Unchallenged Terror Stories

Executive summary: 
This essay argues that the West is dangerously mistaken in treating Islamism as a perversion of an otherwise benign Islam.  Its central contention is that Islamism derives directly from Islam’s foundational texts and universalist political ambitions, including the aspiration to impose Sharia beyond Muslim societies.  “Moderate Muslims” may reject violence, but they do not necessarily challenge the underlying ideological claims that Islamists exploit.  A small, highly committed minority can therefore exert disproportionate political and cultural influence, particularly when reinforced by fear, institutional capture and Western reluctance to confront uncomfortable religious doctrines. By separating Islam from Islamism, Western commentators risk sanitising the ideology and weakening resistance to its long-term objectives.

Post-Christian Guilt

 

Mike Gallagher asks, “Would you mind expanding on what you mean by "self-criticism grounded in inherited Christian guilt"?  This came from my essay Civilisationism.  My answer is as follows. 

We live in a post-Christian era, in that Christian influence has affected all parts of the Western world, mainly Europe and anglophone countries such as the US, Canada, Australia and our own.  It is what built our institutions into what we see today, business, legal, educational, governmental and more.  But our current era is secular; the church has little direct influence on day-to-day interactions, yet is grounded in Christ’s comment, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.”  The Muslim world does not have this separation of church and state.  Islam is both church and state, dependent on the will of Allah. 

Western guilt arises directly from the doctrine of original sin due to the Augustinian view that humanity inherits both the corruption of Adam's nature and the guilt of his actual transgression. Because every human was theoretically "in Adam's loins," this inherited guilt implicates every individual, creating an innate, lifelong sense of moral debt even before personal sins are committed.  This guilt is remediated by redemption through baptism and faith in Christ’s sacrifice.  

The previous paragraph is courtesy of Google’s AI since theology isn’t my specialty.  In terms of redemption, we see guilt affecting moral responsibility.  The West’s self-criticism of slavery, for example, is regarded with guilt, and reparations are being advocated as a form of redemption, along with destruction of statues of those who benefited the nation with its profits.  Cultures such as Islam and in Africa which engaged in far worse examples of slavery don’t feel any guilt at all.  That the West ended slavery and made it illegal throughout the world is ignored and not seen as redeeming its sinfulness.  The same goes for colonisation.  The West’s response is to assist in ‘decolonising’ both formerly colonised states and of their own.  This has clearly not benefited either party, but in terms of redemption this doesn’t matter very much.  Again, Islamic culture has colonised to a greater or lesser extent over fifty countries world-wide and feels no guilt for its irrevocability, its slaughter or its tyranny. 

There is another factor which gets little notice in terms of Western redemption of guilt, and that is the feminisation of society, in part a result of a period unique in Western history of eighty years of peace.  Helen Andrews has written about this in Compact magazine, and J Stone in The Great Feminization – women as drivers of modern social change.  The leading factor resulting from the feminisation of society is an increase in empathy, inherent in the female psyche because of the demands of motherhood.  Empathy has been wittily contrasted with sympathy by describing the latter as seeing someone struggling in a quicksand and throwing them a rope and calling for help.  The empathic person feels compelled to jump in and give the victim a hug.  In its way, this summarises much of the response we see to the results of war elsewhere in the world, only to have the West’s generosity exploited mercilessly.  

I hope this answers your question, Mike.

 

Civilisationism

The European culture I am firmly grounded in is being attacked from within and without, with almost no reaction or resistance.  In its defence I felt pressure to ascribe to myself a political identity which I call ‘civilisationist’.  I say this because I regard civilisation as the highest good, as the best protection against vicissitude.  Its nature is to solve problems, but solutions tend to create problems over time which in turn need to be solved.  By means of this continuous incremental improvement, progress is made.  So I call myself a progressive which I hope will annoy real ‘progressives’ who probably think I’m Right-wing.  But real ‘progressives’ want to change society, not improve it, according to an ideology which promises the triumph of aspiration by force with no thought of consequence.  It does not relate to human nature or the reptilian cortex and indeed refutes its importance.  

