper-tolerant age, such distinctions are not allowed. We’re obliged to view ourselves and Muslims as basically the same, even if they do dress funny, live in hovels, treat women as chattels, and are governed by violent and corrupt despots.

But privately the world knows that Muslims are treated better in the West than Christians are in Muslim countries. That Muslims migrate to the lands of Westerners, and not vice versa.

Not only do Christians treat Muslims better than vice versa, they treat Muslims better than Muslims treat each other. Here in the West Muslims are not only free of political oppression while they engage in their customary behaviors — cousin marriage, polygamy, pederasty, and the oppression of women, just to name a few — but they do so while supported by the infidel welfare state.

No wonder they escape to the West by the millions.

So why are Muslims unhappy with us?

[The world knows that] disputes over a border between Palestinians and Israelis do not explain the unhappiness of the Arab masses, suffering from state-caused poverty and wretchedness. That American military assistance to Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Somalia, direct aid to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians, and moral condemnation of Chinese, Russian, and Balkan treatment of Muslims, coupled with a generous U.S. immigration policy, are not really cause for apology or atonement.

But for some reason, none of this VIP treatment makes Muslims grateful, friendly, or respectful to the United States, nor to any of their other host countries in the West. On the contrary, the second and third generations of Muslim immigrants are the most violent and jihad-oriented of all.

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The Chinese and the Russians are not the customary focus of Islamic terror, despite the routinely brutal treatment they deal out to their Muslim minorities when they deem it necessary.

Or are they in fact largely spared by the jihad precisely because of their ruthless strategies towards any outbreak of jihad within their borders?
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Now we’re entering territory that all well-intentioned PC-indoctrinated people recoil from in horror. The internal logic of the situation leads inexorably towards the hard questions that none of us really want to ask. After all, who wants to respond to terrorist threats in the manner of the Russians or the Chinese?

Consider what happened in Chechnya: the Russian Federation faced an Islamically-based terrorist separatist movement, and dealt with the problem by indiscriminately leveling much of Grozny, the Chechen capital.

By American logic, as described above by Victor Davis Hanson, Russia should be Islam’s Public Enemy Number One. You would expect Al Qaeda and other groups to react with repeated mass terror attacks against Russian cities, schools, and public transportation, on the model of the frequent and deadly terrorist incidents in India. By all rights there should also be high-profile attacks on Russian targets abroad.

But almost none of this occurs. Why?

Islamic terrorists are often described as deranged or insane. And one suspects that the actual shahids — the guys who drive trucks or strap on bomb belts to blow themselves up along with as many infidels as possible — must register quite high on any scale of psychological abnormality.

But there’s no evidence that the directors of these “martyrdom operations” are madmen. They are shrewd, self-serving, calculating, careful, and ruthless servants of a demonic ideology, but they are not nuts — when they see how the Russian government reacts to Islamic terrorism, they scale back their operations on Russian territory, and concentrate on places where they can continue their customary activities with relative impunity.

In other words, they prefer the soft underbelly of the West: the Muslim-placating dhimmocracies of Europe and North America. There they can plan jihad and get paid by the infidel governments while they do so. No wonder they prefer Malmö and Finsbury Park to Moscow!

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In all this we are forced to consider questions that we’d rather not ask. Even mentioning these ideas makes us into “racists” and “neo-fascists” in the eyes of those timid souls who prefer not to look at the hard choices that confront us.

So is the “Grozny Option” the only option?

Are we doomed to act like the Russians?

Do we have to choose between massive brutality and total submission, or is there another way?

A hundred years ago we might have taken a different path. If the United States had reacted forcefully to the nationalization of the Saudi oil fields — if we had re-established our commercial hegemony in the Arabian Peninsula, using military force if necessary — subsequent events might have taken a different course.

If we had not dumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the coffers of despotic Middle Eastern regimes, while demanding virtually nothing in return, then we might not be held in the same contempt that we are now.

Unfortunately, a long-established pattern is in force today, and only a dramatic and brutal turnaround will be likely to convince the Muslim world that we are anything but the biggest jizyah milk-cow that Islam has ever seen.

Europe will shortly begin a battle for its very survival, and the United States may not be that far behind. After all, if you believe what our president says, America is “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” So whatever hard options confront the Europeans will also be ours in just a few years’ time.

As Fjordman wrote earlier today:

It is pretty obvious by now that we are facing a huge structural, economic and ideological collapse throughout the entire Western world in the near future. The crash can no longer be avoided, since our so-called leaders are doing everything in their power to ensure that we will indeed crash. We need to focus on surviving this crash, on regrouping and creating the seeds for the third generation of European civilization out of the leftovers from the coming collapse. We need to think and act like colonized people because that’s in many ways what we are now. We must reclaim our own histories and destinies.

[…]

As we know from history, things that may appear unthinkable today will appear inevitable tomorrow. We will do this or we will perish.

The more unpleasant of tomorrow’s options cannot be publicly discussed because the very structure of our political discourse makes them unthinkable. I can get away with what I say here only because this is an unimportant venue with just a few thousand readers and no advertisers to bring pressure to bear.

But no one in academia, politics, or the major media can speak frankly about the choices we will have to make in just a few short years. Being honest about such topics tends to truncate one’s career, or even one’s life.

As Fjordman and El Inglés have been at pains to point out, the options we describe here aren’t what any of us want. They’re simply what will inevitably face us if we continue to punt the hard choices and pretend we can go on living the way we have for the last sixty years.

But change is on its way. It’s unavoidable, and all the attempts to postpone it will only make it more catastrophic.

And when the future gets here, the Grozny Option may well seem a bucolic utopia in comparison.