RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a BBC interview on January 4, 2008, the senior prelate of the Church of England, Rowan Williams, argued in favour of recognizing certain aspects of Sharia law, which in any case “seems unavoidable,” and that Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty.” Indeed, the rise of Sharia courts in Britain, part of an effort to turn various British cities into Islamic states as promoted by the Islamic Emirates Project, is gathering momentum daily. The UK is riddled with “Sharia law enforcement zones” and, according to Soeren Kern, a senior analyst of the Groupo de Estudios Estratégicos in Madrid, with as many as 85 Sharia courts. Kern cites Bangladeshi-born Lutfur Rahman, mayor of Tower Hamlets in East London, who is “dedicated to changing the ‘very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed…from ignorance to Islam’.” And this state of affairs is, for the most part, winked at by the authorities. Recently, when about-to-be-married Tommy Robinson, head of the English Defence League, walked into an alleged Muslim ambush in East London during his stag night, he and his friends were taken into custody while the “violent Muslim youths” were allowed to go free. The police admitted that the orders to arrest Robinson and his group “had come from above.” The U.K. is no longer OK.

It actually looks as if Sweden might predecease the U.K. as a viable, sovereign Western democracy as it hurtles into the Islamic abyss. Pat Condell has delivered a chilling account of the advanced state of the country’s Islamic plummet which should be consulted by anyone who still believes that coddling the Islamic demographic is a sign of enlightened thinking, social justice and the benefits of unmonitored diversity. We see the same love affair with Islam and multiculturalism being pursued in Denmark, Austria and Holland where prominent individuals are prosecuted on the grounds of “hate speech” for warning against the Islamic aim to subvert the liberal traditions of these countries. Norway is rapidly becoming a kind of earthly Jannah for Muslim immigrants (Arabic for the heavenly garden, or Paradise). In other countries, such as France and Germany, love is plainly alloyed with fear; nevertheless, parties seeking votes in the many Muslim enclaves that chequer the social and political landscape will continue to “make nice.”

What is occurring in Europe is by no means an isolated phenomenon. Events there will soon be appearing in an American theatre near you and, indeed, they already have. One need only consider the possible—perhaps likely—erection of a mosque in the immediate vicinity of Ground Zero; jihadist recruitment among the Somali community in various states, primarily Minnesota; the planning and execution of terrorist assaults on American soil and against military installations, the latest attempt being the plot by Nasser Abdo to attack Fort Hood once again; the effective lobbying and propaganda efforts by radical Muslim organizations like CAIR and ISNA; the spread of Muslim influence on university campuses around the country; the president’s policy of outreach to the Muslim world, including the infamous “apology tour,” the appointment of Islamic ideologue Dalia Mogahed to the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and the formal recognition of the Muslim Brotherhood as a partner in dialogue; the media with few exceptions promoting the Muslim agenda, rarely identifying jihadists as Muslims but as “lone gunmen” or “of Asian origin,” and going soft on the threat of Sharia law; and much more.

We recall that when Nidal Malik Hasan, who was also an army major, shot thirteen unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood, then-chief of staff Mike Mullen worried about a possible anti-Muslim backlash! The counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) put in place in Afghanistan, ostensibly to win the “hearts and minds” of the local people, has resulted in the needless deaths of American soldiers whose operations are severely hampered on the field of battle. As Diana West, author of The Death of the Grown-Up, observes: “When the fear of giving offense to the local Islamic community (by shooting Taliban or wearing body armor) trumps self-preservation…we know the military’s dhimmitude is complete.” Clearly, the military is catering not only to Afghan villagers but to the growing Islamic constituency on American soil.

The Islamic fact is solidly entrenched in the U.S. and continues to bore its way ever more deeply into the body politic, with the collusion of the Democratic administration, a significant portion of the judiciary, the press, the army, and the vociferous left-wing intelligentsia. The European experience is being imported wholesale into the country. Pointing this out is quickly denounced as Islamophobia. The truth is that significant elements in the country have succumbed to an epidemic of Islamophilia.

