National Observer No. 69 -Winter 2006

 

Book Review

National Observer
(Council for the National Interest, Melbourne),
No. 69, Winter 2006.

 

THE WEST’S LAST CHANCE: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?

by Tony Blankley

Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2005

Hardback: 232 pages

Rec. retail price: AUD$54.95

 

Reviewed by Philip Ayres

 

A few months ago Tony Blankley, former senior policy analyst for President Ronald Reagan and currently editorial-page editor of the Washingon Times, published The West’s Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations? Henry Kissinger called it “extremely controversial, thought-provoking”; Bob Dole hailed it as “exceptional, a must-read”. So it is. This is a valuable book because it does more than offer yet another analysis of the terrorist threat from radical Islam; it proposes what we in the West, and especially in the United States, should do to protect ourselves and our children from it. Like John Stone’s recent and important address to the June 2006 Quadrant dinner [reproduced in Quadrant, September 2006], which focussed on the same problem in its Australian dimension, it is very specific in its proposals. What follows is a review of this interesting book and a consideration of some of those proposals.

The book opens with a “Nightmare Scenario” set in 2007. Some of this seems unlikely, at least so soon. I would have set it in 2011. In London, and then quickly in copy-cat fashion all over Europe (the future Eurabia), a wave of attacks on statues, starting with the nude Eros in Piccadilly Circus, and on paintings deemed decadent or immoral, is followed by calls from European Muslims for the institution of sharia law within their communities. (This is likely — in fact, sharia law already operates de facto in parts of Britain, France and the Netherlands, and one day, when those in the Muslim banlieux of Paris decide to project their force to the centre, the Louvre may even burn, since representational art is a Muslim taboo.)

Meanwhile in the United States, according to the author’s scenario, there has been a co-ordinated series of catastrophic bomb-blasts in supermarkets across several states (bombs in easily-accessible airport check-in halls would have greater economic impact, I’d have thought). The female Democratic presidential candidate (Hilary Clinton?), out to win by appearing tougher than the Republicans on the issue, adopts a very hard line against internal Islamists, promising that her administration will register all American Muslims and place them under curfew. (One can easily imagine this happening in the next few years, and it would happen at once, of course, if a nuclear suitcase-bomb went off in an American city.)

The Republican candidate counters by an appeal to the Muslim vote, traditionally Democrat but now alienated by that party’s new hard line. At a massive Muslim rally he announces, to the jubilation of his audience, that he will allow them to establish sharia law within their own communities. After all, their attitudes on morality, the family, Hollywood/Babylon &c, are similar to those of Baptists, Catholics, and many conservative Republicans generally, aren’t they? — and of course there are a lot more Muslim votes to be had than Jewish ones. This again seems far-fetched to me, and I think it was an unwise tactic for the author to put his “nightmare scenario” up-front like this. But keep reading.

The next few chapters are given over to backgrounding the current threats, so we’ll skip them, as we are pretty familiar with them already. Chapter five is titled “The Deracination of the West” and focuses on the professional multiculturalists and associated dictators of political correctness, many of whom have spent their entire adult lives working for multinational organisations like the UN and its affiliates, losing touch with their own cultures, particularly the culture of the common people in the countries from which they sprang, and using as an ideological springboard the partly justified but wildly exaggerated sense of Western shame over the colonial enterprise. (One wonders what Europe could have done differently in regard to Africa in the nineteenth century — just sail around it, perhaps, and establish diplomatic relations?). Multiculturalists talk about the value of ethnicity but the ultimate logic of multiculturalism is no culture at all. That is actually the goal — a deracinated Coca-Cola culture, a vast global non-culture, precisely the kind the Islamists hate, and in this particular respect they are right.

Blankley and the Islamists are on mutual ground here. Some interesting contradictions such as this could have been teased out more in this otherwise thoughtful book. In one of Shakespeare’s scenes a rebellious character cries, “First thing, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Islamists would change “lawyers” to “multiculturalists”. I remember when I was with a group of radical Islamists, members of Hezb-i-Islami, inside Afghanistan in 1987, and I asked them (since they seemed to hate their funders, America, even more than they hated the Russians) what they thought the Christian West should be like. The leader answered without a moment’s delay: “You should be like us.” By that he meant we should believe in our own religion and culture and fight to defend it against people like him. Blankley, unfortunately, does not adequately underline the defensive nature of aggressive Islam. The best form of defence is attack. Radical Islamists perceive their culture to be under attack, as it is, of course, from precisely that globalising, secularising, multi-culturalist non-culture Blankley himself attacks.

There is a nostalgic quality to chapter six, “Saving Democracy, 1940s Style”. Alas, America is no longer the force in world affairs it was in the 1940s, and “the world’s only superpower” has over the past two or three years come to seem something less than that. “Hezbollah must disarm,” it idly proclaims (along with its ally Israel). Perhaps, but who can make Hezbollah disarm? They have not been defeated. The only kind of war the United States can win, it now seems, is battlefield war, as in 1990 and 2003 against Saddam Hussein. In a situation of urban and/or asymmetric warfare it finds the going tough, as in Mogadishu in 1993, the most shameful example of the limitations of our “sole superpower”. Really, there is little to be gained from studying the 1940s for lessons applicable in the 2000s. As a reading of Toynbee will show, each historical challenge is different from the preceding one, subtly or vastly, or they would all be easily overcome.

