Two Jihads for the Price of One

"Thus do Muslim terrorists manage to inflict great damage on Western economies without firing a shot or swinging a scimitar."

Thus does Hugh Fitzgerald mar his otherwise superb essay on the alarmingly remarkable cancellation of the largest flea market in the West, La Braderie, held annually in Lille, France.

As Hugh reports, La Braderie is "the largest flea market in Europe, with 10,000 exhibitors and, last year, 2.5 million visitors."  And he adds the apposite fact: 

"The cancellation of this gigantic event is a severe economic blow to those exhibitors from all over France who depend, for a significant portion of their year’s profit, on that Lille market, but also a blow to those ancillary businesses — cafés, restaurants, and hotels – that benefit from exhibitors and visitors alike."

Hugh then circles in to the searingly relevant crux:

"Martine Aubry, the mayor, and a Socialist stalwart, said that the safety of visitors could not be assured – “there are risks we cannot reduce.” By this she meant, of course, risks of an attack by Muslim terrorists. Only once before, during the goose-stepping German occupation, has La Braderie ever been called off. "

At that point, Hugh had to append his unfortunate sentence with which I opened my piece above:

"Thus do Muslim terrorists manage to inflict great damage on Western economies without firing a shot or swinging a scimitar."

Such a sentence is only correct in a punctiliously technical sense -- that in this particular, concrete instance, Muslims did not actually kill anyone in Lille, France, thus causing the Mayor of Lille to call off the flea market.  But surely, the (reasonable) fear of Muslims is based solidly on the facts -- numerous times, in numerous places, over the years, not only in France but also elsewhere in Europe, let alone the entire planet, and only getting worse -- of Muslims already having killed, and having planned to kill, and still planning to kill, and having threatened to kill.

Thus do Muslim terrorists manage to inflict great damage to Western economies precisely by having fired shots and having swung machetes and having set off explosives and having driven trucks into crowds and having flown planes into buildings.

I.e., after all these years, Hugh is still strangely disconnecting the Stealth Jihad from the Violent Jihad.  I'm not just picking on Hugh; the Counter-Jihad Mainstream more broadly seems to suffer from this inability to see how the two Jihads are intimately dovetailed.  When they're not detaching the Jihad of the Hilt from the Jihad of the Sword, they are undervaluing the Stealth Jihad and fixating on terrorism.  It's like the Counter-Jihad Mainstream can't pat its head and rub its stomach at the same time.

Further Reading:

It's the Violence, Stupid

How the stealth jihad needs violence (a posting I feature on my "Miscellaneous & Potpourri" section up top, culled from a comment I posted on Jihad Watch comments back in the summer of 2010)

A collection of my essays on the nexus between stealth jihad and violent jihad.