Corresponding to this love-in with Islam—schmoozing with terrorists, to quote Aaron Klein—we note the demonization of Israel in the mainstream media, the court of public opinion, the European Union, the United Nations, the majority of NGOs and the current American administration. This is a sign not only of collective bad faith, international hypocrisy, millennial prejudice and pure malevolence, but quite simply of massive intellectual derangement. It is facilitated by a refusal to sift the historical facts from the welter of lies and disinformation that deliberately cloud the historical and political context, the dismissal of the provisions of international law and, once again, the abandonment of reason.

The same can be said of Holocaust denial, which is in many quarters becoming a form of political chic. Joseph Klein points to its latest manifestation in Norway—the home of former Nazi sympathizers Vidkun Quisling and Knut Hamsun, and quite possibly the most reprehensibly antisemitic country in the western world—where Labor Party lawmaker Anders Mathisen claims that “there is no evidence the gas chambers and mass graves existed.” Norwegian ambassador to Israel, Svein Sevje, is not much better, deploring the recent terror rampage in Oslo but somehow understanding Palestinian terror inflicted on Israelis as a result of the so-called “occupation.”

One expects this kind of drivel from out-and-out lunatics, but when members of the governing elite of a democratic country feel free to go on record denying what the historical archive has established with absolute authority—that the Holocaust actually did take place or that the Jewish community in the Holy Land was victimized by terrorism a century before the word “occupation” ever arose to addle the minds of hypocrites and ignoramuses—it is clear that reason has been gravely imperiled. Nonetheless, as Alan Dershowitz deplores, “they will persist in their bigoted view.” For the Norwegians have a long and “sordid history of complicity with all forms of bigotry ranging from the anti-Semitic Nazis to anti-Semitic Hamas.”

This mammoth aberration goes hand in hand, in almost every European country and “progressivist” America, with the privileging of the falsely irredentist Palestinian “narrative” that a mere modicum of applied research would categorically expose as a fiction. The isolation of Israel as an apartheid state is another preposterous distortion. Apartheid is in fact an institutional practice in Muslim countries, as exemplified by the concept of dhimmitude founded in surah 9:29 of the Koran which stipulates “submission” of non-Muslims “until…they feel themselves subdued.” The treatment of democratic Israel as a pariah state is, in the last analysis, another instance of the Western proclivity to side with the Islamic world.

Again, Norway furnishes an emblematic instance of the West’s venereal attachment to Islam and its tandem resilement of Israel and Jews. With respect to dietary laws, for example, Jewish ritual slaughter (shechita) is forbidden. Muslim ritual slaughter (dhabiha) is permitted. What’s good for the goose is not good for the gander. Admittedly, many will regard this illustration as of rather minor import, dealing with a non-mainstream cultural practice and pertaining to only one country, but it serves to clarify a panoptic attitude. Jews tend to be regarded with suspicion and Israel is denounced as a colonial predator, especially by the Europeans. Islam, by the same token, is treated with kid gloves, inflammatory imams are allowed to preach, recruit and call for jihad, municipal districts are permitted to be governed as Islamic mini-states, critics of Islam are hauled into court, and pushback is limited to certain sartorial prohibitions that count for little in the larger scheme of things. America, too, is not exempt. As the Muslim campaign accelerates, Dearborn will not be confined to Michigan.

What we are really witnessing in Europe, the U.S., and its outriders in Canada and Australia—the synoptic West—is the doleful spectacle of a civilization in denial, a myopic civilization that in most of its cultural and political centers will not recognize it is under attack and that seems haplessly incapable of mounting meaningful resistance, let alone launching a counter-attack against an apocalyptically-inspired enemy to ensure its own preservation—what Paul Berman in Terror and Liberalism designates as “the self-absorbed delusions of the Eurocentric imagination” refusing to understand that “a liberal society must be, when challenged, a warlike society; or it will not endure.” The turn against Israel is merely another expression of the West’s complicity in its own demise, for Israel is not only the ancient home of the Jewish people to which it is legally and historically entitled, it is the fount of the West’s moral and cultural inheritance, and a tributary source of the West’s civilizing imperative.

Between Islamophilia and Judeophobia falls the shadow.