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[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
Shock. Horror. And then acceptance.
“Today, millions of Americans mourned and prayed, and tomorrow we go back to work,” President George W. Bush began his address days after 9/11. “Tomorrow the good people of America go back to their shops, their fields, American factories, and go back to work.”
“We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don’t — where we don’t conduct business, where people don’t shop,” he urged in a later press conference.
Defeating the terrorists meant going on with business as usual. And we did.
Life changed. Flying became grueling. There were alerts and terror plots and we stopped paying attention to them. A generation was born and came of age who had never known another life.
It’s not so different in most countries where Islamic Jihadis perform their regular rounds of terror. Israel has been the canary in the coal mine in more ways than one. The scenes we’ve come to accept as normal in Boston, Paris or Manchester, dying flowers on streets, tearful women resting their heads on the shoulders of men while a sad song plays, assertions that we are stronger than the terrorists and will not lose our humanity were all field tested out in Israel.
The peace agreement with the PLO took Israel from a place where occasional terrorist attacks happened to a place where they occurred all the time. And when conservative governments isolated them to end the wave of urban bombings, rocket attacks became normal. And when Israel began to neutralize those, the terrorists broke through for an unprecedented massacre.
At each previous juncture, the horror became the new normal. First it was suicide bombs on buses, body parts scraped off the sidewalks outside pizza stores, and strollers full of broken glass. Parents made sure that their children had cell phones so they could immediately check if they were all right after each terrorist attack. Then residents of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv came to accept running to bomb shelters as the new normal. What will the new normal be now?
Bush may have meant well, but his assertion that, “our nation was horrified, but it’s not going to be terrorized” was wrong. Being terrorized can be expressed just as much through adaptation and numbness as through fear and anger. The failure to fight back and end the state of terror is what being ‘terrorized’ looks like just as much as public outbursts of panic and hysteria.
Getting back to normal without dealing with the problem is not resistance; it’s acceptance.. Living with terror is integrated into everyday routines. What once seemed horrifying slowly becomes the new normal.
What we thought was impossible for the mind to grasp becomes the baseline for life on 9/12 or 10/7 or any of the other dates freighted with horror and meaning until they become history.
Already the atrocities of Oct 7 are being discussed the way 9/11 was: a new reality to adapt to. In America, having terrorists blow things up around us became background noise. It happens sometimes, as it recently did in North Dakota, but we try not to pay too much attention to it.
Israelis will brace for the new normal of having thousands or maybe only hundreds, of murderous savages occasionally invade their communities while out to massacre them.
The talk has already turned to “how do we stop the next one” instead of “how do we make sure this never happens again.” It’s a responsible conversation, but it’s also a sign of acceptance.
Truly resisting terrorism is refusing to accept it as the new normal.
Getting back to normal is not that difficult. It appears initially impossible, but time does its work. We grow numb, too overloaded with stress, worn out by the parade of inconceivable images and thoughts, and then, much like lost travelers trudging through the snow, we go to sleep.
And then before we know it, we’re living in a nightmare but we no longer feel horror at it. The world has monsters. We pass them on the way to work and we see them on the evening news. And we no longer react because extraordinary evil has been integrated into our everyday lives.
What’s the alternative? It’s not a constant immersion in the horrors of Islamic terrorism. But neither is it an acceptance of it as the new normal. Nothing changes when we passively go along and treat the unacceptable as the new course of things. The process of adaptation to each atrocity coarsens and lowers our standards. Slowly we lose our sense that this should not be happening and that it’s happening only because our governments are refusing to end it.
Islamic terrorism is not an indestructible monster. It exists for one reason alone. And the reason is that we tolerate it. Given a choice between two alternatives, doing whatever it takes to end the terror threat or tolerating some acceptable level of terrorism, governments always choose the latter. And when we accept terrorism as the new normal, we make the choice for them.
Big choices like these are not defined by absolutes, but by ‘gut’ feelings. They come down to asking politicians which option seems scarier, more disturbing, immoral or outrageous. We have spent generations suffering from Islamic terrorism because each time the answer is that destroying terrorists is the scarier option while letting them kill us is the least scary one.
As long as Gitmo or Muslim travel bans are scarier than the terrorist attacks, this will go on.
Politicians know how to cope with the aftermath of a terrorist attack. It’s become a new normal for them too. There are flags, tearful songs and finally a call to get back to normal. Go shopping. Laugh. Eat out. And those are all good things to do. But the unspoken passenger on these trips is Islamic terrorism. Getting back to normal also normalizes a new level of terror.
