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Bruce Bawer, author of the essential While Europe Slept, has written an equally essential piece at City Journal (thanks to all who sent this in), "An Anatomy of Surrender": a comprehensive overview of the ongoing voluntary and self-imposed reduction of the West to dhimmi status.
Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Khomeini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.
The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.
Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.
The Western media are in the driver’s seat on this road to sharia. Often their approach is to argue that we’re the bad guys. After the late Dutch sociologist-turned-politician Pim Fortuyn sounded the alarm about the danger that Europe’s Islamization posed to democracy, elite journalists labeled him a threat. A New York Times headline described him as marching the dutch to the right. Dutch newspapers Het Parool and De Volkskrant compared him with Mussolini; Trouw likened him to Hitler. The man (a multiculturalist, not a Muslim) who murdered him in May 2002 seemed to echo such verdicts when explaining his motive: Fortuyn’s views on Islam, the killer insisted, were “dangerous.”
Perhaps no Western media outlet has exhibited this habit of moral inversion more regularly than the BBC. In 2006, to take a typical example, Manchester’s top imam told psychotherapist John Casson that he supported the death penalty for homosexuality. Casson expressed shock—and the BBC, in a dispatch headlined imam accused of “gay death” slur, spun the controversy as an effort by Casson to discredit Islam. The BBC concluded its story with comments from an Islamic Human Rights Commission spokesman, who equated Muslim attitudes toward homosexuality with those of “other orthodox religions, such as Catholicism” and complained that focusing on the issue was “part of demonizing Muslims.”
In June 2005, the BBC aired the documentary Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic, which sought to portray concerns about Islamic radicalism as overblown. This “stunning whitewash of radical Islam,” as Little Green Footballs blogger Charles Johnson put it, “helped keep the British public fast asleep, a few weeks before the bombs went off in London subways and buses” in July 2005. In December 2007, it emerged that five of the documentary’s subjects, served up on the show as examples of innocuous Muslims-next-door, had been charged in those terrorist attacks—and that BBC producers, though aware of their involvement after the attacks took place, had not reported important information about them to the police.
Press acquiescence to Muslim demands and threats is endemic. When the Mohammed cartoons—published in September 2005 by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten to defy rising self-censorship after van Gogh’s murder—were answered by worldwide violence, only one major American newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, joined such European dailies as Die Welt and El País in reprinting them as a gesture of free-speech solidarity. Editors who refused to run the images claimed that their motive was multicultural respect for Islam. Critic Christopher Hitchens believed otherwise, writing that he “knew quite a number of the editors concerned and can say for a certainty that the chief motive for ‘restraint’ was simple fear.” Exemplifying the new dhimmitude, whatever its motivation, was Norway’s leading cartoonist, Finn Graff, who had often depicted Israelis as Nazis, but who now vowed not to draw anything that might provoke Muslim wrath. (On a positive note, this February, over a dozen Danish newspapers, joined by a number of other papers around the world, reprinted one of the original cartoons as a free-speech gesture after the arrest of three people accused of plotting to kill the artist.)
Last year brought another cartoon crisis—this time over Swedish artist Lars Vilks’s drawings of Mohammed as a dog, which ambassadors from Muslim countries used as an excuse to demand speech limits in Sweden. CNN reporter Paula Newton suggested that perhaps “Vilks should have known better” because of the Jyllands-Posten incident—as if people who make art should naturally take their marching orders from people who make death threats. Meanwhile, The Economist depicted Vilks as an eccentric who shouldn’t be taken “too seriously” and noted approvingly that Sweden’s prime minister, unlike Denmark’s, invited the ambassadors “in for a chat.”
The elite media regularly underreport fundamentalist Muslim misbehavior or obfuscate its true nature. After the knighting of Rushdie in 2007 unleashed yet another wave of international Islamist mayhem, Tim Rutten wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “If you’re wondering why you haven’t been able to follow all the columns and editorials in the American press denouncing all this homicidal nonsense, it’s because there haven’t been any.” Or consider the riots that gripped immigrant suburbs in France in the autumn of 2005. These uprisings were largely assertions of Muslim authority over Muslim neighborhoods, and thus clearly jihadist in character. Yet weeks passed before many American press outlets mentioned them—and when they did, they de-emphasized the rioters’ Muslim identity (few cited the cries of “Allahu akbar,” for instance). Instead, they described the violence as an outburst of frustration over economic injustice.
When polls and studies of Muslims appear, the media often spin the results absurdly or drop them down the memory hole after a single news cycle. Journalists celebrated the results of a 2007 Pew poll showing that 80 percent of American Muslims aged 18 to 29 said that they opposed suicide bombing—even though the flip side, and the real story, was that a double-digit percentage of young American Muslims admitted that they supported it. u.s. muslims assimilated, opposed to extremism, the Washington Post rejoiced, echoing USA Today’s american muslims reject extremes. A 2006 Daily Telegraph survey showed that 40 percent of British Muslims wanted sharia in Britain—yet British reporters often write as though only a minuscule minority embraced such views.
