Westminster Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down...

Another Moslem terrorist plot, this one successful, unfolded in London a few days ago.  Adrian Elms became Khalid Masood and, as in so very many cases when a Christopher turns into an Abdullah, decided he hated the West, the Jews, the gays, the liberated women, and so forth... - and that they deserved to die... - and he was going to make it happen.  (That rather contrasts with converts to Buddhism simply shaving off their heads and changing their diet, converts to Hare Krishna going around banging on bongs, and converts to Judaism getting a separate set of crockery for meat and milk dishes.)  Such attacks are intercepted and thwarted by the dozen all over Europe and the West every single week.  They are so commonplace that they are not even being given much airtime or attention anymore.

What transpired in London, then, was not overly surprising.  Nor were the exhaustingly predictable and risible public reactions that followed.  The inane Twitter hashtags, the imbecilic heart-shaped hand gestures, the facile slogans, the insipid props (flowers, candles, and teddybears)...  If that does not petrify the dime-a-dozen Johhny B. Jihadis lurking and scheming all over Britain and the West, or alternatively convince them of the error of their ways, then surely nothing will.  The crowd of saps in London's main square was conspicuously devoid of more than a handful of Moslems, in extremely stark contrast to the tens of thousands of them who come out every few weeks to rage about something or other in "Palestine."  Indeed, more Moslems turn out to flag-burning events than were present at the laughable wake in Trafalgar Square.

Also inevitable were the vacuous protestations about how London had survived the Nazi onslaught so these ragtag terrorists did not have a chance.  The folktales of London's stoic endurance of the Blitz bombings are unfailingly trotted out every time some misfortune befalls London, be it a terrorist outrage such as this or when a bunch of avaricious subway or railroad workers decide to hold millions of passengers for ransom in order to bilk out a few extra thousand pounds on top of their already ludicrously inflated salaries.  A high-profile British newscaster went on a defiant rant on the theme, highlighting London's defeat of the German airforce.  What neither he nor anyone else regurgitating this jaded trope mentioned were a few facts that should be pertinent when attempting to draw analogies.  For one thing, Britain did not defeat the Nazis by holding fatuous candle-lit vigils; rather, it sent manpower and firepower the Nazis' way.  Britain also identified the Nazis as the enemy rather than as some indeterminate aberration that had no connection to anything else happening in the world at the time.  Winston Churchill made no assertions that the Luftwaffe was "not really German" or that it was no better or worse than any other old airforce.  Nor did Britain allow millions of Germans to roam around the country freely--despite serous double-digit percentage of them having unambiguous Nazi sympathies*--and besmirch those who objected as "racists."  Londoners did not elect a Nazi mayor who proceeded to lecture them how being bombed to kingdom come by his fellow travelers was normal: "part and parcel" of living there.  Analogies are very useful, both scholastically and rhetorically, but they need to be accurate.  The London of the early 1940s bears little resemblance by any criterion to the London of 2017.

Meanwhile, the explanation for Adrian-cum-Khalid's terrorist atrocity?  Yep, you guessed it: "racism."  The lunacy marches on.

* For those tempted to reel off the usual canards about Islam being a religion of peace and "the overwhelming majority of Moslems are tolerant," etc., a few home truths would not go amiss.  Firstly this,

Secondly: More granular statistics are just as unequivocal and even more damning.  This site lists a comprehensive overview of the research done into the Moslems' views and attitudes, but some of the highlights include:

