(Part 1 is here.)

We can read. We can read any of the great men who knew, like John Quincy Adams and Tocqueville and Churchill, both from their immense learning and their personal observation of, and experience with, Muslims. They and hundreds of others came to understand Islam far better than those who rule over us, and claim that they are to be listened to. More and more we realize just how little they know, how unlearned they are, how gullible they are, when they accept the versions of history, the present-day sly narratives, the low cunning of those Arabs and Muslims who for decades have kept successive governments in the United States and all over the world in the dark. They have done this with a little help from such friends as the ARAMCO lobby, or all those ex-diplomats to Arab countries, and former intelligence agents, who have for many years been on the Arab and Muslim take as “international business consultants” or some such. They have been writing their Op/Eds, making the rounds in Washington in the corridors of power, and appearing — so thoughtfully, so judiciously, so venally — on radio and television programs, to “explain” things in a way that the propagandists of Saudi Arabia or of the Arab League could not object to by so much as a jot or tittle.

We Infidels who have retained the capacity to study and have done so have come to understand Islam. We have learned not only about its texts, tenets, attitudes, and atmospherics, but have also learned about the 1350-year history of Islamic conquest of vast non-Muslim lands and peoples, and about the subsequent subjugation of those many peoples. Many of them were killed or made subject to intermittent campaigns of forced conversion. Others, over the centuries, simply converted to Islam from Judaism, or Christianity, or Zoroastrianism, or Hinduism, or Buddhism, or Confucianism, in order to avoid the best fate that any non-Muslim could expect under Muslim rule: that of being a dhimmi, and thus enduring a state of permanent humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity.

And as we have learned, sometimes on our own, through reading, sometimes with the help of websites such as this one, we have come to realize, initially simply with dismay and then with growing horror, the civilizational threat that the islamization of Europe would mean. And we have also come to realize that the American government, in the sentimental messianism of Bush who wanted to “bring freedom” to “ordinary moms and dads” in the Middle East, cannot possibly succeed. This effort, more than seven years and two trillion dollars later, is doomed, and in any case, the goals he set — “prosperity” and “freedom” and “national unity” — are not goals that, if obtained, would further Infidel interests or weaken the Camp of Islam.

And the Obama Administration, which even more than the Bush Administration is eager not to recognize, or study, or worry about, the ideology of Islam, still continues to prate about terrorism and to act as if the “root cause” were poverty. Poverty? What about bin Laden? Al-Zawahiri? The decadent plutocrats of Saudi Arabia and the sheikdoms, who salve their consciences by giving great sums to spread Islam? Poverty? Poverty is what keeps Muslims from acting on their hostility to Infidels. Poverty is what keeps them, like remote illiterate villagers in Afghanistan, preoccupied with staying alive, with subsistence living. It is, rather, discretionary income paying for arms and mosques and madrasas around the world, and for transportation to and from the Infidel lands, that makes Muslims a threat today, as they were not in 1960, or 1940, or 1900.

Obama, like Bush, focuses only on one aspect of the Jihad — that is, terrorism. And of course, everything is done to prevent our understanding that Muslims are indeed engaged in a whole series of local Jihads against Infidel nation-states (such as Israel and India), or against Infidel populations in Infidel nation-states (Buddhists in southern Thailand, Christians in the southern Sudan and southern Philippines) and in Muslim nation-states (Assyrians and Chaldeans in Iraq, Copts in Egypt, Maronites and other Christians in Lebanon, Christians and Hindus in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, and so on). And no one in the Bush Administration, and no one in the Obama Administration, has hinted that the main focus of Jihad is today in the countries of Western Europe, the historic home and heart of the West, without which America cannot exist with any kind of civilizational coherence. And in those countries, the political and cultural elites looked the other way, or looked on with indifference and ignorance, when Muslims started to be allowed to settle deep within non-Muslim lands, behind what Muslims themselves are taught to regard as enemy lines, the lines of Dar al-Harb. The members of those elites do not dare to own up to the colossal damage they did, through their carelessness, their ignorance, their bland and complacent stupidity.

The main weapons of Jihad in Western Europe, as I have written here a thousand times before, are the deployment of the Money Weapon — to pay for mosques, madrasas, academic chairs and institutions where anything coming close to a truthful representation of Islam is banned, and of course for armies of Western hirelings to lead the propaganda campaign on behalf of Islam and individual families or regimes, such as the sinister Al-Saud. Then there are the carefully targeted campaigns of Da’wa, directed at the economically and psychically marginal, beginning with prisoners, but not stopping there. Above all, there is demographic conquest, still unchecked. But now it is clear: the large-scale presence of Muslims has led to a situation that is far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous for non-Muslim indigenes and for other, but non-Muslim, immigrants, than would be the case without such a large-scale Muslim presence. People are waking up, shaking their locks and rousing themselves, but there is a race on: will they wake up, in sufficient numbers, in time? And will the American government listen to its best-informed citizens, who have far outpaced the members of the government in their grasp of the matter? Will it recognize the danger in Europe, the danger first of all that is military, for European nations possess weaponry that must never fall into Muslim hands, and then what is perhaps even more important, the danger of civilizational collapse, first in the historic heart of the West, and then in its transatlantic offspring, the United States of America?

