Why all of Macron’s measures against “extremism” are doomed to failure.
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
A critical question arises in light of the recent spate of fatal terror attacks in France and other European nations: How do you once and for all eradicate “extremism” from Muslim communities living in the West?
Western leaders usually respond by citing anything and everything from new “initiatives” meant to foster closer relations between Muslim communities and their host nations, to surveillance measures of hot spots and mosques.
Lamentably, history has already proven that even much more draconian measures against Islam—of the sort that modern Western man cannot even conceive let along implement—are doomed to failure.
Consider the historical experiences of France’s neighbor, Spain. In the eighth century, Muslims from Africa invaded and brutally conquered the Iberian Peninsula. Christians were massacred and subjugated; churches were destroyed and/or converted to mosques. By the late fifteenth century, however—after centuries of wars to liberate Spain from Islam (AKA, the Reconquista)—Christian rule finally extended to every corner of the peninsula.
Muslims, however, remained, mostly centered in Granada. Originally, they were given lenient terms: Muslims could continue practicing their religion, enforce sharia in their own communities, and even travel freely.
Even so, whenever the opportunity arose, Muslims rebelled and launched many hard-to-quell uprisings, some “involving the stoning, dismembering, beheading, impaling, and burning alive of Christians.” Muslims also regularly colluded with foreign Muslim powers (e.g., North Africans, Ottoman Turks) in an effort to subvert Spain back to Islam.
Fed up with this “enemy within,” the Spanish crown finally decreed in 1501 that all Muslims had two choices: convert to Christianity or leave Spain. The motivation was less religious and more political; it was less about making Muslims “good Christians” and more about making them “good citizens.” So long as they remained Muslim—thereby operating under the highly divisive doctrine of “loyalty and enmity”—they would remain hostile and disloyal to Christian Spain; and because secularism, atheism, multiculturalism, or just general “wokeness,” were not options then, the only practical way Muslims could slough off their tribalism and be loyal to a Christian kingdom was by embracing its faith.
Spain’s entire Muslim population—hundreds of thousands of Muslims—responded by openly embracing Christianity while remaining crypto-Muslims, in keeping with the Muslim doctrine of taqiyya. It teaches that, whenever Muslims find themselves under infidel authority, they may say and do almost anything—denounce Muhammad, receive baptism and communion, venerate the cross—as long as their hearts remain true to Islam. So, in public, these newly converted “Christians” went to church and baptized their children; at home, they recited the Koran, preached undying hate for the infidel, and plotted how to destroy Christian Spain.
That these “Moriscos”—that is, self-professed Muslim converts to Christianity who were still “Moorish,” or Islamic, as they came to be known—went to great lengths to foist their deception cannot be doubted, as explained by one historian:
For a Morisco to pass as a good Christian took more than a simple statement to that effect. It required a sustained performance involving hundreds of individual statements and actions of different types, many of which might have little to do with expressions of belief or ritual per se. Dissimulation [taqiyya] was an institutionalized practice in Morisco communities that involved regular patterns of behaviour passed on from one generation to the next.
Despite this elaborate masquerade, Christians increasingly caught on: “With the permission and license that their accursed sect accorded them,” a frustrated Spaniard remarked, “they could feign any religion outwardly and without sinning, as long as they kept their hearts nevertheless devoted to their false impostor of a prophet. We saw so many of them who died while worshipping the Cross and speaking well of our Catholic Religion yet who were inwardly excellent Muslims.”
Christians initially tried to reason with the Moriscos; they reminded them how they became Muslim in the first place: “Your ancestor was a Christian, although he made himself a Muslim” to avoid persecution or elevate his social status; so now “you also must become a Christian.” When that failed, Korans were confiscated and burned; then Arabic, the language of Islam, was banned. When that too failed, more extreme measures were taken; it reached the point that a Morisco could “not even possess a pocketknife for eating with that did not have a rounded point, lest he savage a Christian with it.”
A Muslim chronicler summarizes these times: “Such of the Muslims as still remained in Andalus, although Christians in appearance, were not so in their hearts; for they worshipped Allah in secret. . . . The Christians watched over them with the greatest vigilance, and many were discovered and burnt.”
Such are the origins of the Spanish Inquisition (which, contrary to popular belief, targeted more Muslims than Jews). For no matter how much the Moriscos “might present the appearance of a most peaceful submission,” a nineteenth century historian wrote, “they remained nevertheless fundamental Musulmans, watching for a favourable opportunity and patiently awaiting the hour of revenge, promised by their prophecies.”