• 25% British Muslims say 7/7 bombings were justified.
• 35% of young Muslims in Britain believe suicide bombings are justified.
• 25% of young Muslims in Britain (and 20% overall) sympathize with those who fight for ISIS.
• 66% of Muslims in Britain would not report terror plot to police.
• 48% of British Muslims would not report a person "linked to terror."
• 18% of British Muslims would be proud or indifferent if a family member joined al-Qaeda.
• 1-1/2 Million (30%) British Muslims support the Islamic State.
• 36% of British Muslim students believe anyone who leaves Islam should be killed.
• 78% of British Muslims support punishing the publishers of Muhammad cartoons.
• Hardcore Islamists comprise 9% of Britain's Muslim population, another 29% would "aggressively defend" Islam.
• 11% of British Muslims find violence for religious or political ends acceptable.
• Following the Charlie Hebdo attacks, 27% of British Muslims openly support violence against cartoonists.
• 40% of British Muslims want Sharia in the UK; 23% support the introduction of Sharia in the UK "instead of British Law."
• 28% of British Muslims want Britain to be an Islamic state.
• 68% of British Muslims support the arrest and prosecution of anyone who insults Islam.
• 21% of British Muslims decline to condemn stoning adulterers (5% openly support them).
• 1 in 3 Muslims in the UK strongly agree that a wife should be forced to obey her husband's bidding.
• 10% British Muslims support killing a family member over "dishonor."
• 20% young British Muslims agree that "honor" violence is acceptable.
• Only 34% of British Muslims believe the Holocaust ever happened.
• 51% of British Muslims believe a woman cannot marry a non-Muslim; Only 51% believe a Muslim woman may marry without a guardian's consent.
• Up to 52% of British Muslims believe a Muslim man is entitled to up to four wives.
• 61% of British Muslims want homosexuality punished.
• 62% of British Muslims do not believe in the protection of free speech.
• 58% of British Muslims believe insulting Islam should result in criminal prosecution.
• 11% of British Muslims find violence for political ends acceptable.
• 18% of British Muslims believe homosexuality should remain legal.

The figures are as bad or even worse in other parts of the West, not to mention the rest of the world.  Surely these data are strongly indicative that "Houston, we have a problem."  One wonders in bewilderment what purpose it serves to studiously ignore these figures and/or denounce those who publicize them while persistently promoting diametrically opposite claims.  Yes, if 30% of British Moslems support the Islamic State, it (probably) means up to 70% of them do not.  Is that cause for jubilation though?  Firstly, a million and a half British Moslems think there is nothing wrong with walking up to a stranger kneeling on the floor, grabbing a fistful of their hair, and slowly slicing off their head with a kitchen knife.  Let that sink in.  Secondly, it is worth recalling that only up to 18% of the Germans were members of the National-Socialist (Nazi) Party, and very, very few of those 18% were actually pulling triggers on machine guns or levers in concentration camps.  What difference did the 82%+ non-Nazi Germans make and was their culpability for the Nazi atrocities any less?  The answers are surely in the negative.  Yet, the threat of Moslem terrorism, arguably more potent and much more long-lasting than that of Nazism, is approached with almost no strategy or resolution of the mindset.

Indeed, the British interior ministry announced early February that it would be essaying to "address the threats of 'far-right and extreme right-wing narratives.'"  Yes.  Really.  Though tempting to view such pronouncements as hailing from a parallel universe, they conform perfectly to the prognostications many, including the present author, made a while back, scilicet, that repeated terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Moslems will be countered by increased prosecution against general, abstruse "extremism."  "Extremism," like "hate speech," is an amorphous, subjective notion and by its very nature eludes objective definition.  As such, it is simply begging for misuse and abuse by those in power.  As is already happening, "Islamophobia" (defined as anything ranging from throwing some bacon rashers at a mosque to publishing data such as those above) incurs as astringent legal prosecution and sanction as acts of terror by Moslems.  The Canadian parliament just passed a motion condemning, exclusively, criticism of Islam.  "Extremism" is beginning to receive similar treatment.  The "racism" label has been overused to the point that it has lost much of its potency whereas "hate speech" is not catching on, at least in America where the First Amendment is too inextricably ingrained in the citizens' psyche to be watered down by such an alien concept.  Cue "extremism."  The only "acceptable"--which is another increasingly normalized purely subjective criterion whereby to judge speech and behavior, including in semi-legal contexts--response to the savagery, destruction, genocides, humiliation, and misery wrought by Moslem terrorists will be otiose public piety and virtue signaling.  Such displays must invoke "tolerance," "respect," "coexistence," and all the other vapid, make-feelgood buzzwords so beloved of the peddlers of the politically-correct multiculturalist credo who, invariably, live detached and removed from the areas where that credo has been put into practice in the earnest.  In their environs of leafy suburbs and safe-space campus echo-chambers, "racism" and "global warming" are the biggest problems in the world, Moslems are the biggest victims of injustice including "discrimination," "lone-wolf" terrorism is not connected to any ideology--least of all Islam--and is a product of mental disorder, and--for a great many of them--the Islamic State are "really" Israeli secret service agents and 9/11 was an "inside job."  As bizarre as such a platform is, it is espoused by all "mainstream" politicians, regardless of their supposed factional stripes.  Those who endeavor to follow a different path--such as President Trump, Geert Wilders, Viktor Orban, Marine le Pen--are vilified and demonized, and, if they are fortunate, only their characters are assassinated.  The "little folks" are treated the same: Those who dissent from the "acceptable" narrative are banned from the social media, doxed and hounded by assorted professional "activists" and the media, arrested in dawn raids, fired from their jobs, fined, and jailed.