Living with Islamic terrorism should never be normalized. The answer to an enemy trying to kill you is not going through the stages of grief, passing from anger to acceptance: it’s resistance.
The only acceptable answer to Islamic terrorism is to utterly destroy it while making the terrorist supporting populations pay the largest share of the price for that destruction. Any other answer normalizes terrorism. The failure to commit and then carry out anything short of total destruction perpetuates terrorism. The refusal to imagine that such a thing is possible makes it impossible to end terrorism. And the idea that there is any alternative to this is either a fantasy or a lie.
Refusing to accept terrorism as the new normal means confronting politicians, even those on our side, with the firm position that we will not accept anything from them short of a plan to win: not incrementally, not to establish deterrence, and not just to “show the terrorists we mean business”. We will live our lives, but we will not treat Islamic terror as business as usual.
Bombs, massacres and assaults are not the new normal: they are the new abnormal.
Our only hope for victory is to treat them as abnormal, to never adapt and accept the idea that being attacked by terrorists is just the price we pay for living in a big city, for our foreign policy, for living in the region, or for a world where madmen can get hold of weapons.
It’s easy to forget what life was like before Islamic terrorism since the abnormal world foisted on us by Islamic terrorism is all around us. The political distortion has made that world seem normal and any proposals to dismantle it appear abnormal. The chattering class rushes to shout down even the most modest proposals for stopping the terrorists because moral inversion in this abnormal world has made terrorists into the victims. And we forget that all of this is abnormal.
Our vital resistance is to define this as abnormal, not normal. It is not normal to adapt to terrorism, what is normal is for terrorists to adapt to running for their lives. A lawless society is a place where citizens are terrified and criminals are emboldened. A lawful society however is one where citizens are emboldened and criminals are terrified. Until the terrorists are terrified, we are the ones who are living in a lawless society at the mercy of monsters. We are not physically weak, but morally weakened by politicians who offer mercy to the monsters and none to us.
Failed politicians have ushered in this abnormal world in which we are afraid and our leaders negotiate with the terrorists and appease them to determine how much they can terrorize us. They worry about what the terrorists and their allies will think more than whether their citizens will live or die when the next terrorist attack rolls around. That is abnormal and unacceptable.
Muslim terrorism is a norm within Islamic societies, but abnormal in ours. If we continue to accept it, we will end up living in an Islamic society and the abnormal will become the norm.
What we are fighting for is the abnormalization of not only Islamic terrorism, but its appeasement, any tolerance for it, any acceptance of it and any concern for its perpetrators.
All of these things must be made abnormal, from last to first, to restore a normal world.
Excellent points Daniel, thanks!
Excellent points made. One can only hope that our politicians, those cheap hucksters who call themselves “leaders”, will read this and grow a pair, but these things are highly likely to happen. So the next thing to address is, “How do we make our ‘leaders’ fear for their futures and their pensions if they fail to do the will of Us, the People?” Thomas Jefferson opined that it was better to have the government afraid of the people than the people afraid of the government, and he helped to set up a system in which this is possible. We have allowed that brilliant Declaration and its younger sister, the Constitution, to be ignored and to become pitifully small in the ways of government. Their importance must somehow be restored, and then both the terrorists and the politicians who enabled them will be running for their lives.
“We have allowed that brilliant Declaration and its younger sister, the Constitution, to be ignored and to become pitifully small in the ways of government. Their importance must somehow be restored…”
This cannot be done so long as the Judeo-Christian moral code of altruism remains the central and fundamental moral code of America and the West. The secular values of individualism, individual rights, private property rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of personal happiness, i.e., Laissez-Faire Capitalism, are based on an opposite moral code, Ayn Rand’s moral code of rational selfishness.
“The Americans were political revolutionaries but not ethical revolutionaries. Whatever their partial (and largely implicit) acceptance of the principle of ethical egoism [rational selfishness], they remained explicitly within the standard European tradition [Judeo-Christian altruism], avowing their primary allegiance to a moral code stressing philanthropic service and social duty. Such was the American conflict: an impassioned politics presupposing one kind of ethics, within a cultural atmosphere professing the sublimity of an opposite kind of ethics.
The signs of the conflict and of the toll it was to exact from the distinctively American political approach were evident at the beginning. They were evident in Jefferson’s proposal for free public education; in Paine’s advocacy of a number of governmental welfare functions; in
Franklin’s view that an individual has no right to his “superfluous” property, which the public may dispose of as it chooses, “whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition”; etc.” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels”
False assumptions:
Paragraph 2: The United States was formed by a “moral code of altruism.” “Secular values” produced individualism, individual rights, property rights and the pursuit of happiness.
