The Tribal War with Islam
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
All wars are wars of equals.
That's true in the sense that each side attacks the
other in terms of how it defines itself as an
entity. States try to destroy other states.
Religions fight other religions. Ethnic groups and
races engage in genocide. They do this even when the
other side does not see itself in the same terms.
The United States tried to fight guerrillas and
terrorists as if they were modern states with their
own industrial military organizations protecting
their industrial core. This tactic made no sense in
Vietnam or even Iraq because that wasn't the enemy
we were facing. But states are built to fight other
states. Tribes are built to fight other tribes.
Religions are built to fight other religions.
The modern multicultural super-tolerant western
state of this century takes stock of its strongest
point, and decides that it's not the old industrial
machine, which destroys the environment, its
traditional heritage, which is problematic, or its
problem solving skills, which are too technical, but
its values of super-tolerant multiculturalism. And
so it wages war on those insane terms.
The old Western model of war was brutal and
efficient. Protect the industrial plant. Use it to
churn out more military hardware. Smash the enemy.
The new Western model of war is protect social
harmony. Create more diversity. And the enemy will
eventually be drawn into our global harmony.
When liberals take every terror attack as an
opportunity to lecture us on the vital importance of
not losing "our values", they are in their own
warped and useless way waging war.
In the 20th century, war was distilled down to an
industrial core. In the 21st century, the
anti-industrial rebels who want to de-industrialize
manufacturing while industrializing society, have
distilled all that matters down to their values. In
their confused world order, the terrorists are
attacking "our values" and we in turn must attack
"their values" with our superior "values".
Barely half the country accepts their construct of
what "our values" are and they have no idea
whatsoever what "their values" are, but they assume
that just as our values are "our values" so too
"their values" are also "our values". This is the
sort of thing you do if you're an ideologue.
And also it's a natural human shortcut. It's human
nature to assume that people different from you are
just dumber, nastier versions of yourself who have
the same basic goals and organization as you do.
Ideologues are most likely to assume that everyone
agrees with their premises, but just hasn't been
shown the right textbooks. And these days ideologues
and their textbooks dominate everything.
To the left, Islam is an inefficient sort of
Socialism dependent on medieval superstition and
lacking modern idea. To Muslims, the left is an
inefficient sort of Islam that's missing Allah,
Mohammed and the Koran. It's all just a problem of
explanations and textbooks.
The left plans to defeat ISIS with "our values" by
which it means showing how effective our social
harmony is, which it isn't, by refusing to actually
fight Islamic terrorism. Eventually the Jihadists
will give up their reactionary ways as the ordinary
Muslims realizes that he has the same interests as
the rest of the great rainbow coalition does. This
hasn't even worked too well in Europe.
The left is a purely ideological entity and so it
has reduced our countries and cultures to the
transportable "our values". Despite Islam's
ideological reach, it's not purely an ideological
entity.
At the ground floor, Islam is tribal. The Iraqis
viewed us as the American Tribe. Tribes raid each
other. Their members lash out and kill each other
over insults. They count coup on each other. They
steal and humiliate each other's women. Tribes are
nomadic and they are concerned with honor.
Tribes from Iraq, Syria and North Africa can come to
Europe, set up their own territories, pile up loot
and then humiliate the native women for New Year's
Eve. And then laugh at the impotence of the European
tribal authorities.
The Islamic no-go zones are seen primarily as
religious, but they are also tribal. Islam
incorporates both. Islamic migration also expands
tribal territories. It's always been that way.
And this is also how Muslims fight us on a tribal
level. They attack the honor of the European tribes.
But it's not as if the Merkel government or any of
the other European Socialist governments have any
concept of honor anyway.
While European Socialists attempt to integrate them
with "our values", the ungrateful integratees show
that the systems have no honor on a tribal level and
are not worth taking seriously.
Beyond the tribal, is the religious. In Islam,
religion remains limited to the most primitive level
of "My tribal deity Allah is stronger than your
deity because we beat you up."
This is literally what Allahu Akbar means.
To the representatives of the secular West, religion
is identical with "our values", which is to say that
it contains nothing religious about it, certainly no
claims which require divine validation or unique
truths. Their religion is a spiritual background
noise which affirms the essential position that we
should be nice to each other while providing support
for any leftist position of the moment.
No meaningful dialogue is possible between Allahu
Akbar and "Our values" because the two are not
speaking the same language except in one sense, both
insist on absolute submission. But the left's demand
for submission is based on the absolute moral
superiority of "Our values". Islam literally means
submission, but its moral superiority is a revealed
truth based on Islam's military victories.
Islam is right, because it won. It won, because it's
right. There's your cycle of violence in a nutshell.
Islam sanctified the tribal raid as a religious act
and turned the dead into martyrs. That's Jihad.
Terrorism incorporates both the tribal and the
religious. Islamic missionary activity in the West
also targets dissatisfied minorities, potential
fifth columns, in the same manner as the original
Arab Islamic conquests did. Even here, Islam unites
tribal and religious tactics.
The final element of the tribal war is
organizational. It is here that Islam attacks "Our
values".
Tribes are forever quarreling. They are weakest at
their points of mutual association. This is how
Mohammed originally got his start. Islam expanded
initially more through clever games of divide and
conquer than military strategy.
To the Muslim mind, we are a series of fragile
tribal associations. That is also how we appear to
the "Our values" left. The "Our values" crowd thinks
of the threat in terms of "radicalization", but the
real threat is "integration". Mohammed did some of
his best work by undermining from within.
To undermine a tribal association, you have to be a
part of it. Then you have to raise grievances, find
other dissatisfied allies and eventually promise
them better treatment under Islam.
That's what Mohammed did. It's what his followers
are doing today.
This is where groups like the Muslim Brotherhood
play the long game while ISIS plays the short game.
The left's multicultural vision made this mess
possible. It's also making it worse. The left
despises tribal thinking and yet its entire
political infrastructure is built on rewarding it.
All Islamic organizations have had to do is built on
the left's own work, joining its coalitions as
Islamic groups, and then working to hijack them. The
growing takeover of #BlackLivesMatter by Muslim
groups is one example of the phenomenon.
Our enemies are not states and they will not fight
us as states. To the extent that they are tribal,
they will fight us as tribes. To the extent that
they are religious, in a primitive sort of way, they
will attack us that way. But the real problem is
that we are no longer states either. Instead we are
in the grip of a mystical deluded cult that squawks
of "Our values" while tribalizing and dividing us to
push through discredited economic and social
policies. They have opened the gates to a cruel,
backward enemy.
And in doing so, they have brought a tribal war into
our own homelands.