Weekly Think Piece ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Is Islamization the New Finlandization?
Like this blog, Norman Podhoretz's new book, "World
War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism," posits that we
are back in 1938, appeasing the latest dictator with global ambitions. He gives
good examples of how appeasement, like in 1938, is the order of the day. But he
does something else. He gives us an insight into a strategy of the Islamists
learned from the free world's Cold War adversary - the Soviet
Union.
In 'World War IV', Podhoretz makes the first serious
effort to set 9/11 itself, the battles that have followed it in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the war of ideas that it
has provoked at home into a broad historical context. Through a brilliant
telling of this epic story, Podhoretz shows that the global war against
Islamofascism is as vital and necessary as the two world wars and the cold war
("World War III") by which it was preceded. He also lays out a compelling case
in defense of the Bush Doctrine, contending that its new military strategy of
preemption and its new political strategy of democratization represent the only
viable way to fight and win the special kind of war into which we were suddenly
plunged.
In his article at the Wall Street Journal entitled 'The Case for Bombing Iran', he covers the usual ground of how Iran will be responsible for World War IV. But what I like is his comparison, not so
much between World War II and now but between now and the Cold War - or World
War II. With it, he gives us another way to look at how the Islamo-fascist
threat is playing out in Europe.
Not surprisingly, the old American foreign-policy establishment and many others say
that these dreams [of Ahmadinejad ] are nothing more than the fantasies of a
madman. They also dismiss those who think otherwise as neoconservative
alarmists trying to drag this country into another senseless war that is in the
interest not of the United States
but only of Israel.
But the irony is that Ahmadinejad's dreams are more realistic than the
dismissal of those dreams as merely insane delusions. To understand why, an
analogy with World War III may help.
At certain points in that earlier war, some of us feared that the Soviets might
seize control of the oil fields of the Middle East, and that the West, faced
with a choice between surrendering to their dominance or trying to stop them at
the risk of a nuclear exchange, would choose surrender. In that case, we
thought, the result would be what in those days went by the name of
Finlandization.
Podhoretz describes Finlandization as the
process of "Communist parties coming
to political power so that they could establish "red Vichy"
regimes like the one already in place in Finland--regimes whose
subservience to the Soviet will in all things, domestic and foreign alike,
would make military occupation unnecessary."
In the United
States, where there was no Communist Party
to speak of, we speculated that Finlandization would take a subtler form. In
the realm of foreign affairs, politicians and pundits would arise to celebrate
the arrival of a new era of peace and friendship in which the Cold War policy
of containment would be scrapped, thus giving the Soviets complete freedom to
expand without encountering any significant obstacles. And in the realm of
domestic affairs, Finlandization would mean that the only candidates running
for office with a prayer of being elected would be those who promised to work
toward a sociopolitical system more in harmony with the Soviet model than the
unjust capitalist plutocracy under which we had been living.
This is a perfect description of the Left then - and now - in league with the
Marxists then and the Islamists now.
Looking at Europe today,
we already see the unfolding of a process analogous to Finlandization:
it has been called, rightly, Islamization. Consider, for example, what
happened when, only a few weeks ago, the Iranians captured 15 British sailors
and marines and held them hostage. Did the Royal Navy, which once boasted that
it ruled the waves, immediately retaliate against this blatant act of
aggression, or even threaten to do so unless the captives were immediately
released? Not by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed, using force was the
last thing in the world the British contemplated doing, as they made sure to
announce. Instead they relied on the "soft power" so beloved of
"sophisticated" Europeans and their American fellow travelers.
The British lion was emasculated. The response from the free world?
As if this show of impotence were not humiliating enough,
the British were unable even to mobilize any of that soft power. The European
Union, of which they are a member, turned down their request to threaten Iran with
a freeze of imports. As for the U.N., under whose very auspices they were
patrolling the international waters in which the sailors were kidnapped, it
once again showed its true colors by refusing even to condemn the Iranians. The
most the Security Council could bring itself to do was to express "grave
concern." Meanwhile, a member of the British cabinet was going the
Security Council one better. While registering no objection to propaganda
pictures of the one female hostage, who had been forced to shed her uniform and
dress for the cameras in Muslim clothing, Health Secretary Patricia
Hewitt pronounced it "deplorable" that she should have permitted
herself to be photographed with a cigarette in her mouth. "This,"
said Hewitt, "sends completely the wrong message to our young
people."
Can you spell 'cultural castration'?
As with Finlandization, Islamization extends to the
domestic realm, too. In one recent illustration of this process, as reported in
the British press, "schools in England are dropping the Holocaust
from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils . . . whose beliefs
include Holocaust denial." But this is an equal-opportunity capitulation,
since the schools are also eliminating lessons about the Crusades because "such
lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques."
Podhoretz shows that the process of Finlandization
extends to other European countries too.
But why single out England?
If anything, much more, and worse, has been going on in other European
countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands.
All of these countries have large and growing Muslim populations demanding that
their religious values and sensibilities be accommodated at the expense of the
traditional values of the West, and even in some instances of the law. Yet
rather than insisting that, like all immigrant groups before them, they
assimilate to Western norms, almost all European politicians have been cravenly
giving in to the Muslims' outrageous demands.
As in the realm of foreign affairs, if this much can be accomplished under present
circumstances, what might not be done if the process were being backed by
Iranian nuclear blackmail?
Ahmadinejad does not shrink from describing as 'a world
without America,'
[or for the short run] a world without much American influence." Either
way, Iran will see its plans of Islamizing the world come to pass with the
assistance of the same allies of old who declare Islam a religion of peace and
a "sociopolitical system more in harmony with Muslim demands than the
unjust capitalist plutocracy under which we had been living." | 
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