Michel Houellebecq and the Decline of European Civilization

In Submission, his most recent novel, the French writer-provocateur Michel Houellebecq imagines France after an Islamic takeover. The book, argues Amir Taheri, is as much a critique of European decadence as a warning about the dangers of radical Islam:

It is, of course, possible to read Submission as an exercise in tongue-in-cheek provocation. The trouble is that the self-loathing it portrays is real. Many Frenchmen see their society as drifting in uncertain waters without an anchor. They are concerned by increasingly powerless elected governments, distant bureaucrats who intervene in every aspect of people’s lives, and an economic system that promises more and more but delivers less and less. Advocates of the view that the West is in “decline” claim that Europeans no longer believe in anything and are thus doomed to lose the fight against home grown Islamists who passionately believe in the little they know of Islam.

The novel partly answers the question that many French are asking these days: What do jihadists want? The answer is that they don’t want anything in particular because they want everything. They want to seize control of your life and dictate its every aspect to the last detail. In exchange, they offer you security and a share of whatever cake may remain.

Houellebecq’s novel ends without its hero specifically accepting the bargain, although he clearly tilts towards doing so. In other words, the French, even seven years from now (the novel is set in 2022), still have a choice. My guess is that the overwhelming majority of the French will not feel the same temptation felt by Houellebecq’s narrator.

 

Read more at Asharq al-Aswat

More about: European Islam, France, Jihadism, Literature, Western civilization

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF