Monday, April 28, 2008

CREEPING SHARIA & CREEPING LEFTISM

From City Journal:

Motivated by fear and multiculturalism, too many Westerners are acquiescing to creeping sharia.

An example of Western self-censorship: Belgian officials prohibited Shark, by David Cerny, depicting Saddam Hussein as an aquatic predator.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.


Read it all.

As we silence artists, writers and critics of Islam; give Islamic customs special preference in our public schools, gyms and even our public bathrooms, we are only paving the way for our own cultural destruction. We are not tolerating their cultural practices, we are suborning our own so as not to give them offense. And, much of this behavior comes about because of an unconscious fear of their violence and threat of violence.

Thus we surrender Western civilization, not with a bang, but a whimper.

Organizations like CAIR are nothing more than an advance recon units for Al Qaeda-style jihad, disguised as self-righteous and terribly oppressed muslim moderates crying that Islamophobia is the root cause of their unhappiness. They have taken the pulse of the enemy infidel, and know that it is weak--particularly on the left.

They must be disabused of the notion that their crusade to obtain special status for Islam under the law--by eliminating free speech protections--has any chance of success. Only the the useful PC idiots of the left are sympathetic with their efforts, but that is exactly the problem.

Both CAIR and the left have made a mockery of our most precious freedoms and the think they can get away with it. But in Europe and here, they are only succeeding in hardening the resolve of people like myself to actively oppose their coercive and cynical manipulation of our free society.

Once upon a time, I could have cared less about Islam and what any Muslim believed or how they lived--as long as they left me alone. Now I have a strange and compelling desire (my "difficulty dealing with authority" personality, I guess) to organize groups to "Flush the Quran" and write mockingly of the idiotic prophet to whom they have sold their souls and the even more idiotic religious leaders who are steeped in paranoia and ignorance.

All sorts of possible non-PC civil disobedience flash through my mind; because quite frankly, submission has never been either a personal trait; nor a common American character trait.

Islam may find our lack of faith in Allah disturbing, but they have no magical powers to make me or anyone else conform to their religion unless we ourselves give it to them.

It is time to firmly reject this creeping sharia and tell the primitive throwbacks who demand us to submit to their medieval ways to take their religious beliefs and religious law an stick them where the sun don't shine.

And, for the record, I feel the same way about anyone who expects me to behave as if I were a member of their religious cult. Screw that. Civilization has come a long way, baby.

As for the creeping leftism that supports, encourages and enables this slow destruction of our values and freedoms in the name of 'multiculturalism' and 'peace' and all things politically correct--you people already have a lot to answer for; and sometime soon, you will either have to come to terms with the fear and hate that motivates your appeasement; or you will finally have to admit that the submission and selflessness offered by Islam is the religion you have been searching for all along.

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