Essays in Idleness

We may assume that Sponge-Bob and Snoopy overhead, for the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade in New York City, are fitted with cameras today. If not, there are drones enough to cover all the angles. Police sharp-shooters are set out on every roof; police dogs everywhere sniff for explosives. (I am copying the New York Times here, lacking my own newsroom.) From my Scotch genetic heritage, I wonder what it costs.

But to their credit the Yanks don’t just cancel the parade, the way the Belgians lock down Brussels. The Europeans are quicker to concede their daily lives to fear of Muslim killers — the enemy many of their politicians still dare not name. The fear is understandable, but the concession is foolish, cowardly, and shameful. (Foolish because it is rewarding the terrorists for their attack.)

It is what follows promptly on all those street signs reading, “We are not afraid!” In fact they are scared witless, as I can see from many reports. For there are few men left in Europe; or more precisely, few with chests. And only a few more left in North America, under constant attack from the politically correct, so that the terrorists need not even bother with them. The masses save their cojones for the Black Friday sales.

And now we watch the passive aggression of a Europe aroused by fear — lashing out by instinct at the blameless and defenceless. For it remains true, the great majority of Muslims have no intention to disturb the peace, whatever silly thoughts they may be secretly entertaining. For after all, they are cowards, too. The very people who might deserve some mercy, will be first to get it in the neck. By now, Europe has a long tradition of this; the whole wide world, for that matter, is included in this tradition, of punishing the defenceless for the crimes of their neighbours — who know where to hide.

To me, it seems, as it seemed to me also on the morning of 9/11, that we have essentially a police problem, made so much more expensive when we do not let them follow it to source.

It is unwise to allow unrestricted immigration anywhere, to a people unacculturated. It is asking for trouble, and it fetches trouble, not occasionally, but invariably. Refugees from anywhere must be held back at the frontier, generously treated, but admitted only a few at a time. It would be no different if they were Shintoists or Parsis: no settled people should be overrun. The more exotic they are, the more cautious the “we” should be. I put that in quotes because the “we” is universal; it is hardly “racism” except insofar as racialism is universal, too.

And this is true whether or not the refugees include potential terrorists. There is no population in the world dominated by psychopaths; that is not nature’s way. And we cannot tar the world’s billion Muslims with one administrative brush. We, who are Christians, must always take them case by case, and suffer the consequences of making a few mistakes.

Thus far, I must sound like a liberal.

But here I will not: It is to the disadvantage of the Muslims themselves to be walled in a camp of “political correctness,” exempt from focused search and challenge. It is to their ultimate cost that police dare not “ethnically profile,” in pursuit of their wrongdoers. For in the end they become interchangeable, and the “host” people turn against them every one. You do not pend up a dam, until it finally bursts. This is in itself among the oldest political principles.

The response to Islamic psychopaths should not be allowed to transform our lives. It is a police business, backed up by military only when necessity requires. The task is to track them down to source, and as the nice phrase has it, squash them like bugs — the malefactors, and not the harmless. And the more we succeed, the more the great majority of Muslims will account us just. For they, too, are threatened by the enemy within, and those of goodwill are already very likely to co-operate in the hunt.

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But as it is USA Thanksgiving, my love to all gentle Stateside readers. “The Lord hath done great things for us; we offer thanks unto the Lord.”

And that grace having been said, in the heart, kill and eat a turkey for me!