Thus, when a rumor arose in 1568 that the Ottoman Turks had finally arrived, Spain’s crypto-Muslim fifth column, “believing that the days under Christian rule were over, went berserk. Priests all over the countryside were attacked, mutilated, or murdered; some were burned alive; one was sewed inside a pig and barbequed; the pretty Christian girls were assiduously raped, some sent off to join the harems of Moroccan and Algerian potentates.”
In the end, if Muslims could never be loyal to infidel authority—constantly colluding and subverting, including with foreign Muslims—and if conversion to Christianity was no solution, then only one solution remained: between 1609 and 1614, all Moriscos were expelled from the Peninsula to Africa, whence Islam had first invaded Spain nearly a millennium earlier.
This decision was not taken lightly. Many Christians in Spain—and the pope in Rome—deemed it too harsh; some suggested the castration of all Morisco males as an alternative. Yet, in the end, the monarchy concluded that there was no other guarantee against the constant subversions and sporadic bouts of terrorism than the complete elimination of Islam from Spain.
The point here is that Spain did everything humanly possible to get its Muslim population to assimilate and forsake their hate for Christian “infidels”—including by forcing them to convert to, and their children to be born in, Christianity, and monitoring their commitment—and even that was not enough, thanks to the dispensation of taqiyya, which still informs much of Europe’s Muslim population.
As such, surely any and all “anti-extremist” measures France and other Western nations take—none of which will ever be anywhere near as extreme as premodern Spain’s, and most of which currently revolve around silly platitudes such as “They will not divide us,” to quote Macron after a beheading—are doomed to failure.
Note: Quotes in the above narrative were excerpted from and documented in the author’s Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West. Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
[Note about the Inquisition:
In its 353-year history, the Spanish Inquisition was responsible for a grand total of 3,230 deaths, which on an annual basis is less than the number of French citizens who have been murdered by Muslims in 2020 alone. Source: The actual historical records. Look up the 783-page report published in 2004 by Agostino Borromeo of Sapienza University.
Another source is historian Henry Kamen.
We can in all probability accept the estimate, made on the basis of available documentation, that a maximum of three thousand persons may have suffered death during the entire history of the tribunal.
I think “Going underground” presupposes a hard totalitarianism. Soft Totalitarianism utilizes social pressure, and going underground accomplishes what the soft totalitarians want, which is to not be bothered by you anymore.
I think soft totalitarianism requires more of a “coming out” if you’ll pardon the phrase. As you say, an open declaration of being a social pariah. A kind of “I am spartacus” whereby Christians declare both their intent to remain unapologetically christian and their lack of caring in what the soft totalitarians think. Far too many Christians are allowed to be “Christian in name only” because they are not required to name themselves. Going underground promotes this hiddenness, and in my opinion puts us closer to the rot which we acknowledge has infected certain elements of the Church, and definitely christendom. Remaining firm and declaring ones allegiance, to me, is the contrary action to soft totalitarianism because it forces the Christian to find his reasons for believing and then to hold to them publicly. This doesn’t even have to be a romantic, dramatic sacrifice. Simply abstaining from meat on Friday is a radically foreign concept to most people.
You point out that only in hard totalitarianism does this create martyrs, and in soft totalitarianism will only create pariahs. Deplatforming can and in some cases does have the “barbara streisand” effect of amplifying a message they want extinguished. Going underground pre-emptively steals us away from open witness. Persistent low-status pariahs in sufficient numbers dares hard totalitarianism, which is the inevitable end of soft totalitarianism. A deplatformed individual can still talk to people, and if their thoughts are still thoughtcrimes then there’s no reason not to deplatform them from reality.
My point in all this is that Martyrs aren’t possible to an underground-people. Martyrdom has it’s place, you point out that it tends to multiply the number of dissidents. We shouldn’t prefer martyrdom, but we shouldn’t flee from it either. Survival will either require a new kind of burrowing, where Christians adapt themselves to being invisible in the modern age; or it will require a new kind of Faith, which is unapologetic and stares evil in the face.
Let’s say you were fired because you made coworkers uncomfortable with a frank affirmation of St. Paul’s view of sex roles. What kind of support would you expect from the Church? Legal counsel? A couch to sleep on? Thoughts and prayers?
Does the Church offer those things now? Of course there would be hardship–that’s kind of my point. We shouldn’t seek out that kind of hardship, of course, but neither should we fear it; it helps knit a community closer together to take care of their own. Far from isolating individuals, I think it would drive like-minded Christians and Catholics together in a stronger community than we have now. There’s an astonishing video on youtube of parishoners in France, some years ago, creating a battering ram to get inside a church whose doors had been boarded up. Targeting and isolating a community can strengthen that community’s resolve.
