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Jewish World Review
March 25, 2004
/ 3 Nissan, 5764
We tried appeasement once before
By
Mark Steyn
http://www.jewishworldreview.com |
A neighbor of mine refuses to let her boy play with "militaristic" toys. So when a friend gave the l'il tyke a plastic sword and shield, mom mulled it over and then took away the former and allowed him to keep the latter. And for a while, on my drive down to town, I'd pass Junior in the yard playing with his shield, mastering the art of cowering more effectively against unseen blows.
That's how the "peace" crowd thinks the West should fight terrorism: eschew the sword, but keep the shield if you absolutely have to. This week, The London Telegraph reported that two Greenpeace activists had climbed up to Big Ben to protest at the Iraq war. Don't ask me why Greenpeace is opposed to the liberation of Iraq. It's been marvelous for the eco-system: the marshlands of southern Iraq are now being restored after decades of Saddamite devastation.
Nevertheless, the Greenpeace guys shinned up St Stephen's Tower, just as a couple of months before that a Daily Mirror reporter blagged his way into a servants' gig at Buckingham Palace just in time for the Bush visit, and a couple of months before that an Osama lookalike gatecrashed Prince William's party.
History repeats itself: farce, farce, farce, but sooner or later tragedy is bound to kick in. The inability of the state to secure even the three highest-profile targets in the realm — the Queen, her heir, her Parliament — should remind us that a defensive war against terrorism will ensure terrorism. Tony Blair understands that. Few other European leaders do.
For more than a week now, American friends have asked me why 3/11 wasn't 9/11. I think it comes down to those two words you find on Holocaust memorials all over Europe: "Never again." Fine-sounding, but claptrap. The never-again scenario comes round again every year. This very minute in North Korea there are entire families interned in concentration camps. Concentration camps with gas chambers. Think Kim Jong-Il's worried that the civilized world might mean something by those two words? Ha-ha.
How did a pledge to the memory of the dead decay into hollow moral preening? When an American Jew stands at the gates of a former concentration camp and sees the inscription "Never again", he assumes it's a commitment never again to tolerate genocide. Alain Finkielkraut, a French thinker, says that those two words to a European mean this: never again the führers and duces who enabled such genocide. "Never again power politics. Never again nationalism. Never again Auschwitz" — a slightly different set of priorities. And over the years a revulsion against any kind of "power politics" has come to trump whatever revulsion post-Auschwitz Europe might feel about mass murder. 
That's why the EU let hundreds of thousands of Bosnians and Croats die on its borders until the Americans were permitted to step in. That's why the fact that thousands of Iraqis are no longer being murdered by their government is trivial when weighed against the use of Anglo-American military force required to effect their freedom. "Never again" has evolved to mean precisely the kind of passivity that enabled the Holocaust first time round. "Neville again" would be a better slogan.
Among all the foolish apologists for the murderers of Madrid, it was the Reverend Mark Beach who happened to catch my eye. Preaching at St Andrew's Church, Rugby, nine days ago, Mr Beach said: "The people of Madrid are reaping the fruits of our intolerance towards those of different races and religions. The war in Iraq was never going to solve the problems of that region but instead inflamed Arab people all over the world to new heights of anger towards the West."
G-d Almighty. The sooner the Potemkin Church of England is sold for scrap the better. Almost every word of Mr Beach's is false; there are mosques in the English Midlands, but no Christian churches in Saudi Arabia. Its official tourism commission lists among prohibited categories of visitor "Jewish persons".
It is precisely because the West is so open to different races that Islamist bombers can blend in on Madrid commuter trains, and the Tube and the Paris Metro, in a way that, say, a team of blond, blue-eyed Aryan bombers certainly couldn't in Damascus. The war in Iraq has actually solved quite a few problems in that region, and Arab people all over the world aren't inflamed — the allegedly seething Arab street is as somnolent as ever.
In 2002 and 2003, I took a couple of two-legged, mini fact-finding trips — first to western Europe, then on to the Middle East. And both times I was struck by the way the Muslims of Araby were far less inflamed than those in the alienated immigrant ghettoes around Paris and Amsterdam. Life in the West, exposure to the self-loathing platitudes of Anglican clerics, these are the sort of things that seem to inflame Muslims. Many of the wackiest Islamists from Richard Reid to Zacarias Moussaoui to Metin Kaplan are products of the enervated Europe symbolized by the Rev Mark Beach.
A century ago, in The Riddle Of The Sands, the first great English spy novel, Erskine Childers has his yachtsman, Davies, try to persuade the Foreign Office wallah Carruthers to take seriously the possibility of German naval marauders in the Fresian Islands: "Follow the parallel of a war on land. People your mountains with a daring and resourceful race, who possess an intimate knowledge of every track and bridlepath, who operate in small bands, travel light, and move rapidly. See what an immense advantage such guerrillas possess over an enemy which clings to beaten tracks, moves in large bodies, slowly, and does not 'know the country'."
Davies wants Carruthers to apply the old principles to new forms of warfare. The Islamists are doing that. Their most effective guerrillas aren't in the Hindu Kush, where it is the work of moments to drop a daisycutter on the mighty Pashtun warrior. They're traveling light on the bridle-paths of Europe — the small cells that operate in the nooks and crannies of a free society, while politicians cling to the beaten tracks — old ideas, multicultural pieties and a general hope that things will turn out for the best.
That's the drawback of sticking with the "Neville again" routine: appeasement is even less effective when the faraway country of which you know little is your own.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Mark Steyn is North American Editor of The (London) Spectator and the author, most recently, of "The Face of the Tiger," a new book on the world post-Sept. 11. (Sales help fund JWR). Comment by clicking here.
© 2004, Mark Steyn
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