Ushering in Civilization's Destroyers

In the twentieth century, the Nazis tried to take over the world and failed. The Communists nearly succeeded. Now, in the twenty-first century, emboldened religious fanatics have their sights set on global domination. The Islamic conquest of civilization has already begun. The United States and Europe have laid out the welcome mat for their destroyers.

Islam is experiencing unprecedented growth. It is now the world's second largest religion. Within 20 years, it will surpass Christianity as the predominant world religion. Islam's surge is due largely to rapid population increases in Arab countries. In Saudi Arabia, for example, the average family has six children, giving the kingdom the swiftest rate of population growth in the world. Muslims are emigrating from their increasingly crowded homelands to places such as the United States. Some may be yearning to be free. But many, certainly, are not. Americans should have been awakened to the dangers of Islam on September 11, 2001. However, on the first anniversary of September 11, U.S. President George W. Bush paid tribute to Islam, declaring that it "is a faith that has made brothers and sisters of every faith of every race."

Is that so? This is the same religion whose holy book instructs its followers thusly: "fight and slay the pagans wherever ye may find them" (Sura 9:1-6). This is the same religion whose central figure, the prophet Mohammed, provided the inspiration for the 9-11 hijackers with words such as these: "A single endeavor [of fighting] in Allah's cause in the forenoon or in the afternoon is better than the world and whatever is in it." Mohammed proclaimed in another well-known passage, "I have been made victorious with terror."

President Bush wants us to believe that terrorists represent a tiny faction of the Islamic religion. But terrorism enjoys widespread moral support among Muslims. Upon the toppling of the Twin Towers, Palestinians spontaneously broke out in celebration, partying and dancing in the streets. In most Muslim countries, t-shirts, posters, and other paraphernalia bearing Osama Bin Laden's likeness are commonplace. Since the September 11th attacks, "Osama" has become one of the most popular names given to newborn children in Arab countries. Formal polls confirm that support for Bin Laden is strong in the Muslim world, including non-Arab Muslim countries. One survey found that half of all Indonesian Muslims would describe the terrorist as a "justice fighter." Surveys of young Muslim men in Egypt have revealed that half would be willing to sacrifice their lives in a murderous jihad against Americans.

How does a country go about defending itself against potentially millions of suicidal "justice fighters"? The first step is to identify the unconventional nature of the threat. Namely, it is a broad religious and cultural movement whose values and aims are incompatible with civilization. The United States and Europe are in denial on this point. British Prime Minister Tony Blair insists that there are no important differences between Western and Islamic culture. As he put it in a speech before the United States Congress on July 17, 2003, "There is a myth. That though we love freedom, others don't, that our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture." The relativistic Blair and the politically correct Bush apparently believe that the terrorists, rogue governments, and dictators of the Islamic world have nothing to do with the culture of the Islamic world.

It is no coincidence that Osama Bin Laden and 15 of the 19 September 11th hijackers were Saudis. In Saudi Arabia, the dominant religion is Wahhabi Islam. It glorifies such things as the wholesale killing of Jews and other "infidels." These ideas are presented to Saudi schoolchildren in official textbooks. Ahmed Ali, a man who grew up in Saudi Arabia, was interviewed for the American public television program Frontline and explained, "Bin Laden learned [his ideology] in Saudi Arabia. He didn't learn it in the moon. That message that Bin Laden received is still taught in Saudi Arabia. And if Bin Laden dies, and this policy or curriculum stays, we will have other Bin Ladens."

The Saudi brand of Islamic fundamentalism, once confined to the Arabian Peninsula, is expanding outward through Africa, central Asia, Oceania, Europe, and North America. Al Qaeda operatives are stationed in virtually every country on the globe that has a significant Muslim population, from Somalia to Great Britain to Canada. To stimulate Islam's growth, the Saudi government is funding the construction of mosques throughout the world. Saudi-funded training centers for Islamic fundamentalists are making Arab immigrants feel right at home in countries they have been taught to hate.

Terrorism is the most immediate threat facing the civilized world. At its root is a quieter, but more fundamental, threat that the politicians don't want to talk about. I'm referring to civilized countries' indiscriminate welcoming of "permanent residents," "guest workers," "students," and "tourists" from terrorist-infested countries. This was the proximate cause of September 11. It will be the silent partner of future attacks and will result in untold economic, cultural, and political catastrophes yet to come.

Europeans will by the end of the century wake up to find themselves living in a foreign land. Europe will be under the control of a majority-Muslim population. It will be history's first instance of a massive "reverse colonization" whereby civilized people allow themselves to be taken over by savages. How do I know this will happen? Because it's happening now.

Europe has over the past two decades opened its doors to millions of Arab and African Muslims. Islam has quickly become the continent's second largest religion. There are now more than 15 million Muslims in the European Union. Heavy immigration coupled with high birth rates among European Muslims (which are three times higher than the birth rates of native Europeans) will result in a doubling of Europe's Islamic population in just 15 years. In 50 years, Muslims will be a majority in several key European cities. Perhaps London or Paris will serve as the European Mecca. In 100 years, the European Union will be an Islamic superstate.