Paragraph 3: The primary ethic of Judaism and Christianity is altruism, stressing philanthropy and public service.
Paragraph 4: Ben Franklin believed individual “surplus property” belonged to the public who could dispose of it at any time of their choosing.
One true assumption: The Founders were Christians who sought to incorporate Enlightenment principles that did not conflict with their Protestant Christian faith.
Fact: Enlightenment principles, untethered by a foundation in Christian truth, give us reigns of terror and the elimination of human rights, flourishing and dignity. IOW, progressivism.
I responded to you yesterday, and today saw one upvote which I doubt was from you. In any case, I did find your comparison of the child in “Emperor’s New Clothes” to an “independent selfish thinker” to be absurd. Check it out if you like:
I don’t think Daniel Greenfield will allow me to reply to all of your points but I’d like to reply to the one about Benjamin Franklin, because it’s not a false assumption, his thoughts on “superfluous property” have been preserved in a letter he wrote to Founding Father Robert Morris, he sounds quite a lot like Obama, AOC, or any Christian Socialist, because in fact, the fundamental and central ethics of Jesus Christ are altruism and self-sacrifice for God, neighbor, stranger, the enemy, the poor, and the needy:
“All Property, indeed, except the Savage’s temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.” – 25 Dec. 1783,
Context. Ben Franklin is not mandating a welfare state in which government decides who is rich and who should be forcibly dispossessed of his “excess.” He is acknowledging that excess money creates responsibility to one’s “neighbor” in need.
Franklin wrote timeless pieces about gaining wealth and was never averse to having it.
Franklin would understand money as the Christian does. We receive money as a stewardship because all is given by God: strength, wit, stamina, talent, perceptiveness, and even capacity to labor and produce wealth. As a good steward, you minister to the needs (not wants) of your “neighbor” as God has blessed you.
Franklin was a clever fellow. Robert Morris was a very wealthy man who attended church with Franklin and who was largely responsible for overseeing finances to support the Revolutionary War effort. He would have a lot more money than he needed, and certainly much more than Franklin.
You want context? This is the full philosophical context and full implications of being the creation of your Judeo-Christian God:
“The mentality of Augustinianism had been transplanted to a virgin continent. It was the period of America’s Middle Ages. Since man is innately depraved, the Puritans argued, a dictatorship ruled by the elect is required to curb his vicious impulses and enforce the Lord’s commandments. Since wealth, like all values, is a gift from Heaven, men of property are not owners of their wealth, but stewards
charged with a divine trust; such men are properly subject to whatever economic controls the elect deem it necessary to impose. God, in short, rules nature; his agents, therefore, rule men.
It has been said—mostly by illiterates and conservatives—that the belief in God is at the base of the American system, and that the United States is a product of Christian piety. In fact, the religious mentality was not the source of this country’s distinctive institutions, but the fundamental obstacle to their emergence. So long as men took the idea of God seriously, the idea of America, the America conceived by the Founding Fathers, was not possible….
All rights rest on the ethics of egoism. Rights are an individual’s SELFISH possessions — his title to HIS life, his liberty, his property, the pursuit of his own happiness. Only a being who is an end in himself can claim a moral sanction to independent action. If man existed to serve an entity beyond himself, whether God or society, then he would not have rights, but only the duties of a servant…
The individual, says the intrinsicist who accepts rights, is God’s creation and therefore His property, not the collective’s. Such an approach implies the denial of rights: it means that only God is morally sovereign. in practice, this leads to the conclusion that man on earth may be used and disposed of by God’s representatives on earth.
No religious society has ever cherished or protected individual freedom, which is a purely secular value and achievement. Rights, contrary to a formulation common during the Enlightenment, do not derive from man’s source or “creator”. They derive from the fact of man’s existence and the requirements of his survival, however he came into being.” – Leonard Peikoff
I was the one who up voted you.
Funded by the United Nations
And the DNC/CFR/SOROS and the Open Society(Soros)and Open Borders fools
You don’t exactly advance the cause of Objectivism with these cut and paste statements from either Peikoff or Rand. None of them show any sign of rational engagement in which you demonstrate thought. It’s repetition all the way down, with a predetermined and unquestioning set of premises taken 100% or not at all. Rand was very intelligent and had much to say, but if she was infallible, she’d be the first human ever to be so. This is even more so of Peikoff, who was slavishly derivative.
