R.R. Reno suggests that there are Western reasons for British-born Muslims becoming part of violent movements.

The British have arrested Muslim terrorists, and once again, soul-searching is very much in evidence. “Why,” I hear asked, “are those born among us turning against us?”

High unemployment, social isolation, anti-Muslim prejudice—the standard explanations are canvassed. They boil down to a general analysis of homegrown terrorism as stemming from isolation from Western culture and ideals.

But is that right? Is the Muslim terrorist really such a strange, marginal, and alien figure in our own cultural history and mythology? Or is he not a rather familiar figure, perhaps all-too-well socialized into certain aspects of the modern and postmodern West?

The philosopher Charles Taylor has observed that a “politics of recognition” plays a significant role in the political psychology of modern liberal culture. People do not just have a right to speak their minds—they have a right to be heard! Protest, burning draft cards, street violence, the Black Panthers: Public aggression and assertion have long been legitimated by our dominant, progressive mentality. “Silenced voices must be heard!”

Step back for a moment and think about it. We wonder why Muslims in Europe won’t contain their grievances and settle down to live within the ordinary routines of European society. I imagine that the tacit motto of most British politicians is “Just give assimilation a chance.” And yet that same society supports and idealizes an entire class of perpetual protestors (Greenpeace, anti-globalization groups, animal rights activists, and so on) whose waking lives are spent hurtling themselves against society. May I be forgiven for thinking that mode of modern European existence has been well assimilated by the arrested terrorists?

Moreover, the linkage of supposedly idealistic protest with violence and aggression is also very much a part our modern Western political aesthetic. The French Revolution sanctified mob violence and ritualized public executions as noble expressions of liberty. The revolutionary remains a heroic type with a gun slung across his shoulder. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir wrote about gratuitous crimes as acts of existential purity. Norman Mailer romanticized murderers, and the Marquis de Sade ascends to canonical status in our universities.

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Hat tip to truepeers.

The Financial Times reports

the White House on Tuesday confirmed that Gordon England, deputy defence secretary, sent a memorandum to senior defence officials and military officers last week, telling them that Common article III of the Geneva Convention — which prohibits inhumane treatment of prisoners and requires certain basic legal rights at trial — would apply to all detainees held in US military custody.

The Administration is knuckling under to the Supreme Court’s preposterous application of Geneva Convention status in Hamdan.

The sanctimonious do-gooder element is burbling with joy. Dave Hoffman aptly compared Hamdan with Brown, and he’s perfectly correct.

As in Brown, the Hamdan decision takes a leap of faith in the legitimacy of particular justices’ self-righteous moral intuitions as a basis for overruling objective law, counting on the sentimentality of the general public to affirm politically over time the Court’s decision.

There is a difference, though. The Brown decision was made at a time when state segregation represented a strange anachronism, when the laws under scrutiny were nearly universally despised, when the legal fruit was already overripe and ready to drop off the vine of its own accord.

The principle of reciprocity in the laws and usages of war has considerably greater vitality and reason behind it than Jim Crow ever did. The entire point of the Geneva Convention is to encourage humane treatment of prisoners of war on the basis of reciprocity. Signing the Convention is a promise that, if you do not abuse our soldiers who fall into your hands, we will also spare yours.

Justice Stevens’ generosity in the awarding of honorable status, rights, and protections to illegal combatants really represents a fraudulent check written at the expense of American fighting men.

When Justice Stevens effeminately promises that illegal combatants, terrorists, murderers, and brigands will all be treated as honorable adversaries, attempting to preclude the American fighting man, exposed to the hazard of falling alive into the hands of a merciless and barbarous enemy, from punishing violations of the customs and usages of war, he goes far beyond his own legitimate perogative. The decision to spare this enemy’s life, or that, belongs to the man who bested him, not to some theorist and scribbler sitting in a marble building in the District of Columbia.

In WWII, my father served in the USMC on Guadalcanal. He told me that the Japanese had people able to speak English, and in the long tropical nights, the Japanese forces would amuse themselves by imitating the pleas for assistance of a wounded American lying helpless between the fighting lines. Naive young Marines often had to be restrained physically from climbing out their foxholes and dashing off into the night to the rescue of their miserable and suffering fellow Marine. Every now and then, an individual hero would break free, and go out there. They always found him the next day, crucified with Japanese bayonets to a palm tree, his reproductive organs cut off and stuffed insultingly in his mouth. The Marines on Guadalcanal consequently took no Japanese prisoners, except for the purpose of short and forcible interrogation.

In today’s absurd world, bourgeois lawyers, safe in the United States and far from the fighting (who know nothing of war) would interpose their own opinions and emotions between the just revenge of American fighting men and a cowardly and dishonorable enemy.

The answer to Justice Stevens is simple. US forces will need to be certain to take no illegal combatants alive.

Israel wants to join the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and Muslims are (as usual) making trouble.

An attempt to end Israel’s long isolation from the Red Cross humanitarian movement hit a snag Tuesday as Muslim opponents used procedural moves to block progress at a decisive international conference, delegates said.