As the crescendo of Moslem terrorism intensifies, so will those tactics by the authorities.  Eventually though, as more and more people get groomed (q.v. Rotherham, England) and raped, deliberately run over by a truck or a car, hacked up with an ax or a machete, executed in a restaurant or a theater, gunned down on a train, blown up on a plane, there will come a straw that breaks the camel's back.  When it does, all the "narratives" and normative imperatives and laws and treaties and crowds with candles will go out the proverbial window.  It is often said that every few generations need to experience a good old-fashioned bloody war in order to appreciate peace.  Perhaps this will be the West's next war...

© 2017 Michael L.S.

UPDATED: Five Minutes to Midnight

This entry is being written as the results of the U.S. Presidential election are streaming in.  It certainly promises to be a roller-coaster ride, just as the entire year leading up to the election has been.  In reality, the outcome of the election is not as important as it is made out to be.  If Mr. Trump wins, many of his grand plans will be severely stymied by the Congress, even if both the House and the Senate emerge Republican-controlled.  If Secretary Clinton prevails, she will encounter similar obstacles.

The election is but an exiguous piece in a much larger puzzle, which concerns the survival of the Western civilization.  Europe, Canada, and Australia--and, if Clinton has her way, America, too--are being inundated with millions of migrants.  Carefully vetted immigration is to be encouraged and, indeed, it is precisely on the talents, diligence, and sheer numbers of immigrants that the Western civilization emerged to be dominant and prosperous.  However, it hardly requires much divination or analysis to understand that permitting the importation, wholesale, of millions of individuals who live and breathe tribalism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism, nepotism, polygamy, and other habits that the West abjured eons ago will end in conflict.  Certainly, some of those migrants will renounce their cultural values and nomos, and they will do so of their own accord and--lamentably--contrary to the exhortations of the assorted bien-pensants in the West.  The latter still persist in their preposterous belief that all cultures are equally valid or, worse, that the Western values should defer to minority norms in the name of "diversity."  These days, one observes, everything is relativized and open to debate; every absolute of old must be challenged.  While it is assuredly laudable to question and to doubt, leering to the extreme of discarding everything once cherished is foolhardy and outright foolish.  Rule of law is better that authoritarian caprice.  Equality of the sexes is better than institutionalized misogyny.  Democracy is better than autocracy.  Separation of church and state is better than theocracy.  Ultimately, individualism (including individual human rights) is better than collectivism.  Therefore, the prevailing precepts upon which the Western civilization rests are better than those practiced in, say, the Near East: be it Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iran or Yemen or the supposedly more enlightened Lebanon, Morocco or Malaysia.

While some migrants, accordingly, will embrace the liberal democratic values of their new host states, many will not.  Those who do not will do one or both of two things: Withdraw to their self-imposed ghettos and procreate or bomb and shoot up the rest of the population.  Even if they do merely the former, they will only do so until their numbers grow sufficiently to engage in the civil unrest that inevitably arises with ghettoization.  In either case, civil strife is unavoidable.

