FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - NIGHTMARE COALITION

HISTORY HAS NOT ENDED: FRANCIS FUKUYAMA ERRS IN DISMISSING THE CALIPHATE IDEA
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Rant Number 601          25 Sept. 2014


‘The Caliphate…get real! A fantasy of a bunch of 17 year olds… with some Kalashnikovs…ask me again in five years…’ Thus at Chatham House Japanese-American Francis Fukuyama – he of the ‘End of History’ thesis - breezily dismissed my question with a sneer and a chuckle. And the smug establishment audience shared his mirth.

Get real indeed. The ‘fantasising’ teens have created a fearsome Islamic entity in the Levant. Mighty America does not treat them as juvenile jokes.  An unlikely East-West war alliance has hastily been assembled: fighter-bombers, armed predator drones and Tomahawk cruise missiles are unleashed, aimed at the teenagers…Hhhmmm… some Bolshie, bothersome lads!

A weird coalition. The oddest bedfellows. Including, e.g. the tyrannical king of little Bahrain where a popular uprising of its majority population began in 2011. Repressions, killings, torture, raids on civilians, foreign mercenaries – all those and more the ruler deploys against his own people. Fine example of ‘democracy’!

And Saudi Arabia. Regular chopper-off of heads, not unlike the naughty teenagers. A country owned by a dodgy, despotic royal family. Where state-sponsored scholars preach hatred of Christians and Jews and where possessing a Bible is illegal, let alone building a church or a synagogue. Or cosy Qatar. Quite open, compared to Saudi but…till yesterday they were funding various terror networks in Syria – like the Saudis, in fact. Now they are helping with bombing the restless kids so they must be good…

Sure, the US and the UK provide the biggest guns. Happy, tolerant liberal-democratic societies in which bagatelles like adultery, abortion, usury, gambling, boozing, Satanism and homo-marriage flourish unimpeded. And King Abdullah, his play-boy princes and their shaggy Wahhabi fanatics are blissfully in bed with Obumble and Cameron, the sponsors and protectors of all that. Nightmare alliance? Hardly a hyperbole, eh?

The teenagers are foolish, F.F. pontificated. They have even succeeded in adding Iran to the coalition, he noted. Well, given that Shia’ people are prime targets of the sanguinary Khilafa boys, you cannot blame a Shia state for wishing to protect its own, can you? Besides, President Rohani since he was elected has sought rapprochement with the West, nothing new there.

Cameron, unlike Fukuyama, dreads the teens: ‘This is a fight you cannot opt out of…these people want to kill us’, he opined. Dear Prime Minister, try to get it right. The gory sight of severed heads should not prevent clear thinking. This Islamist enemy offers not one but three options to ahl al-Kitab, the peoples of the Book, i.e. Christians and Jews: 1) conversion to Islam; 2) paying the jizya, the infidel tax or 3) death. None of these prospects are rosy but the point is that these Islamists are not acting in an arbitrary way: they stick to key tenets of their religion.

Naturally the wretched Yezidis of Iraq are not counted amongst the peoples of the Book, therefore theirs has been Hobson’s choice – to be killed. And so many have. QED.

President Obumble has long wavered and hesitated but at last he breathes fire: ‘If you threaten America you will find no safe haven. This counter-terrorism campaign…steady…relentless… blah, blah, blah.’ The pesky teens must be shaking in their boots. Still, methinks the most comical remark by a coalition military chief has been uttered by General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. Amongst the countries threatened by ISIS and needing defending he includes…Israel! Surely there are limits to absurdity, even in a soldier. Israel needing a defender?! The Jewish state’s mammoth military machine could make mincemeat of any enemy. (Except perhaps the Turks but then Erdogan only talks – he’d never dare to break ranks with NATO. His sound and fury signify nothing.) The teenagers could be rubbed out, should Israel so desire. Only, Israel has no such a wish. Regional instability, quarrels and internecine strife amongst Arabs are boons to Zionists.

Curiously, several times Fukuyama mentioned Professor Samuel Huntington as his ‘mentor’. But Huntington’s name became balefully linked with the title of his most famous book, The Clash of Civilisations. Today that work unfailingly evokes strong disapprobation, shrill refutations and hysterical anathemas. Why? Because, although Huntington identifies more than one civilisation hostile to the West, Islam takes pride of place. Not that the author advocated the fearful clash – he claimed that his scholarly concern was to avoid it. Nonetheless the Prof suggested that Islam was perhaps the West’s biggest challenge. I think Muslims should have been proud. Instead they and the liberals pilloried Huntington as a latter-day type of crusader. The late lamented Prof has been under a cloud ever since. No wonder that cunning and ambitious F.F. does not intend to follow his mentor in oblivion.

Listening to Fukuyama made the priest reflect: ‘This is par excellence horizontal thinking. It moves always in one direction, on one plane, along one dimension. It conceives of one single set of exclusive values. Western sacred cows like capitalism, finance, and liberal-democratic politics are the only paradigm this man can envisage. How significant he likes to quote Max Weber, the “Marx of the Bourgeoisie”, namely the supreme theorist of a capitalism conceived as the Summum Bonum of humanity. This peculiar mind is like that.’

‘We don’t want this model to succeed’, a British former diplomat said minutes ago on radio. He meant the Caliphate model. The idea could spread around the world, generating havoc for the West, he warned. A tell-tale worry. Likely or not, it shows history is not ended but it marches on, pace the learned Fukuyama. The shadow of the resurgent Khilafa stalks and frightens our comfy bourgeois politicos  – the Nightmare Coalition proves it.

Fukuyama laughed at me but the Caliphate lads and I may have the last laugh.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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