When such an ideology as Marxism was external, as it was during the Cold War, it offered the West shadow projection enabling it to exceed all other nations in social and economic progress.  But the loss of it at the end of the Cold War brought about an era of increasing self-criticism grounded in inherited Christian guilt, opening the doors to two ideologies known with certainty in the past to be diametrically opposed to Western values and virtues.  These are now operating internally, destroying the foundation and fabric of the greatest civilisation the world had ever seen.  These are firstly cultural Marxism, through Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony which evolved into ‘woke culture’ ably assisted by the Duchy of Muscovy in pursuit of its own goals.  The second is Islam, through a confluence of factors enabling its resurgent form to use oil money and uncontrolled borders to expand into the West at a rate not seen since the Ottomans’ conquest of the Balkan peninsula in the 14th century.  Ironically this seems not to be recognised by Humanists as the danger it is, since Humanism in principle opposes Islam’s telos, that of global theocracy.

When I revised this piece I found Google AI placed ‘civilisationism’ as an “often far-Right ideology…characterized by the belief that this civilization is under threat and must be defended.”  Support for civilisation as the highest good, not so much.  The corollary would appear to be that the far-Left supports civilisation’s destruction, and this is in line with Marx’s ‘forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions’ and Islam’s deen, the imposition of divine law and the institutions which enable it.

No other nation or civilisation is having ‘diversity’ forced upon their people or told that their civilisation is grounded in the sins of slavery and colonisation by a detached and educated elite unaware of the ideology that formed their opinions.  No enemies to the Left; only racists, bigots, xenophobes, Islamophobes, far-Right, extreme-Right, fascists and Nazis to the Right.  Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.  There’s a Gramscian morbid symptom right there.

This, then, is the perspective through which I view the present, the most polarised and irresolvable in my lifetime.

Diary of Defeat, February 2026

PAULINE HANSON QUESTIONS THE EXISTENCE OF "GOOD MUSLIMS" and well she might.  "You say, 'Well, there's good Muslims out there.' How can you tell me there are good Muslims?"  The Spectator gives us the transcript which makes it clear that whatever Hanson’s faults might be, she certainly understands Islam. 

‘Good Muslims’ fall into the ‘millions of moderate Muslims myth’ category.  No question that there are good and moderate Muslims who want nothing more than to live the great life that Western civilisation offers and the Islamic world does not.  (Their children might not see things that way, but that’s another matter.)  But it’s worth examining the role played by moderate Muslims in terms of Islam’s telos.  Here are six reasons why ‘moderate Muslims’ are not a group the West can count on.

1.      Moderate Muslims do not drive Islam’s agenda, the Islamists do.

2.      Moderate Muslims are more fearful and less able than Western authorities to criticise, resist or change Islamists’ activities.  Hamas' wilful slaughter of its fellow citizens shows the power that Islamists have over the moderate and the good.

3.      When push comes to shove and shove comes to jihad, moderate Muslims will have no role to play in defending either side.

4.      Moderate Muslims will be regarded by Islamists as ‘friends of the enemy’ and will have to make a choice – support jihad or face death as apostates.  They know this.  Islamists’ fake narratives of grievance and oppression, of Western attacks on the Middle East and Islam itself, and Hamas’ attack and Israel’s reaction will force moderates’ polarisation. 

5.      Moderate Muslims serve the fundamentalists’ agenda in presenting Islam with a moderate face – Potemkin villagers – and a lesser evil for pandering and leveraging purposes. 

6.      Islam is regressively essentialist.  The children of moderate Muslims will have to make a choice between Western liberalism and Islamic conservatism and there is no guarantee of them being moderate.  European-born Islamists testify to that. 

“There is no moderate Islam.  Islam is Islam and that’s it.”  Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
"There is no radical or moderate Islam. There is only authentic Islam." Mohamed Achamlane
“Islam is very similar to our ideology.” Heinrich Himmler 

Further reading
https://spectator.com/article/the-myth-of-moderate-islam/
The Quranic Concept of War by Brigadier K S Malik
Takfirism in Wikipedia

Diary of Defeat, December 2025

 

GOOGLE’S AI OVERVIEW IS GREAT.  Ask a specific question and it will give an accurate, sourced and specific answer.  Not that its sources will answer specifically, however.  Asking for the population of the United Kingdom will give a variable answer depending on which regions it includes.  But when I asked Google AI for separate population figures for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in the 2001, 2011 and 2021 censuses I got exactly what I wanted and could assemble the answers into a coherent whole.