The West’s Last Chance gives hardly any attention to Israel and Palestine because, it must be said, it rightly sees the Islamist cause against the West as above and beyond any such local conflict:

“The modern theory of Islamist jihad and terrorism was founded in a deep loathing of the American way of life. Osama bin Laden is an intellectual disciple of Sayyid Qutb, the mid-twentieth-century Egyptian intellectual who was executed by the Egyptian government in 1966 and who created the modern Islamist terror doctrine. Qutb came to America in 1948 and left hating all things American. He titled his book The America I Have Seen. In it, he claimed he was seduced by a drunken Christian woman and was discriminated against because he was an Arab. He expressed his loathing for American music. He called Christian church services in America ‘entertainment centers and sexual playgrounds’. He condemned America’s Indian wars, which he wrote were still ongoing in 1949, and argued that American colonists had driven Hispanic peasants back to Central America before the American Revolution. He called the Revolution ‘a destructive war led by George Washington’.” (Page 181). (Canadians would agree with that last bit.)

Israel is just a side-issue, though of course for jihadists it is at the same time a glaring symbol of what the West represents for all of the formerly-colonised — or rather, not a symbol but the thing itself: a colony of Europe-and-America, but worse than a colony because built on the expulsion of the indigenes. Of course, we all know that most non-Palestinian Arabs and other Muslims look down on the Palestinians as the lowest of peasants — in Lebanon, for instance, its Palestinian refugees have never been well treated by their brothers in faith.

Blankley certainly accepts that if the Israeli-Palestinian problem could be fixed this would deprive the Islamists of their greatest single “justification”, but he offers no solutions any more than the vague Bush “road-map” does. In fact, a strong and viable Palestine could be created (badly wrong-footing the jihadists), given a few pricey quid pro quos. For instance, this might require Palestininans surrendering their claim to a “Right of Return” (abstractly justifiable but practically unrealisable) in return for a Palestinian East Jerusalem — difficult, this, and something that would have to be forced on Israel, but the United States has the ability to force it — and a free, internationally-supervised plebiscite in Jordan, whose population is sixty per cent Palestinian, to determine whether its people would accept a re-union with the West Bank, which of course before 1967 was part of Jordan. Then we would have a viable Palestine, recognising Israel de facto, and Israel could have the thickest wall it wanted, along with most of the adjustments that the wall has recently made to the 1967 boundary. After that, a mini-Marshall Plan for Palestine, and the only thing left unfixed would be the Gaza Strip — pay Egypt, beg Egypt to take it, for it’s a horrid hell-on-earth, then offer its inhabitants generous incentives to move to the new Palestine. The details are variable, but the problem can be solved, as surely Blankley would agree, for his book is optimistic about the future in the event that we have the courage to make the hard decisions.

He reserves his final chapter for “the Way Forward”, which is the most valuable part of the book, and I will devote the remainder of this review to some of his proposals, since one seldom sees such a clear statement regarding “what is to be done”.

 

Proposal 1: “Declare War”

President Bush declared war on an amorphous “terrorism”, but did not put the country on a war footing. Blankley argues that America needs a clear Congressional (and thus constitutional) declaration of war very specifically identifying just the Islamist jihadists as “the enemy”. There are many terrorist groups in the world, such as the Tamil Tigers, the Real IRA, &c, &c, but America’s war is not against the Tamil Tigers. It has to be tightly defined: it is against Islamic jihadists. “Naming the threat also expands the scope of our war effort to all the networks of radical Islam, including mosques, schools, and radical Islamic sites on the Internet. It is not only terrorist acts that we are confronting, but also the propaganda and organizations that make them possible”. Any state of war entails restrictions on civil liberties, but Blankley would put a sunset provision on the declaration: “Every two years, all exclusively wartime powers would be extinguished and would need to be renewed in a free-standing bill by the next Congress. If a majority of the public was disturbed by a president’s use of his war powers, that attitude could be reflected in the next congressional election.”

 

Proposal 2: “Utilise Ethnic Profiling”

We’ve all been witness to the absurd sight of our grandmothers or other old ladies forced to take off their shoes when being checked through to the departure lounge. What a waste of time and manpower. No, my grandmother is not a terrorist, you probably informed the officer, and he replied in his smart-alecky way, “What does a terrorist look like, sir?”, and you replied “Not like my grandmother, sir.” Blankley again:

“Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has declared that any profiling taking race, religion, or nationality into account is forbidden in airport security. When CBS’s 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft asked him if there were any circumstances in which such profiling would make sense, Secretary Mineta replied, ‘Absolutely not.’ When Kroft asked whether an elderly white woman and a young Muslim man should be treated the same, Secretary Mineta responded, ‘Basically, I would hope so.’ Kroft then asked, ‘If you saw three young Arab men sitting, kneeling, praying, before they boarded a flight, getting on, talking to each other in Arabic, getting on the plane, no reason to stop and ask them any questions?’ President Bush’s secretary of transportation replied, ‘No reason.’