Were there inconsistencies in the Founders’ thought and was a lack of a broader and comprehensive Enlightenment validation of reason and ethics a problem? Sure. That’s a valid point. What you miss – and I grant Rand’s point about this – is that most Americans are benevolent and do voluntarily seek to assist one another, with some measure of reciprocity based on the Golden Rule. The desire to immolate oneself for one’s neighbor, even if that’s your interpretation of the Judeo-Christian ethics, hasn’t been a defining characteristic of American culture or behavior.
What I think you also miss – and this is why your posting is so reductive – is that concepts are fundamentally inductive i.e., derived by integrating a large number of specific cases. The application of Rand’s political concepts has, in most Objectivist writing, been highly deductive i.e., starting with a true but not necessarily complete premise and then running wild with it to its logical end. This tends to ignore a lot of things. The Founders approached the creation of government inductively, recognizing that man could reason but was not automatically so. In other words, they assessed human nature fully. That’s why the Founders opted to place boundaries on government, very strong ones on particular things (e.g., the First Amendment) while leaving things less specific elsewhere. Experience may now teach us that there should have been more boundaries. But reducing their oversights or errors to an excess of sacrificial altruism is just nonsense.
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America were based on Christianity as well as liberty, both personal and national. The Bible stresses liberty.
Vicious self interest at the expense of decency and altruism is exactly why America is in the sorry state its in, including the acceptance of Islamic jihad as the new “normal.”.
I agree with you and Mr. Greenfield today. I hope the answer is simply “failed politicians” will “grow a pair.”
But I fear the politicians are “successful” and “ballsy.” They knowingly do evil because it is profitable (successful) and have become vigorous (ballsy) in so doing because there is no consequence, no justice.
Of course they have “failed” to govern in accordance with the will of the people and they need to “grow a pair” to be true to their office held on their behalf, but they serve another master. They have sold themselves to do evil like Ahab and have even sacrificed their sons and daughters (the people and our future) in its service.
The safest position is not to flirt with the idea of their weakness, ignorance or poor reasoning. Even if their intentions are good, they are to be judged solely by the results – strict liability without regard to intent.
They work for their own good, thinking they will have peace in their time. It makes better sense and is safer to see this as intentional evil.
Mr. Greenfield’s article is a master class in how the Overton Window works.
I think scumbag politicians are brazen, not ballsy. In fact, I think they’e cowardly weaklings who abuse power they haven’t earned.
I think you are right. “Brazen” is not ballsy. I would like to think of “ballsy” as being associated with masculine virtue, not wickedness, and your word allows that.
After two thousand years of brutal antisemitism culminating in the Shoah, Israel was reestablished and miraculously survived and even thrived despite the Arabs with their oil. Unfortunately, it took another Shoah on Oct 7, 2023, to unite the Israelis on the right and left to destroy the Arab terrorists in Gaza.
Prior to Hussein Obama, the US was concerned about the flow of oil and could not care less about the spilling of Jewish blood, unless Israel’s response to the spilling of Jewish blood interfered with the flow of that oil.
Since Hussein Obama, the US is less concerned about the flow of oil and more concerned about causing the spilling of Jewish blood. Hussein Obama Every day Israel survives is a defeat against Hussein Obama’s “fundamental (fascist) transformation”.
IMHO, Hussein Obama is still running the White House with his corrupt puppet named Joe installed in the White House after stealing the US presidential election in 2020.
May Israel stay strong and get stronger. For as told in the Haggadah, every generation a group arises that wants to destroy the Jews.
Am Yisrael Chai, despite 4000 years of brutal, anti-Semitism and Democrats.
All true except that Bareback Hasbeen Osama doesn’t run anything. He’s incapable but plenty of his former policy makers are squatting in the Alzheimer Joe administration.
“ Given a choice between two alternatives, doing whatever it takes to end the terror threat or tolerating some acceptable level of terrorism, governments always choose the latter. ”
That’s because it is the easy road and requires zero effort on their part.
When they decided to lockdown the world it was because the UN told them to, the easy thing to do is just follow orders or follow the crowd.
This is one of the reasons that the leftist elites love islam, after every terrorist attack our freedoms were reduced little by little.
Thanks Daniel.
You couldn’t correctly apply biblical teaching no matter how hard you try. The Bible is not an all you can eat buffet.
Daniel Greenfield is brilliant and so is Bosch Fawstin.
The big picture in America is overwhelmingly ominous.
