This weekend just ended has given us some stark illustrations of the great cultural and religious conflict of our time. And there can be no doubt that a conflict is what it is, and that this clash is not a clash of civilizations, but of civilization against barbarity. And barbarity, to be honest, is the only word that applies here.
We do not yet know the motivations of the shooter at Brown University, although we do know that the professor whose class was attacked is Jewish and, in addition to teaching economics, is a faculty associate in the university's Judaic Studies program. The Redlands, California, drive-by shooting targeted a Jewish family, and the horrific attack in Australia targeted a Jewish community celebrating the first day of Hanukkah.
And then, earlier on Sunday, we learned of a thwarted attack on a German Christmas market.
The conflict has not gone unrecognized for what it is. In Australia, an education author and commentator, Dr. Kevin Donnelly, informs us that attitudes towards unchecked and, more importantly, unassimilated immigration are changing. And it's about time.
The latest Resolve survey published in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald found 64% agreed immigration should be paused until the housing crisis was addressed and 54% only want migrants who speak English and who are from countries with similar laws and customs.
In the same way that the 60/40 vote against the Indigenous Voice to parliament represents a victory for what Scott Morrison termed the “quiet Australians” after winning the 2019 federal election, the Resolve survey also represents a significant cultural change.
While the inner-city, university-educated, cosmopolitan elites, who Roger Scruton in his book Where We Are describes as those suffering from ‘oikophobia’ or fear of place, embrace multiculturalism, more and more Australians want to affirm a sense of community and national cohesion, stability and pride.
Dr. Donnelly is, in large part, concerned about housing availability and the demands unchecked immigration places on infrastructure, and he's right to be concerned. But there's a much larger issue, as demonstrated on Saturday and Sunday.
One can't have a nation without a national identity and, perhaps more significantly, a cultural identity. Here in the United States, as well as in Australia, for many decades these identities were somewhat aligned: Both nations were part of the Anglosphere, both recognized some fundamental human rights (the United States more so, I would say, than Australia), and the cultures of both nations were broadly Judeo-Christian. Both nations accepted immigrants, but throughout most of this time, those immigrants were expected to assimilate, and for the most part, they came from places that made such assimilation possible.
That's all changing. Europe is lost under a flood of "migrants" from the Islamic world, and last year's Magdeburg Christmas market attack stands as evidence of what this has wrought. Australia has accepted its share of these "migrants," as well. The Bondi Beach attack represents one result of that. And there's also the demographic problem: Europeans in particular aren't breeding at anything close to replacement rate, while the "migrants" are poised to breed themselves into a majority.
We have accepted them into the United States, too; during the four years of Joe Biden's presidency, we admitted thousands upon thousands, with little or no idea who they were, where they were headed, or what they intended to do when they got there.
This is the great conflict of our time.
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Here's the thing: While, as I have pointed out, this is a clash of civilization vs. barbarity, it's also a religious war. No wars are nastier, more driven by hate, more viciously fought than religious wars. Some examples include the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), fought between Protestant and Catholic states in central Europe, which wrecked the Holy Roman Empire and caused an estimated 8 million deaths. There were the French Religious Wars (1562-1598), a religious civil war fought between Catholics and Huguenots, which included the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572, where tens of thousands were killed throughout France. And these aren't limited to the Western world; the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1862) featured an uprising led by one Hong Xiuquan against the Qing dynasty; Hong claimed to be the brother of Jesus Christ, and the rebellion he led may have resulted in the deaths of as many as 30 million.
If today's brush fires and attacks ever degenerate into open warfare, as they have done in Gaza and Israel, we could be looking to dwarf any of these events. And the elephant in the room is Islamic terrorism, which has, in recent years, produced some of the most barbaric attacks on innocent civilians in human history.
This is the great conflict of our time. It's happening in the Middle East, but it's also happening in Germany, in Britain, in Scandinavia, in Australia, and right here, in the United States. The enemy, furthermore, is already within the city walls. The least drastic action we could take, here in the United States, would be to declare a moratorium on immigration from the Muslim world, and to immediately repatriate any who are here illegally - if we can find them. Our one hope is that it isn't already too late.
