8. THE REAL CULTURE WAR

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

—THEODORE DALRYMPLE1

The civilization of dhimmitude* does not develop all at once. It is a long process that involves many elements and a specific mental conditioning. It happens when people replace history by myths, when they fight to uphold these destructive myths more than their own values because they are confused by having transformed lies into truth.… They replace history with childish tales, thus living in amnesia, inventing moral justification for their own self-destruction.

—BAT YE’OR2

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

—GEORGE ORWELL (ATTRIBUTED)

 

Let me ask that question again: Is it any way to fight a war? Which war is that?

Before 9/11, the war for identity was well known as the “culture war.” Even at its bloodiest and most wounding, though, this was a fight embodied not by troop movements across hostile terrain, but by syllabus changes in lecture halls. That’s not to say that lecture halls weren’t hostile terrain, but everyone lived, more or less, to “fight” another day.

Or not. To make a long story short, in the battle between the multiculturalists on the Left and the culture warriors on the Right, it was a resounding multiculturalist victory. “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s got to go!” may once have sounded as shocking as throwing Leonardo da Vinci, Louis Pasteur, Robert Browning, and Clark Gable overboard for being “dead white males,” but Western culture went, and DWMs are hangers-on in a new, multicultural pantheon. The Western canon, cultural citadel of Judeo-Christian civilization, was—to extend the war metaphor—breached and overrun by “the rest.” In this post-culture-war period, then, what Americans are taught about themselves and their past is no longer identifiably Western but self-consciously multicultural; what Americans expect of their future is no longer minimally Western but increasingly multicultural. This is the result of the education revolution, from preschool to grad school, that became entrenched particularly since 1988 when Stanford junked its Western culture requirement for a multicultural sequence of courses.

Whatever controversy raged at that time is by now cold and scattered ash. Case in point: Nearly twenty years later, having just flipped through a seventh grade reader3 from a traditional Catholic school, I see a well-balanced, indeed, finely calibrated selection of stories—well-balanced and finely calibrated, that is, with regard to race, color, and creed. The table of contents is, by author, a perfectly planned menu of identity politics, which is not at all the same as a nourishing dish of the cultural best that has been thought and said: Isaac Bashevis Singer (male but okay by virtue of being Jewish), Amy Tan, Nadya Labi, Walt Whitman (male but okay by virtue of being thought to have been homosexual), Emily Dickinson, Walter de la Mare (French), Alex Haley, Bill Cosby, Gary Soto, Johnette Howard, Alice Walker, oh, and William T. Shakespeare (“T” is for token). End of story? Hardly. More like a beginning, and one that doesn’t have an ending. Yet.

That became clearest on 9/11, of all days, when the Multicultural States of America, a nation that had taught itself to believe that the complete works of Alice Walker and William Shakespeare were interchangeable—offering equal enlightenment and meriting equal study (giving Shakespeare the benefit of the doubt)—came under cataclysmic attack. Thousands dead in a burning hole in Manhattan; the Pentagon ripped open; a battle in the skies that went smash in the woods of Pennsylvania. It was a real war, this time, not a culture war … or was it a real culture war?

As the Twin Towers rained down fire and flesh, a country that had been taught to equate The Federalist Papers with the Seneca Falls Declaration; to see in Western capitalism a shade of gray indistinguishable from gulag communism (think John le Carré); to value Tolmec culture as it valued Ancient Greece; to accept that standard English was no more “valid” than so-called black English; to emphasize self-esteem over self-respect; to believe, or at least to pretend to believe, all these things; this same country found itself in the unthinkable position of having to ward off attack, of having to fight off someone or something to protect what soon became officially if somewhat awkwardly known as “the homeland.” Suddenly, as we all remember, our streets and shops, cars and lapels, porches and plazas, bristled with flags, that stirring symbol of unity and fight. What is harder to recall is exactly when the flags came down. They did, of course, most of them, even as the war that started on that day goes on.

And to what end? I ask that not as a rhetorical endorsement of the futility of war, to which I don’t ascribe; war, fought with just purpose, is never futile. But what do we fight for, and—no less important—what do we fight against? These are skull-cracking questions for the post-grown-up, multiculturalist society that now makes up the Western world. It’s not just the mystery identity of “we” that’s problematic. When a civilization defines itself by an eternally youthful pliance and infinite openness—just as its citizens define their personal lives, not at all coincidentally—it’s difficult to determine what, if anything, that same civilization can be definitively closed to.

A snapshot depicting the resulting limbo comes from the Netherlands, land of windmills, tulips, and, in recent decades, mosques. There, what is considered the most boundary-free, tolerant society in the world (gay marriage, legalized drugs and prostitution, euthanasia) struggles to coexist with a walled-off and intolerant Islamic population in the wake of nation-shaking acts of specifically Islamic violence.

To recap: In 2002, Pim Fortuyn, a rocketing political star campaigning against the Islamization of Dutch society, was shot dead. In 2003, his Dutch assassin confessed to killing him in order to, as The Telegraph put it, “defend Dutch Muslims from persecution.”4 In 2004, Theo van Gogh was shot off his bicycle, stabbed, and nearly beheaded on an Amsterdam street by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-born Muslim. The assassin said van Gogh had “insulted” Islam with his film, Submission, which critiques the plight of Islamic women, and, as Bouyeri put it while on trial in 2005, “the law [the Koran] compels me to chop off the head of anyone who insults Allah and the prophet.”5

This, er, “point of view” is prevalent in the Netherlands to the extent that the Dutch Interior Ministry has established a special unit to assess death threats from Islamic groups and provide security for the “soaring number of Dutch academics, lawmakers and other public figures [who have been] forced to accept 24-hour protection or go into hiding.” Among those living under Holland’s protective lock and key are parliamentarians Geert Wilders and, at least until she emigrated to the United States in 2006, van Gogh’s collaborator, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, as well as Amsterdam mayor Jacob Cohen and Afshin Ellian, an Islamic, reform-minded, Iranian-born university professor of—irony of ironies—“social cohesion.”6

Some social cohesion: Also in 2004, the Dutch government uncovered plans for an Islamic group’s attack on the Dutch parliament, Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, the Borssele nuclear reactor, the defense ministry, and the Leidschendam office of the AIVD, the country’s secret service.7 In 2005, on the first anniversary of van Gogh’s death, a shot was fired into the office of the Dutch interior minister, Rita Verdonk, a proponent of Muslim-restrictive immigration policies. She is now said to serve her country in a bulletproof vest.8 A scholarly conference on Islam in Europe at the Hague in 2006 required a level of security, The Times of London reported, “just one level below ‘national emergency.’”9 Given that the Netherlands hasn’t seen such currents of violence since the seventeenth century—and then it was a matter of one political assassination—the Amsterdam city council recently pondered what it could do to “moderate” the “extremism” of the city’s burgeoning Muslim population. What was needed, the council decided, was an “alternative” media message of “moderate” Islam. This strategy, alas, was about as likely to neutralize the jihadist hatespeak poisoning Dutch society as putting up balloons at a Nazi rally. That’s because in urging moderation (balloons), the city council refused to ban any examples of extremism (Nazi rally). This meant that while the council would sponsor messages to Muslims to make nice with infidels, it would do nothing to ban messages, for example, urging Muslims to hurl homosexuals to their death from tall buildings headfirst—as advocated in the Dutch book De weg van de Moslem, or The Way of the Muslim. (If victims don’t die on impact, the book instructs, the faithful should stone the wounded to death.) Book banning, the council said, would limit “the freedom to express opinions,” and that, it believed, would be “counterproductive.”10

But how productive, to use the good Dutch burghers’ word, is tolerance without limits? The British philosopher Karl R. Popper formulated his answer more than a half century ago.

