So what's worse? Fear or foolishness

The Daily Inter Lake

I was upbraided this week, as I have been before, for spreading fear in this column.

To which I plead guilty. But of course I call it spreading awareness.

Cesar Hernandez of Polson wrote a nice letter claiming I was "peddling fear as a course of reaction for [my] unwillingness to look within [myself]." He cited my columns on illegal immigration and the Muslim terror threat and said that I was "inflicting" my readers with a "series of articles on fear immigrants, fear Muslims, fear their religion. Fear, fear, fear!"

Oddly enough, or really not so oddly at all, it was just one sentence later that Cesar pulled his own "fear card" out of his back pocket - "This formula and writing are right out of the extreme right's playbook."

So really what it all comes down to is that Cesar and I are both afraid, but he is afraid of the "extreme right" - of which I am not even a member - and I am afraid of people who strap bombs on themselves and blow up women and children. He is afraid of President Bush; I am afraid of President bin Laden.

The question, as I have written before, isn't whether you should be afraid, but rather what you should be afraid of. I don't mind telling you that I am afraid of what will happen to our country if we continue to allow illegal immigrants to flood across the border from Mexico at the rate of a million or more a year. I don't mind telling you I am afraid of what will happen to our country and our world if we do not have the courage of our convictions, or worse yet, if we have no convictions at all.

Now I have a question for Cesar: Why should I be afraid to say so? Why should I shut up? Why should I keep quiet about my concerns for myself and my children? Why should I be considered an extremist because I love my country and way of life and want to protect them from threats foreign and domestic? Isn't that what good Americans have sworn to do from the day our great country was founded:

"I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter, so help me God."

Well, my office is a high one indeed - citizen of the United States, and as a citizen of the country that gave us Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Eisenhower, I do so solemnly swear to support and defend the Constitution and the nation of states which it stitched together. I do bear true faith and allegiance not just to the words of the Constitution, but to its ideals, and that means I will not be cowed, bullied or shamed into silence.

There used to be a name for people who hated their culture, their upbringing and their way of life - they were called "antisocial." There is still a word for such people, but now they call them "liberals." At one time, not too long ago, I counted myself among their number, but when you are repeatedly berated as a racist, fear-mongering, right-wing toady by such people, by such "it takes a village to pat yourself on the back" liberals, you eventually decide there might be something better than being a liberal, after all.

If being a liberal means I must be chained to a party line, then I don't want it. If being a liberal means I must be more concerned about defending my enemy's rights than protecting my own children's lives, then I don't want it. If being a liberal means finding fault with everything that makes America great, then I don't want it. If being a liberal means sticking my head in the sand, then I don't want it. You can keep your Charles Lindbergh liberals who pride themselves on "speaking truth to power," but conveniently close their eyes to the truth of Hitler. You can keep your Chuck Hagel liberals who pride themselves on "speaking truth to Bush," but close their eyes to the inconvenient truth of Ahmadinejad.

As for me, I will "speak truth to liberals" until they stop trying to dismantle the foundations of our freedom and our civilization, or until they succeed and throw me in a prison cell. It was the great historian Arnold Toynbee who said "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder." That puts it very well, and takes the blame off the Islamists or the Mexicans, and puts it squarely on ourselves. If this country, this civilization is going to perish, then it will be because we sacrificed our values, and laughed at our principles, not because a few thousand terrorists or a few million Mexicans crossed our borders.

Which brings us back to fear.

Isn't "fear" just another name for "understanding consequences"? When you see a child playing with matches, are you afraid because you are a right-wing extremist, or because you understand the potential consequences to your house, your neighborhood or your national forest if the child is not stopped?

Is it fear mongering when the National Park Service hands out those brochures about grizzly bears when you drive into Glacier Park? Or is it merely an attempt to avoid the unpleasant task of scraping up bear scat for signs of human DNA after a couple of campers go missing?

Many of the people who complain most loudly about "fear, fear, fear" being the tactic of the "extreme right" are also the first ones to tell you that we are all going to die a horrible death from global warming. No fear mongering there. Just good, calm rational thinking about how the "extreme right" is trying to kill everyone off, including their own families, for the sake of a little filthy lucre.

What about the liberals' fear of the Forest Service, and its long-standing policies to ensure that America's national forests are utilized as a renewable resource rather than as a source of fuel for forest fires? Is fear OK for liberals, but not the rest of us?

