by Timothy Furnish
His warning 600 years ago.
In the last 2 ½ years alone—from Charlie Hebdo to Manchester—there have been 20 Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States, killing a total of 381 people. The vast majority of terrorists convicted in the US since 9/11 have pledged allegiance to Islamic groups: ISIS, al-Qaeda and their ilk. Over 70% of the US State Department’s designated foreign terrorist organizations are Muslim in ideology and goals. Muslim “grooming gangs” have roamed the UK for years, setting girls and young women up to be sexually used. Over a thousand women were sexually assaulted in Germany on New Year’s 2016, largely by “foreign nationals.” Sexual crimes against women are increasing in Sweden, largely as a result of the massive influx of young Muslim men.
Yet how do most Europeans, and far too many Americans, respond to this civilizational assault? With sorrow and tears, “love trumps hate” and candle-lighting. By creating memes with the appropriate victims’ national flag. With cringing apologies for non-existent “Islamophobia” and promises to bring in even more Muslim “refugees” in order to demonstrate, once and for all (or at least until the next jihad) that we Westerners are truly open-minded and tolerant—even if it literally kills us. The President of the United States cannot even temporarily stop immigration from a few terrorist-haven countries—because they happen to be Muslim-majority ones, and leftist American judges, like British politicians, privilege the rights of non-citizen foreigners over their own countrymen in the name of Leftist ideology and global humanitarianism.
Western civilization may or may not be sick—but it’s certainly become spineless. This happens to many cultures, eventually—as described first, ironically, by the great 14th century North African Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun in his work The Muqaddimah. Ibn Khaldun, based on his study of ancient, Islamic and Christian history, ascertained a cyclical pattern of rise-and-fall among what he termed “dynasties” which, mutatis mutandis, is applicable to our culture as well. All of them go through three phases:
[1] The first is the one which establishes the society: “its members are used to privation and to sharing their glory with each other; they are brave….sharp and greatly feared. People submit to them.”
[2] Following that is the stage in which the society moves “from privation to luxury and plenty” and “the vigour of group feeling is broken…. People become used to lowliness and obedience. But many of the old virtues remain” and the people “live in hope that the conditions that existed in the first generation may come back, or they live under the illusion that those conditions still exist.”
[3] The final generation “has completely forgotten the period of…toughness, as if it had never existed…. because they are so much given to a life of prosperity and ease. They…are like women and children who need to be defended. Group feeling disappears completely….. When someone comes and demands something from them, they cannot repel him.”
The fourth phase, then, is the conquest of the civilization by another that is still in the robust, determined and, yes, dangerous phase.
Applying this paradigm to our American branch of Western civilization, we can say that the first, vigorous chapter of our history lasted from the Revolution to World War II (about 170 years); the second from the Korean War to our triumph in the Cold War (about four decades), an era dominated, alas, by the “Great Society” of LBJ and the liberal Democrats which institutionalized dependence on government; and the third began a quarter-century ago and has proceeded much more rapidly than the others—because, as Yeats observed in his poem “The Second Coming:” “things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”
The center, Ibn Khaldun’s group feeling, used to be Christianity, but that was jettisoned over the course of the 20th century; then American exceptionalism was terminated with extreme prejudice by Obama in his quest to humble America. Washington and Hollywood have spent years teaching people to rely on their emotions rather than rational faculties—with the result that now many young Americans prefer socialism, believe that gender is not biological, and insist that Christianity is as violent as Islam. Even the new administration’s National Security Advisor refuses to acknowledge that Islam has anything to do with jihad and violence.
Those of us still in Ibn Khaldun’s stage two want President Trump to draw a line and stop the replacement of Jerusalem and Athens with Brussels and Mecca. But when our fellow Americans are more concerned about whether men can use the women’s bathroom than the jihadists in our midst, we’re almost certainly trapped in terminal stage three—wherein a civilization which no longer believes in itself, said Ibn Khaldun, “is seized by senility and the chronic disease…for which it can find no cure, and, eventually, is destroyed.”
Perhaps there is hope yet—though it becomes difficult to see it. But as conservatives we must continue to fight on -- and appreciate a president who is finally, unlike so many conservatives, fighting the political and cultural battle the way it’s supposed to be fought.
Timothy Furnish
Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266828/arab-muslims-prediction-about-fall-western-timothy-furnish
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