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them.… We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal. [Emphasis added.]11

As the situation in Holland reveals, the West is now at the point where enforcing “openness” trumps preserving “tolerance.” In other words, better to be “open” to intolerance than “closed” to anything—including intolerance. There must be some rich, ripe irony in the fact, according to this mind-set, that tolerating the intolerant becomes the ultimate act of openness—literally “ultimate,” as Popper tells us, since tolerance of the intolerant leads to the destruction of the tolerant. Call it terminal tolerance.

In the meantime—our own era—such terminal tolerance is positively praised as an act of “inclusion”; thus, it never draws multiculti catcalls of “mean-spritedness” or “racism,” the two terms of opprobrium the terminally tolerant will do absolutely anything to avoid, to the point of committing cultural suicide. By contrast, any act of closing ranks as a Western culture—banning publications calling for homosexual defenestration, maybe?—is a necessarily limiting, and, therefore, negative act of exclusion, and, as such, autobranded as an act of mean-spiritedness and racism.

Or it would be so branded if any boundary-seeking, line-drawing society actually existed in the West. There isn’t one, not in real life, not even in theory—maybe especially not in theory. This is due to the freezing effect multiculturalism has had on the Western logic of making distinctions among cultures, particularly between “the West” and “the rest.” Give me cultural equivalence, or give me death by media feeding frenzy: This will be the battle cry old-timers of the future will recall from the bad old days of the war on “terror.” Already, who can forget the storm of censure that rained down on former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for illuminating the differences between Western and Islamic culture, and for finding—for stating out loud—that Western culture was superior. It was less than two weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001, which Berlusconi called an attack on “our civilization,” when he spoke out, in Italian, about the superiority of Western civilization due to its principles of liberty. The BBC translated his remarks this way:

We have to be conscious of the strength of our civilization. We cannot put the two civilizations on the same level. All of the achievements of our civilization: free institutions, the love of liberty itself—which represents our greatest asset—the liberty of the individual and the liberty of the peoples. These certainly are not the inheritance of other civilizations such as Islamic civilization.12

And the Associated Press wrote:

We must be aware of the superiority of our civilization, a system that has guaranteed well-being, respect for human rights and—in contrast with Islamic countries—respect for religious and political rights, a system that has as its values understandings of diversity and tolerance. [Western civilization is superior because it] has at its core, as its greatest value, freedom, which is not the heritage of Islamic culture.13

Versions vary somewhat, but the gist is clear. Maybe the billionaire media-mogul-turned-politician was an unlikely champion of the virtues of Western civ—or anything else for that matter. After all, the almost operatically buffoonish and scandal-ridden Berlusconi was in the public eye practically as much for his outrageous financial maneuvers as for his political programs. Nonetheless, this Italian prime minister was the lone ranger on the international horizon to seize on and uphold the essence of Western civilization—liberty, prosperity, human rights—and point out the obvious: Liberty, prosperity, and human rights are not part of Islamic civilization. We have to be conscious, we must be aware of this distinction. It was something worth fighting for, Berlusconi presumed, against Islamic terrorists and the Islamic nations and networks that openly, secretly, tactically, financially, or religiously support them. Some reports included Berlusconi’s additional point—strangely overlooked—that just as Western liberty had defeated communism, so, too, would it vanquish Islam.

In a pre-PC time, such remarks would have been regarded as boilerplate bromides, the platitudes of a politician trying out new applause lines at the outbreak of war. But back to real life. According to the “international community” circa September 2001, Berlusconi couldn’t have said anything more horrifying. First, there was the outcry from the EU outposts of Berlusconi’s beloved Western civilization:

“I can hardly believe Mr. Berlusconi made such remarks because the EU is based on values such as multiculturalism and the meeting of different civilizations.…”14

“These remarks could, in a dangerous way, have consequences.…”15

“All I can say is that the values of Europe do not allow us to consider that our civilization is superior to another.”16

“It is clear that Mr. Berlusconi’s remarks were offensive and offense has been taken … and they were culturally inaccurate.”17

“We certainly don’t share the views expressed by Mr. Berlusconi.…”18

Not surprisingly, “Islamic civilization” was even more put out. Jordan denounced the remarks as “chauvinistic, fascist and repugnant,”19 while the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) called them “an act of aggression unbecoming of a civilized nation.”20 The Arab League said it was “waiting for either a denial or an apology,” which I guess left Berlusconi the option to deny or apologize for the fact that Western-style freedom isn’t a hallmark of Islam.21 Egypt more subtly demanded “clarifications”—which, in diplospeak, means tracks-covering obfuscation, and which, in fact, is what Berlusconi ultimately expressed.22 Amidst all the sputtering, though, no one seemed to notice that West and East had found common ground, unity even, a place to vent their shared contempt for these bumptious declarations of the singularity of Western liberty and human rights.

Which again begs the question: Is this any way to fight a war? Berlusconi hadn’t said anything even remotely false. Liberty, prosperity, and human rights are hallmarks of Western civilization; liberty, prosperity, and human rights are not hallmarks of Islamic civilization. End of story. They are not only worth fighting for, but also what comes under attack every time an Islamic terror network successfully detonates, beheads, bombs, and burns a Western or Western-allied target—thus stealing the liberty, destroying the prosperity, and revoking the human rights of us all, not to mention those of its victims. So why, then, did the prime minister of Italy, land of Leonardo and La Scala, the Bridge of Sighs and the Vatican, apologize?