Our current ruling class is unlike that, say, of FDR”s day. So many had backgrounds akin to his — Endicott Peabody’s Groton, the Gold Coast at Harvard, membership in the English-Speaking Union, trips to Europe not only for a Wanderjahre, but again and again, and a knowledge of French. That knowledge, French consuls everywhere pushing “la Francophonie” should note, is important because the acquisition of the French language implies a great deal else. It implies and implicates the idea of Europe, brings with it unannounced a familiarity with European history, and European art and literature. This has disappeared from our ruling class, whose children — filling out their resumes — are more likely to spend the requisite resume-filling time working with teenage prostitutes in Cambodia, or at a battered women’s shelter in Morocco or Madagascar, than they are reading about, learning about, the civilisation of the West, and of the United States as part of that West. I have gone through a great many books in French, previously owned by Boston Brahmins or Dutch Knickerbockers, and have found in many of them marginal annotations that show clearly that previous owner’s thorough knowledge of the language. I know the monologues of Ruth Draper, from the 1920s and 1930s, about the American rich, with the trips of schoolgirls to the museums of Europe, especially to Italy.

I know that once upon a time one did not have to be a member of the DAR or the Society of the Cincinnati or a scion of one of the FFV (First Families of Virginia), or to be a member of the English-Speaking Union (my god, you could be Hyman Kaplan in Night School, learning English with Mrs. Mazzolino) in order to recognize that the laws and political institutions, the language and the literature, of the United States are all English in origin. Everyone understood this, and everyone was taught it too, because it was true. The United States, whatever the country of origin of its inhabitants, is largely therefore a child of England. And therefore to watch England islamize, to see England, with its universities and museums and all of its history, that is also our history, succumb to islamization, should be painful, should terrify. And so should the loss of Italy, were it ever to happen, with 2/3 of the Western world’s art. And France, and all the other countries similarly threatened, at different rates, by demographic changes that the European elites seem able at long last to dimly recognize. Yet save for such people as Geert Wilders, they seem unable or unwilling to consider the obvious ways, the perfectly legitimate obvious thousand ways, to diminish the threat, rather than think of ways to make the succumbing more palatable and less unpleasant on all sides.

Think of a quintessential American, William James — quintessential, that is, a century ago. Now imagine James, or Charles Sanders Pierce, or Josiah Royce, or George Santayana — that is, James or any of his colleagues in the Philosophy Department, or any of their colleagues in any other department — observing, in slow motion, and being unmoved, remaining nonchalant about the disappearance of Europe into an Islamic world that was rightly seen, once, as hopelessly primitive. It is seen differently now only because the rich Arab and Muslim oil states have since 1973 alone received more than twelve trillion dollars, and because millions of Muslims have been, in a dangerous fit of inattention, allowed to settle within the countries of Western Europe, deep behind what those Muslims themselves are taught to regard as enemy lines.

For Obama, World Citizen, Europe has no special appeal. And unless you are one of his well-credentialed meritocrats who happens to have some European connection, possibly a summer house in Provence or Tuscany, you are unlikely to think of Europe as, civilisationally, it should be thought about. And even those in the defense establishment who understand the continuing relevance of NATO (or NATO aside from now debatable Turkey) have an interest that is military, and the deep cultural connection is scanted.

The ruling class no longer looks to Europe, knows European languages, is familiar with Europe, and sees feelingly what the loss of Europe to Islam would mean, to the future of art, to the enterprise of science, to the development or retention of human freedoms and to the very idea of individualism. Those who do see what this loss would mean would support to the hilt all those in Europe who, having awakened, are working now to the same ends, out of the same justified civilisational fear — fear for art, science, human freedom, solicitude for the individual. Or will our new ruling class pay no attention to, have no special affection for, or deep sympathy with, the nations of Western Europe, as some in that ruling class have already indicated with respect to Israel, another indispensable part of the West? Some are no doubt ready to trade in not only the idea of NATO, but the very idea of a special connection between Europe and America, because they don’t really feel it, they don’t sense it, it isn’t part of their own “personal narrative.” And for them their own “personal narratives” supersede history, and the larger, national and even supra-national civilisational history, that of the non-Muslim West.

And that’s where we are. And that’s why we have every right to worry. Ignorance yoked to a self-assured arrogance (expressed, or perhaps better camouflaged, in the most sweetly winning of ways) has been on display of late. A gift of the gab, with lot less there, we are coming to suspect, than meets the eye or, better, the eardrum. You have reason to be downcast. You have reason to be dismayed. You have reason to worry.