WarSclerotic

The Insistent Blindness of the Elite, Counter Jihad, September 19, 2016

“[F]or Mayor Bill de Blasio and top city officials, terrorism was the word that could not be spoken on Sunday,” the New York Times reports.  It has become a familiar pattern.  After San Bernardino, we were told not to jump to conclusions about what turned out to be — exactly as expected — an act of jihad by Islamist terrorists.  After the Fort Hood shootings, we were told by the elite that this was really an act of workplace violence.  The first person to disagree was the shooter, for whom it was an act of jihad.  It took six years for President Obama to admit that it was a terrorist shooting.

De Blasio must have felt the irony of his position particularly strongly.  On Sunday he attended a forum with London’s new mayor, Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim to hold the post.  The two of them gave a grand show on the importance of tolerance and  understanding, especially where Muslims are concerned.  The forum, called “Building Inclusive and Progressive Cities,” was a perfect picture of the world these elites wished that they lived in instead of the one they actually inhabit.

The elites are unified in their rejection of reality.  The media waded into the Presidential campaign to chide candidate Donald Trump for characterizing the bomb blast in New York as a bomb — which of course was always the most likely thing for it to be, and indeed what it turned out to be.  The press went so far as to edit out candidate Hillary Clinton’s exactly similar wording, just so they could continue chiding Donald Trump for his jumping to a perfectly correct conclusion.

And now the FBI have come forward and declared that they are concerned about a possible terror cell, just as expected.  And is there a religious connection?  Yes, just as expected.

Is there a connection to al Qaeda or the Islamic State (ISIS)?  “The official added that it ‘really doesn’t matter whether its inspired or directed’ by ISIS or al Qaeda. ‘We’re way past that. The intent and capability are there regardless.’” (Emphasis added.)

Granting that a capable terrorist cell with murderous intent would be dangerous regardless of its inspiration or direction, it really does matter that we apparently can’t admit the truth.  The most frequently quoted line fromSun Tzu’s classic text on war is this:  “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.  If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”  If we refuse to know the enemy, we endanger ourselves.

The elite refusal to speak the truth about the cause and the scale of the problem is only going to worsen the problem.  Longtime security analyst “Wretchard” explains the dynamic:

The announcement that a certain Ahmad Rahami is a person of interest in the NY bombings will have the effect of making those who urged the public not to anticipate the outcome look like fools.Given previous evidence, GIVEN a bombing or public attack the prior probability some sort of Islamic plot behind it was very high. Past frequencies informs the prior. By ignoring this the PC brigade was almost certainly going to discredit themselves.

The argument they really should be making is that an overwhelming majority of Muslims are law abiding peaceful people. This is an entirely different assertion from saying that given a bombing, the parties behind it are unlikely to be Islamic.  It is perfectly possible that say … only 1 in 50,000 Muslims are terrorists while it being simultaneously true that once you observe a bombing, knife attack or mass execution the perpetrator is say 90% likely to identify as Muslim.

Knowing that, you can begin to speak seriously about both the scale and the source of the problem.  No one is arguing that every Muslim is a terrorist.  The argument, and the evidence, is that there is a special problem associated with Islam as it exists right now.  There is no answer to the terror problem facing the West today that does not grapple with those problems in Islam.  It does not matter how much you wish that the answer were “tolerance and inclusion.”  Tolerating these differences opens us to violence.  Including more Muslims in our cities, without dealing with these problems in the faith, is only going to increase the incidence of terrorism in our nations.

As long as our elites keep trying to convince us that this obvious truth is not true, they will continue to lose the trust of the people.  Political movements against this willfully blind elite are already sweeping Europe.  It may well be soon that “the elite” are no longer elite in any sense of the word.