Heavens, wouldn't we all prefer to be involved more pleasant and productive enterprises than to spend time in contemplation of murderous adherents of totalitarian ideologies who intend to either enslave or kill us all? In this case, the word "bore" refers to the frustration and weariness rather than ennui or apathy.
JihadWatch's Hugh Fitzgerald very eloquently expresses his "boredom":
A reader asks, "Is anyone else getting bored with Iraq and Islam?"I am. I am getting bored, quite bored, with Iraq and Islam. In fact, I've long been bored silly with the whole business of Iraq and Islam. It is not terribly interesting in itself, except as a case study offering a rich variety of different kinds of willful ignorance, sentimentalism, and avoidance of the obvious -- as well as of sheer stupidity in so many different, and differently unappealing, forms. It must have been the same for all kinds of people who encountered similar phenomena, although perhaps it was not boring for Winston Churchill to have to again and again say the obvious things (or obvious now) about Adolf Hitler, about the Storm Troopers, about Nationalsozialismus, and about how Mein Kampf was meant seriously and should not be dismissed.
They have my attention. I take every word very seriously.
Or it may not have been similarly boring for all those who wrote about Japanese militarism and emperor-worship, that is Kodo, in Japan beginning in the 1920s, with the full menace already clear to some by 1930: one Western student of the subject laid it all out, and even predicted the exact places the Japanese would attack.And don't you think the members of Giustizia e Liberta would have preferred to do other things in southern France then have to worry about being picked off by the secret police of Il Granitico, with those endless harangues matched only by the crazed speeches of Hitler? Imagine having to watch those speeches, or having to read anything written by either one, or having to solemnly study, for example, the kind of thing Kremlinologists used to have to study: what went on at the First Party Congress in Minsk, and what Comrade Lenin wrote about Renegade Kautsky, and when Comrade Stalin first started airbrushing that wrecker Bukharin out of those photographs of the Soviet leadership.
Who in his right mind could stand it then? Who in his right mind can stand it now?
And why would we want to follow, day by day, what general or admiral in the Japanese Imperial War Office is in, or out, or on his way up, or on his way down, and the ideological origins of Emperor-worship and bushido-cults and all the rest, when one would much rather, if one were reporting on Japan in those days, write about the cherry-tree ceremony, or Murasaki Shikibu, or possibly that nice exhibit of wazikashi blades in the Japanese War Ministry's museum?
We're all bored, just as bored, even more bored, than you are with Islam, and Jihad, and with having to listen to solemn parsing of speeches by Bin Laden, or Ahmadinejad, or Mahathir Mohammed, or with having to analyze some promise made by Hosni Mubarak or Pervez Musharraf or Mahmoud Abbas. Why should primitive peoples with primitive belief-systems take up our time? Because they can. Because they must. Because the Western world made a big mistake, over the past four decades, and now it is paying for it. And the Western world will, if something is not done, pay much more for that big mistake of letting into its midst, at the moment of maximum sentimentality and softness in the collective Western brain, people who do not and cannot wish that Western world, its legal and political institutions, well.
And politics, just writing about anything involving large numbers of people -- so that one writes, actually writes and can't quite believe it, such phrases as "the Iraqis" or "the Arabs" or "the French" or "the Israelis" or "the Hindus." One writes, and then still has to look at oneself in the mirror to keep from cutting oneself when shaving. One simply has to agree to the rules of the public game, in an age of the degradation of the democratic dogma. What else can one do? No one in the world could be as bored with Islam as I am, not even you, given my natural bent and interests and hierarchy of values. But it has to be discussed, until enough people understand what the whole thing is all about, and by helping them make sense, they can be helped to come to their senses.
And he adds:
Among Sistani's fervent admirers have been Reuel Gerecht and assorted Weiss-Schwartz Syndromists at My Weekly Standard.Fouad Ajami, too, was deeply moved by his meeting (a meeting that neither Bremer, nor any other Infidel, being unclean, or "unclean," was able to have) with Sistani, described in Ajami's tellingly mis-titled book, "The Foreigner's Gift" (for "Foreigner's" read "Infidel's").Whether it is "staunch ally" Saudi Arabia, "staunch ally" Pakistan, "staunch ally" Egypt, "staunch ally" Jordan, "moderate" Abbas, or for that matter the Hero of Iraq, the "moderate" Sistani and the "moderate" Shi'a (as opposed to wild-man Moqtada al-Sadr) -- Sunni or Shi'a, "extremist" or "moderate" -- let's call the whole thing off.
Instead, no more mistaken seeking for the Good Muslim, but attend rather to what those who were born into and raised within Islam, but have found there way out, just as defectors from the Soviet system found their way out, and got to the West, and managed to tell the Western world what so many simply could not believe. And if those intelligent and articulate apostates -- Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ali Sina, and others are heeded, then policies can be constructed on some basis other than the endless and essentially pointless search for those "moderate" Muslims -- whether it is those in Amman who laugh appreciatively at the witticisms of Bernard Lewis, and he recalls so fondly, or those "moderate Muslims" who are the "answer" to the other kind, in the repeatedly expressed view of Daniel Pipes, or whether it is the Sistani-worship of his claque at My Weekly Standard -- throw it all over the side.
Look at Islam as Ibn Warraq or Wafa Sultan looks at it. Or as Bat Ye'or does. Or Arthur Jeffery. Or Samuel Zwemer or St. Clair Tisdall. Or so many others. Unreformable, yet containable. And then contain it, and work to undo the gains made by the Camp of Islam over the past forty years. It is entirley doable. It does not require Boots on the Ground and the expenditure of $750 billion to win hearts and minds in Iraq. There is a military component, but that is far less important than diminishing the money weapon, halting Da'wa or supporting campaigns of counter-Da'wa, and halting the penetration of Western societies by Muslims who were foolishly allowed into those societies by many different governments unaware of what Islam as a belief-system means, and still not able to come to grips with, to recognize, the terrible problems that will not be solved by brightly encouraging, at state expense, "integration" through better teaching of language, affirmative-action school and job programs, and all the other things that will merely increase the ability of Muslims to win over Infidels (see Tariq Ramadan, and compare him to this or that inarticulate, semi-educated Imam -- who is the greater threat?), or at least to stave them off, while the demographic conquest continues unabated, until it is, or at least is judged by many to be, too late.
Comments