Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein relays an adage holding that “even God took his holidays in France” because among atheists “God himself could be carefree, a flaneur, like any tourist.” Idling outside of notice apparently appeals to God’s, or at least Allah’s, soldiers, too.
The ex-wife of Ibrahim Abdeslam, who blew himself up in last Friday’s Paris attacks, says he worked one whole day during their two-year marriage. Instead of labor, he slept during business hours, watched DVDs, and smoked “alarming” amounts of marijuana every day while blaring Arabic rap music. She told the Daily Mail, “We lived on unemployment benefit which was only €1,000 a month between us so we worried a lot about money.” When Abdeslam finally obtained gainful employment, he ran a drug den disguised as a bar. “Ibrahim used to go to discos,” one friend recalls. “He would drink alcohol, smoke.”
Before he blew himself up outside a French soccer stadium, Bilal Hadfi lived in state-subsidized housing. Like so many, he hated his landlord. His Facebook page shows him drinking, raising his middle finger, and aiming a firearm. He failed his school exams and confessed an addiction to video games. He repeatedly posted the message (pardon my French) “Nique de police.”
Hasna Ait Boulahcen enjoyed a last supper at KFC before blowing herself up on Wednesday during a police raid outside Paris. She drank, wore cowboy hats, and understandably attracted attention from the opposite sex. Her brother notes, “She was permanently on her phone, looking at Facebook or WhatsApp.” She exploded her body into pieces on Wednesday. She exploited her body in a naked bubble-bath selfie not too long ago.
Many of the terrorists displayed more decadence than devotion. Boulahcen’s brothermaintains she never read the Koran. The headmaster at Hadfi’s Belgium school says he “wasn’t especially religious.” Abdeslam’s wife notes that he refused to go to mosque.
They appear to combine the most degenerate qualities of Western Civilization with the most barbaric aspects of Islamic Civilization while inheriting nothing worthwhile from either ancient culture. This marriage of corruption and purity consummated in the Muslim enclaves around Paris, Brussels, and other European metropolises spawned a contradictory creature, the religious nihilist.
Sane calls for a second Reconquista through immigration restrictions miss the larger point. EU citizens, rather than foreign invaders, primarily terrorized Paris. To quote Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Only the terrorists, and the terrorized, don’t regard them as us. Immigration minus assimilation means conflict. And in the case of Muslims migrating to Europe, assimilation atop immigration works as a pipe dream realized as a nightmare.
Open wallets as much as open borders doom Europe. Harboring shiftless populations alienated from the surrounding culture by religion asks for trouble. Give them blank checks and watch them fill up the blank spaces of indolence with destruction. We hate our benefactors.
The Islamists understand the tolerance and multiculturalism of the West as weaknesses to exploit rather than kindnesses to reciprocate. They pay back the dole with gunfire. Ahmed Almuhamed, saved off a sinking refugee boat by the Greeks, returned the favor by shooting up a packed concert hall. The English language lacks a word describing such off-the-charts ingratitude. Perhaps the French now have one. Almuhameditude?
“The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism,” Samuel Huntington concluded two decades ago in The Clash of Civilizations. “It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world.”
Materialism and multiculturalism offers no protection against the jihadists. Christendom, traces of which still appear in the flags of the various European states, served as a rallying point to repel jihadists of an earlier era. A civilization defined by nothing soon gets defined by something.
The West continues to offer clubbing, cowboy hats, and KFC as its empty enticements. The Koran keeps winning.
