Do you remember a mere three years ago when the gullible sob-sisters of the western media declared the Arab Spring "the Facebook revolution"?
It wasn't, of course. But what's going on right now in the Iraqi and Syrian territory held by the new Caliphate is the real Facebook revolution, and Twitter revolution, and Tumblr revolution, and YouTube revolution. These guys love social media. They can't wait to chop your head off and then zip the video footage all around the world. In the old days, when you decapitated somebody, the best you could do was stick his head on a spike on the edge of the village, and hope for good word of mouth from those terrified locals with an eye for the telling detail. Now you can saw through somebody's neck or stone a woman to death in the Sunni Triangle and, thanks to your Verizon or O2 account, your friends back in London or Frankfurt or Chicago can see it instantly!
America Alone (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available, etc, etc, he pleads with an eye to his upcoming trial of the century) has a chapter on what I call "The State-of-the-Art Primitive" - the many young men in the world at ease with both new technology and old-school decapitation, at the intersection of which "the dark imponderables of the future lie".
Consider, for example, the photograph above. It's a Tweet from Syria reprinted in The Australian, and neatly sums up the dead end of diversity:
Khaled Sharrouf's son, a child raised in the suburbs of Sydney, struggles with both arms to hold up the decapitated head of a slain Syrian soldier.
He is a seven-year old boy, Australian born and bred. But he's proudly holding up the latest severed head in his dad's collection. "Diversity is our strength", as they say. A family that raises their seven-year-old to participate in the decapitation celebrations certainly adds to the diversity of the Sydney suburbs. Whether it adds to their "strength" is another matter.
That's why the photograph and the original Tweet matter: They reduce to rubble the central delusion of the multicultists - that progress is all one way, and that the high-tech baubles of the modern secular state are so seductive no one can resist them. Isis have transformed social media into anti-social media. To the pouty-faced passivity of presidential hashtags, these guys scoff, "Ha! You don't know how to use the Internet..."
If you think the picture's appalling, consider the Australian establishment's reaction. Could you turn Khaled Sharrouf's son into a functioning Australian citizen? Maybe. In theory. But, in practice, no - not if the limp-wristed hand-wringing of the deluded multicultists is any indication. Tim Blair has a helpful round-up. First, the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, Bill Shorten, who thinks it's a parenting issue:
"As a parent, I have no idea how you could ever let your child be in that situation. I think that's shocking," the Opposition Leader said.
Perhaps we need some sort of federal parenting class, in which prospective parents have to pick the age-appropriate toy for their infant to play with:
a) severed head of Assad supporter;
b) severed head of Mosul Christian;
c) severed head of Kurdish Yazidi;
d) bloody pulped remains of post-stoning Ramadi adulteress;
e) Tickle-Me Elmo.
Mr Shorten also cautions against attaching any particular significance to that photograph:
"I would be careful about using that shocking image, that shocking evil image, and trying to use it for purposes which it shouldn't be used for."
In other words, now that the Australian Government has caved in on its Section 18C promise, if you know what's best for you, you'll think twice before suggesting seven-year-old Aussie citizens waving around severed heads might be indicative of broader, er, assimilation issues within, ah, certain communities, or anything like that.
Mr Shorten's fellow Labor Member of Parliament, Andrew Leigh, feels just shushing up isn't enough:
"We need to celebrate the Australian Muslim community to recognise that there are many peoples of different faiths in the world and extremism comes in all sorts of guises. The Oklahoma bombing was carried out by a Christian."
It's a shame the Aussie expression "cultural cringe" is already taken because nobody cringes culturally like a jelly-spined western squish before Islam. But, if we "need" to celebrate the Australian Muslim community, how about a rousing performance of one of the old traditional community folk songs?
There was a wild colonial boy
Khaled Sharrouf was his dad
He was born and raised in New South Wales
Till he flew off for jihad...
As for the Oklahoma bombing being "carried out by a Christian"*, I'll let the Great Blair handle this one:
Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in 1995. Get back to us, Andrew, when you've added up all the deaths due to Islamic extremism since then.
Isis effortlessly topped McVeigh's body count with just one mass grave in a town Andrew Leigh's never heard of. That's cultural cringing, too: At a time when Christians are being slaughtered in Iraq and their churches and shrines razed to the ground, Andrew Leigh feels the need to turn the clock back 20 years so he can indict Christianity.