The late Oriana Fallaci answered this way in The Rage and the Pride, a book she wrote immediately after 9/11, when “I did not eat, I did not sleep, I fed on coffee, I kept awake with cigarettes, and the words fell on the paper like a waterfall.”23

I have just read that, albeit grossly and inadequately, you [Mr. Berlusconi] preceded me in the defense of the Western Culture. But, as soon as the cicadas yelled racist-racist, you retracted at the speed of light. You spoke of unfortunate blunder, involuntary mistake, you promptly presented your apologies to the sons of Allah, then you swallowed the affront of their refusal and meekly accepted the hypocritical reprimands of your European colleagues plus the scolding by Blair. In short, you got scared.24

Fallaci was right; Berlusconi got scared. But why? Certainly, there was the fact that he had zero support for his remarks from his PC colleagues, and going out on a limb is hardly second nature to most politicians. But it may also be argued that he didn’t have sufficient confidence in his remarks to weather a naysaying storm. This, to my way of thinking, is like saying he wasn’t grown-up enough. If the confidence that comes of maturity is a casualty of the death of the grown-up, the cultural confidence of the West is a casualty of the destruction of cultural hierarchy that disappeared in the multicultural ascendance—a twenty-first-century institution Berlusconi seemed to have temporarily forgotten in the adrenal rush of the 9/11 aftermath. When Berlusconi’s Euro-confreres juxtaposed their horror at the virtues that define Western civilization with their avowal of the European Union “values” of “multiculturalism,” they were expressing not just a bureacratic consensus, but a fervent orthodoxy. In this new secular religion, notions of the superiority of Western culture are heretical, an imminent threat to the leveling arrangement that makes the EU’s so-called meeting of different civilizations possible. As the Eurocrats put it, “the values of Europe do not allow us to consider that our civilization is superior to another.” Berlusconi’s apostasy, however short-lived, threatened to upend those “values,” and with them the postmodern “meeting of different civilizations,” thus threatening to restore the traditional hierarchy that put Western civilization, for having enshrined liberty and human rights, at the pinnacle.

This would never do—and, of course, it didn’t. It couldn’t. Let Berlusconi’s remarks stand and someone might declare that Shakespeare amounts to more than Alice Walker, or that ancient Greece surpasses Tolmec culture. The next thing you know, the multicultural world order has toppled. Naturally, Berlusconi apologized, and no world leader has made the same “blunder” since. And this is why what we’re hearing out there—despite the catchiness of Samuel Huntington’s buzz phrase—is not “the clash of civilizations” at all. After all, “clash” conjures up the vibrating smash of brass cymbals. There can be no Clash when one cymbal has muffled itself (the West) even as it tries to mute the sound—the attributes—of the other (Islam). What comes across, then, is a lot of shushing.

And sometimes, it sounds like Condoleezza Rice. “We in America know the benevolence that is at the heart of Islam,” the secretary of state declared in 2005, addressing assembled Muslim dignitaries at the annual Ramadan dinner at the State Department.25 The secretary of state’s annual Ramadan dinner, by the way, is not to be confused with the president’s annual Ramadan dinner, although it’s easy to get them mixed up. The legacy of 9/11 has left us with an open-ended war abroad; the introduction of homeland hyperinsecurity; and the open-ended introduction of Ramadan celebrations all over official Washington. The latter is worth a question or two on its own, beginning with: Why? Why has it become the post-9/11 function of the United States government to celebrate Ramadan? The term “Muslim outreach” comes to mind, but, as the Judeo-Christian culture hit by Islamikazes on 9/11, haven’t we got it exactly backward? That is, wouldn’t Muslims better outreach themselves if the Saudi embassy, for example, celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah?

But I digress. “We in America know the benevolence that is at the heart of Islam,” Rice said. Really? Is that what we know? Is that what history tells us? Is that what current events tell us? Rice’s speechifying, which included a personal riff on Ramadan as being a time “characterized by sacrifice and abiding faith, by prayer and self-reflection and by compassion and profound joy,” made a wicked contrast to real live Ramadan ’05 headlines. Not the big ones about Scooter and Judy (remember them?), or bird flu, or Charles and Camilla, or even the substantial ones about a new Supreme Court nominee, Samuel Alito.

I’m thinking of the Muslim suicide bombing in Hadera that killed six Israelis that same Ramadan month,26 and the Hitlerite promise of Iran’s Muslim president that “the stain of disgrace”—Israel—will be “purged from the center of the Islamic world.”27 I’m thinking of the weeks of Muslim rioting in Paris, and the news that a London Underground suicide bomber was buried in Pakistan (his exploded remains, anyway) at the shrine of an Islamic saint.28 In New Delhi, Muslims were suspected of killing sixty in three powerful blasts,29 while actor Omar Sharif received a death threat on a Web site linked to al-Qaeda for playing St. Peter in an Italian television movie.30 And I have never forgotten the three Christian girls who were beheaded in Indonesia en route to their Christian high school. Their Muslim killers carried off one of the severed heads to a newly built church, where they left it.31

I could go on about the magazine editor in liberated Afghanistan, himself a Muslim, who, just about the time Rice was tucking in to her Ramadan meal, had been sentenced to two years in jail for “blasphemy”—that is, criticizing sharia. Then there’s Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper in Denmark that, as of October 2005, had already received bomb threats, become a potential terror target on an al-Qaeda Internet list, sparked street violence in Denmark and Kashmir, and drawn protests from eleven Muslim ambassadors, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the Council of Europe, and the United Nations human rights commissioner for having published twelve cartoons of Muhammad. (Cartoon Rage 2006 would come later.) Depictions of the Islamic prophet may be a no-no under Islamic law, but redoubtable Denmark and its free (nonapologizing) newspaper was trying to demonstrate that it was not under Islamic law.

Condoleezza Rice isn’t, either. But her soft-soap “benevolence” routine sounds more like supplication than statecraft, particularly in the context of a standard stump speech she delivers comparing the Iraqi and U.S. constitutions—with the “miracle at Philadelphia” coming up way short. “We should note that unlike in our constitutional convention, the Iraqis have not made a compromise as bad as the one that made my ancestors three-fifths of a man,” she has said.32 Yes, in 1787, slaves were indeed counted as a fractional person in pre-abolition censuses that determined how many representatives a state would send to the House of Representatives. (Slaveholders, not slavery opponents, wanted a slave to count as one person to augment that state’s political power.) But it is the miracle of that eighteenth-century document that it contained the blueprint for abolition. By contrast, the 2005 Iraqi constitution (also the 2003 Palestinian Authority constitution and the 2004 Afghanistan constitution) contains provisions for a sharia state under which all men are not created equal, and freedom of conscience is denied.33

Failing to acknowledge the distinction, Rice engages in cultural equivalence, the Mush of Civilizations which Berlusconi reverted to so quickly back in 2001: We’re not that great; they’re not that bad; we’re pretty bad; they’re pretty great. There is a point to all this: Cultural equivalence, the universal mantra of the multicultural world, effectively preempts cultural confrontation. There can be no cultural confrontation—no culture clash—if we are all, roughly, the same; if we are all, roughly, no better than the other; and particularly if we (the West) are roughly worse. Such a doctrine is the geopolitical expression of political correctness, and it is informed by the same drive, the same terminal tolerance, to do whatever it takes to supress those nasty catcalls of “racism” and “mean-spiritedness.” But to what end?

