Bruce Thorton makes numerous important observations about the dhimmis in the Administration and some revealing behavior on the part of “moderate Muslims” in Private Papers (thanks to Looney Tunes):
As stalwart as the Bush administration has been in the current conflict with Islamic jihadists, judging from the op-ed in last Saturday’s New York Times by National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and Homeland Security Advisor Frances Townsend, it still entertains dangerous illusions about the enemy we are facing.
Hadley and Townsend reprise the narrative the administration has used all along in making sense of our adversary. Those wishing to destroy us are enemies of freedom who espouse a totalitarian ideology akin to fascism and communism. As such, they are driven by a diseased passion for domination that will brook no dissent nor allow for ideals such as tolerance and human rights. And they gain traction from “conditions of despair and feelings of resentment where freedom is denied.” Thus America must promote democratic freedom and prosperity to remove those conditions, for “people everywhere prefer freedom to slavery and will embrace it whenever they can, because freedom is the wish of every human being.” Finally, since these terrorists are enemies of Islam as well, we must support those Muslims who “are speaking the truth about their proud religion and history, and seizing it back from those who would hijack it for evil ends.”
The key to this mistaken interpretation is the short shrift given to the power of spiritual needs “” an omission surprising given how religious the media keeps telling us this administration is. That ignoring of spiritual reality is what makes the analogy with fascism and communism false. Both of those ideologies were anti-Christian: fascism was a species of debased Romantic neo-paganism, and communism was blatantly atheist. As such, both ran counter to the powerful Judeo-Christian forces that shaped European and Russian civilization, and so could not satisfy for long the spiritual yearnings of the people, yearnings denied their traditional expressions. Thus these ideologies were doomed because they denied not just political freedom, but the powerful human need for religious expression and spiritual experience.
The jihadist enemy, on the other hand, is operating on principles and values squarely in the tradition of Islam, and thus unlike fascism and communism is expressing a spiritual need and an orthodox religious mandate: to fulfill by force the will of Allah that all the world be subject to Islam and an Islamic state, the caliphate, ruled by sharia, Islamic religious law. Those conquered infidels who refuse to convert are reduced to dhimmi, subordinated and humiliated peoples whose restricted rights, diminished lives, and circumscribed behavior testify to the superiority of their Muslim overlords and their divine right to oppress the infidel and exploit him economically. This dynamic of jihad and dhimmitude has been extensively documented by Bat Ye’or and other scholars, and is apparent on every page of Islamic jurisprudence, theology, and history from the eighth century to today….
In fact, the obsession with the Palestinians is the smoking gun that reveals the jihadist sentiments of double-talking “moderates.” Consider how many British Muslims, supposedly opposed to homicide bombings, praised Hamas founder Sheikh Yassim, who engineered the murder of over 500 Israelis in furtherance of his organization’s long-term goal to destroy Israel. After the Israeli Defense Forces killed him, a memorial service was held in London, an event attended by “moderates” like Muslim Council Secretary General Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who called Yassim a “renowned Islamic scholar,” an estimation shared by Inayat Bunglawla. Think about the implications: respected, Westernized “moderate” Muslims praise a terrorist murderer as an “Islamic scholar,” and we are supposed to believe that “fanatics” have “hijacked” and “distorted” Islam?…
Read it all.