Fitzgerald: Reasonable accommodation and Muslim demands

To Sum Up:

1) Islam is a Total System. It offers a Complete Regulation of Life. It is dualistic: Believer and Infidel; Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb (with a transient and trivial category, Dar al-Sulh, where a "truce" has been put into effect); What Is Commanded (Halal) and What Is Prohibited (Haram).

2) Muslims are obligated to participate in the "struggle," or Jihad, to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam.

3) Those obstacles include the most important matters -- the legal and political institutions of a country. We recognize at once, or would recognize, a direct assault on, say, our Constitution -- which will forever be under assault or attempted undermining by those who believe in Islam, that is in the Shari'a, which in letter and spirit flatly contradicts the American Constitution.

4) Those who think the word "Jihad" must necessarily refer to the use of terrorism or other kinds of violence are the ones most likely to ignore, or not make sufficient sense of, all the other instruments of Jihad -- the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest being the most important. Similarly, those who might at least be alarmed about assaults on important liberties, such as the attempt by Muslims in the West, and Muslim states and groups, both to prevent Westerners (Dutchmen, Danes, along with less-publicized examples of threats made in order to silence Englishmen and Frenchmen) from exercising their freedom of speech, and to prevent individuals in the advanced West, if they have been born into Islam and in the free West wish to leave it (something unthinkable in a Muslim-dominated country) from so doing on pain of...well, on pain of whatever can be inflicted on them, might fail to recognize that "Jihad" is about everything, including things which we might regard as too trivial to bother with.

5) But if Muslim demands will never let up, and will be made here and there and everywhere, there is no such thing as too trivial a demand not to oppose it. The whole effort is one of wearing away, wearing away Infidel resolve, wearing down opposition, wearing wearing wearing it away. And it is only if one fully grasps how everything connects, how "tout se tient," that one will be able to see why granting a seemingly innocuous demand -- such as this special exception for janitorial dress -- is not a good idea.

6) It is clear that the wearing of pants was deemed by employers to be a requirement, for janitorial work in the airport, both appropriate and useful. It is also clear that many Muslimahs wear pants, so that the argument that it simply cannot be done is a false one. But even if it were to be argued that at least "some Muslims" think that women are prohibited from wearing pants, the Constitutional theory of "reasonable accommodation" should not be too easily invoked. Why? Well, for several reasons. The first is that it is perfectly reasonable for janitorial staff in airports -- places of public accommodation -- for health and safety reasons, to wear pants rather than skirts. Epidemiologists and health-safety experts can give the details. Second, the entire Constitutional edifice about "reasonable accommodation" relates to "religion," but "religion" has never been defined by the Supreme Court. Dress regulations can be safety-related. They can also reflect an employer's belief that certain kinds of clothes are desirable, and should be made mandatory for commercial reasons, for staff cohesion in the work place, or to alert the public as to who is indeed an employee, or simply for an atmosphere that will attract and keep customers. And it makes sense, and it is the right, of employers to be able to reasonably impose such requirements. Crew members planes, or trains, or busses, need to be distinctively dressed so that passengers, fellow workers, and even police can recognize them. It is perfectly reasonable to request that employees of a hair salon or a dress shop ought not to be wearing distinctively off-putting hijab, much less burqas. It is no different from regulations in the military. The phrase "reasonable accommodaton" must be used sparingly, and only by those who are prepared to see how many kinds of accommodation demanded by Muslims are not "reasonable" at all, and are made only in order to aggressively push forward a scheme to forcibly make Islam present everywhere, accepted everywhere, made part of the American mental landscape, even to the extent of carefully rewriting textbooks, and placing Muslims on this continent hundreds of years before they actually appeared -- and they appeared, in numbers, only in the last few decades. Why, there have even been claims that a Muslim discovered America, or that Muslims were among the members of Columbus's crew, absurdly impossible as that would have been.

7) As is said by Robert Spencer here, taken out of the wider and deeper context, that is the context of aggressive Muslim campaigns to demand special treatment all over the Western world, with the goal of "removing all barriers to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam," some -- many -- will not quite realize what the fuss is about. They may even be persuaded to think that if such "trivial" demands set off worried warning-sounds, then those who sound the tocsin must themselves not be far-seeing, but merely alarmists, neurotics, and easily dismissable cassandras.

Would that they were. Would that what is happening in the southern Philippines, in southern Nigeria, in the southern Sudan, in France and the Netherlands and Spain and Italy and Great Britain and Belgium and Germany and Denmark and Norway and Sweden and several dozen other Infidel lands had nothing to do with each other, were not prompted by the same attitudes, nurtured by the same atmospherics, and were not in the end the result of the same tenets and the same texts.

Would that no dots needed to be connected. Would that it was all a great big fantasy, and that the evidence presented to us, in great and scholarly detail, by the scholars of Islam and the historians who wrote about Islamic conquest long before the Great Inhibition set in (that Great Inhibition may, having been subject to so many battering-rams, now have too many dents and even gaping holes in it to ever be put back the way it was five, or ten, years ago), and confirmed by the articulate defectors from the Army of Islam, could be ignored, and we could all go back to bed.

Would that that were true.

But, as you and I know, alas, it isn't.

Posted by Hugh at September 3, 2008 4:16 PM
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