The International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, which opened Tuesday and is expected to conclude Wednesday, is being asked to approve changes to meet Israeli demands of almost six decades that it be granted full membership without using the cross or crescent to identify itself.

I’m not sure that I see any overpowering need for all this ecumenicism in the first place.

William Saletan in Slate sees what’s coming.

The Crisper and Dr. Helen are opposed, and so am I, but you know how the people Don Corleone refers to as the pezzonovante are: relentless and implacable.

H/T again to PJM.

Connoisseurs of Theodore Dalrymple’s regular columns heaping scorn on contemporary demotic Britain will enjoy his latest: From stiff upper lip to clenched jaws, in which the good doctor examines the consequences of modern rights-inflation:

WHAT a human catastrophe is the doctrine of human rights! Not only does it give officialdom an excuse to insinuate itself into the fabric of our lives but it has a profoundly corrupting effect on youth, who have been indoctrinated into believing that until such rights were granted (or is it discovered?) there was no freedom.

Worse still, it persuades each young person that they are uniquely precious, which is to say more precious than anyone else; and that, moreover, the world is a giant conspiracy to deprive them of their rightful entitlements. Once someone is convinced of their rights, it becomes impossible to reason with them; and thus the reason of the Enlightenment is swiftly transformed into the unreason of the psychopath.

The doctrine of rights has borne putrid fruit.

Reuters reports:

French President Jacques Chirac scrapped a youth job law on Monday after weeks of angry unrest, in a climbdown that undermined his prime minister and handed protesters victory.

Gateway Pundit is providing major coverage.

Convicted terrorist Ilych Ramirez Sanchez, known world-wide as “Carlos the Jackal,” though serving a life sentence, was permitted by the enlightened government of France to give an interview in 2004 broadcast by French M6 television.

In that interview, Sanchez argued that his crimes were justified and that there were no innocent victims of terrorism. He also expressed satisfaction over the September 11 attacks in the United States and allegedly laughed that “the Great Satan got it up the arse.”

French prosecutors sought a fine of E20,000 ($34,022) for these remarks. But, at the end of the judicial proceedings, French courts only fined him E5000 ($8505), finding that his arguing that terrorism was justified did constitute a crime under French law, but his expressions of pleasure at the Al Qaeda attacks on the United States represented only a personal reaction, and were not justiciable.

Guardian – Telegraph (Australia) – Reuters

Pat Buchanan (even a stopped clock is right twice a day) argues that the British strikes and French student riots represent a futile effort to preserve a Welfare State, doomed by world economic competition, which European demographics in any case could not sustain.

Like the U.S. campus riots of the 1960s, the French protests appear to some of us as the Revolt of the Over-Privileged. For what these pampered young people are demanding seems to be some kind of student deferment from the Global Economy.

The striking public employees in Britain and the young in Paris are protesting something unavoidable, like middle age. For what they see slipping away is something they are never going to see again.

What is happening in Britain and France is happening across Europe: the unwinding of the social welfare state. “Are the good times really over for good?” wailed Merle Haggard, decades ago. In Europe, the answer to Merle’s question is, “Yes, they are.”

In Belarus, people of all ages were beaten and arrested by police for demonstrating against tyranny. In France, rioters burned automobiles, looted shops, and mugged fellow demonstrators in the midst of demonstrations demanding secure jobs at somebody else’s expense.

Some people struggle for freedom; others passionately desire its opposite.

Eugéne Delacroix (1798-1863), Attila suivi de ses hordes, foule aux pieds l’Italie et les arts (Attila followed by his Horde, Trampling under Foot Italy and the Arts), Bibliothèque, Palais Bourbon, Paris, 1843-47

The Sorbonne was occupied for twelve hours by rioters, before being retaken by French police.

“A sad assessment succeeded the forcible intervention of the police: at least six rooms sacked, five offices of the National School of Chartres looted, two lecture-halls and all the cafeterias destroyed, three other devastated rooms, and forty rare books mutilated or burned. Those who held out for reasonable dialogue were overtaken by events, observed someone from the Rector’s office. Everything degenerated because of a horde of savages.

RARE BOOKS STOLEN OR BURNED

Rare religious books of great value were burned or stolen at the time of the occupation of the Sorbonne on the night of March 10 to March 11. Not only were hundreds of tables and chairs destroyed in the Sorbonne. Some 300 people, some students, some not, who occupied the place also violated works of a great historical value. A preliminary list of books burned on the spot or stolen has been just transmitted to the vice-chancellor of Paris by the Director of Studies of the School of Chartres, Jerome Belmon.

An American commie web-site has a manifesto from the barbarians.

Bullied by the European Union into conformity with contemporary political shibboleths, the tiny (formerly) self-governing island of Sark voted grudgingly to replace its 450 year old system of rule by landowners, originally negotiated with Queen Elizabeth, into a conventional modern democracy. USATODAY — Telegraph.

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Hat tip to Matthew MacLean.