Closing the Barn Door

If a farm is threatened by wolves, many of which have already attacked and killed some livestock, it makes sense to close the barn door.

But what if there are wolves inside the barn already?

Well, it should be easy -- with an adequate force of farmers armed with shotguns and torches -- to ferret out the wolves, chase them out if not shoot them.

What if some of the wolves already inside look like sheep?  Then it depends on how astute the farmers are, to be able to discern which of the seemingly harmless farm animals are really wolves.

Can we, however, trust the judgement of the farmers in charge if they assert that some of the wolves inside the barn -- even after knowing they are wolves -- are harmless, and that only "radical" wolves should be ejected while the other wolves can remain?

That essentially is the position of the otherwise robustly anti-Islam opposition party of the Netherlands, PVV ("Party for Freedom"), headed by Geert Wilders, a preeminent member of the leadership of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (CJM).

In their recent 11-point plan they issued, the very first one says:

1. De-islamize the Netherlands.

What this entails is adumbrated in bullet points:

• Zero asylum seekers and no immigrants anymore from Islamic countries: close the borders
• Withdraw all asylum residence permits which have already been granted for specific periods, close the asylum centers
• No Islamic headscarves in public functions
• Prohibition of other Islamic expressions which violate public order
• Preventive detention of radical Muslims
• Denaturalization and expulsion of criminals with a dual nationality
• Jihadists who went to Syria will not be allow to return to the Netherlands
• Close all mosques and Islamic schools, ban the Koran

This resembles Trump's plan, though it tightens a couple of the bolts a bit, insofar as the first bullet point would prohibit all immigrants from apparently all Islamic countries (if defined as belonging to the O.I.C. -- as it should be -- that would be 56 countries including the "occupied" territories in what should be Israel).  Trump's rhetoric, from his acceptance speech at the RNC, meanwhile, is not so sweeping:

...we must immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism until such time as proven vetting mechanisms have been put in place.

And, of course, Trump will do nothing about the wolves already in the U.S. (approximately three million), and only promises to go after the radical extremist wolves among them.

Meanwhile, the remainder of the PVV bullet points stipulate that only "radical" wolves inside the barn will be ferreted out and "detained" while only "criminals with a dual nationality" will be tracked down and expelled, and only those Muslims who go to Syria (to join ISIS or other jihadist groups) will not be allowed back in.  It says nothing of all the Muslims who will lie about being moderate. 

While there are robust measures in the PVV plan to minimize public Islamic expression (prohibition of hijab, closure of mosques & Islamic schools, and banning of the Koran), one could say these are almost too robust, if they are going to continue to allow approximately one million Muslims to live inside the Netherlands, who will surely be deeply angered and offended by their religion being so profoundly stigmatized by laws.  That would be like allowing 50 wolves to live inside the barn and then set up measures whereby those wolves will be regularly provoked every day for years.

Three factors elucidate why this problem is worse than the CJM apparently realizes:

1) the ability of all the "wolves" in question -- viz., the Muslims who will be allowed to remain inside the West -- to feign assimilation and to lie about their moderation;

2) the guillibility of the "farmers" in question -- our Western representatives, even our fellow Western citizens, and apparently the majority of those in the CJM -- that leads them to believe that not all Muslims are wolves either openly or in sheep's clothing; and

3) the monumentally plausible likelihood that no Western country, Netherlands or any other, is going to go as far as the platform of Geert Wilders any time soon and before Muslims mass-murder many more Westerners through a series of terror attacks worse than 911.

Even if by some miracle, the PVV did win an election in the near future in the Netherlands, it's highly doubtful that the other political forces, which in a parliamentary system like the Netherlands continue to have a say in policy, would allow those bullet points to pass (particularly the one about closing down all mosques and banning the Koran).  And even if the rosiest prediction came true for the Netherlands, there still remains the rest of the West, nearly all member nations lagging seriously behind in a PC/MC-blinkered retardation that continues to enable Mohammedan infiltration.

An expression of this attitude could not be more exquisitely expressed than by an editorial in the UK Sun about the recent reversal of the French ban on burkinis in public places.  While the UK Sun is broadly mainstream, it is a bit of a tabloid.  The more important point for our purposes here, however, is that the editorial was reported by that bastion of the CJM, Jihad Watch, and the reporter, Christine Williams, who has published many pieces for Robert Spencer over this past year, relays the UK Sun report without the slightest hint in her long introduction to it of anything amiss with one of its main assumptions (emphasis in bold mine):

But the truth is that most French citizens at both ends of the political spectrum SUPPORT the [burkini] bans.
 
