Islamic terrorist attacks.
People in Western countries blown-up, burned, shot, stabbed, crushed under the tires of automobiles, and, lately, doused with acid.
It has become routine. Also, routine is the response of many Western politicians who are to Islamic extremism what Hillary is to Bill’s philandering—de facto enablers. Following the Westminster Bridge rampage earlier this year, British Prime Minister Theresa May said it was wrong to describe the attack as “Islamic terrorism.”
How would she have us describe it? The perpetrator was a convert to Islam, not Mormonism. Would she think it wrong to link, say, kamikaze attacks in World War II with fanatical emperor worship and Imperial Japan? Or is it that they really can’t see what is fueling terrorism throughout the Western world?
Expressing frustration over this phenomenon, NY Congressman Peter King said:
“I wish the Democrats would put aside political correctness, [and] realize there is nothing racist or bigoted about having a border wall … you have these good intentions, we’re an Open Society, people come across the border, well, listen, if you saw the dead bodies in my district as a result of people coming across the border freely, you’d see the consequences of this.”
So why don’t they realize there is nothing wrong with a border wall? Why don’t they acknowledge what Bill Maher rightly calls “the connective tissue” between Islam and terrorism?
Contrary to what many believe, advocates of the open borders policy now being championed by just about every left-of-center politician in the Western world are not blind to Islam’s penchant for violence. They know it very well. It is, rather, that they are gambling everything—or should I say everyone?—on a grand, continental-sized social experiment that is based, in part, on the ideas of Austrian philosopher Karl Popper and his seminal work The Open Society and its Enemies (1945).
Like all philosophies, Popper’s was born as a reaction to the world in which he lived. Writing during World War II, his native Europe was then rent in two by ideologies claiming to be absolute “scientific” truth: communism on the one hand and fascism on the other. These were, he said, “tribal” or “closed societies.” Popper’s solution was the “open society”—a borderless world free of tribalism, nationalism, and provincialism; a democratic society that shares a universal morality and where truth is tentative at best.
Philosophers like Popper—and Machiavelli and Malthus and Marx and others before him— however noble their intentions, have left the landscape of history pockmarked and heaped with corpses. But that has never stopped a bad philosophy before. All a philosophy really needs is someone with the resources and the determination to implement it, and, for Popper’s, billionaire George Soros is that guy.
It is no coincidence that Soros, whose money fuels both liberal politicians and policies, should name his non-profit advocacy group The Open Society Foundation. Soros was, after all, one of Popper’s students at the London School of Economics. In a February 2016 interview with the New York Review of Books, Soros explained why he is “a strong supporter of the values and principles of an open society” and how German Chancellor Angela Merkel, through her “open door” immigration policy, demonstrates that she “shares those values.” He goes on to say that the European Union is “the embodiment of the principles of the open society.”
But how is it supposed to work in real terms? How is the West going to absorb millions of people whose religion, as many would practice it, is anathema to Western values? Herein lies the great gamble. The architects of the Open Society believe the West’s seductive powers—politically, materially, and sexually—will eventually win-out over Islam and any other form of tribalism.
One might have thought, however, that after so many terrorist attacks, that the engineers of the Open Society would want to pause and reconsider their program.
Nope.
Following the November 2015 Paris attacks in which suicide bombers and gunmen killed 130 people and injured 368 others, Judy Dempsey, a senior fellow of Carnegie Europe, a think tank providing policy recommendations to the European Union, published a piece titled, “After the Paris Attacks: The Open Society and Its Enemies.” In it, Ms. Dempsey writes that Europe has reached a defining moment:
“At stake is how to strike a balance between the open society and the defense of citizens. It will require steady nerves from all European governments not to bow to populist, Euroskeptic, and anti-Muslim movements that wish to batten down the hatches.”
In other words, Ms. Dempsey urged European leaders to ignore the howls of their citizens who are skeptical of globalism, alarmed by mass Muslim resettlement within their own countries, and who want their borders secured and regulated by a sensible immigration policy.
There is a subtle contempt for democracy in all of this. Note how globalists use the word “populism.” In their usage, it’s synonymous with tribalism; and tribalism, according to Ms. Dempsey, is the “enemy within.”
Brexit? Trump elected president? That’s populism.
Angela Merkel re-elected? That’s democracy!
What the globalist ideologues like Ms. Dempsey—and Soros and Merkel and Obama and Macron—don’t see, of course, is that they are a tribe unto themselves, albeit an elitist and very dangerous one.
Why dangerous?
Because, at bottom, they believe that ideas—their ideas, anyway—matter more than people. Victims of terrorism? They are merely the price that we—i.e., those of us not protected by walls and armed guards—must pay to build the Open Society Utopia. Yes, the thinking here is that of an old Russian proverb:
“When you cut down a forest, woodchips fly.”
So far, woodchips have flown in New York, San Bernardino, Ft. Hood, Orlando, London, Paris, Berlin, Nice, Stockholm and dozens of other places.
Where next?