A few years back, just after the 2002 arrests of the so-called D.C. snipers, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, I was listening to a talk radio discussion of the case when a listener called in with a request: Would the media please refrain from identifying John Muhammad as “John Muhammad”? Identifying Muhammad as “Muhammad”—the surname the serial killer took when he converted to Islam—might reflect badly on Islam, which, as the caller explained, is a religion of peace, not violence, and whose prophet, of course, also happened to be named Muhammad. And no, this wasn’t a put-on. The caller sounded only sincere, and the hosts treated him accordingly. While they gurgled over the ramifications of the Muhammad mix-up, I realized that what was most disturbing about this “logic”—the urge to repress a truth that undercuts a belief—was not its absurd extremism, but rather its mind-numbing prevalence. The caller may have taken things to its satirical limit, but we’re just as likely to hear the same willful line of supression from a newspaper of record, or a head of state setting national policy. There is too much that is considered unmentionable—too much that reflects badly on Islam, not to mention its prophet, Muhammad. If, for example, our leaders spoke up about the primacy of jihad (holy war) as a uniquely Islamic institution established by Muhammad that has almost continuously convulsed large parts of the world in violence for thirteen centuries, how could they also call Islam a “religion of peace”? If our leaders broke the historic silence on the massive tragedy of non-Muslim peoples—dhimmis—subjugated by Islam according to Muhammad’s example across those same thirteen centuries, how could they also tell us that Islam is “one of the world’s three great religions”? Quite simply they couldn’t. So, in the name of cultural equivalence that avoids cultural confrontation, the Mush of Civilizations, they keep their silence—the same sort of silence that the radio-listener, in his absurdist way, hoped to impose on the talk radio hosts.

Similar shushing, for example, characterized the coverage and anaylsis of the 2005 riots in France. In fact, you might say such shushing was the coverage and analysis of the 2005 riots in France. It was the Berlusconi brouhaha in reverse: Where the Italian prime minister was muzzled as the lone voice extolling the virtues of the West (good) next to the lack thereof in Islam (bad), the Muslim riots were trumpeted across the board as being about the evils of the West (bad), and having nothing to do with Islam (good). According to an insta-consensus that emerged from Left to Right, the fault was to all one side: France. No question about it—please, no question about it. The rioters were nonaccountable victims, practically bystanders, whose Muslim identity was officially ignored and journalistically renounced, even as heterodox reports surfaced from time to time. One such report came from Amir Taheri, writing in the New York Post.

With cries of “God is great,” bands of youths armed with whatever they could get hold of went on a rampage and forced the police to flee.… Within hours, the original cause of the incidents was forgotten and the issue jelled around a demand by the representatives of the rioters that the French police leave the “occupied territories.” … Some are even calling for the areas where Muslims form a majority of the population to be reorganized on the basis of the “millet” system of the Ottoman Empire: each religious community (millet) would enjoy the right to organize its social, cultural and educational life in accordance with its religious beliefs. In parts of France, a de facto millet system is already in place.… “All we demand is to be left alone,” said Mouloud Dahmani, one of the local “emirs” engaged in negotiations to persuade the French to withdraw the police and allow a committee of sheiks, mostly from the Muslim Brotherhood, to negotiate an end to the hostilities.34

Such bombshells sent not even a ripple across the calm and glassy narrative of an impervious elite. And when they did (as when French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut noted the Muslim identity of the rioters in a newspaper interview), they were repressed (he publicly recanted) and smoothed over.35 Here, as in the Berlusconi incident, Islam was taken neatly and completely off the hook. “Clash” was thus squelched, and a kind of PC peace and quiet—silence—returned to the international arena. To invoke the terminology of the death of the grown-up, the international arena was pacified.

This word is apt because in this de facto conspiracy of omission there is more than an element of soothing, calming fantasy; there is a load of political pabulum that fills, or tries to, the gaping void opened by the simply question, Why? Why did these riots occur? Here, said the intelligentsia, suck on this: Like the terrorism that engraved the blood-drenched anniversaries of 9/11, 3/11, and 7/7 into collective memory, and transformed Amman, Amsterdam, Baghdad, Bali, Beslan, Davao, Hadera, Haifa, Jakarta, Jerusalem, Nairobi, New Delhi, Sharm al-Sheik, Tel Aviv, and Tunisia into hallowed outposts of mass murder, the rioting that convulsed France had nothing to do with Islam.

Shhhh, shh: There’s nothing here that one or two billion Euros won’t take care of. So what if twelve French churches were destroyed and/or desecrated during the rioting?36 So what if French intelligence has determined that 40 percent of French imams not only have no religious training but download their homilies from pro-al-Qaeda Web sites?37 So what if Jacques Chirac, president of the French Republic, had to deploy more than two thousand police to secure his route down the Champs-Élysées for an Armistice Day ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe as though Paris were not the heart of la République, but a war zone?38 So what? Thank goodness none of it had anything to do with Islam and its non-assimilable legions in Europe.

That was the narrative from the start. It was Our Story, the subtext, the thread to which we cling. The problem driving “youths” to incinerate lines of parked buses or immolate the occasional grand-mère on crutches was French racism, neglect, a failure to integrate—or, better, a failure to be integrated due to French racist neglect. Don’t forget the snobbery of French waiters and don’t forget George W. Bush. Well before the riot’s last French fires were kindled, let alone cooled, The Washington Post editorial page, for example, said—no, it insisted: “Islamic ideology and leaders have played no part in the disturbances and many of those who are participating are not Muslim.”39 From The New York Times to the National Review, writers ruled out the role of religion. Writing in The New York Times, French Islamic expert Olivier Roy ruled Islam out with equally categorical and doctrinal confidence.40

How did they know? Yes, the thugs we saw depicted through the smoke of burning civilization weren’t dressed for the part by Central Casting—either in the beards and robes of the mosque, or the mask and scimitar of the jihad. They looked like urban punks, “riffraff,” as French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy called them before diving under the covers with the rest of the Gallic government. They were, we heard, unemployed toughs and secular criminals, devoted not to Allah so much as to what you might call, loosely and very grimly, French “culture”—French pop culture, that is.

Writing in The Weekly Standard some weeks before the riots broke out, Olivier Guitta offered a shocking insight into one expression of that culture—rap music as we in the U.S. have never quite heard it, even at its “cop-killing” worst.41 As Guitta explained, some of the most successful bands in France are made up “mostly of French citizens of Arab or African descent”—like our pals in the French projects, or “cités.” But where so-called gangsta rap, American style, glorifies senseless violence and sexual bestiality, Muslim rap, French style, fuses that same violence and sexuality to attack the State.

