Terrorism from the Middle East got going in a serious way in the 1960’s and was allegedly spawned by the creation of Israel. Having failed to destroy Israel militarily, the Arabs set off on a policy of targeting civilians outside the Levant. The main actors at the time were Palestinians, but the rest of the Arabs, including Arab governments, eventually got into the act. Now, of course, we have these amorphous criminal organizations that exploit the global telecommunications system to recruit and direct lunatics all over the globe.

At the same time, Western involvement, and particularly US involvement, in the Muslim world has steadily increased. In the 70’s a handful of Americans worked in these countries, mostly in the oil business, but also as defense contractors. Today tens of thousands of Americans, plus equal numbers of Europeans are in these countries. That is on top of the saturation of Western culture via the internet and television. Then there is the military aspect. America has been dropping bombs on Muslims since the 80’s.

No sane person can conclude that relations between the West and Islam are on the upswing. Thirty years ago, the typical Westerner had no reason to care about the Muslims. Today, it is all we think about, because every other week a Muslim goes bonkers and kills a bunch a people. To make matters worse, the flood of Muslims into Western countries is threatening the social fabric of the West. Think about it. We now have political candidates running on explicitly anti-Islamic platforms.

What is to be done?

The first thing to do is to ban all immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. Banning Muslim immigration is impossible as you cannot implement it, but you can halt immigration from countries like Afghanistan and Iran. The United States actually runs recruiting drives in these countries via something called a diversity lottery. There is no patriotic reason to be importing these people. The West is not short of low-skilled, low-IQ people so importing more of them makes no economic sense. Importing people violently hostile to the West is suicidal and it must end.

That still leaves the problem of illegal migrants. The West used to have no qualms about rounding up illegals and sending them back, but fear of being rude to strangers has paralyzed Western governments. There is no reason to think this will change, but governments can make migration less attractive. Cutting off welfare benefits is the most obvious point of attack. Every Western country is creaking under the weight of social welfare programs. End all welfare programs to non-citizens.

Obviously, there are millions of Muslims living in the West and many have been here for a couple of generations. The Orlando shooter was born in America and his father was a naturalized citizen. America has about five million legal Muslims, while Europe has over forty-four million. Germany is 25% the size of the US and has far more Muslims. Given current fertility rates, these are dangerously high populations of people with an extremely poor history of assimilation. The West needs to think hard about encouraging reverse migration.

One way to do that is to offer cash bribes to leave. Some European countries are already doing this. It is a form of Danegeld, but sometimes that is what must be done. Many of the recent arrivals will jump at the cash bonus, figuring out that the party is over and they are better off going home. That is a big part of all of this. The West needs to make it clear that Islam is not welcome in the West. Cutting off the welfare and paying them to leave sends that message and it discourages others from making the trip to the West.

Another tool that can be used to discourage Muslim migration is a hard ban on cousin marriage. Most Muslim countries continue to marry off daughters to family members. First and second cousin marriage should be banned and heavily fined. No marriage of this type should be recognized. We have DNA tests to check this so it is cheap and easy to enforce. This is one of those things that sends a clear message, “You’re not welcome” to the Muslims.

All of this is incandescently obvious to anyone who has been paying attention. What is remarkable about the age in which we live is that the things people have known and understood for thousands of years are now suddenly heretical. This is due to the fever that has gripped our rulers, but normal people fully understand the sensibleness of limiting Muslim migration into the West. We owe Muslims nothing and are under no obligation to destroy ourselves to accommodate them.

What is not obvious is that our good intentions have done a lot of harm to the Muslim world and as a consequence invited these manufactured problems to our door. The culture and habits of the West evolved in the West. The people of Europe evolved in Europe and in the culture they created. Exporting our culture around the world to people, wholly unprepared for it, has had the same impact as exporting smallpox to the Americas. What has made the Mohammedan go crazy is the endless assault on his culture by Western culture.

The West not only needs to stop bombing the Muslims, but we also have to stop flooding their world with our culture. Western governments, especially the US, have to halt the export of Western culture to the Muslim world. Guys like Sergey Brin will fight it as he wants to control the world via Google, but maybe it is time for Sergey to take two in the hat anyway, but that is a post for another day. For now, the point is to halt the export of Western culture into Islamic countries via TV and Internet.

This also includes technology. What we fail to appreciate is how toxic Western technology is to these countries. They are not built for it. Our technology is like an infectious disease that seems harmless at first, maybe even beneficial, but then curdles into something that destroys the social fabric of these cultures. It is why we have observed initial periods of great progress, followed by a shift to tyranny and then total chaos. It is the pattern all over the Muslim world and the main driver is technology.

What happens is technology results in a material improvement in the lives of the people. They get better food, better medicine, better entertainments and better stuff. But then, this material improvement starts to disrupt the social arrangements and the ruling class uses the better technology to clamp down on dissent in very modern ways. As we see with the Turks, the result is authoritarianism. All over the Muslim world, the only stability comes either from despotism or backwardness.

Secular authoritarianism, however, sets off a counter-reaction where cultural elements begin to take on the secular authorities, the Islamic movements in the Middle East are not just religious in nature. They are counter arguments to Westernization. They are the response to tidal waves of foreign culture that are sweeping over Muslim lands. The West thinks it is helping by demanding democracy and shoving our values onto these people. Instead, we are creating fanatics who are dedicating themselves to fighting against what they see as an invasion.

Since this is going too long, let us summarize it this way. The solution to the West’s Islam problem is a version of containment. The goal is to keep the Muslims bottled up in their lands. Limit their access to the West physically, but l also limit their access culturally. Cut them off from our TV and the Internet. Let them drift back to their traditional ways, even if that means living in tents and riding camels. The Muslim Middle East needs to be a reservation for the Muslim. The only role of the West is to make sure they do not wander off the reservation.