I wanted to know what the rates of increase of Muslim and non-Muslim populations of the UK were.  It’s not possible to look back further than 2001 since the 1991 census didn’t include a figure for religions.  This is a pity in a way, since the equivalent New Zealand figures show that the Islamic attack on New York’s Twin Towers had a salutary effect on immigration policy.  The annual rate of increase in Muslim population dropped from 10% before 2001 to 5.4% afterwards.  Just as well.  The ratio of Muslim growth fell from a twenty year average of 24 times the non-Muslim growth rate to just under 5 times post 9/11.

Here's the equivalent growth rate calculations for the United Kingdom:

The phrase “demographic bombing” is dismissed as conspiratorial but is supported by these statistics.  The causes are more diverse, and include the chaos caused by Islamists in Africa and the Middle East forcing an exodus, Islam’s telos of global theocracy and the Koranic injunction to migrate in the cause of Allah (4:100, 8:72-75), and Europe’s Christian moral obligation to give succour to migrants.  The ‘pull’ factor of Europe’s welfare system mustn’t be underestimated as it forms a major part of migrant narrative and discourse.

Diary of Defeat, November 2025

LANGUAGE CHANGES IN SUBTLE WAYS.  The prospective mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, avers his Muslim identity by declaring “No longer will I live in the shadows,” describing anti-Muslim bias as “the one form of bigotry that remains largely accepted.”  At that point I realised that ‘bigotry’ had changed its definition.  20^th century dictionaries described ‘bigot’ and ‘bigotry’ as “obstinately and unreasonably wedded to a creed, opinion, or ritual; blind attachment.  Blind or excessive zeal, especially in religious matters.”  The subject (that is, acting with agency) of the word is the individual and strength of his or her belief, the object being internal, their own belief system.  The 21^st century definition now appears that bigotry is an individual’s agency acting on an external object, in the form of prejudice, and this is to which Wikipedia directs ‘bigotry’ without further defining it. 

This shift serves a useful purpose.  What could be more bigoted than a Muslim intent on bringing about Islam’s telos, that of global conquest?  Is there a greater example of bigotry than Muslims following Islam’s Five Pillars and defining infidels in terms of annihilation?  Or of Shia Muslims engaging in bloody self-flagellation during Ashura?  Or of the jihadists’ cry of Allahu akbar, ‘our God is greater’ after every act of violent supremacy?  Yet now we see critics of Islam’s mandates described as bigots in a reversal of subject.  This is how conquest works, by manipulating discourse to create a false consciousness, of who is victim and who is the oppressor.  The West will find out the true nature of its situation in time and to its cost.

 

Diary of Defeat, October 2025

EINE KULTUR OHNE SCHATTEN.  It seems to me that the polarisation coming from the Left through its identity politics, and the Right’s reaction to it, is a result of the peace dividend.  Eighty years of peace for the West is pretty much unique in history and Westerners are unprepared for the effects of human nature on such a situation.  Since the collapse of the Soviet Empire the West has lost an enemy on which it can focus its ‘shadow projection’, the attribution of our culture’s worst features onto an identifiable opponent.  Given the influence of the extreme Left’s desire for the “forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions” and taking its opportunity to dominate discourse, it has created a shadow from within the culture it inhabits.  What are perceived to be the West’s worst features, slavery, colonialism, capitalism, individualism, materialism, misogyny, patriarchy and so on, are targeted to condemn the West in order to dispirit it.  And it’s working.  We now have the CRINK bloc – the autocratic states of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea – which along with Islam and its goal of global theocratic dominance, are natural enemies of Western culture, unified in their attempts to weaken it.  If the West had not lost its self-respect, this ‘axis of upheaval’ would have a minor impact, and it could focus on expanding its extraordinary achievements without wasting resources on factors that do nothing to improve – and indeed detract – from the civilisational goal of incremental improvement.

HUMAN NATURE, HOWEVER, NEEDS A SHADOW IT CAN FOCUS ON.  And none better than its ancient enemy, the Jew.  In an extraordinary exercise of mass manipulation, the West’s enemies manage to focus its attention onto Israel, condemning it for its own defence.  It is a war where Israel does its best to minimise collateral damage, and its enemy does its best to maximise it, twisting the discourse for ‘Palestine’s’ benefit.  The effect of this propaganda effort shows just how a formidable and threatening an enemy and the direct cause of this war, Islam, is to the West.