This includes French Muslims, especially women.
 
They agree with Laurence Rossignol, France’s Socialist women’s minister, who suggested burkinis were designed to “hide women’s bodies in order better to control them”.
 
To liberal Muslims — still the majority in France, where the burka has been banned since 2010 — the burkini is the latest of encroaching advances made by the ultra-conservative Salafist Muslims.

Even if Christine Williams, and any of the Counter-Jihad civilians in the Jihad Watch comments section, might, if someone called their asleep-at-the-switch attention to it, balk at this almost comically outdated assumption by the UK Sun of a majority of moderate Muslims, the much more frequent tendency among CJMers to balk at deportation of all Muslims implies basically the same assumption -- that, to wit, in any given Western country, not all the Muslims are equally suspect.  This was one theme of a couple of my previous essays.

Let's take a gander at that brook flowing out of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, the 90 comments (to this point) attached to the report by Christine Williams, shall we...?

David A. writes:

Deport all Muslims who follow this orthodox Islam. Ban all religions that advocate any of the above crimes ["hate, violence, murder, sedition, legal rape, legal assult, and second class status for all but Muslim males"], because they are crimes. If Catholics want a Catholic government again, that is sedition. Support the very few Muslims who interpret the Koran and jihad as internal struggle ONLY. Remove all hate literature from all mosques. Confiscate their assets.

The problem with David A.'s prescription is that he's not factoring in taqiyya and the clever ability of Muslims to obfuscate their mainstream Islamic support for those veritable crimes.  And David A. leaves a wedge for precisely that Islamic sophistry, by his silly belief that there are any Muslims (even if "very few") who don't support those crimes -- since such a Muslim would be, ipso facto, a non-Islamic Muslim.  But that, in a nutshell, is the incoherent meme of the CJM in its refusal to adopt and cultivate a zero tolerance of all Muslims.

Another Jihad Watch commenter, billybob, uncritically relays a report from that soft-on-Islam mainstream news source, FOX, which itself uncritically gave its platform to a Better Cop Muslima, which in turn only helps to reinforce the UK Sun's meme (again, bold emphasis mine):

“Don’t be fooled, the burkini has nothing to do with Islam or faith”

Quote:

“I’m a conservative, an American, and a Muslim reformer. As a Muslim woman I was disappointed on Friday to see the France’s highest court overturn the burkini ban. For a liberal society, the decision means the protection of free expression. For watchdogs like myself who look to the horizon, we know this sets a second precedent: the acceptance of Islamist culture. Friday there were two wins: the first for a tolerant society and the second for Islamists waging a soft civilization jihad.”

Notice the clever deployment of the term "Islamist" by this Muslim "reformer" -- that term, which has no basis in any Islamic reality other than in the clever propaganda of pseudo-reformers like her (the snake-oil salesman of Reformed Islam, Maajid Nawaz, leaps to mind).  And, of course, none of the Jihad Watch regulars, or anyone else in that comments section, saw fit to take 60 seconds out of their life to register an appropriate skepticism about the notion of a "Muslim reformer".

A commenter named "KnowThyEnemy" circles elliptically around the point, and never quite gets there.  His final paragraph may or may not logically lead to the conclusion that all Muslims are suspect of seditious support for the Islamic plan to destroy our societies.  Naturally, none of the other Jihad Watch regulars (or anyone else there) saw fit to help nudge his last paragraph into more useful clarity:

Conclusion: Islam, its members, symbols, and practices should be declared tool of a foreign govt by all non-Muslim majority countries. The burqinis should especially be banned, including in the US, because of the societal threat they pose to women (besides the reasons mentioned by you, and in point 1).

The reason, perhaps, why "KnowThyEnemy" is so strangely vague about a logical conclusion to his comment, is that he hasn't capped off his knowledge of the enemy with the crucial corollary: that they are waging hot war against us which includes stealth jihad, and in doing so they have already mass-murdered us and are now and for the foreseeable future planning more mass murders of us in order to bring us down.  And that the success for their goal against us depends crucially upon two things: their continued presence among us, and our continued stupidity about how not all of them are part of the one jihad against us.

Meanwhile, naturally, none of the other 87 Jihad Watch commenters came anywhere close to noticing this most important aspect of the broader, deeper problem that threatens our societies with destruction.

Further Reading:

An essay I wrote some seven years ago:

Closing the barn door -- not after the horse has got out, but after the wolves have got in.