Guitta translated some choice examples. There is the rap band Sniper (nice), which, not incidentally, was unsuccessfully sued in 2004 by Nicolas Sarkozy for violence and incitement in the song “La France.” Sniper sings: “We’re all hot for a mission to exterminate the government and the fascists.… France is a b———and we’ve been betrayed.… We f——— France, we don’t care about the Republic and freedom of speech. We should change the laws so we can see Arabs and Blacks in power in the Élysée Palace. Things have to explode.”

Well, of course, things did. But not, our elites reflexively instructed us, because of Islamic attitudes toward a non-Islamic country, but because of establishment attitudes toward a downtrodden minority. Integration, we heard, or the lack thereof, was the problem, so integration was also the answer. But how will France—or “FranSSe,” as rapper Mr. R has titled this song—integrate this? “France is a bitch, don’t forget to f—— her to exhaustion. You have to treat her like a whore, man!… France is one of the b—— who gave birth to you … I am not at home and I don’t give a d——, and besides the state can go f——— itself. I pee on Napoleon and General de Gaulle … F—— cops, sons of whores.…” It went on, lashing out in a similarly poisonous vein. Not that this stopped Fnac, the largest chain of French music stores, from praising the popular Mr. R as “a revelation.”

And so he and his rap brethren are. But a revelation of what—urban barbarism or ghetto jihad? Or some new cultural permutation of both? Such pressing, pertinent questions went unasked and ignored, just as Muslim rap imagery went unexamined and unmentioned. But the vicious contempt in these lyrics, the exhortation to humiliation, the vindictive rape imagery: These are the motifs, at least, of brutal conquest, patterns and expressions familiar to students of Islamic jihad for having repeated themselves over the centuries as non-Muslim lands—Dar al Harb (Land of War)—were conquered and subjugated as Dar al Islam (Land of Islam). Was that what was going on in France? Without doubt, such music prefigures a state of war, although no one but the rioters was listening.

More important, no one but the rioters wanted to listen. Who in the West wants to fight Clash when you can eat Mush? In psychology, they call this act of mental digging-in “denial.” It’s familiar to anyone who didn’t want to stop believing in Santa Claus even after the gross illogic of the proposition—chimneys, reindeer, ho-ho—became all too clear. Better to keep your eyes closed and believe; better to wear ear plugs and hear what you want: The moderates are coming, the moderates are coming. Similarly, in Paris, they shut their eyes and ears to the smoke and sound of jihad, and woke up, if not to Muslim moderates, then to a peaceable solution: mea culpa. Far less stressful than J’accuse, the “mea culpa” solution is part of the Western basis of cultural equivalence. J’accuse rings the gong of “clash,” shifting blame to the Muslim community (and demanding confrontational French action). But “mea culpa” allows France to assume responsibility and write a check. What, the French might ask, are Euros for? Better to pacify. Better to be pacified. It isn’t grown-up, but it’s survival.

Only it’s not. What gets by in a sheltered childhood doesn’t work in the real world. Take Berlusconi again. The enraged heir to ancient Rome defending his civiliation against barbarians in 2001, briefly, became the self-effacing host of Italy’s first official fast-breaking Ramadan dinner for Muslim diplomats in 2005. “Italy,” he began in a speech guaranteed to mollify every Euro-Arab colleague who ever attacked him, “has a long tradition of fruitful exchanges with Islam.…” All the rhetoric of superiority was gone, along with all the pride in human rights and liberty.

Inclusively, he went on from there.

Our country has always been, is now, and will always be open to all forms of spirituality and respectful of all cultures and all religions.…

In particular, it is important that Italians learn to understand better the foundations of the Islamic religion because, after the tragedy of 11 September, it must be clear to everyone that terrorists who kill do not have anything to do with it [Islam].…

After the defeat of the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, the new great enemy for many suffering peoples is terrorism, which wants to lure us into the trap of the “clash of civilisations.” This pitfall must be avoided: we must make sure that a new “Iron Curtain” does not divide the West and the Muslim world.…

For this reason, we stress the importance of dialogue between our civilisations, that for all our differences, we are united by the same values of humanity. [Emphasis added.]42

If I seem to be picking on Berlusconi, it’s only because the voluble former prime minister is never one to let discretion cloud his enthusiasms di giorno. Once upon a time, Berlusconi articulated the Clash of Civilizations—the distinction between the West (liberty and human rights) and Islam (the lack thereof). Now, he gums the Mush of Civilizations, which, not incidentally, echoes the canned declarations of every successful beauty pageant contestant: For all our differences, we are united by the same values of humanity. The Italian leader is by no means alone in this; indeed, he speaks off the same page as every other world leader, up to and including George W. Bush. It is easy to tell which worldview, Clash or Mush, is politically correct; but which of them is just plain correct? And which offers a strategy for the survival of the world that is Western?

Five days after the 9/11 atrocities, President Bush described the war America was then mobilizing to fight. He counciled patience in the new cause, telling Americans, “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.”43

Crusade? Did he say crusade? Prefiguring the wrath to descend upon Berlusconi the following week, the multicultural grandees and guardians of PC declared the president to be in error—major error. So what if Manhattan was still burning? The word itself, they said, was inflammatory. So what if al-Qaeda squads of Muslim hijackers had just transformed four U.S. passenger planes filled with men, women, and children into ballistic weapons against American office buildings? Characterizing the response to Islamic terrorism as a “crusade” was just as offensive, according to multicultural logic, and would make Muslims, including Muslim “moderates,” go ballistic. But “moderates” don’t go ballistic, unless, that is, they really aren’t so moderate to begin with—which is the tip-off so hard to pick up on in a multicultural world. The question is, If a more or less literary allusion to “crusade” catapults Muslim “moderates” into the arms of “extremists,” either metaphorically or literally to training camp, how “moderate” were they in the first place?44 No answer. This is another one of those urgent questions that goes unasked. What we are left with in the absence of rational discussion is the phenomenon of the Hair-Trigger Moderate: Anything sets him off, from the word “crusade” to Islamic profiling (to catch Islamic terrorists), from Muhammad cartoons to opposition to the proposed operational transfer of six major U.S. ports to a country that has coddled al-Qaeda and helped Hamas. Like codependent family members, we cater to this tick-tick-tick pathology by tying on a gag of self-censorship and playing along with a fantasy of victimhood: Did the president say crusade?

Here’s how an unnamed White House codependent, I mean, correspondent put it to the president’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer, exactly one week after the 9/11 atrocities:

Q: The other question was, the President used the word “crusade” last Sunday, which has caused some consternation in a lot of Muslim countries. Can you explain his usage of that word, given the connotation to Muslims?

MR. FLEISCHER: I think what the President was saying was—had no intended consequences for anybody, Muslim or otherwise, other than to say that this is a broad cause that he is calling on America and the nations around the world to join. That was the point—purpose of what he said.

Q: Does he regret having used that word, Ari, and will he not use it again in the context of talking about this effort?

