The Downward Spiral

As Muslim fury peaked over the Muhammad cartoons, this picture was taken at a "protest" in London three weeks ago.

Now, a court in Nordrhein-Westfalen has sentenced a 61-year-old German man to one year in jail and 300 hours of community service for marketing toilet paper with the word "Koran" printed on it, and pledging to donate the proceeds to victims of Islamic terrorism.

Outside Paris, a 23-year-old Jewish man was tortured for three weeks and left for dead by Muslims who lured him with female bait. Ilan Halimi, who sensed which way the winds are blowing and was saving up to move to Israel, died on the way to the hospital. French authorities, naturally, have been working overtime to bury the religion/ethnicity of both the victim and the perpetrators.

In the wake of the Cartoon Intifada, EU officials and national governments are scrambling to decide how best to restrict free speech -- that of the blasphemers, mind you, not of the pro-genocide Muslim "protesters." Presently, I'll compile the long, sordid list of eager Eurodhimmis and what they're proposing. But first, I'd like to explain why I've been MIA for the last two weeks.

Reason number one is simply a huge workload and not enough hours in the day. Reason number two, however, is what I want to discuss. Every single day, I browse the news with my morning cup of coffee, and feel an increasing sense of futility and inevitability.

Multiple times daily, Islamists murder an innocent, burn down an embassy, destroy a church, suicide-bomb an unsuspecting crowd, burn a flag, issue a death threat, put a bounty on an infidel's head, publish sick blood-libel propaganda, blame the US and/or Israel for everything, hold a "peace" rally demanding the extermination of non-Muslims, credibly threaten to finish what Hitler started, and insist on shari'a in the West.

And multiple times daily, Western dhimmis issue apologies, gloss over the violence out of "respect" for Islam, hold conferences to work out how best to accede to Muslim demands, defend unchecked Muslim immigration, turn a blind eye to the atrocious treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic countries, and refuse to even arrest "protesters" who would as soon kill us all.

At the same time, the Cartoon Jihad has awakened a segment of the West that for whatever reason was not roused by 9/11, 3/11, or 7/7. Nevermind the thousands of lives those events claimed; now that 12 Danish cartoonists are living in secrecy and fear under 24-hour police protection, even comatose pacifist liberals are starting to grasp that the Green Peril is no phantom bogeyman. Good. Better late than never.

But here's my problem. Regardless of what I say -- or Robert Spencer, or Ali Sina, or Daniel Pipes, or Michelle Malkin, or Charles Johnson, or Andrew Bostom, or Nidra Poller, or Mark Steyn, or Oriana Fallaci, or Victor Davis Hanson, or Bat Ye'or, or Ibn Warraq, or any number of other writers far more eminent than I -- our words are so much ephemeral fluff in the face of the oncoming freight train. Within living memory, we've been through this before: Europe watched the Nazi juggernaut gather steam for nearly a full decade, finding the resolve to do something only after it was too late. Here we are once again -- but the consequences of acting "too late" will be far worse.

Imagine how much more difficult it would have been to defeat Nazism if it'd had official immunity as a respected world religion. If large populations of committed Nazis had lived in allied territories, under the protection of laws discouraging, prohibiting, or criminalizing Naziphobia. If our cultural climate had been so dysfunctional that we accepted genocidal thugocracy as merely a diverse alternative to democratic freedoms. If we'd been admonished not to criticize Mein Kampf by people who'd never read it, and threatened with death by people who'd read it very carefully indeed. If we'd been so unsure of ourselves, and so eager to surrender, that mocking Nazis provoked widespread official opprobrium.

We wouldn't have defeated Nazism. We would be speaking German, packing our eight kids off to Hitler Jugend rallies, and hunting down every last Jew, gypsy, and misfit. And we would have done it with attitudes ranging from tired indifference to enthusiastic piety. It would have been a world, as Nietzsche put it, beyond good and evil.

Maybe I'm being melodramatic here. The point is, I'm increasingly convinced that nothing I or any other resister says will change what is coming. While we must use our power to speak with all possible vigor while we still have it -- Europeans especially -- it's also time to think about what we will do when our efforts fail to slow or reverse the inevitable. Western governments occasionally shovel shit against the tide, but overall, we cannot count on their protection, at least not until too many have lost too much. I suppose I'd say it feels as if we're running out of time.

So, these last two silent weeks, I've been contemplating how much I appreciate the things we have, and the unfathomable things we, as individuals, might have to do to protect them.

Carpe diem!