Muslims in Europe, including most of those born there, remain loyal to the cultures of their "ethnicity." Individual conversions out of Islam are rare. Although man by nature has free will and the ability to think for himself, a culture that constantly preaches obedience, group allegiance, and self-sacrifice, from the earliest days of childhood, is the only context to which most Muslims will readily relate. It took the West centuries to begin breaking free from the shackles of Christianity, and the process is still far from complete. It will take the Arab world, which is still mired in the Dark Ages, centuries to begin breaking free from the shackles of Islam. It will take only a few decades for Islamic primitives to engulf the West.

Even if European countries decided to halt all new immigration today, built-in momentum would make Europe more and more Muslim year by year for the foreseeable future. The present Muslim baby boom will lead to future Muslim baby booms. Meanwhile, Europe's non-Muslim population is in the midst of a dire birth dearth that will yield a 15% drop in the European population over the next 50 years. At that point, Europe will be ripe for a radical transformation. Middle East expert Daniel Pipes confirms that Muslim activists are making long-range plans to impose Islamic Law on European countries once they are able to mobilize a critical mass.

The Arab underclass in Europe is a ticking time-bomb. Hints of the intense hostility Muslims harbor toward their adopted countries are everywhere. In Denmark, Muslims are responsible for a majority of all rape cases. In France, which is home to nearly 6 million Muslims, half the prison population is of foreign origin. Throughout Western Europe, crime, unemployment, and welfare dependency among Muslims runs extraordinarily high. Instead of learning the language of their country and finding productive employment (like most East Asian immigrants), Muslim immigrants tend to live in insular communities that shun the outside world. As the angry Muslim underclass rapidly grows, European cities could soon explode into turmoil.

Pro-terrorism vitriol, mainstream in most Muslim countries, is becoming common in Muslim-swamped Europe. A Lebanese immigrant to Belgium named Dyab Abou Jahjah, often referred to as the "Belgian Malcolm X," formed the Arab European League to rile Europe's Muslims for political activism. Police say he incites racial violence. His and his many followers' attitude toward terrorism is particularly disturbing. The Arab European League has staged pro-Palestinian demonstrations in European cities in which militants chanted "jihad" while cheering Osama Bin Laden. Dyab Abou Jahjah boasted in an Egyptian newspaper that after the terrorist attacks of September 11, "in the Arab ghetto in Brussels, people were smiling."

Some Muslims in the United States were smiling, too. Even among those American Muslims who claim to be against terrorism, an unequivocal condemnation of the September 11th attacks is hard to come by. "We oppose terrorism, but..." is usually a prelude to a rant against U.S. foreign policy and Israel - the same issues exploited by Osama Bin Laden. Officials of the American Muslim Council, a group courted by the Bush Administration after September 11, have described Al Qaeda as a "resistance movement."

Pakistani cleric Fazrul Rehman vowed, "Americans will wake up to the existence of an Islamic army in their midst." Islam is, in fact, the fastest growing religion in the United States. Although Muslim migration is somewhat less intense in North America than in Europe, it only takes a few dedicated Wahhabists to launch another devastating terrorist attack. The U.S. government acknowledges that there are some 5,000 terrorist-connected individuals living in America, almost all of them foreign born. Some are raising money. Some are conducting reconnaissance of dams, bridges, power plants, airports, and other places of interest. Some are awaiting instructions to launch an attack.

The United States remains the #1 target on Al Qaeda's hit list. Top government officials agree that another major attack on the United States in the near future is probable. What, then, is the U.S. government doing to prevent likely terrorists from entering the country?

Incredibly, not much at all. Instead, in the name of "fighting terrorism," the government has launched an invasion of Iraq and a full-scale attack on citizens' basic liberties. The fact that neither Saddam Hussein nor U.S. citizens were responsible for 9-11 seems to escape the politicians' notice. The hijackings were carried out mostly by Saudis. Moreover, a majority of the men currently on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list were born either in Saudi Arabia or Egypt. See a pattern? The Bush Administration doesn't. Since the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt aren't sponsors of terrorism (according to the State Department, anyway), people from those countries are assumed to be friendly. Only entrants from seven countries - Cuba, Iran, Iraq (for now), Libya, North Korea, Syria, and Sudan - receive intense scrutiny.

Fighting terrorism doesn't require the United States to wage war on Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Sudan, Nigeria, Syria, etc., in an impossible attempt to try to remake every last terrorist stronghold on the globe. Fighting terrorism doesn't require armies of government agents to be deployed at every airport, hospital, stadium, shopping mall, etc., in an impossible attempt to "secure" every conceivable terrorist target. Defeating terrorism requires the United States to give up its delusions and refocus its foreign policy on defending the homeland. The primary objective of national defense is to deter and repel invasions from foreign governments and foreign terrorists. Americans must be willing to do what they tragically weren't before September 11: slam the door on "visitors" from countries that foment terrorism. They must be willing to stand up and say, unreservedly and unashamedly, that not a single American life or a single American freedom will ever be sacrificed or jeopardized in order to accommodate individuals from known terrorist havens.

