Civilization is law. A civilization makes its own laws and
enforces them. And it views those who do not abide by those laws as lawless
savages. Who the civilized lawkeepers and who the lawless savages is a matter
of perspective.
From the perspective of our rulers, law is defined by
multilateral human rights commitments. From the perspective of their rulers,
law is defined by the Koran and allegiance to Islamic law. Both consider their
approach just and believe that their mission is to extend and universalize
their legal codes. The transnationalists believe that they can integrate
Muslims within their codes. Muslims believe that they can integrate
transnationalists within their system.
Similar alliances between Muslims and Leftists, whether in
Iran or Egypt, have always broken in favor of the Islamists. The determining
factor in those countries was ruthlessness and lower class support. In a global
struggle for our civilization, it will be demographics that will determine the
losers and winners. If Muslim immigration can shift the demographics of a
region or of our entire civilization sufficiently in favor of their creed then
freedom will be as dead as a rebellious daughter in Afghanistan.
The Clash of Civilizations is at its most essential a clash
of laws. Law is the organizing principle of a civilization. It determines who
has what powers and what rights. It structures responsibilities and penalties
to create a system that encompasses any and all possibilities that may arise
within a society. Western societies have attempted to impose their laws on
their own Muslim immigrants and on entire Muslim countries. Muslims are
attempting to impose their own laws on Western countries through violence and
demographics.
At its most naked, law is control. Those who can force
others to comply with their laws are the lawmakers. Those who cannot can be
rebels or philosophers.
Compliance with the law can be obtained through the higher
means of convincing people that it represents an ideal. It can be obtained by
convincing them that the law is in their interest. Or it can be obtained
through the lowest barbaric means of pure compulsion.
Islamic law, with its manifold punishments and its
ubiquitous brutalities, is rooted in the compulsion of force. Islam spread
through conquest and retained its grip through empire. Its seduction of
self-interest enlisted Muslim converts by sanctifying banditry and rape. The
bandits became Emirs and Caliphs, and put on airs, filling their gardens with
singing birds and their throne rooms with exotic treasures, but their power
always derived from naked force.
The instability of the Muslim world is tied to this
essential lawlessness. For all the proliferation of scholars and clerics, the
second-hand legalisms cobbled together from Jewish and Greek law, the essential
foundation of Muslim civilizations is in the drug-peddling Taliban raiders and
the Shiite militias in Iraq and Lebanon. Islamic law is a convenience that
enshrines the force of the bandit into religious law.
A Muslim regime lasts only as long as the essential tensions
in its society act to tear it apart. The Arab Spring was not a tremendous step
forward, but a repetition of the long history of the region where the final law
is the law of force.
Tethered to the law of force, the Muslim world remains
violent and unstable, and exports its bandit civilization with the same means.
It imposes its laws, whether on Afghan schoolgirls or French artists, with the
same measures that their barbaric tribal ancestors did over a thousand years
ago. All the sophistication of Islamic legalism eventually comes down to the
sharpened sword.
Western law’s universalism has a broader and narrower appeal
to self-interest than Islamic law. This is the paradox that undermines any
attempt to export it to the Muslim world. While universalism with its equality
clause appears on the surface to have broader appeal, it actually has far less
appeal, because it weakens the position of those in power while holding an
appeal only to those who are not in power.
That paradox makes Western law a “slave religion” that appeals most to
the oppressed. It holds little appeal for Muslim men who risk
losing power over their wives and daughters. It holds little appeal for
wives
who risk losing power over their daughters. It holds little appeal for
religious majorities who risk losing power over minorities. It holds
little
appeal for strong tribes and strong families who risk losing power over
weaker
tribes and families.
The problems exporting Western law also hold true for
maintaining it in areas of America, Europe, Canada and Australia that have been
overrun by Muslim immigrants. Honor killings are how Muslim men retain control
of their women and how Muslim women retain control of their daughters nullifying
the appeal of Western legal equality.
While Western law is trying to push forward, Muslim law is
working to go backward. The Arab Spring and the No Go Zones of Europe show that
when it comes to pure control, backward is more effective than forward.
The blasphemy clash is a war of laws. But those laws are
more than mere technicalities. Freedom of Speech is a means of power
redistribution. By making it possible for any idea to be expressed, this
freedom deinstitutionalizes culture and political authority. Maintaining a
monopoly on law and power is difficult when any idea can be expressed.
