March 24, 2017
Westminster, London
Source: Bigstock
This, of course, is the great difference between Islamist terrorists and previous terrorists like the IRA. The IRA could have ignited bombs on crowded planes or trains but instead tried to restrict the number of people they murdered, for fear of losing support and funding and being suppressed by the British state.
It is hard to see how Islamism will be eradicated, but one day it will. I wonder if the nature of terrorism (itself a relatively new phenomenon that started in the late 19th century) has changed forever. Terrorism’s roots lie with the Anarchists but are to a large extent a part of the phenomenon of total war that began with the Spanish Civil War and then the Second World War. In those wars civilians were massacred as a matter of course.
Terry Jones of Monty Python said all there was to be said about the war on terror when he said, in 2001, “What really alarms me about President Bush’s “war on terrorism” is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? It’s rather like bombing murder.”
You can”t make war on Islamism, either, and you can”t stop an individual Islamist from killing innocent people, as may have happened last Tuesday.
What you can do is stop further immigration into Western countries from mostly Muslim ones. It won”t help solve the problem of terrorism, but it would help stop things getting worse over the next ten, twenty, thirty, or a hundred years.
At the same time you must prevent ordinary law-abiding Muslims from thinking the authorities are anti-Muslim. If they start to do so, things become very dangerous indeed. So the easiest thing to do is sharply reduce settlement in Europe by all non-Europeans.
How can this be squared with declining birth rates?
In this way: Immigrants could still come and work in Europe but leave after completing their contracts, just as Europeans do when they go to live in, for example, the Gulf.
This is exactly what Merkel, Macron, Juncker, etc. are determined never to do. So perhaps Trump is not so bad after all.