Once that societal upheaval materializes, two scenarios can come to pass.  A section of the population (commonly derided as "nationalist" by the soi-disant opinion-formers) may decide to proverbially take matters into its own hands.  The people being insulted for wearing certain apparel, harassed for drinking alcohol, assaulted, attacked and killed may well reason that they can no longer rely on the authorities to protect them and so resolve to do so themselves.  The authorities, such as there are and will be, may accept that, without resolute measures aimed at filtering out the destabilizing elements in the society, said society faces an imminent collapse, and they may or may not assist the popular uprising.  Alternatively, the governments may use the societal instability as a pretext for arrogating to themselves enormous powers, such as not seen in decades, even centuries.  Such governments--bigger and stronger than for many a generation--would ineluctably engage in blanket repression of the general population, migrant and nonmigrant, under the guise of restoring and maintaining public order and security.  Put simply, what today happens at airport "security" would be extended to almost every facet of life.  One needs to be only a casual student of history to know that suppression of dissent can successfully last for only a limited time before the population revolts.  That would in turn trigger the first course of events detailed earlier.

The upshot of the foregoing is that, unless the migrant invasion of the West is not stanched immediately, the question of war is going to be a matter of when rather than if.  Whatever the corollary of that war, it would shake the Western world to its core and undoubtedly abrogate the West's cultural, political, economic, military, and other dominance.  While some elements in the West--particularly among the elites--may exult at such a possibility, they would do well to reflect on whether they would rather live in Pakistan, Venezuela, Congo or Laos than in their comfortable ivory towers in the West.

This being an international law platform, it behooves to examine the role legislation and jurisprudence might play in the above context.  The answer is: enormous.  International law pertaining to refugees and human rights is hopelessly anachronistic.  It was designed decades ago and was not envisioned to cater for scenarios such as the one unfolding in the United States and in Europe at this time.  The laws on the books were passed in order to protect the most vulnerable, destitute people fleeing for their very lives: women, children, and the elderly escaping by the skin of their teeth an almost certain death and ensconcing themselves, mostly temporarily, in the nearest shelter they could find.  Those laws did not foresee millions of healthy young men storming national borders thousands of miles from their domiciles because they heard welfare and other freebies would be doled out there.  Nor were those laws meant to provide for the fact that a fair many of the said millions would endeavor to change their new host lands into the image of the decrepit third-world despotisms and theocracies whence they came.

With that in mind, it is high time for alterations of the relevant laws to be effected without delay.  The most salient and pressing of these are:

