Sunday, June 04, 2006

Importing Our Own Executioners


A couple of years ago I saw that Brad Pitt movie, "Troy." I was intrigued to learn all I could about ancient Troy (did it really exist? What really happened?). I read all I could find about it on the net.

The story of Troy was one of two epic poems written by a blind Ionian poet named Homer. Or at least that's what the legend says. When you go back far enough into history, you enter the realm of legend where fact and myth become intermixed, and what is really true is not completely known. The Legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is an example. So is the story of Troy. But no matter, often these legends impart important moral lessons and act as guides for our own lives and times.

You've all heard the story of Troy. A Trojan named Paris couldn't keep his toga buttoned, and fell in love with a Greek woman named Helen, young wife of King Menelaus. So Paris abducted Helen and took her back to Troy, a walled city overlooking the sea in what is now Turkey. Troy really did exist, but is today only rubble and ruins.

Helen's hiatus didn't set well with the king, who launched an armada of ships (supposedly 1,000 of them) to retrieve Helen, who was now called "Helen of Troy." The ships were full of Greek soldiers, including a bad-ass named Achilles, who legend tells us was a real heel. The Trojans remained safe in their walled city for over ten years while the Greeks slept on the beach and became increasingly pissed off. But the Trojans did come out to play a few times and knocked off a few of the Greeks. Hector killed Patroclus, best buddy of Achilles, who then challenged Hector to a fight.

Hector was a brave and decent man, fighting for his people and his city, but not too bright. Instead of having his archers turn Achilles into a pin cushion, and having the mainstream media write scrolls claiming it was an atrocity, Hector accepted the challenge.

He went out of the city and fought Achilles, who promptly killed him. Achilles then tied Hector's body to his chariot and dragged it around the city a few times. Talk about adding insult to injury. Paris, the guy who started this whole rumble in the first place, later slays Achilles in battle by shooting Achilles in the heel with a poisoned arrow. Serves him right, I say.

Well to make a long epic short, the Greeks were getting bored with the game, so they pretended to sail away in their triremes. But before they did, they left a great big wooden horse outside the main gate of Troy, a gift to the gods, they said. The overjoyed Trojans then took the big horse inside Troy's walls as a kind of war prize.

The picture above is a replica of the Trojan Horse as depicted on ancient urns. You'd think the windows and doors and the ladder on the horse would have caused some suspicion in the Trojans, but they were the dhimmi-liberals of antiquity. The warning signs were there, but they believed what they wanted to believe and couldn't or wouldn't see the obvious. Maybe they were afraid of being accused of profiling or ethnic intolerance if they assumed evil intent on the part of their guests. The most likely scenario is that after so many years of war they desperately needed to believe that peace had finally come. They were wilfully blind to any other possibility.

That night, the Greek soldiers hiding in the horse came out and opened the gate to the rest of the Greek army, who then sacked the city and murdered the male inhabitants. The Trojan women were taken as slaves. Hector's infant son was thrown from the walls and killed, and his wife taken as a sex slave by one of the Greek officials. (That's from the book. It was rewritten for the screenplay.) There are fates worse than death, and Hector suffered one.

In the end, Troy was a city who was successfully infiltrated by an enemy who feigned peace and hid its malevolent intent. If you can't see the parallels between the Trojan Horse and massive immigration of Muslims into the West, then you haven't been paying attention.

Just this week authorities in England and Canada raided Muslim terrorist cells, made arrests and, in Canada, retrieved two tons of explosives. Before that, we had 9/11 in the U.S., 4/11 in Spain, and 7/7 in London. Muslim terrorists killed Westerners each time. More Westerners will die as long as the enemy remains in our midst.

Like the Trojans, we are importing our own executioners. The enemy is inside the gate and it is we who have let him in.