The indescribably decadent West

In a conversation about the Moslem problem and the West’s failure to face it, I said to a correspondent:

I dream of what it would be like to have a Western leader who would plainly say to the Moslems: “You are a danger to us. We have nothing against you, but, given what you are and what your religion commands you to do, we have no choice but to protect ourselves from you.” We’d be living in a different world.

A. wrote back:

Instead we get this dhimmi subservience, which has absolutely no foundation in historical truth, and is completely counterfactual. From Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia, p. 172:

…Faithful to the 1991 colloquy of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, speaking to the Ismaili Center in London on October 8, 1998, stated,

“It is the most wonderful reminder in the very heart of London that the roots of our culture are not just Greek or Roman in origin, but Islamic as well. Islamic art, science and philosophy have helped to shape who we are and how we think.” After stressing “… the debt our culture owes to Islam,” he added, “Islam laid the intellectual foundation for large portions of Western civilization.”

LA:

This is the intellectual and civilizational equivalent of a heroin addict in an alley eating out of a garbage can. It’s a complete self-undoing.

A:

The heroin addict eating out of a garbage can at least has some instinct left for self-preservation

LA:

True. I realized as soon as I sent the e-mail that my image was not sufficiently sick and decadent to capture the quality of Robin Cook’s statement.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 14, 2005 09:56 PM | Send