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COMMENTARY
August 28, 2004
Death of Baldoni
One is moved by a quotation from the late Enzo Baldoni the Italian freelance journalist and Red Cross volunteer who was murdered on video by the Jihadis in Iraq this week. "Some people think I am some sort of Rambo who loves strong emotions and watching people die. I am miles away from that. I am a convinced pacifist and for that reason I am curious to understand what makes normal people brandish guns." Poor Baldoni who survived previous adventures in East Timor and Colombia had stopped appearing in the Milan weekly Diario and started appearing on Al Jazeera as the latest in a series of bourgeois Western captives which the network has shown gloatingly to the Muslim world. (Canada which bans the U.S. Fox News network has recently permitted Al Jazeera to broadcast nationally through cable. It will most certainly be a source of incitement among radical Muslims here.) Baldoni's murderers sent a message to Italy and the West that his fellow pacifists seem incapable of understanding. It is that they don't make distinctions between infidels. They don't seek "fellow travellers" as the Communists did when at the height of the Cold War the Soviet state was massively funding both openly and secretly peace movements across Europe and America as a way to subvert the Western democracies. There are two reasons for this. One of them is that the nature of the new East-West conflict is fundamentally different from the old one. It is a hot war in progress not a cold one of prospect; and while much of it is fought with what appear to us to be mere terrorist gestures the perpetrators intend them as real acts of war. The other is the nature of the enemy. It is not all of Islam. But within Islam it is a substantial force drawing on 14 centuries of common historical memory. Thus it is more of a conflict between civilizations than of an ideological competition within a common civilization. This is the mistake that was made in Spain: the popular willingness to believe that simply by getting out of Iraq and staying out of Iraq Spain could be freed of trouble. But the terror attacks on Madrid last March were as we now know planned long before the invasion of Iraq had even started let alone before the Spanish government had thought of contributing a small contingent to help. The Spanish were assuming the Jihadis were thinking in a Western way: "You do this or we'll do that." But that is not how they think at all. The terrorists did not want the Spanish out of Iraq for their being in Iraq was useful in recruiting. Instead they want the Spanish out of Spain. As Osama bin Laden and many others have argued the whole country is Muslim property rightfully part of the Dar al-Islam as the result of the Arab conquest in the 8th century. Spain's re-Christianization has never been accepted any more than the foundation of Israel on soil conquered by Muslims in the 7th century will ever be accepted. To this radical Muslim view the Moroccan immigrants in Spain are not foreigners but returnees. They own the country as the gift of Allah and the Spanish who think of themselves as hosts are instead rightfully their subjects -- whose choice finally must be conversion dhimmitude or death. Is it any surprise that in the swelling Muslim ghettoes of Spain and elsewhere across Europe this "Islamist" religious ideology is spreading especially among the testosterone-challenged youth of the second and third immigrant generations who feel their own poverty and disadvantage in juxtaposition with the great wealth and ease of the decadent European societies around them? Societies which by refusing to assert themselves when directly threatened seem so ripe for the plucking? To this Jihadi mindset the pacifist multiculturalist bleeding heart liberal is not the "useful idiot" whom Lenin once defined. He is instead a symptom of the weakness of the West to be exploited in an hour of historical opportunity. And so far as that "nice liberal" is useful it is only by being especially easy to scare and thus a means to spread panic through the larger society. This is all hard and disagreeable stuff to write. I know from mail that many of my readers reject this utterly not because they are stupid but because what I am telling them flies in the face of everything they've been raised to believe. They would rather silence the messenger. Events however will continue to undermine their assumptions. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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