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Islam and the Liberal West: a Fatal Complementarity
Declaring that some of the words used by Orianna Fallaci in her book
about Islam were "without doubt offensive to Islam and to those who
practice that religious faith," an Italian judge has ordered her to
stand trial for anti-Islamic defamation. Meanwhile, Condoleezza Rice
has in effect accused all of America of anti-Islamic defamation,
saying that a single mishandling by a single U.S. serviceman of a
single copy of the Koran is a terrible offense that tarnishes the
image of our country. Yet even as our Secretary of State condemns
America for its bigotry, the Saudi government funds the massive
distribution of anti-American hate literature at U.S. mosques—and the
Saudi Crown Prince, far from being criticized, let alone indicted,
for spreading defamation of Christians and Jews, is invited to
President Bush's ranch for a chummy get-together. At the same time,
the main cleric of the Palestinian Authority issues Hitlerian calls
for the utter destruction of America and the Jews—and Secretary Rice
praises the Palestinians for their march to peace and democracy and
the U.S. government gives the Palestinians hundreds of millions more
in U.S. taxpayer dollars.
The answer is simple. In resurgent Islam the liberal West has met its
fate. Islam is a non-Western religion set on conquering and
converting non-Muslims, while liberalism is a Western ideology set on
tolerating and including non-Westerners. They are predators, we are
prey. This complementarity spells the death of the West, unless there
is a radical awakening on our part to the true nature of Islam and a
willingness to oppose it.
Jewsihworldreview_____________________
People have pointed to all this recent know-towing to Muslims as
evidence of dhimmitude, the subjection of non-Muslims to a
humiliated, second-class status under Muslim rule. But looking at the
total pattern described above, I wonder if dhimmitude is an adequate
description of it. The condition of dhimmitude, as miserable as it
is, is relatively straightforward: dhimmis have no power, they're in
a defeated, subordinate position, and they have no choice but to
accept the harsh treatment meted out to them by their Muslim
overlords. But what we have now is in a sense worse than dhimmitude.
After all, we are the more powerful party. We are the ones who
bestride the world like a colossus. We are the country that
arrogantly or idealistically claims to be setting standards for all
the nations of the earth. And yet, from our superior position of
unquestioned military power and insufferable moral pretentiousness,
we engage in a vicious double standard against ourselves, in which we
condemn and punish our fellow Westerners for using critical language
about Islam (let us remember that Americans as well as Europeans have
been threatened with legal action for condemning Islam), while we
reward our Muslim enemies who are openly engaged in a war of
vilification and civilizational destruction against us.
What is it that leads us to accept the use of this spectacular double
standard against ourselves? Why are we rushing to surrender to those
who hate us and everything we cherish?
The answer is simple. In resurgent Islam the liberal West has met its
fate. Islam is a non-Western religion set on conquering and
converting non-Muslims, while liberalism is a Western ideology set on
tolerating and including non-Westerners. They are predators, we are
prey. This complementarity spells the death of the West, unless there
is a radical awakening on our part to the true nature of Islam and a
willingness to oppose it.
But there's a further twist to this complementarity that makes it
even harder for us to extricate ourselves from the dhimmi-like trap
in which our own ideology has placed us.
As I said, Muslims seek to turn the whole human race into Muslims. We
are the demonic and tempting Other, whom they must subvert and
convert, and against whom any deception or double standard that may
be used to accomplish those ends is sanctioned by God. But liberal
Westerners and particularly liberal Americans (which, when we
understand the word "liberal" correctly, means basically all
Americans, including most conservatives) remain for the most part
indefeasibly naïve about the nature and goals of Islam. We imagine
that the Muslims—except for a "tiny minority" of extremists—are more-
or-less similar to ourselves, citizens-in-making of a democratic
world order. Just as the Muslims' hard-boiled view of us as the
infidel Other stems from their very being and faith as Muslims,
liberal Americans' naïve view of the Muslims as people "just like us"
stems from our very being and faith as liberal Americans. Being a
liberal American means being non-judgmental of other cultures and
civilizations, seeing other people as individuals, and putting group
differences into the background.
For our liberal American identity to be sustainable, we must go on
believing that all people are essentially like us. If we became
convinced that a billion Muslims are not like us but are
irreconcilably different from us and dangerous to us, then, instead
of being open and accepting toward them, we would have to become
closed and defensive. We would lose our very being as liberal
Americans, as well as our hope of a harmonious, unified, equal world.
And that is why we stubbornly ignore the Muslims' actual qualities.
We don't do it simply because we are "naïve." We do it in order to
maintain our own identity, our liberal identity which is based on our
believing that humanity consists of nice people like ourselves, and
that discrimination against anyone on the basis of religion,
nationality, or ethnicity is always wrong.
We thus have a false view of our own motives, which Sartre would have
called bad faith. We think that we disregard other people's negative
qualities out of unselfish generosity and tolerance. In reality, we
are pursuing an imperial impulse, constructing an image of an
Americanist world in which everyone is at least potentially an
American, reasonable and easy-going like ourselves, and in which
discrimination is therefore unnecessary. But—the final irony—our
imperial agenda is leading to our dhimmi-like subjection to the
Muslims' imperial agenda, since our empire is an empire of tolerance
and inclusion in which we must open our arms to merciless world-
conquering jihadists.
Story credits: Lawrence Auster writing in FrontPageMagazine.com
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