There is no lack of analyses on the condition of the West in its struggle with radical Islam. Many, however, hardly view it as a struggle, and play down the threat of Islam. Serge Trifkovic, author of Defeating Jihad and The Sword of the Prophet, does not belong to those optimists. He has unconventional ideas, many of which need to be openly debated. He delivered a speech April 28, 2006 in California that offers a summary of his thinking. Here are a few excerpts from that speech, a speech that should be read in its entirety.
Hilaire Belloc, in The Great Heresies (1938), presciently wondered, "Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Muhammadan world which will shake the dominion of Europeans—still nominally Christian—and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?" Seven decades later, the same traits of decrepitude are present in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, Canada – and here in the United States, including both the primary cause, which is the loss of religious faith, and several secondary ones.
The latter include elite hostility to all forms of solidarity of the majority population based on shared historical memories and common culture; the loss of a sense of place and history; rapid demographic decline, unparalleled in history; rampant Third World immigration; collapse of private and public manners and morals; imposition of "diversity," "multiculturalism," "sensitivity"; and demonization and criminalization of any opposition to any of the above. . .
There is a problem, however. It is that a depraved mass culture and multiculturalist indoctrination in state schools have already largely neutralized the sense of historical and cultural continuity among young West Europeans and North Americans. . .
Race, Gender and Sexuality have replaced the Proletariat as both the oppressed underclass (hence the cult of the non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual victimhood), and as the historically preordained agent of revolutionary change. . .The war against jihad can and must be won. The first task is to start talking frankly about the identity and character of the enemy and the nature of the threat. It is essential to discard the taboos and to discuss Islam and the Muslims without fear or guilt, or the shackles of mandated thinking. The obligation to do so is dictated by morality no less than by the need for self-preservation. "Historians in free countries have a moral and professional obligation not to shirk the difficult issues and subjects that some people would place under a sort of taboo," Bernard Lewis warned over two decades ago, "not to submit to voluntary censorship, but to deal with these matters fairly, honestly, without apologetics, without polemic, and, of course, competently."
"If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles," says Sun Tzu. We know the jihadist enemy. We know his core beliefs, his role models, his track-record, his mindset, his modus operandi, and his intentions. We also know his weaknesses, which are many, above all his inability to develop a prosperous economy or a functional, harmonious society.
The main problem is with ourselves, with those among us who have the power to make policy and shape opinions, and who will reject and condemn our diagnosis. Having absorbed postmodernist assumptions, certain only of uncertainty, devoid of any serious faith except that in their own infallibility but loath to be "judgmental," members of our own elite class treat the jihadist mindset as a pathology that can and should be treated by treating causes external to Islam itself. The result is a plethora of proposed "cures" that are as likely to succeed in making us safe from terrorism as snake oil is likely to cure leukemia. . . . Having reduced religion, politics and art to "narratives" and "metaphors" which merely reflect prejudices based on the distribution of power, the elite class saw the [French] rioters’ shout of "Allahu akbar!" as a mere idiosyncrasy that would be cured if the French state gave those "youths" more jobs, dark-skinned TV anchors, and, of course, lots of "affirmative action" in employment and education.
So what does Trivkovic propose?
For starters, it is essential to refuse or rescind U.S. citizenship to Islamic activists. . .. The citizenship of any naturalized American who preaches jihad, inequality of "infidels" and women, the establishment of the Shari’a law etc., should be revoked, and that person promptly deported to the country of origin.
A foreigner who becomes naturalized has to declare, on oath, "that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God." . . .
New immigration legislation should include laws to exclude all persons engaged in Islamic activism from America. Such activism should be defined as the political act of propagating, disseminating or otherwise supporting "Jihad" (in its primary sense of divinely sanctioned war against non-Muslims), discrimination against Christians, Jews and other "infidels," discrimination and violence against women and sexual minorities, sanction of slavery, poll tax, etc. This definition of Islamic activism would be a major step in the direction of denying actual or potential terrorists a foothold on American shores.
New legislation should treat a resident alien’s or prospective visitor’s known or suspected adherence to an Islamic world outlook or affiliation with the propagators of Jihad, sharia, etc. as excludable – excludable, let us re-emphasize, on political, rather than "religious" grounds. The broad model is provided by the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (INA, the McCarran-Walter Act), mandating the exclusion or deportation of any alien who engaged or had purpose to engage in activities prejudicial to the public interest or subversive to national security.
Islamic activism should be treated as the grounds for the exclusion or deportation of any alien, regardless of his status or ties in the United States, because such activism is inherently prejudicial to the public interest and injurious to national security. Useful precedents exist. [See for more]
We are in a war of ideas and religion, whether we want that or not and however much we hate the fact. This war is being fought, on the Islamic side, with the deep conviction that the West is on its last legs. The success of its demographic onslaught on Europe enhances the image of "a candy store with the busted lock," and that view is reinforced by the evidence from history that a civilization that loses the urge for self-perpetuation is indeed in peril. (My emphasis)Targeting people for screening, supervision and exclusion on the basis of their genes would be discriminatory indeed, but doing so because of their beliefs, ideas, actions, and intentions is justified and necessary.
Islamic beliefs, ideas and intentions as such pose a threat to our civilization and our way of life, and not some allegedly aberrant variety of Muhammad’s faith. The elite class rejects this diagnosis, of course, but among reasonable, patriotic, and well-informed citizens the debate on Islam’s nature should be long over. Americans did not agonize over communism’s "true" nature during the Berlin air lift in 1949, or at Pusan in 1950, but acted effectively to contain it by whatever means necessary.
Yes, back then we had a legion of Moscow’s apologists, character witnesses, moles and fellow-travelers, assuring us that the Comrades want nothing but social justice at home and peaceful coexistence abroad. They held tenured chairs, staffed the New York Times’ Moscow bureaus, controlled many Hollywood studios, and dominated all smart salons on both coasts. They explained away and justified the inconsistencies and horrifyingly violent implications of the source texts of Marx and Lenin. They explained away and justified the appalling fruits: the bloodbath of the Bolshevik Revolution itself, the genocidal crime of the great famine, the show trials and purges, the killing machine that destroyed millions of innocents known as the Gulag, the pact with Hitler, the works.
Today their spiritual heirs in politics, the academy and the media establishment act as Islam’s apologists, character witnesses and fellow travelers. They explain away, with identical scholastic sophistry and moral depravity, the dark and violent implications of the source texts, the Koran and the Hadith, the deeply unnerving career of Muhammad, and 14 centuries of conquests, wars, slaughters, subjugation, decline without fall, spiritual and material misery, and murderous fanaticism
(I am having to omit much that really should be read!)
Those Americans and Europeans who love their lands more than any others, and who put their families and their neighborhoods before all others, are normal people. Those who tell them that their attachments should be global and that their lands and neighborhoods belong to the whole world are sick and evil. They are our main enemies and jihad’s indispensable allies. The elite class, rootless, arrogant, cynically manipulative, and irreversibly jihad-friendly, has every intention of continuing to "fight" the war on terrorism without naming the enemy, without revealing his beliefs, without unmasking his intentions, without offending his accomplices, without expelling his fifth columnists, and without ever daring to win.
It is up to the millions of normal Americans and their European cousins to stop the madness. The traitor class wants them to share its death wish, to self-annihilate as people with a historical memory and a cultural identity, and to make room for the post-human, monistic Utopia spearheaded by the jihadist fifth column. This crime can and must be stopped. The founders of the United States overthrew the colonial government for offenses far lighter than those of which the traitor class is guilty