National Dhimmi Radio shows how dim it is

When my book Londonistan was published four years ago, chronicling the way in which the British political and cultural elite had become paralysed by the mind-bending moral inversion of the Islamic jihad, much of the reaction in the US consisted of a horrified fascination on the basis that it ‘could not happen here’ alongside a horrified fascination on the basis that it ’could indeed happen here if we don’t learn these lessons’.

Well, America didn’t learn them, did it. There has been uproar over the firing by National Public Radio of its correspondent Juan Williams for making comments about Muslims on the Bill O’Reilly show on Fox News. So what did Williams say that was such a crime? This:

Political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis where you don’t address reality. I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous. Now, I remember also that when the Times Square bomber was at court, I think this was just last week. He said the war with Muslims, America’s war is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don’t think there’s any way to get away from these facts.

But I think there are people who want to somehow remind us all as President Bush did after 9/11, it’s not a war against Islam. … Bill, here’s a caution point. The other day in New York, some guy cuts a Muslim cabby’s neck and says he’s attacking him or you think about the protest at the mosque near Ground Zero … I don’t know what is in that guy’s head. But I’m saying, we don’t want in America, people to have their rights violated to be attacked on the street because they heard a rhetoric from Bill O’Reilly and they act crazy. We’ve got to say to people as Bill was saying tonight, that guy is a nut.

Williams also went on to caution against identifying Islamic terrorism as an Islamic problem:

If you said Timothy McVeigh, the Atlanta bomber, these people who are protesting against homosexuality at military funerals, very obnoxious, you don’t say first and foremost, we got a problem with Christians. That’s crazy.

In other words Williams – playing the role of token liberal on the show – was even taking in that respect an ultra-liberal position. Having expressed his own fears, he was also effectively warning against giving in to such fears. And he was admonishing O’Reilly, who himself had been engulfed by controversy for remarks about Muslims and 9/11, for being too careless about the possibly adverse consequences of those remarks.

Yet for his airplane admission, Williams was fired – for bigotry. For sure, it wasn’t a very smart remark – terrorists intending to blow up airplanes are surely more likely to be dressed inconspicuously than in full Islamic fig – but to treat it as bigotry goes to show how political correctness really does destroy cognitive function.

Furthermore NPR’s Chief Executive Officer Vivian Schiller even questioned Williams’s sanity by saying that he should have

kept his feelings about Muslims between himself and ‘his psychiatrist or his publicist’

a remark for which she subsequently apologised.

This comes on top of the 9/11 mosque controversy, marked by a bone-headed failure to grasp the enormous importance of such a symbol as a declaration of victory over America and the use to which this will be put in fomenting more murderous hysteria in the Muslim world. This  has been surpassed only by the demonisation and bullying of those who have tried to point this out and been classified as bigots for their pains. The word for all this is ‘dhimmitude’ — from the Islamic term ‘dhimmi’ used to denote a conquered people who are kept in servitude — and of which the cultural cringe involved in such internalisation of inverted thinking marks the surrender of a civilisation.