Blasphemy codes on the other hand are a monopolization of
ideas. Blasphemy makes Islam and the dominant form of the religion
unchallengable. It takes religion and law away from the people and assigns them
to a specialized class of interpreters and scholars. And it makes the political
system dependent on faith in the system, rather than in open government. To
believe in Islam is to believe in the Islamist politician. The outcome is not a
government of laws, but a system of faith, not faith in any divinity, but in
the power of Mohammed and his political descendants.
Mohammed represents the Divine Right of Caliphs, he cannot
be blasphemed against because he embodies the power principle that underlies
Islamic law. Without Mohammed there is no Islamic law and without Islamic law,
there is neither law nor government, only the nakedness of the existing power
struggles without the sanctification of any higher power.
The Bill of Rights can survive the complete discrediting of
Thomas Jefferson because we are not obligated to take its premises on faith.
Islamic Law cannot survive even gentle mockery of Mohammed because to question
the central figure is to destroy an entire edifice built on unquestioning
faith.
Western governments have attempted to impose their law on
Muslims by appealing to their ideals and their self-interest, and both
approaches have failed. Far more Muslims believe that they have something to
lose from universal rights than they have to gain from them. Add up every
Muslim who can look down on someone else, even if he has to do it from the
bottom rung of the ladder, and you have a compelling opposition to universal
equality.
That leaves ideals and ideals come too close to faith and it
is difficult to convert people with their own faith to your own faith. Western
systems combine the populist mysticism of democracy with rational appeals to
self-interest. Both fall flat when confronted by the denizens of medieval
societies who do not accept universalist premises, either as self-interest or
as mystic populism.
Muslim attempts to export their law into the West have
become altogether direct. America has faced the same treatment as any domestic
minority group has in the Muslim world. The gathering mobs had a very simple
message, either prosecute blasphemy or face the mob.
Obama chose to drag the Mohammed filmmaker to prison rather
than face the mob. And so Islamic law was complied with, if not openly, but as
a covert gesture that allowed both sides to save face. This has been the usual
tactic adopted by Western governments that punish blasphemy as crimes against
tolerance and social harmony.
Western countries hold on to a facade of being free nations
governed by reason and progressive politics, rather than medieval
blasphemy
laws. Muslims get to see blasphemers punished, but without the penal
system
acknowledging the Islamic law that serves as the basis for that
punishment. The
West loses its freedom while Muslims remain dissatisfied with the
outcome. Through such means the transnationalists hope to integrate
Muslim codes into their codes, but the effort is doomed from the start.
Law is control and Muslims have used violence to take
control of the process. For the last fifty years they have turned the problem
of their violence into a challenge for civilization. That challenge intensified
with the attacks of September 11 and in response the integrationists have
worked overtime to align Muslim codes with our own. They have been willing to
compromise, but Muslims have not.
The Clash of Civilizations will come down to control of
spaces, the physical spaces in which we live and the conceptual spaces that
define how we live. The nervous reaction to Muslim blasphemy laws shows the
extent to which our conceptual spaces have already been taken care of. The No
Go Zones carve out their own alien territories, imposing their systems on our
cities and the way we live.
The extent to which we maintain control of these physical
and conceptual spaces is also the extent to which we remain free.
Freedom is not always taken at the point of a gun, sometimes
it is taken at the very idea of the gun or at the economic and political
disruption that would be caused by the idea of the gun. These are the effects
that ripple through the conceptual spaces, breeding appeasement and surrender,
as the system tries to integrate the foreign element, rather than spitting it
out.
Our leaders are willing to pay almost any price to retain
the multilateral and multicultural narrative, but as individuals, as societies
and as nations, we cannot afford to lose our civil rights and our future for
the sake of their Sisyphean progressivism. The conceptual spaces that they have
imposed on us have no room for a world without multiculturalism and
multilateralism. But to survive we must break with their discredited
philosophies and their bloody cost or risk losing everything.
Law is the fundamental characteristic of a civilization. And
law must be defended. To save our civilization, we must save our laws, and
protect our territories, the physical territories of our cities, towns and
villages, and the spiritual territories of our minds and cultures. Within those
territories we must find the fortitude to defy the brute force of the lesser
law that the savage would impose on us in the name of his bandit-prophet and
his license to rule over those he can crush beneath his boots.
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