Incompatible with Civilization

Monday night the Manchester Arena was bombed, at the end of a concert, where many young people—often along with their parents—were attending. The perpetrator was among the 22 dead. He was an Islamist extremist. Of course.

In today’s world, despite news media going far out of their way to hide names, ethnicity, and religion, heinous mass murder attempts are 99% of the time Islamist extremists.

There’s always this overweening concern that if the fact is mentioned, there will be a backlash against non-extreme Muslims. While that backlash has been mostly non-existent, the failure to provide truth is stirring people to anger. Muslims who are not Islamist extremists have a stake in clarifying who they are, in contrast to the terrorists. They need to find a way to separate out the wicked from among them, for their own sake as well as for civilization at large.

I don’t know how they should go about this. But I wish them well, because the friends we’ve had who are Muslim are very well suited to civilization, and we want them with us.

I believe clarity will help. Since I’m about defining civilization, I appreciated a response from Steven Crowder on Tuesday.

Instead of civilization, he refers to Western culture, but for now we’ll call that a synonym. He lays out several beliefs that are incompatible with Western culture:

• Want sharia courts? You’re not welcome.

• Think it’s okay to marry a six-year-old? You’re not welcome.

• Think it’s okay to strike your wife for ANY reason? You’re not welcome.

• Believe in ANY kind of punishment for apostasy? You’re not welcome.

• Believe in ANY kind of punishment for “blasphemy”? You’re not welcome.

It’s a big more specific than what we at the Spherical Model call the requirements for Civilization:

·         Honor God—which must include freedom of thought, freedom of belief, and freedom of speech that disagrees with those who believe differently. As one of the Articles of Faith in my religion puts it, “We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.” [Articles of Faith 11]

·         Honor life—protect the life of each innocent human life, including the weak and defenseless, such as the unborn and the elderly and the afflicted. All human life is valuable, more valuable than other animals; no groups of humans can be categorized as subhuman. Categorizing any “them” as subhuman leads to atrocities.

·         Honor family—respect parents, and reserve sex for marriage, where mother and father raise children faithfully to adulthood.

·         Honor property—never taking what belongs to someone else, never expecting something to be given to you at someone else’s expense.

·         Honor truth—real objective truth, that exists outside ourselves and we are obliged to do our best to perceive.

Crowder’s list mainly targets freedom of thought and honoring life. But he’s right; you can’t get along in the civilized world when you’re believing savage things. We have to say, “If you believe in savagery, you’re not welcome among us.”

The full video is about seven minutes, and includes commentary on the need to “shame” the believers of what he accurately refers to as political Islam—because it’s seeking power rather than righteousness. Worth watching:

Some people are crying that this is Islamic terrorist attack is a new low—targeting children. But that’s not accurate. This savagery has long included targeting children. Michelle Malkin, in her piece "The Forgotten Slaughter of the Innocents," reminds us of eight previous attacks targeting or including young people and children.

She didn’t include Beslan, September 2004. Glenn Beck retells that event, from his days at CNN:

There’s a school in Beslan, and it started on the first day of school. In Russia, they have this tradition that the parents bring their kids to school for the first day of school. And so the parents brought their little kids into school, and there waiting for them were monsters, armed Islamic groups. They ushered everybody into the gym. Anybody who spoke out, anybody who cried, was killed. The mothers and the daughters were raped in front of everyone. It lasted three days. There were 1100 hostages, 777 children. They killed 385.

Every civilized person in the world can recognize this behavior as savage. There is no reason within the sphere of civilization that can include this behavior. The perpetrators will have no place in the afterlife but hell, and they have no place among civilized human beings on this planet.

What should be the civilized response? Celebrities, such as Katy Perry, call for love and unity. Blogger Matt Walsh responds to that call:

I realize that celebrities who pontificate about love and unity aren’t talking about the kind of love or unity that actually requires us to do anything or make any kind of sacrifice. That’s why they feel comfortable telling us about “love” even as they treat their own spouses and children like disposable props. The love that keeps a marriage going is active and self-giving. The “love” Katy Perry refers to is just a vague feeling of pleasant indifference towards all of humanity. She “loves the world” by shrugging her shoulders at it. And when she tells us to respond to these tragedies with “love,” she means only that we ought not do anything to actively stop it from happening again. Instead, we should throw our hands up in loving surrender, and if more of us are brutally slaughtered, well, that’s a price Katy Perry is willing to pay.

Perry and others who call for “no borders or barriers” hypocritically live in gated, guarded homes. They know, for the sake of their own life and property, they can’t just invite the world to “co-own” their home.

But, just to consider the “love” response, let’s keep an open mind and assume, if you could retrain the brains of these brainwashed savages, they could come to choose civilization. Theoretically I’d like to believe that’s possible. 

But you can only do that if you put a stop to their killing first. And that requires defense: killing, imprisoning, or containing in their own walled-off corner of the globe—every single one who holds the belief that killing us is a delight to them and their god.