A long-ish piece by Victor Davis Hanson that covers many elements of this war we are engaged in. As always with VDH, it is well constructed, complex,  multi-faceted, and worth reading.

I give you this excerpt not as a good representation of the peice as a whole, but becasue this is one aspect that is particulaly poignent for me right now.  All the more reason to go read the whole thing.

Finally, we are witnessing a larger existential war, in which Iraq is the central, but not the only, theater. Put simply: will the spreading affluence and liberality of Westernization undermine the 8th-century mentality of the Islamists more quickly than their terrorists, armed with Western weapons, prey on the ennui of a postmodern Europe and America — with our large gullible populations that either don’t believe we are in a real war, or think that we should not be?

Americans know exactly the creed of the Islamists and what they have in store for us nonbelievers. Yet if we are not infidels, can we at least be fideles? That is, can we any longer articulate what we believe in, and whether it is worth defending?

The problem is not that the majority of Americans have voiced doubts about the future of Iraq — arguments over self-interest and values happen in every long war when the battlefield does not daily bring back good news.

Instead, the worry is that too many have misdirected their anger at the very culture that produced and nourished them. [...]

Emphasis mine.

July 3rd, 2006 | Global War On Terror, International Politics, Liberty | No comments

Over at the Gates of Vienna [the place to go for in depth analysis on all things Islam and our struggles with its global aims] the Fjordman has filed a report on the EU with a call for its destruction in order to save Europe. Here is a taste:

The Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950, widely presented as the beginning of the efforts towards a European Union and commemorated in “Europe Day,” contains phrases which state that it is “a first step in the federation of Europe”, and that “this proposal will lead to the realization of the first concrete foundation of a European federation”. As critics of the EU have noted, these political objectives are usually omitted when the Declaration is referred to, and most people do not even know of their existence. A federation is of course a State and “yet for decades now the champions of EC/EU integration have been swearing blind that they have no knowledge of any such plans. EEC/EC/EU has steadily acquired ever more features of a supranational Federation: flag, anthem, Parliament, Supreme Court, currency, laws.” The EU founders “were careful only to show their citizens the benign features of their project. It had been designed to be implemented incrementally, as an ongoing process, so that no single phase of the project would arouse sufficient opposition as to stop or derail it.” Booker and North calls the European Union “a slow-motion coup d’état: the most spectacular coup d’état in history,” designed to gradually and carefully sideline the democratic process and subdue the older nation states of Europe without saying so in public.

In 2005, an unprecedented joint declaration by the leaders of all British political groups in Brussels called for PM Tony Blair to push for an end the “medieval” practice of European legislation being decided behind closed doors. Critics claim that the Council of Ministers, the EU’s supreme law-making body, which decides two thirds of all Britain’s laws (and the majority of laws in all Western European countries), “is the only legislature outside the Communist dictatorships of North Korea and Cuba to pass laws in secret.” As one of the signers put it: “We still have this medieval way of making decisions in the EU; people hide behind other member states, and blame them. It increases people’s sense of cynicism, but what we need is some straight talking.” According to British Conservative politician Daniel Hannan, this is how the EU was designed. “Its founding fathers understood from the first that their audacious plan to merge the ancient nations of Europe into a single polity would never succeed if each successive transfer of power had to be referred back to the voters for approval. So they cunningly devised a structure where supreme power was in the hands of appointed functionaries, immune to public opinion.” “Indeed, the EU’s structure is not so much undemocratic as anti-democratic.”

But be sure to read the whole thing.

UPDATE: this is good news:

Many adults in the Netherlands hold strong views on the way Muslims adapt to the European continent, according to a poll by Motivaction released by GPD. 63 per cent of respondents believe think Islam is incompatible with modern European life.

And they would be correct. And god help us all if modern European life is altered to accomodate Islam in its current form.

June 8th, 2006 | Global War On Terror, International Institutions, International Politics, Liberty | No comments