Yes, and hardship also reveals the true contours of community.
Churches need to be prepared to offer financial help to people who lose their jobs under certain circumstances. What else did God provide them with money for anyway? : )
Aye, there’s the rub. How to “burrow” in this new manner? Concrete tools and tactics. Retreat to small, rural communities of Benedicters might have been a viable option for progressively alienated transgressors of NICE before the regimen of COVID measures became ubiquitous, of obscure duration and apparently selective enforcement. But the kind of face-to-face-in-meatspace interaction necessary to foster trust and civic cooperation is now immeasurably more difficult to engender and sustain. Some may have the heroic fortitude to embrace solitude like modern day Desert Fathers; but many of us coping with isolation through the thin gruel of internet-mediated social relations have learned an abject lesson on the necessity of community and the pain of its loss. The ostracism of soft totalinarianism may not threaten us with the spilt blood of martyrdom, but it’s as fearful a prospect as the cruelties of hard totalinarianism nonetheless.
Handle describes the way that martyrdom under the Soviets was made easier for the martyr because his suffering was admired by his community. If he was able to return to that community, it was as a hero. As you say, suffering in solitude is hard. Ostracism will break most men quicker than the lash.
It is a strategic error to commit ourselves to any specific strategy. We need to protect ourselves; sometimes this requires fighting and other times it requires hiding. Sometimes becoming obvious and sometimes blending in. (Probably more of the latter.)
The one imperative is protecting our people.
I say this mainly because sometimes people become attached to one strategy or the other. We must be flexible.
Good point. What works today will not always work tomorrow.
All forms of persecution is survivable. But only one seems effective at seemingly stamping out Christianity at least in the East. That is wholesale massacre:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangzhou_massacre
There was no cult of the martyrs there I know of because all Christians have apparently died. Except when it got reintroduced by Jesuits.
Persecution means to harry and chase. So I guess persecution is survivable. But, sooner or later, they catch you . . .
@JMSmith
It is divine providence that the persecutions in the Roman Empire isn’t exterminationist in nature.
And the Gospel is preserved in the European Context.
I gave up on Dreher about a year ago after one-too-many virtue-signaling melt-downs over some Trump tweet. Also, Handel is more than right about his “sentimental soft spot” for the aims of the left. Dreher stated that he voted for the Democratic governor of Louisiana, which hardly makes sense under any circumstance, especially considering Louisiana’s two Republican Senators, who, like anyone, are merely mortal.
Dreher’s “solutions” of going underground, or Benedict Option type communities are no solutions at all, unless you’re willing to consign the rest of your life to second-class citizen status.
I’m more convinced than ever that the only solution to NICE is Separation. A big undertaking no doubt, but one that offers more promise than acknowledging that the Dark Side cannot be overcome.
Dreher’s old Crunchy Con blog was one of the first things I read on the internet. Like Dreher, I am a man of conservative opinions but SWPL tastes, and I thought he could teach me how to balance these things. I came to the conclusion that he is a man of conservative tastes and SWPL opinions, although I know this isn’t entirely fair. I don’t think NICE will let anyone secede, and will justify violence against secession with humanitarian arguments. They will claim to be protecting the human rights of the women and children the secessionists propose to take with them. This is the argument liberalism uses to capture anyone who runs away from the plantation (fundamentalist Mormons, for instance).
The phrase ‘Christian Diaspora’ has been floating in my head for a few months now. It sure would be a turn of the wheel if the Church became an ethnicity.
I just wish I knew how to advertise to the kindred spirits I pass on the sidewalk, or meet in the store, or chat with at the gym – when, as noted here, so much of speech has turned into mere gesture; and moreover, that the meaning of my words has been appropriated by the Beast. I am trying to set a good example to follow, but I crave an explicit community and I just cannot seem to find or formulate it.
I think there are many who share your sense of isolation. The internet is great, so far as it goes, but it is no substitute for genuine community.
Dreher did an article sometime in the last two years where he described an altercation he had with a male peer at some point during his adolescence. It was basically a scuffle that young Rod wasn’t looking for and in the article he goes on about how adults in the room didn’t jump in to stop the bullying on his behalf. We’ve all had similar playground fights where you make the internal decision to either unleash the flashpoint and shove back or cower and look for a hero. Rod looked to the rails for a savior instead of making his stand. He’s not a fighter. Probably a decent man. Maybe even a good one but not someone I’d count on to lead me into battle.
Most writers are not fighters. They became bookworms and wordsmiths because they couldn’t compete in bare-knuckels arena. There is some truth to the taunt that most writing is revenge for a wedgie received in the third grade.
