UPDATED: A Show Of Solidarity Or Sentimentality? Winning À La The West

Free Speech, Islam, Jihad, Justice, The West

Lots of displays of profound, understandable sorrow are underway around the Western world, in response to the massacre by native (as in French) Muslims of French journalists and caricaturists. Plaintive signs and symbols are being held up, mournfully. In Barcelona, Brussels, London, Paris, Nice, Lyon, tens of thousands of Europeans are flaunting their feelings: “Je Suis Charlie,” “Not Afraid.” Pencils and notepads are being piled up on sidewalks, symbolically.

But where is the rage?

Anderson Cooper interviewed a French “documentary maker”—a title everyone with a camera assumes these days. The Frenchman declared that we were winning. How so? Coming out en masse to plonk teddy bears on a sidewalk: Is that winning?

As Diana West observed, “Islamic blasphemy law, the barbarous essence of mainstream, authoritative Islam,” is making progress in the West. West, like myself, looked to the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders for a prescription.

The assassinations of ten journalists and two policemen today in Paris serve as a warning to all the countries in the free world. We are at war. Charlie Hebdo was under police protection following numerous threats because of its outspoken criticism of Islam. Despite the protection by the police, terrorists were able to murder their opponents.

He gave it.

If we continue dying while we practice what we believe in; how, pray tell, are we winning?

UPDATED (1/8): More of What Winning Looks Like In The West:

We contribute “an outpouring of art in response,” as signatories to the dhimma pact (“pact of surrender”) at CNN called the response to the execution of irreverent talent in Paris.

We add a plural option to the rallying cry, Je Suis Charlie: We are Charlie Hebdo – Nous Sommes Charlie.

We Know Whodunit

Crime, Islam, Media, Terrorism

Just as some media still pretend the phrase “radical Islam,” deployed by Megyn Kelly again today, is not a redundancy—Islam is radical—others make believe that when individuals shoot up a place of business yelling praise for their vampiric godhead, “the motive … of the perpetrators [is] still unknown.” How many journalists like Ms. Krule of Slate still pretend, with each Islam-inspired atrocity, the we have a Whodunit to unravel?

On Satire

Free Speech, Journalism

Satire—caricatures included—is a highly civilized and refined way of exposing ‘folly, vice, or stupidity,’ to follow the dictionary. The dictionary defines satire as ‘a literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit.’ Writers, this one included, have instantiated in writing the questions the cartoons of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo posed in pictures.

With a cartoon, a subset of satire, ‘the subject’s distinctive features or peculiarities are deliberately exaggerated to produce a comic or grotesque effect,’ so as to bring to the fore the illustrator’s perspective. The Charlie Hebdo satirical spoofing, like the 12 Jyllands-Posten cartoons before it, did not in the least exaggerate the connection between the example the prophet set, his teachings, including the exhortation to Jihad, and the violence that convulses a critical mass of Muslims.

Only Dutchman Geert Wilders Edifies

Europe, Free Speech, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Jihad

It is to be expected. The only edifying words to come from a politician, worldwide, in response to the craven, yet characteristic massacre, today, of staff at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, come from Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders:

The West is at war and should de-Islamize.

“… Wilders, leader of the anti-Islam Party of Freedom PVV … responded quickly via Twitter. ‘Just requested a debate with Prime Minister Rutte after the terrible attack in Paris,’ he tweeted.”

While Wilders’ full statement, via Vlad Tepes, is not endorsed here in full—it does contain more than a kernel of truth regarding the solution to “Islam’s bloody borders,” in the worlds of Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington.

Said Geert Wilders: “We have to close our borders, reinstate border controls, get rid of political correctness, introduce administrative detention, and stop immigration from Islamic countries. We must defend ourselves. Enough is enough.”

If experience tells us anything, there are certainly better candidates for immigration to the West—minority South Africans, perhaps?—than practitioners of the religion of peace.