• The refugee law has to be clear that an asylum application lodged anywhere other than the nearest safe state to the asylee's will be automatically denied and followed with an immediate deportation.  That means that e.g. an Afghan can only hope to receive asylum in Pakistan, Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan, but not Sweden, Germany or even Turkey.  An Eritrean--insofar as Eritrea can be deemed unsafe at all--can get asylum only in Djibouti, Ethiopia or Sudan, not in Italy, Greece or England.  In practice, since the European Union does not border any state that can be considered unsafe, all asylum applications made in an E.U. member should be ipso facto rejected, with extreme prejudice.  The same applies to the U.S.
• Dovetailing off the previous point, deportations of failed asylum seekers have to be rendered at the time the refusal is issued.  There should certainly be an appeals process--except when the rejection is based on the grounds from the first point--but it cannot be dragged out for months and years, all the while allowing the asylee to roam around at will.
• Human rights cannot be invoked by a failed asylee as a means of circumventing the refugee law and stay in the host country.  It very frequently happens that someone whose asylum claim has been rejected then launches a suit preventing his or her deportation on the basis that, say, they already formed a family in the host state or that, though their life might not be in danger in their home state, they might nonetheless get arrested there and wind up in a prison without a T.V. and Xbox in the cell.
• Technicalities must likewise not preclude the operation of the law, the foremost of which is an asylee lacking identity documents or a failed asylee's home state refusing to accept them.  Those two arguments thwart both processing of asylum applications as well as deportations in alarming numbers of cases.  States that refuse to admit failed asylees have to be subjected to extreme pressure, including economic and other sanctions, with a view to making them amend their ways.
• Similarly to the preceding point, political correctness must not be permitted to impede investigations into the validity of asylum claims.  An asylee professing to be underage (which attracts more lenient treatment as well as conferral of more generous entitlements) has to undergo whatever tests are necessary to ascertain the veracity of his or her claim regarding age.  It is unforgivable that, as recently reported, 29-year-olds are admitted into a country as "child refugees" because conducting examinations into their age would be "intrusive" and breach their "right" to "privacy."  Similarly, those not in possession of identity documents must be interviewed and interrogated, with skepticism and at length, to determine where it is they come from.  Making false claims about one's background has to be disincentivized.
• While their claims are being processed, asylees must be housed in secure accommodations.  They cannot be allowed to wander around the country (or, indeed, the whole Schengen area) together with their flashy sneakers and latest smartphones, all the while being in receipt of hundreds of dollars of monthly maintenance.  Further, those accommodations have to conform to the domestic legal standards, meaning that incidents such as that reported recently in Denmark, where an asylee was allowed to live as a married couple with his underage "wife," must not occur.
• Asylees who are successful and thus legally become refugees do so on the understanding that (1) their stay in the host country is temporary, and (2) their status applies exclusively to them.  That means that there is no pathway to citizenship, but only to permanent residence, and even that only after the best part of a decade has elapsed.  Moreover, a successful asylee cannot be permitted to "bring in" (i.e. sponsor) any current or new family members to the host country.  It is egregious that a single asylee--even before having his/her asylum claim approved--is allowed to bring in a half a dozen family members, too, on the grounds of family unification. 
• Refugees, although their sojourn in the host state is temporary, are to be expected to fully integrate with and practice the host state's cultural, social, and legal values.  That, in the West and many other places, includes, but is not limited to, speaking the language, abandoning the burka, abjuring the sharia, earnestly looking for work, participating in the civic life, respecting and promoting individual liberties (including in and for own family's), etc.
• Migrants rescued from dingy, sinking ships on the high seas, most often in international waters, should be given basic immediate assistance, such as some food provisions, blankets, and clothing.  They should then be sailed back to the shores they had set off from and left there.  There is no justification for transporting migrants who shipwrecked a few dozen miles off the coast of Libya 500 miles to Italy.
• Probably the most commonsense point of all: An asylee who commits any legal infraction--even jaywalking, let alone rioting or rape--is, if need be, incarcerated, and deported with a lifetime immigration ban.  The sight of hordes of asylees who (1) illegally snuck into a country thousands of miles away from their home, (2) are lavished with munificent benefits paid for by the host country's taxpayers, (3) show overt disdain for the host state's citizenry and culture, and then (4) engage in rioting, sexual abuse or terrorist activities is enough to make anybody's blood boil.

The antecedent constitute the bare minimum necessary to save the Western civilization from not only civil war with the battalions of migrants and their descendants but also from the populism, jingoism, virulent nationalism, xenophobia, and bigotry that will inevitably arise betimes if such measures are not taken.  The measures above, and the sentiments behind them, may sound callous.  I personally do not blame the asylees for trying all kinds of tactics to make it to the West.  I know that if I had been born--through no fault of my own--in a part of the world where I knew I would never have any prospects for a better life regardless of whatever I did, I might well essay to go elsewhere by any means necessary.  I also do not blame the terrorists and other enemies of the civilized world for exploiting the refugee and other laws to form a fifth column in our midst and attack us.  As they say: All is fair in love and war.

I do, however, blame the Western governments for not patching up those laws and commissioning other methods of combating illegal immigration. 

Just as it is not the fault of a Honduran, Pakistani, Sudanese, Syrian or Senegalese that they were born where they were, neither is it ours.  Nor is it our fault that we happen to live in much nicer and all-around better places.  Life is unfair and just because not everyone can partake in the quality of life and other privileges we in the West have does not mean we, too, should be stripped of them by allowing ourselves to be swamped by millions of people who share neither our demographics nor--far more importantly--psychographics.
 
©2017 Michael L.S.