dhimmitude
Posted at 10:20am on May 6, 2008 Too large to see.
By Paul J Cella
There is a famous crack by Chesterton to the effect that it is possible for things to be too large to see. The huge and obvious becomes invisible under certain pressures. Take, for instance, this very useful, if dispiriting catalog of capitulation, presented ably by Mr. Bruce Bawer in City Journal. His thesis is simple enough: “Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology,” he writes, “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.” Dhimmitude. “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.” Bawer goes on to detail at length the many ways in which Liberalism is capitulating to an armed doctrine that, in most of its specifics, is implacably hostile to Liberalism.
Well and good. Mr. Bawer has proven himself in many respects a careful and daring observer. He is several steps ahead of most people in his appraisal of the problem. Yet the curiosity, the frustration, is how blind he is to some elementary observations. In this he is hardly alone. There is in fact a whole cottage industry of writing like this, where the huge and obvious has become invisible.
In the course of a 4000-word essay, Mr. Bawer makes use of variations on the word “immigration” exactly twice, by my count; and both times it is used descriptively, rather than analytically. It seems that this whole surrender of the West to the rigid code of sharia, this forfeiture of our freedom to an alien tyranny, is going on, right under our noses, in perfect innocence of Western immigration policy. Islam is a kind of force of nature, against which Liberalism, lacking certain qualities of heroism, is impotent. Jihad is not so much an armed doctrine, held or freely adopted by living men, as a contagion.
What is huge and obvious is that our immigration policy exposes us to the Jihad. What is huge and obvious is that continuing to increase the number of Muslims entering our country, and other Western nations, will increase our exposure to this armed doctrine; will increase the strength of those whose position is already strong enough to impose upon our Leftists and Liberals the surrender that Bawer describes so vividly.
Posted in dhimmitude | Immigration | the Jihad | War — Comments (11)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 2:33pm on Oct. 24, 2007 Not The Image We Need
By streiff
Back in April I posted on Nancy Pelosi's slide into dhimmitude. As a constitutional officer of the United States she denied her own religious tradition and her status as a human being with equal rights regardless of her sex in order to assuage muslim sensibilities.
If anything I feel stronger about the utter wrongness of this episode today than I did then.
I feel no less strongly about First Lady Laura Bush's photo op in the United Arab Emirates, above, but for different reasons.
Read on.
Posted in dhimmitude | Laura Bush | UAE | War — Comments (42)/ Email this page » / Read More »