After each major terrorist act since 9/11, the press has dutifully published stories about Western Muslims fearing an “anti-Muslim backlash”—thus neatly shifting the focus from Islamists’ real acts of violence to non-Muslims’ imaginary ones. (These backlashes, of course, never materialize.) While books by Islam experts like Bat Ye’or and Robert Spencer, who tell difficult truths about jihad and sharia, go unreviewed in newspapers like the New York Times, the elite press legitimizes thinkers like Karen Armstrong and John Esposito, whose sugarcoated representations of Islam should have been discredited for all time by 9/11. The Times described Armstrong’s hagiography of Mohammed as “a good place to start” learning about Islam; in July 2007, the Washington Post headlined a piece by Esposito "Want to understand Islam? Start here."
Don't fail to read it all.
Posted by Robert at April 28, 2008 8:18 AM
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Excellent article. Thanks to everyone who sent this in.
Posted by: tanstaafl![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at April 28, 2008 8:56 AM
I've been wondering for a long time what the Left's reaction would be if some Muslim cleric pronounced a fatwa against abortion, and we had Muslim extremists bombing abortion clinics.
Would they finally turn? Or would they shut down all the clinics to avoid "offending"?
Posted by: PapaBear at April 28, 2008 9:07 AM
Until the West's leaders (political, religious, educational, media, artistic, literary etc.) start writing and talking the way Bawer does, they are all just whistling past the graveyard.
Their own.
And ours, by their derelection-of-duty default.
Posted by: profitsbeard at April 28, 2008 10:15 AM
Every time that I try to comment on jihad watch I get this message:
Jihad Watch
Thank You for Commenting
Your comment has been received. To protect against malicious comments, I have enabled a feature that allows your comments to be held for approval the first time you post a comment. I'll approve your comment when convenient; there is no need to re-post your comment.
I have been commenting there for a couple of years.
So, why do I keep getting that message?
at April 28, 2008 11:28 AM
Speaking of cultural jihad...
United American committee exposes Cultural Jihad In Central Florida
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-875161054537808915&hl=en
Recently the United American Committee's Central Florida chapter exposed cultural Jihad in a Central Florida school. What would you do if your child was forced to attend a class on Islam without your consent in a Public School? This is the same public school system who says your child can not be exposed to prayer in schools. It is also the same public school system that your tax dollars fund to be able to give YOUR children a quality unbiased education. The public school system that says you can not force a child to participate in any religion. Well it happened this week in Central Florida. The Central Florida chapter of the United American Committee uncovered this plot to educate your children with the religion of Islam and exposed it.
The Central Florida Chapter of the United American Committee then contacted WFTV Channel 9 news in Orlando to expose a cultural Jihad at a local school. This class was called family dynamics and was supposed to have nothing to do with religion, but ISLAM turned it into a religious discussion and these students had no choice to stay or go.
Posted by: adobe at April 28, 2008 12:27 PM
Very fine article, and I quite agree with it's being work as essential as While Europe Slept.
It's a strange experience, though, to be reading such things, and all the while the feeling grows
that it's not enough. It is long past time that articles have become not enough. Each new one gets
to seeming like just another nail in the coffin.
I fear that the success of the modern jihad will have to become downright overwhelming before any substantial audience forms for the work of Bruce Bawer...or Robert Spencer.
Posted by: Novalis at April 28, 2008 2:11 PM
Western legislatures and courts have reinforced the “spirit of appeasement.” In 2005, Norway’s parliament, with virtually no public discussion or media coverage, criminalized religious insults (and placed the burden of proof on the defendant). Last year, that country’s most celebrated lawyer, Tor Erling Staff, argued that the punishment for honor killing should be less than for other murders, because it’s arrogant for us to expect Muslim men to conform to our society’s norms. Also in 2007, in one of several instances in which magistrates sworn to uphold German law have followed sharia instead, a Frankfurt judge rejected a Muslim woman’s request for a quick divorce from her brutally abusive husband; after all, under the Koran he had the right to beat her.- from Bruce Bawer’s City Journal
It is far more ‘arrogant’ to use violent coercions against women, gays, and apostates, especially murder ‘honor’ killings, than to expect Muslim men to conform to civilized norms of our freedoms. Sharia is the most arrogant form of law there is, demanding that we surrender our freedoms to some barbaric 7th century codex of world domination for their so-called ‘religion’. They must adapt to our civlizaitional values of freedom, not the other way around. Drop the “religion” tag and the whole issue of 'whose arrogance’ becomes totally transparent: Islam is a violent anti-freedom political coercive Cult!
at April 28, 2008 3:00 PM
"What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad."
What is even less recognised is that the fatwa against Rushdie was suggested to Khomeini by a British muslim. According to this mans obituary published in the British press(The Sunday Times?) several years ago he met Khomeini when he was passing through Heathrow airport. They discussed what should be done Rushdie’s book and it was at his at suggestion the fatwa was issued.
This is the same man who was responsible for setting up the "Muslim Parliament of Great Britain".