MR. FLEISCHER: I think to the degree that that word has any connotations that would upset any of our partners, or anybody else in the world, the President would regret if anything like that was conveyed. But the purpose of his conveying it is in the traditional English sense of the word. It’s a broad cause.45

I just love that question—Does he regret having used that word, Ari, and will he not use it again in the context of talking about this effort? Thousands are dead, America is reeling, and a White House correspondent is playing preschool teacher, coaching an erring toddler—the president of the United States—about a naughty word. Too bad Fleischer played along, conceding that the president “would regret” anything to anyone.

Why too bad? Let me count the ways. First, let’s examine the word “crusade.” It harkens back, obviously, to the brutal wars launched by the armies of European Christendom against the Seljuk Turks and other Muslim armies about nine centuries ago. Why did they crusade—just for sadistic grins? Hardly. Muslims, having waged holy war, or jihad, across the Middle East for the previous five hundred years, had conquered lands from Corsica to India, from Iran to Egypt, from Jerusalem to Syria, from North Africa to Cyprus to Spain to Sicily to Sardinia, brutalizing native Jewish and Christian populations, destroying churches and preying on Christian pilgrims journeying from Europe to the Holy Land. In this historic context of jihad and domination—a clear historical record covered up by PC dogma—the crusades to reclaim the previously Christian (pre-Islam) Holy Land for Christianity may be definitively understood as defensive conflicts. Calling for the First Crusade at the very end of the eleventh century, Pope Urban II outlined a defensive, eminently reasonable rationale for war: “They [Muslim forces] have killed and captured many, and have destroyed the churches and devastated the [Greek Christian] empire. If you permit them to continue thus for awhile with impunity, the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked by them.”46

Almost a millennium later, the rationale for war against al-Qaeda and other Islamic terror networks, along with the Islamic states that sponsor them, isn’t much different, except insofar as “the faithful of God” aren’t so faithful anymore. We, roughly their twenty-first-century heirs (if not in all cases their descendants), have created increasingly secular societies that have long and deliberately separated themselves from Christianity as a public creed or government policy. Such detachment from religion marks not only a contrast with our own past, but also with the Islamic present, which to this day is predicated on the perfect union of mosque and state. (Furiously reading V. S. Naipaul in those first days after 9/11, it took me about three hundred pages to get to this eureka revelation: In Islam, there is no separation between mosque and state, religion and politics.) Today, as for the past thirteen centuries, Islam upholds sharia as the ideal public creed and government policy. I suspect it is partly the separation of church and state in the West that has inclined us, erroneously, to regard the religion of Islam as being separate from the inspiration and rationale of both Islamic revolutions (Iran) and Islamic terrorism (almost everywhere).

Another dissimilarity between then and now—at least I hope it’s a dissimilarity—is the crusades’ ultimate outcome: After eight crusades in roughly 175 years, the Christians were basically driven out of the Middle East for more than five hundred years. In other words, “the faithful of God” (Christian) lost. But in another sense, they won; that is, they won time—time to evolve as defensible societies back home that would ultimately drive Islam from Western Europe at the non-proverbial gates of Vienna in 1683. Islamic expert Robert Spencer has explained the ramifications of this hard-won grace period in his bestselling primer, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades— a book shut out by the mainstream media (no reviews), even as it found a home on the New York Times bestseller list for fifteen weeks. Although the crusaders were ultimately repulsed, Spencer explains, “the level of Islamic adventurism into Europe dropped off significantly during the era of the Crusades.” He continues:

The [Muslim] conquest of Spain, the Middle East, and North Africa, as well as the first siege of Constantinople, all took place well before the First Crusade. The battles of Kosovo and Varna [Bulgaria], which heralded a resurgent Islamic expansionism in Eastern Europe, took place after the collapse of the last Crusader holdings in the Middle East.

So what did the Crusades accomplish? They bought Europe time—time that might have meant the difference between her demise and dhimmitude and her rise and return to glory. If Godrey of Bouillon, Richard the Lionhearted, and countless others hadn’t risked their lives to uphold the honor of Christ and His Church thousands of miles from home, the jihadists would almost certainly have swept across Europe much sooner. Not only did the Crusader armies keep them tied down at a crucial period, fighting for Antioch [Turkey] and Ascalon [Palestine] instead of Varna and Vienna, they also brought together armies that would not have existed otherwise. Pope Urban’s call united men around a cause; had that cause not existed or been publicized throughout Europe, many of these men would not have been warriors at all. They would have been ill-equipped to repel a Muslim invasion of their homeland.

The Crusades, then, were the ultimate reason why Edward Gibbon’s vision of “the interpretation of the Koran” being “taught in the schools of Oxford” did not come true.47

I would bet that neither George W. Bush—nor a single one of his advisers—has an inkling of the historic import of “crusade” beyond its politically correct, if historically incorrect, reputation as an early example of chauvinistic Western aggression against peaceable, non-Western utopians. Not that the president was very likely alluding to the literal origins of the word. The Crusades are a historic interlude that doesn’t resonate in U.S. prehistory. For Americans, the word is more familiarly and more significantly a metaphoric fixture that potently describes any moral fight for right: “crusade” against ignorance (Thomas Jefferson); women’s temperance “crusade” (Susan B. Anthony); equal rights “crusade” (Colin Powell);48 breast cancer “crusade” (Avon Foundation). In 1948, Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme allied commander in Europe, wrote his colossal war memoir about the struggle against Nazi Germany and called it, Crusade in Europe.

Declared in the burning wake of 9/11, the “war on terror” is a crusade if ever there was one; but this is not to PC-be. Indeed, it is impossible; it is an axiom of PC that Western history and Western point of view are always superceded by non-Western history and non-Western point of view. In other words, when a Western tradition butts up against a non-Western grievance (Christmas, cowboys, Columbus, crusade) in the modern-day mainstream, it is the Western tradition that yields to the non-Western grievance every time. And there is a penalty: For the maximum crime of “giving offense,” the sentence on the West is renunciation and apology in perpetuity.

“This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while,” said the president of the United States, warning the nation to gird itself for the long haul with the language of Jefferson, Eisenhower, Powell, and Avon. Crusade? Like the journalista said in 2001, the word “caused some consternation in a lot of Muslim countries.” Hmm. Would that be consternation in Saudi Arabia (financial engine of international jihad and homeland of fifteen out of the nineteen hijackers and Osama bin Laden himself)? Consternation in Iran (monster sponsor of Hezbollah, Islamic nukes, and “death to Israel”)? Maybe consternation in Taliban Afghanistan (home of the Taliban-destroyed Buddhas of Bamiyan, a brutalized female population, and home away from home of al-Qaeda)? Or was there consternation among the Hair-Trigger Moderates (tick, tick, tick…)? Frankly, I hope there was consternation; I hope there was fear that the U.S. of A. was about to hit back and hard, contrary to my confreres in the fourth estate. Does he regret having used that word, Ari, and will he not use it again in the context of talking about this effort? Yes, said Ari, he surely does, and no, said Ari, he surely won’t. Like an offending lesion, the word “crusade” was cut out of the body politic, and regretted. Crusade rage averted.