Dreher being pushed underground, unable to be seen or heard may be part of God’s plan.
It will teach him that you’ve got to eat everything they set out if you want to eat at the Progressive table. Good manners aren’t enough. They don’t accept picky eaters.
Thanks for linking Handel’s review. I agree that it is very good, probably more valuable than the book.
Since I’ve been an adult, I’ve been attending churches that warned me that being a Catholic will often mean not going along with mainstream culture and being disliked for it. However, these same priests were usually very reluctant to say exactly what popular beliefs or practices we are meant to defy. When an example seemed to be demanded, they would mention general selfishness and consumerism, or the like. There’s something to be said for speaking generally. Probably when priests preach this, they’re thinking of people being tempted to participate in petty dishonesty, gossip, or drug abuse among a group of friends or coworkers, and in the past refusing to go along most often occurred in such contexts of small-group peer pressure. However, I think among the professional classes, such general entreaties do more harm than good. We’re all encouraged to think of ourselves as vaguely non-conformist, with the media-academic establishment telling us in exactly what way we are to non-conform so as to win the esteem of our peers and to rebuke low-status people whom we’ll probably never have to meet.
From Dreher’s blog, it’s clear he knows what sort of attacks Christians are actually likely to face. (For example, he knows perfectly well that we’re not likely to suffer for our brave stand against “neoliberalism”.) I won’t accuse him of not mentioning specifics out of fear. I do wonder what sort of self-defense manual one can put together without discussing the enemy’s specific lines of attack.
Live Not by Lies is a good book, with many words of warning and encouragement to stand from Soviet-era dissidents who see the dangers of our own time and place. I’m hoping pastors (among others) will read it and have bought copies for the pastors of a district in our area, one of them having decided that the book will be the topic of a pastors’ monthly meeting that he will be hosting.
I may read it. I was accosted on my evening walk a month or so ago, by a man who said he is some sort of a minister. He said he thought he recognized me, although I think it was probably a case of mistaken identity. Whether he though I was me or someone else, he knew I was a professor, and he was eager to talk about cultural Marxism. He had apparently been reading things on the internet, and was in a rather agitated state of mind. I’m not the guy to talk to if you want your mind to be put at ease on this question, so I agitated him a little more. The clergy need to adjust themselves and their flocks to the reality of post-Christian America. Not railing against it from the pulpit, but dispensing practical advice how to survive in it.
The clergy’s dilemma is that more than half of the congregation is already on the other side. The people in the pews is already too big a group to start with.
Here’s a plan.
Step 1: Decide what it would mean for a person to be “on our side”. This is presumably some combination of beliefs and gut identification. It does not require personal courage or morality. A coward or porn addict on your side is still on your side.
Step 2: Try to get a group of people on your side in one room. This is where the real step 1 can begin. One now has some community, however tiny, in which being on your side is high status. From there, the group can start thinking about ways to protect or expand itself.
Probably, at a regular-size Catholic parish, one could find half a dozen or more people fully on the Catholic side (however this is defined), but currently there is no parish activity in which any such Catholic can know that he’s surrounded by allies.
Humans find it very hard to fake enthusiasm for people and ideas they dislike. They may feel compelled to clap and smile, but a spark of self-respect requires that they do this in a tired or ironical way. So to find people who are on our side, you should look for the people who are the first to stop clapping for some Progressive piety. Chances are that they do not have much in the way of positive doctrine, only a vague dislike for platitudes they are given. When you get them in that room, you give them the positive doctrine that explains why they dislike those platitudes. Radicalism grows by recruiting people with the potential to be radicalized. Reaction must work in the same way, with what today’s slang calls “red-pilling.”
Ironically, Mr. Dreher was one of the first to jump on the persecution bandwagon against a Christian minister in Louisiana who had the audacity to open his church doors in spite of the lockdowns. Rod is a card-carrying member of the republic of NICE. Rod–like a broken clock–is also occasionally right.
At core, Rod lacks courage. Vox Day (despite his flaws) is very perceptive and wrote an insghtful piece about him as a “cuckservative” here: http://voxday.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-gamma-never-grows-up.html
Remember his initial response to the smirking white boys at the march for life? He recanted pretty quickly, but his gut reaction was that the boys were a disgrace the Christian community. A victim of misleading hot takes, but of course, but it does reveal an inordinate thirst for strange new respect.
Men of the right are far too eager to seek atonement by denunciation of other men of the right. They feel an entirely unreciprocated obligation to police their own ranks for the benefit of the Left. Quisling is the name for such rats.