Posted by: Fred at April 28, 2008 5:50 PM
An excellent article; however, I shall make one critical remark. The word cultural placed in front of "jihadist" muddies the dictionary water. I see no difference between a "cultural jihadist" and the regular, ordinary jihadist.
Are the cultural types sneakier, less violent? Without the threat, er, promise of violence, there would be no jihad. They would be reduced to knocking on doors and have people like Pelayo insult them, as I do with other door to door cults, without the need of a shotgun in easy reach.
Posted by: Pelayo at April 28, 2008 8:14 PM
Best article on this subject I've seen in a very long time. I'm sending it to everyone I can. Maybe it should be sent to our politicians in some form.
Posted by: traeh at April 28, 2008 11:09 PM
Novalis,
Over in the comments thread on the Quranic science article, I responded to your response to my comment. Might interest.
at April 28, 2008 11:11 PM
Bruce Bawer is an amazing writer. Every person with "liberal" inclinations (and I count myself as one) who is appalled by the direction the West is heading in, and the general apathy and/or complicity of fellow liberals, should read his book "While Europe Slept."
Posted by: angloirishslav at April 28, 2008 11:19 PM
capner
If you aren't using the Firefox browser - give it a try.
The article is brilliant. Nails it completely. Nothing many of us didn't know :(
Posted by: Gramfan at April 29, 2008 12:32 AM
It really poes me to no end. I believe in insulting everyone, from the Pope to some scumbag imam who glorifies a mass murdering plundering Arabian psychopath. But I have more respect for the Pope than most of them.
Posted by: Dumbo at April 29, 2008 12:42 AM
This is indeed an excellent article. It superbly summarises the process of dhimmification in the media, entertainment, and arts, though it could have been far more comprehensive with regards to the academic capitulation to Islam. There is a wealth of information in here; of particular note is the striking dhimmification of Norway, if not Europe in general. I've not read his book though I suspect this is a kind of update of that. Though he's completely missed out on the Fitna episode, probably since it takes time for written works to get through the publishing process. The only fault I would attribute to this article is that it is strong on describing the capitulation to Islam but weak on describing what it is that is being capitulated to. Shari'a and jihad - the goal and the means - could have been more explicitly detailed and exposed. This, of course, is the strength of Robert's work. Yet we need both - a thorough and widespread knowledge of the doctrine of Islam, as well as an acute awareness of the battlefronts upon which the war, in its violent and non-violent manifestations, is being fought.
Posted by: dlp at April 29, 2008 2:07 AM
dlp,
There are similarities between Bawer´s article above and Bawer´s book While Europe Slept, but the book includes a great many personal experiences of Bawer in Europe. An absolutely outstanding book on the Islamization of Europe.
And it´s a book that can speak at least as well to those on the Left as to those on the Right. We desperately need leftie allies in this fight. Conservatives should do their best to speak about these things in terms that lefties will appreciate and understand. For example, instead of bashing multiculturalism as the cause of Islamification, try gently pointing out to a leftie that Islamization will destroy multiculturalism, and say that you are concerned and worried about that, because even though multiculturalism has its negative side, its positive side is called "pluralism" and "freedom". We´ve got to go half way to meet the left sometimes, to understand where they are coming from, or else we will further a division that only helps the spread of Islamic law and dhimmification.
Posted by: traeh at April 29, 2008 3:43 AM
The article is a litany of capitulations, one after the other. After reading it, one can't help but feel both galvanized and depressed.
at April 29, 2008 7:30 AM
traeh
I agree and empathize completely with the feeling that we need to involve both the left and right on the issue of islamization. Though 'multiculturalism' is so far down the road of cultural relativism that it would be hard to rescue it and give it new sense.
We need to affirm the values that made the West great, though in all honesty, even with Ibn Warraq's new book on this, we really haven't scratched the surface on what these values are and how to institutionalise them.
It brings us into a whole new field, which many of us are unfamiliar. The answer to the question of what makes the West the best is not painting and the arts - in my view a romantic distraction of Warraq's from the foundations to the fruit of freedom - but the environment in which these were allowed and encouraged to flourish.
But what values shaped this? The Western values of freedom and humanitarianism - overly abstract - differ markedly between the Anglosphere tradition and the European tradition (see James Bennett on this). And these gave rise to different lineages of the legal, political and financial institutions which strongly influenced the divisions we see today between the continent and the Anglosphere.
The Anglosphere - the name Bennett gives the network of English speaking nations - has its roots in England, where individualism was enshrined in a legal tradition that pre-dated the industrial revolution. Nothing to do with race but entirely with the culture of the institutions established, the Anglosphere produced constitutional liberalism, including equality before the law, separation of the judicial and executive powers, and the freedoms of expression, conscience and association.
The ideology of cultural relativism, masquerading as multiculturalism, and a positively defined notion of human rights comes from the European continent: a disease that has now infected the Anglosphere and our ability to fight this Long War. There are real differences in the values of the West: we need to reassert the ones we first ought to know are the right ones.
Posted by: dlp at April 29, 2008 9:21 AM
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