But here’s the point: There was no dipping into the thesaurus for a replacement. In acceding to the multicultural understanding of “crusade” as indefensibly bad and therefore verboten, the president also acceded to a discernible diminishment of the West, trading a facet of our history and language—and our understanding of our history through language—in exchange for … what? In accepting the skewed, demonstrably ahistorical “crusade” interpretation of the Other, the president allowed that interpretation to overwrite our own. In bowing to the Muslim world’s centuries-old sense of aggrievement—inexplicable, frankly, since the Crusades were an Islamic military triumph—he acknowledged it as the multicultural Word.

It wasn’t the last time. After the about-face on “crusade,” there was another quick semantic retreat, this one from the highfalutin name given to the military campaign against the Taliban: Operation Infinite Justice. Having gotten word that only Allah dispenses “infinite justice,” the Pentagon went into tizzy mode and rechristened (is that okay to say?) the assault Operation Enduring Freedom.49 This seemed to please everyone—or, rather, every culture. Chalk another one up for self-abnegation. (Five years later, the multiculti beat went on: On the subject of the Bush administration’s National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, U.S. News reported infighting authors of the plan could agree on one point: “Worried that they will offend Muslims, they’ve replaced the word ‘jihadist’ with ‘extremist.’”50)

This may seem like a lot of cultural baggage to load onto a few words, but the crusade against “crusade” and the rest follows a set pattern for culture clash, or, rather, the widely determined lack thereof: an ever contrite West versus an always aggrieved Islam. In the reflexive frenzy to avoid giving offense, we surrender not just words or phrases—whether “human rights,” “superiority,” or “infinite justice”—but also the legitimacy of the inspiration we derive from them. In so doing, we surrender something of ourselves, our guiding ideals, our storied past. No longer do we confidently depict civilizations that enshrine human rights as being superior to civilizations that don’t, we discuss “fruitful exchanges”; no longer do we husband our forces for the long, costly “crusade” against Islamic jihad; we tilt at “extremism.” Sure, the moniker Infinite Justice was a little—okay, a lot—on the bombastic side (me, I like “Operation Sledgehammer”), but the fact remains that Allah’s law isn’t the law of this land. So, why, then, do we enforce it?

Why, indeed. Before broaching the explanation, which also considers the point at which postmodern “sensitivity” becomes old-fashioned appeasement, it’s important to make clear that the Bush administration’s semantic retreat was neither unique nor exceptional. Indeed, such self-censorship is common to our time, an essential feature of the Mush of Civilizations, which, by definition, gets lost among the shushing. Examples abound, from the official silence on the core Islamic element—jihad—of the ongoing “war on terror” (remember when the president talked only about “evildoers”?), to the de facto media blackout on the Islamic aspect of sundry acts of jihad violence (from Chechnya to Israel to Paris to Sydney), to the blind eye turned to thirteen centuries of jihad waged on the non-Muslim world (“a permanent historic force,” Clement Huart summed up in 190751). Anything to avert Clash. Which is not at all the same as doing what it takes to preserve civilization—at least, to preserve Western civilization.

There’s a difference, the understanding of which may be the fundamental political incorrectness, the taboo to end all. That’s because we are at a point in the multiculturing of the West at which the single unifying theme is a fervent, indeed, zealous belief in “universal”—not Western—values. These, of course, come down to your basic life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as translated into the modern vernacular of human rights lingo. As a civilization, the West regards these values as “universal” because, as a civilization, the West also believes in their universalism: The idea is, such values are not only the right of every human being, they are also the ideal of every human being. As Berlusconi says, “For all our differences, we are united by the same values of humanity.” Great Britain’s Tony Blair, in addressing the U.S. Congress in 2003, made the same point still more emphatically. It is a “myth” that “our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture,” he said, adding: “Ours are not Western values, they are the universal values of the human spirit.”52

Whether that spirit is universal is never called into question, but some serious reflection on the answer just might lead us to conclude that Blair’s straw myth is a hard reality: namely, that our attachment to freedom—Western-style freedom—is very much a product of our culture. To be sure, “universal values” embody the guiding ethos of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the 1948 code adopted by the United Nations, which begins, rousingly enough, by positing that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” The document goes on from there to enumerate a grab bag of dignity and rights already to be found in largely Western societies, the universal hope being that they will somehow, someday, some way, be found in all societies, making them thus quite literally “universal.” In the imperfect here and now, however, it is not just for rhetorical purposes that they are treated as if they are already a universalist fait accompli. As President Bush has put it,

The twentieth century ended with a single surviving model of human progress, based on non-negotiable demands of human dignity, the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women and private property and free speech and equal justice and religious tolerance.… When it comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, there is no clash of civilizations.53

This is universalist gospel.

But what if these leaders of the Western world—or, better, these leaders of the universal world—are wrong? That is, what if their universal values and common rights are, after all, uniquely Western values and rights? What if it is not a myth that the attachment to freedom is a product of Western culture? “We” may well be the world, like the song says, but what if “we” are not united by the “same values” of humanity? Universalists assume all peoples prefer freedom to its absence, which is probably true; but are they correct to believe all peoples define “freedom” in the same way? And if our definitions of “freedom” are different, can there be, as the president believes, only one “single surviving model for human progress”—or is there, instead, one single surviving model for Western progress? We in the West believe in freedom from tyranny; that’s both evident and, as the Founders said, self-evident. But what if the Other—in this case, the Islamic umma (community)—believes in freedom all right, but in freedom from unbelief?

In a thought-provoking 1985 essay called “Jihad and the Ideology of Enslavement,” Princeton’s John Ralph Willis focuses on this particular understanding of Islamic freedom as a motivation of jihad—the holy war that “seeks to ennoble the spirit in Islam—to release the spirit from the bondage of unbelief.” Think about that for a moment: the bondage of unbelief. If bondage is unbelief in Islam, then it follows that belief in Islam leads to “freedom,” yes? In his analysis of the enslavement of non-Muslims that historically followed jihad campaigns, Willis lays out the following brain-twister for Westerners: “the apparent paradox that the jihad, in its effort to free men from unbelief, should become a device to deprive men of freedom.”54

If we even begin to understand the Islamic definition of “freedom,” however, this is no paradox. The entry on freedom, or hurriyya, in the Encyclopaedia of Islam describes a state of divine enthrallment that bears little resemblance to any Western understanding of freedom as being predicated in the workings of the individual conscience. According to the encyclopedia, Islamic freedom is “the recognition of the essential relationship between God the master and His human slaves who are completely dependent on Him.” Ibn Arabi, a Sufi scholar of note, is cited for having defined freedom as “being perfect slavery” to Allah.

