Tea at Trianon: The West at War

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, October 14, 2023

The West at War

From TFP:

Allahu Akbar!—“Allah is great!” This cry has resounded all over the world through the videos that documented the violence of Islamic militants against women, children and young people of all nationalities, massacred or kidnapped on October 7, 2023, while an avalanche of rockets beat down on Israel. The same invocation—Allahu Akbar!—rang out again in the days that followed in the Arab squares and on pro-Islamic Western social media to celebrate the aggression of Hamas against Israel. It matters little that this has occurred on Israeli rather than European territory. What counts is that a new war has been declared.

The attack came at the dawn of a symbolic day for the West, the anniversary of the victory at Lepanto on October 7, 1571, just as the attack on the Twin Towers coincided with the anniversary of the liberation of Vienna from the Turks, which came about between September 11 and 12, 1683. Two emblematic events, which for Islam must be avenged through Jihad, or “holy war,” the doctrine that obliges every Muslim to bring the world under sharia, the religious and political law of Allah.
Islam is not a monolithic religion, but all of its branches agree on the need to fight against the corrupt West. In this struggle, Islam does not distinguish between Christians and Jews. February 23, 1998, saw the release of the Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders, inspired and signed by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. The first objective of the Islamic Front, as of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), is the reconquest of Jerusalem, the city from which the prophet Muhammad is said to have ascended in a chariot of fire and where the Al-Aqsa Mosque stands, built on the ruins of the Temple. The second objective is the conquest of Rome, called the Kizil-Elma—“Red Apple”—in analogy with the golden globe that surmounted the statue of the emperor Constantine in the Byzantine capital. After Constantinople, Rome became the “Red Apple,” that is, the final destination of the triumph of Islam over Christianity.
Islam’s strategy of expansion foresees the migratory invasion of Europe and the destruction of the State of Israel. In the days of the attack on Israel, the “Alliance of Mosques” was born in Paris, the new association of Muslims all over Europe, inspired by the wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, which theorizes the “soft jihad,” the “gentle” Islamization of Europe. The Hamas attack of October 7 is instead a dramatic expression of the “hard jihad,” which involves terrorism and war. Behind the former strategic approach is Turkey, which controls the migratory flow into Europe and, for years, has aspired to become part of the European Union in order to dismantle it. Behind the latter approach is Iran, through its agents, Hamas and Hezbollah, which are pressing their siege to the south and north of the State of Israel. (Read more.)