“This is the current policy of the United States government. … In fact, our government has severely fined airlines that have barred suspicious-looking Muslim young men from flights.” (Pages 168–9).

Such are the absurdities of political correctness. Yet in the Second World War the Supreme Court found that merely an increased possibility of disloyalty based on nationality or ethnicity sufficed to trigger detention or deportation for the duration of hostilities.

 

Proposal 3: “Secure Our Borders”

Australia has done more in this line than the United States. During the Second World War, America had the resources and will to build 100,000 warplanes in a single year. Today they lack even the will to secure their border with Mexico, because that might seem “inappropriate”, or harsh, and President Bush doesn’t want to offend the Mexican president, and illegals are needed as cheap domestics. Blankley:

“… [I]n December 2004, at a farewell luncheon for Attorney General John Ashcroft, I asked him if, during his four years of service, he had ever seen or heard of any comprehensive study assessing what it would take to substantially secure our borders. He said no.

“Yet, on February 16, 2005, Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security James Loy testified in a Senate hearing that ‘Recent information from ongoing investigations, detentions, and emerging threat streams strongly suggests that al Qaeda has considered using the southwest border to infiltrate the United States. Several al Qaeda leaders believe operatives can pay their way into the country through Mexico and also believe illegal entry is more advantageous than legal entry for operational security reasons’.” (Page 172).

 

Proposal 4: “Adopt National Identification Cards”

This one was unpopular here a number of years ago, and is also unpopular in the United States, but we put ourselves at unnecessary risk every day we delay requiring a national identity card. Blankley points out the obvious: secured entry into a country — closely monitored borders and entry ports — cannot be the whole story because anyone can fly in on a tourist visa and simply overstay it, so that to be effective, border control has to be backed up by biometric identity cards in the interior.

 

Proposal 5: “Win the European Culture War”

This entails the reinvigoration of our own culture. Blankley wants a strong religious revival and is optimistic about its occurring, seeing hopeful signs already in Europe and the United States. Pope Benedict XVI is campaigning for Europe to rediscover its Christian roots “if it truly wants to survive”, and has criticised the culturally suicidal campaigns waged by European governments on behalf of multiculturalism because, in Benedict’s words, it “amounts to an abandonment and disavowal of what is our own. … We have to redefine what Europe is, and we cannot stop at positivism”. Benedict opposes Turkey’s entry into the EU because it is not a Christian country. Protestant evangelists, Catholics and Orthodox need to make common cause in reclaiming Europe for Christianity and denying the possibility of a Muslim re-conquest of Europe. Whether there could ever be a religious revival in Australia, so much more materialistic even than America, is another question. I would add something to Blankley’s prescription for cultural renewal: clear out the Augean stables; re-institute or increase the censorship of the grossly indecent in print, film and the electronic media; show that we have some moral standards that we are prepared to insist on here.

 

Proposal 6: Increase the Birthrate

Keen to give his book an optimistic spin because he knows that to demoralise his readers will not be effective, Blankley makes some interesting claims regarding European demography. He gives projected figures for the populations of major European countries in 2050 that show little decline over the figures for 2005, but he doesn’t indicate how much of the 2050 figure in each case is made up of Muslims, simply telling us that “there is some evidence that ethnic European birthrates could rise again”. He notes that the Netherlands and some other European countries are now restricting the immigration of Muslims, and he expects that within a few years some European countries will be expelling their Muslim “illegals”. He does not make any specific proposal about expelling all Muslim “illegals” in the United States, but a national identity card of the kind he proposes would make that possible. He neglects to consider the feasibility of governments promoting an increased birthrate through generous incentives such as those the Howard Government provides — around $3,000 for each child born, and ongoing family benefits. It would be good if our Government would increase this to $5,000 and make it payable also to those mothers who wish immediately to adopt out the child they would otherwise have had aborted: $5,000 to every mother on the birth of every child, no questions asked.

The West’s Last Chance , particularly its chapter on “The Way Forward”, should be required reading for our politicians. And we need one of them to ask the Minister for Immigration to give us the figures for Muslim immigration into Australia for each year since 2001. Perhaps this is known; I have not seen the figures, but we have a right and a need to know them, now.

 

 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:

Philip Ayres has held professorial positions at Monash University, Boston University and Vassar College, and is the author of numerous articles and biographies, including Malcolm Fraser (1987), Douglas Mawson (1999) and most recently Owen Dixon (2003). His forthcoming book, The Worlds of Cardinal Moran, is scheduled for release in 2007.

 

National Observer No. 69 - Winter 2006