We should respond to the question of whether the West is worth defending by first asking the more important question of which West it is that we are being asked to defend… There are many people who will cite the West as something which is under threat and something for which we should be prepared [...]
Sphinx-like Lebanon—best known for its businessmen, bankers, and civil wars—is the ultimate example in explaining the inexplicable in the Mideast. If the dog now wants something, he wags his tail; impatient of Master’s stupidity in not understanding the perfectly distinct and expressive speech, he adds vocal expression—he barks—and finally an expression of attitude—he mimes or [...]
No good Muslim, unless he is trying to deceive us, has any doubt that Allah is exactly as he is described in the Koran... Most people know that the Quran (Qur’an, Koran) is the holy book of the Muslim religion, hence of about a fifth of the world’s population. But knowing this much, we still must [...]
Let it be known that I am not a prophet, and I will quite happily eat crow, eat my hat, eat my words… eat whatever is necessary when my prognostications prove preposterous and my prophecies prove to be not prophetic, but pathetic. Nevertheless, with my finger to the wind and my squinty eye on the [...]
What ideology ever threatened America more than Islamic extremism? And yet might Islam, which once helped save and preserve Western thought and culture a thousand years ago, do something similar this century, helping to bring us back to a more spiritual, less materialistic, epoch?… 1938. The world is on the threshold of the most devastating war [...]
For Christians caught in the crossfire between Islamist and “Islamophobic” hatred, the only choice is to take the Mercutio option, refusing to take sides in a heartless and headless feud and calling down a plague upon both hate-filled parties… What is the world coming to? More specifically, what is my own country of England coming [...]
We can only hope that our current president will not now, in his efforts to make the world safe from terrorism, instead make the world safe for Wahhabism, the last remaining totalitarianism of our time... There have been more than a dozen Islamic terrorist attacks perpetrated in the United States. They mostly fall within the [...]
Wars, it is said, are the death of republics. And we now seem to be caught up in an endless war... Saturday, three Islamic terrorists committed "suicide-by-cop," using a van to run down pedestrians on London Bridge, and then slashing and stabbing patrons of pubs and diners in the nearby Borough Market. By all accounts, [...]
The West is dying because it has turned its back on the Permanent Things. But what will be left when the secularist “West” is dead?... I expected my recent essay “Race against Reason” to provoke an element of controversy and was not surprised when it elicited the following comment: Yes, this is all well and [...]
One of the more popular themes dominating media and social media in the last week have been fears that America’s multicultural project will be reversed, and exhibited by increased prejudice and discrimination against racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. One protester in Chicago told The Washington Post: “It’s a bad time to be a Muslim or [...]
It’s always refreshing to read essays these days that are intelligent and genuinely engaging, principally because such essays are becoming fewer and farther between. One such, which I enjoyed reading even though I ultimately disagreed with it, was Paul Berman’s “Why the French Ban the Veil: The Secular Republic Debates How Best to Contain and Suppress [...]
In The Great Heresies (1938), Hilaire Belloc wrote of the lifting of the Muslim siege of Vienna “on a date that ought to be among the most famous in history—September 11, 1683.” The date of September 11, if not the year of 1683, would become branded on everyone’s memory after the 9/11 attacks. One wonders, indeed, [...]
On the morning of June 24, the world awoke to a changed Europe. With the so-called Brexit referendum, the UK voted to leave the European Union, and as such, the EU lost one of its most important member nations. Almost immediately, there were calls from France, Italy, and the Netherlands to hold similar referenda, jeopardizing [...]
These are troubling times. Europe is apparently on the verge of meltdown. Unable to withstand the heat caused by the growing friction between the European Union and its member states, especially as the former tries to force an open-door immigration policy on its subject nations, there are fears that the melting pot might be melting. [...]