Finally, Tim Blair cites Defence Minister David Johnston:
"One of the things that I must stress here is this is an extreme minority in Muslims in Australia and around the world. The vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving and peaceful people," Senator Johnston said.
Maybe. But "moderate Muslims" are more accurately characterized as quiescent Muslims: they've no desire to pull their own seven-year-old out of school for vacation jihad, but nor are they prepared to stand up within their own communities. What matters in any society is who makes the noise, who makes the running. Let us turn from the diversity of the Sydney suburbs to the diversity of London's East End, where the black flag of Isis has been flying over the Will Crooks Estate in Tower Hamlets. Express photographer Ted Jeory went to snap a picture of it and was told, "F**k off, Jew!" Mr Jeory is not a Jew. His wife is a Bengali Muslim and on the question of the moment - Gaza - Mr Jeory appears to take pretty much the same side as the excitable lads who surrounded him. Nevertheless, he has a prominent nose, so close enough: "F**k off, Jew!"
These guys do not want to go head-hacking in the Sunni Triangle. Well, most of them. Probably. But they share the head-hackers' goal and are in the same business - of seizing land in the cause of Islamic imperialism. When they meet "the other" - Jew, Christian, Yazidi, man with large nose - one group wants to chop his head off, the other wants him to f**k off. But these are merely different points on the same continuum, and both ultimately lead to the same place: a land without Jews, Christians, Yazidi, gays, uncovered women...
Let us consider a third faction. Baroness Warsi resigned last week from David Cameron's ministry. She was a rising star of the new post-Thatcher Tory Party - a young female Muslim - but she decided to quit over Gaza. Lady Warsi has no desire to go decapitating in Syria nor to yell "F**k off, Jew!" at big-nosed men in Tower Hamlets. But she says her party needs to acknowledge "electoral reality":
David Cameron will fail to win a majority at the next election because he has not done enough to woo minority ethnic voters, former cabinet minister Sayeeda Warsi has warned.
Lady Warsi – who unexpectedly resigned last week over the government's "morally indefensible" policy on Gaza – said her party is ignoring "electoral reality" by relying on white voters... "We have to appeal to all of Britain, not just because it's morally the right thing to do … but because it is an electoral reality."
She's right. In a democracy, you can't buck "electoral reality". In five years' time, there will be more young men in Tower Hamlets who think like that "F**k off, Jew!" mob, and more well-connected imams in Sydney whose only problem with that head-swinging seven-year-old boy is that he risks attracting too much attention to their "community". And there will be more people like those feeble Aussie politicians - too cowed to address honestly what's happening. In other words, absent serious assimilationist pressures the likes of Lady Warsi and Bill Shorten are disinclined to bring to bear, Britons and Australians will lose their country.
What was the name of that estate? "The Will Crooks Estate"? Oh, my. Will Crooks was one of the first Labour Members of Parliament (the fourth, if memory serves). He disliked the influx of Jews fleeing Tsarist Russia for the East End, and was a keen supporter of the 1905 Aliens Act, one of the British Empire's first serious prohibitions on mass immigration.
Nine decades after his death, he would be relieved to find that there are virtually no Jews to be found in Tower Hamlets.
On the other hand, he wouldn't recognize the place.
If it's any consolation, one day, soon, his name will no longer be on that estate. "The Khaled Sharrouf Estate" has kind of a ring to it.
*UPDATE: Several readers are irked that I didn't point out McVeigh was no kind of Christian, observant or residual or lapsed or anything else. I didn't do so, because I said as much at the time and have no desire to spend the rest of my life saying the same thing over and over while dingbats like Andrew Leigh say "Nya-nya, can't hear you" as they drive western civilization over the cliff. McVeigh had no Christian faith, and no connection with the church except that, in his childhood, his dad ran bingo nights in the church hall. In fact, after his service in the US Army, McVeigh became somewhat Islamophile. As I wrote in Britain's Sunday Telegraph on May 6th 2001:
He quit the Army with a Bronze Star, combat medal and a slew of other honours. And the only job anyone wanted him for was the minimum-wage security-guard gig he'd had before he enlisted. But travel had broadened his mind: the "Iraqi suffering" he'd witnessed made him think the government for which he soldiered was a global bully...
In that sense, he'd have quite a lot in common with Khaled Sharrouf.
~I'm sorry our weekly mailbox feature has been on hiatus these last couple of weeks. We've all been tied up with legal matters and trial preparation. However, I promise it will return this weekend. Thanks for your patience.