What about the often repeated bromide that the Bush administration failed to sufficiently scare people prior to Hurricane Katrina's devastating arrival on shore in 2005? Is ramping up fear OK for the "extreme right" in some cases, but not in others? Is there a double standard for fear? Will the "extreme left" admit that it is deathly afraid of wiretaps, timber companies, trans fat and Christian values, and hopes to spread that fear from sea to shining sea?

And perhaps most importantly, will the "extreme left" ever take responsibility for its strategy of "deny, defy, decry" as it tries to shut up those of us clamoring to save Western civilization? Will it accept the blame for the fall of Europe to Muslim domination 50 years from now because they pooh-poohed the warnings of people like me as "peddling fear"?

Do they have any idea of what "rough beast," as the poet Yeats said, "slouches toward Bethlehem" to be born? Do they live in this same 21st century as you and me? Do they remember 9/11? Do they remember the Taliban destroying the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan?

Ah yes, that is a story the Islamo-fascists will tell their grandchildren with glee. The two megalithic statues were built on the side of a cliff more than 1,300 years ago and survived intact until the year 2001 when the Islamic Taliban regime in Afghanistan bombarded them with artillery and dynamite for more than a month to dismember them. Why did they do it? Perhaps just to prove their passionate intensity, or just to prove their disdain for all things that are not Islamic. All we know for sure is that a panel of fundamentalist clerics ruled that all statues are idols, so they had to be destroyed regardless of their artistic and historic and cultural importance.

What do you think will happen to Florence when it falls under sharia law? What will happen to the David of Michelangelo? What will happen to Botticelli's "Adoration of the Magi"? What will happen to "Il Duomo" - the domed cathedral at the heart of the great city of the Renaissance? Will they be destroyed piecemeal? Or will the entire city have to be pulverized with an atomic blast? One idol after another, one Christian sculpture, one painting, one church after another? How else could it be cleaned up so that no Muslims are offended? Blow it all up.

Of course, Italy only has about a 1 percent population of Muslims now, but that will change. France already has a population of 10 percent. Many other countries in Europe have between 3 and 6 percent. It doesn't sound too threatening, but the fact of the matter is that in a generation or two, unless something is done to prevent the suicide of the West, these numbers will shift dramatically, and then it may be too late to save the Louvre or the Uffizi Gallery or the Prado. If you do not think so, then you should read the words of the great Italian author Oriana Fallaci in her book "The Rage and the Pride," written as a jeremiad to warn the world after September 11. Look it up for yourself online at http://italian.about.com/library/fallaci/blfallaci01.htm and if you read it with a clear mind you will understand that this is not the time to wonder how we can get along better with our Muslim friends. This is the time to worry about how we can survive our Muslim enemies.

Am I afraid? Of course I am afraid. The question is "Why are you not?"

As Fallaci says in her great book, "Wake up, people, wake up! Intimidated as you are by the fear of going against the mainstream, that is to appear racist (a word inappropriate here because we are not discussing race, but religion), you do not understand or don't want to understand that what is underway here is a Reverse Crusade. … you don't understand or don't want to understand that what is in motion here is a religious war. A war that they call Jihad. Holy War. A war that is not after the conquest of our territory, perhaps, but certainly aims to conquer our souls. To the disappearance of our freedom and our civilization. To the annihilation of our way of living and of dying, our way of praying or not praying, of our way of eating and drinking and dressing and enjoying ourselves, and informing ourselves…

"You don't understand or don't want to understand that if it is not opposed now, if we don't defend ourselves, if we don't fight, the Jihad will win. It will destroy the world that good or bad we have managed to create, change, make better and render it a little more intelligent, that is less bigoted or not bigoted at all. With that it will destroy our culture, our art, our science, our morality, values, pleasures… Christ! Don't you realize that [all these] Osama Bin Ladens consider themselves authorized to kill you and your children because you drink wine or beer, because you don't wear a long beard or wear a chador, because you go to the theater and the cinema, because you listen to music and sing some songs, because you dance in the discotheques or in your house, because you watch TV, because you wear mini skirts or short pants, because at the beach or pool you're naked or almost naked, because you make it with whom you want, when you want, where you want?

"Don't you care … even about this, idiots?"

But, of course, Fallaci, knew they don't care - she knew it was a losing battle - but she knew there was no alternative. She grew up as a girl whose family was under the thumb of the Nazis in Florence in World War II. Because her father refused to submit to their fascist regime he was sent to jail, and the young girl learned the importance of resistance and principles.

As Winston Churchill famously said, "If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to a moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case; you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."

From one fear monger to another, right on, Winston, right on!