But, it might be objected, aren't tight borders antithetical to freedom? It all depends on whose freedom is at stake. Take the case of Israel, a tiny country surrounded by tens of millions of hostile neighbors who believe passionately that Israel has no right to exist. What would happen if the Jewish State adopted a policy of open immigration? It wouldn't take long for its citizens to be driven out from their homes. If open borders would be deadly for Israel, then what about other countries that are being targeted by foreign terrorists? I think this question was answered on September 11, 2001.

Some libertarians will oppose any effort by any government to restrict immigration, even if a country's very survival is at stake. They regard this as a principled approach, much like this "principled" line of reasoning: Free speech must always be protected. Therefore, a man should be free to walk into a bank and say, "Give me $50,000 right now or I'll kill you." The basic error here is rationalism, which involves the attempt to deduce a conclusion from a wider generalization while disregarding the context upon which the generalization depends. The principle of freedom of speech arises from the recognition that individuals should be able to express ideas without fear of censorship. Threats of violence, even in the form of speech, amount to the initiation of physical force.

Open-borders absolutists fail to grasp the contextual nature of a proper immigration policy. The inductive generalization that the citizens of a country gain value when citizens of other countries are free to immigrate is valid, but within a particular context. The generalization assumes that immigrants are essentially traders. It does not follow that all immigrants are, in fact, traders. Islamic jihadists, Marxist guerillas, and cannibalistic tribes have no right to enter a civilized country. They are properly treated as invaders who pose an immediate threat to the rights of citizens.

The invaders of September 11 should never have been allowed into the United States. In addition to murdering 3,000 people, they destroyed hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth and triggered a massive expansion of the size and scope of government, the full economic costs of which won't be known for years. Yet even after 9-11, rationalistic free-market economists continue to insist that indiscriminately open borders spur economic growth, because that's what their theories say. This economic argument collapsed as suddenly and completely as the Twin Towers. Borders that are open to terrorist-infested countries represent an economic hazard, not a boon.

When Ayn Rand emigrated from Russia in 1926, she consciously chose her new country based on the values held by its people. The United States in 1926 had a specific identity. Despite being a land of immigrants, it was not teeming with terrorists. America prided itself on being the Land of the Free.

Now it's the Land of Political Correctness. And in order to be able to continue to indulge the "diversity" and multiculturalism that immigrants from terrorist hotbeds bring, the United States is erecting multi-billion dollar Orwellian citizen-surveillance programs to try to sort out the terrorists living among us. Sacrificing every citizen's freedoms is the principal strategy of the domestic "war on terrorism." Turning away likely terrorists before they enter the country in the first place wouldn't require any citizen's liberties to be sacrificed.

The altruism inherent in America's immigration policies is exemplified by the refugee program and the so-called Diversity Lottery. Under the refugee program, the United States is permitting the United Nations to resettle in American towns tens of thousands of Muslim "refugees" from war-torn African countries such as Somalia. They generally have no money, don't know English, and don't possess useful job skills - in short, they have nothing of value to offer Americans. So, the U.S. government is handing out millions of dollars in grants to pay for their housing, food, and schooling, and to help them set up mosques. The Diversity Lottery, meanwhile, randomly grants permanent resident status to 50,000 aliens from countries with marginally low rates of immigration. Saudis and Egyptians are eligible. Canadians and Brits are not. Egyptian immigrant Hesham Mohamed Hadayet was a beneficiary of the Diversity Lottery. On July 4, 2002, he shot and killed two Jews at the El Al Airlines counter at Los Angeles International Airport.

Officials of the United States and most Western countries regard "diversity" as sacrosanct, freedom as dispensable, and culture as irrelevant. These ideas, combined with current demographic patterns, make Europe's plunge into the abyss all but inevitable. The United States won't be far behind. Decades from now, Australia and New Zealand may be the last remaining relative bastions of freedom. But not if their future leaders are immigration anarchists. Having small populations, the Aussies and the Kiwis could suddenly find themselves overwhelmed by Muslims from burgeoning Indonesia, Malaysia, central Asia, and the Middle East. By then, of course, it would be impossible to turn back the clock, as Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and possibly the United States will have already learned.

Not even another September 11th is likely to jar civilization from its self-destructive path. There will certainly be another terrorist attack on the people of the United States. Probably, it will again be carried out by foreign Muslims who entered the United States legally - that is, with the full knowledge and approval of the government. The blood of the victims will be on the hands of the altruistic politicians who granted free passes to nationals of the world's most dangerous countries. The politicians will respond by ratcheting up the domestic police state a few more notches. They will lecture us about how Islam is a peaceful religion, promise to protect the civil rights of Muslims, proclaim that we must honor our country's diversity, etc., ad nauseum.

An individual who acts consistently on the morality of altruism will logically pursue suicide as the supreme act of self-sacrifice. If the cultural and political trends of our age continue unabated, altruism will eventually take its final toll on the West in the form of its death. When future historians write its obituary, some will classify its decline and fall as "death by conquest," which will be true superficially. More careful historians will deem it to be "death by suicide," with conquest merely being the chosen means.

Open-borders absolutists ignore the evidence of global Islamic insurgency and the grave threat it poses at their own peril - and civilization's.

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