The administration is a not so thinly veiled Muslim regime doing its part to make America a vassal of a Muslim Empire. Maybe too many American citizens actually feel in their hearts that terror will end once Israel and the Jews are gone? If that’s not it, what is it? ‘Something’ is stopping ‘America‘ from saving herself. Europe couldn’t stop hating Jews after WWII; so it chose the Muslims, who also hate Jews. So Europe decided to commit suicide instead of owning up to its lethal brand of antisemitism. In America, antisemitism is called Islamophobia. That, too, is toxic. If America does not own up to this fact, then America is lying to herself; and like Europe, is well on her way to self-destruction.
Just read the warning label on the bottle: antisemitism is very, very, very bad for the health and normalcy of humanity.
This administration is a noxious admixture of Dirtbagocrat totalitarian corruption and Islam.
I needed a pick-me-up so I just read, yet again, the foundational, inspiring Declaration of Independence.
These true words of absolute moral conviction were put into action. The American Revolution was hard fought and won and the United States of America was born. This full term baby is now being aborted.
It looks like only a second American Revolution can set America aright. Voting isn’t working. The political process, institutions, the voice of the people and recourse to justice, have been hijacked, overrun, muzzled and suffocated.
“ Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.
But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. “
Unfortunately, a second American revolution IS the only thing that could save America from the leftists/Dirtbagocrats, RINOs, Moslems and the rest of the degenerates in the minority.
One of the main thing that must happen is to stop playing cutsie with our terrorist-loving scumbags in the WH (Biden, Blinken and Sullivan) and Congress. Vote these terrorist-chic loving traitors out. We know who they are. Stop sending the Jihadists bribe billions as Trump did. Take out their leaders as Trump did. All of them. We know where the Hamas Leaders are luxuriating.
Stop funding these terrorist loving universities. The nexus between higher education and all of our Moscow-on-the-Hudson Universities, and the ability to get a good job must be broken. Pull your kids out these crap-a$$ sh*t-holes. Don’t pay for this garbage. If your little darling wants to go let him get a loan from real bank.
Break the hold the DEI, CRT and Equity Studies have on businesses and the phony colleges.
Prosecute the media for running a RICO scam.
Arrest and prosecute the leaders of these anti-semitic protests taking place now. They are calling for the death of Jews. That is not free speech.
Hamas has already announced that after they are done with the Jews they are coming for the Sunday People. Do not let any more Muslims into this country. Deport the ones that are here.
In othe words it’s long past time to get serious . That won’t happen with unserious people running things
Serious people are the solution and it’s an uphill battle, as much as I hate metaphors. One of the best ways to get serious people would be to de-fund universities and colleges, as you suggested.
What are the alternatives? In this country we can begin by ending Muslim immigration, most student visas, and by deporting as many of them as we can. For Israel, and world Jewry, it should begin with an all out hasbara attack on the concept of Palestinianism, that there exists a people of historic ethnicity to whom eretz Israel belongs. This must be done in conjunction with a dispersal of the threatening Arab populations. How to accomplish this short of crimes against humanity?Perhaps world Jewry can raise the enormous amount of money that would be required to buy them off, and send them on their way to places where they would be happier, e.g. Jordan, Egypt, or hell.
“The chattering class rushes to shout down even the most modest proposals for stopping the terrorists because moral inversion in this abnormal world has made terrorists into the victims.” Isn’t that the crux of the problem? Elites across the West embrace this moral inversion to avoid actually having to do anything difficult or mean in order to resist the cause of the terrorism.
That and leftist politics is an inversion that turns society into the enemy and its destroyers into revolutionary heroes.
The only good Islamist is a dead Islamist. Arm up people. You need to prepare for an October 7th event coming to a neighborhood near you. Don’t count on the present federal govt. to protect you. It won’t, as their policies only encourage such a happening.
Reportedly, Hezb’allah has more sleeper cells in America than any other jihadist group.
I have deep concerns about this coming Christmas.
No wonder the people of Argentina and the Netherlands elected Conservative leaders. They had enough of forced liberal government that wasn’t condusive to prosperity, peace, or freedom. There will be more scare tactics used to get another lockdown using China as the model to follow. The UN is dictating the agenda now. This is the World elites and rulers trying to run the show.
Excellent observations in this article. I’ve always been enraged by the hand wringing, weeping, candlelight vigils and stupid shrines as responses to every jihad attack. Rage and extermination are the proper responses, indeed.
Ragheada Tlaib, Inbred Omar, Ho-mar Ahmad and Ibrahim Pooper should be the first to be deported.