Written by Franz Rosenthal, a great American scholar of Islam of the mid-twentieth century, the entry continues, describing how such “freedom” fails to engender political free will:

Hurriyya, although much discussed, did not achieve the status of a fundamental political concept that could have served as a rallying cry for great causes.… The individual Muslim was expected to consider subordination of his own freedom to the beliefs, morality and customs of the group as the only proper course of behavior.… Politically, the individual was not expected to exercise any free choice as to how he wished to be governed.… In general,… governmental authority admitted of no participation of the individual as such, who therefore did not possess any real freedom [i.e., freedom in the Western sense] vis-à-vis it. On the metaphysical level, the question of how much freedom could be vouchsafed to human beings in view of the omnipotence of God has occupied the Muslim mind from the very beginnings of Islam. Whatever concessions were made, however, were not made in the name of any kind of individual freedom, but in order to assure a better regulated society.55

Worth mentioning, too, is the second section in the freedom (hurriyya) entry by Bernard Lewis, the noted historian of Islam. In recent times, Lewis may be the most eminent expert to champion the Bush administration’s chimerical notions of transforming the Muslim Middle East via democracy, but he did not see fit, apparently, to infuse his encyclopedia entry with similar optimism. In discussing hurriyya in modern times, from “the Ottoman Empire and after,” Lewis writes:

… there is still no idea that the subjects have any right to share in the formation or conduct of government—to political freedom, or citizenship, in the sense which underlies the development of political thought in the West. While conservative reformers talked of freedom under law, and some Muslim rulers even experimented with councils and assemblies, government was in fact becoming more and not less arbitrary.56

Lewis went on to conclude that Western colonialism had actually improved the situation:

During the period of British and French domination, individual freedom was never much of an issue. Though often limited and sometimes suspended, it was on the whole more extensive and better protected than either before or after. In the final revulsion against the West, Western democracy too was rejected as a fraud and a delusion, of no value to Muslims.57

Would that Lewis and other Islamic “experts” had bothered to consult the encyclopedia to remind themselves of the incompatibility of the Islamic definition of “freedom” (freedom from unbelief, or freedom as slavery to God) and the Western ideal of freedom (freedom from man-made tyranny with a hearty emphasis on freedom of conscience).

For the average infidel, whose personal reflections on universal values may be summed up by a peace-on-earth “holiday” card, such an exotic notion will induce a headache, one that can only be relieved by the comforting prattle of universalism. But failing to examine and evaluate Western freedom vis-à-vis Islamic freedom has got to be a new height of Western arrogance, a lazy kind of neo-chauvinism that is willfully blind to the crux of the issue: Where freedom from unbelief (Islam) is the ideal, freedom from tyranny (Western values) is anathema. As predicated on freedom of conscience, equality of rights, equality of religions, and equality of sexes, the Western concept of “freedom from tyranny” isn’t just an obstacle to Islam’s “freedom from unbelief,” it’s a threat. Such freedom in the West, based in secular institutions, necessarily undermines “freedom from unbelief” as predicated on Islamic religious supremacy, inequality of rights and inequality of sexes. “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” said Kipling. No doubt President Bush and his supporters would dismiss such a line as so much churlishness from one of those “skeptics of democracy.” The president’s statement from the 2004 State of the Union address is a likely rejoinder. “It is mistaken and condescending to assume that whole cultures and great religions are incompatible with liberty and self-government. I believe God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom.”58 Such an assertion relies more on wishful thinking than on the historical or theological record. “Whole cultures and religions”—Islam, for instance—have been by design and history not just incompatible with, but deeply hostile to such liberty and self-government, driven as they have been by the desire to create or impose a very different kind of “freedom”—one inspired by Allah through his prophet Muhammad. Grasping this fundamental concept helps us understand how, for example, the Web site of Saudi Arabia’s embassy in London, in a document titled, “Saudi Arabia—Questions of Human Rights” could answer a question as to whether Saudi Arabia accepts “universally accepted human rights” by stating: “No, Saudi Arabia doesn’t accept that. Some human rights are controversial, and yet others are anathema to a large portion of humanity.”59

Sayyid Qutb, one of the signal Islamic scholars of the twentieth century, has written extensively on what might, in this context, be thought of as the nonuniversalism of Islam. Known as “the father of modern [Islamic] fundamentalism,” Qutb may be dismissed by some for also being “the father of the tiny band of extremists”—that Islam-hijacking terrorist minority we read about. But Qutb’s influence is by no means marginal given the prevalence of such “modern fundamentalism”—as revealed, for example, in a 2006 poll showing that 40 percent of British Muslims support the establishment of sharia in Great Britain.60 Qutb wrote, “Islam is a comprehensive philosophy and a homogenous unity, and to introduce into it any foreign element would mean ruining it. It is like a delicate and perfect piece of machinery that may be completely ruined by the presence of an alien component.”61

Commenting on this passage, Robert Spencer explains:

The chief “alien component” was secularism. Qutb regarded Western secularism not as the solution to the problems of the Islamic world (as many have proposed) but as the chief source of the problem: It destroyed the fundamental unity of Islam by separating the religious sphere from that of daily life.62

Understanding that “fundamental unity” helps explain why the ideal Islamic government is based upon sharia, and not the Judeo-Christian-derived, now secularly established precepts of “liberty and self-government” compatible with George W. Bush’s idea of both God and the human heart, not to mention the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is neither “mistaken” nor “condescending,” as President Bush suggests, to point this out. On the contrary, it is vitally important to understand also, for example, that Sayyid Qutb’s idea of universal values—something for everybody—is to guarantee “a basic human right to be addressed with the message of Islam.”63 Boning up on such theory helps explain why sharia is not just incompatible with, but also inimical to such secularly grounded “universal” rights. And vice versa.

The resulting disconnect—ignored by the universalist West—has a lot to do with what the two-year-old revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran was trying to tell the world in 1981 when it declared to the United Nations General Assembly that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights wasn’t really so “universal” after all. As historian David G. Littman put it, the Iranians said that the UN human rights decaration “represented a secular interpretation of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which could not be implemented by Muslims.” Ever since, as Littman has cataloged in a series of statements and essays drawn from his work and observations as a NGO representative of the Association for World Education to the United Nations in Geneva, Iran has been at the forefront of global Islamic efforts to modify the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to better accommodate sharia-observant states. Littman summed up this first Iranian declaration this way: “If a choice had to be made between [the stipulations of the human rights declaration] and ‘the divine law of the country,’ Iran [said it] would always choose Islamic law.”64

Iran’s declaration of independence from the recognized norms of settled human rights law was by no means the ravings of a lone revolutionary state on the fringe of Islam. On the contrary, the Islamic world as a diplomatic whole ended up codifying the distinctions between Islam and the West that George W. Bush and Tony Blair so assiduously deny. Also in 1981, the Islamic Council of Europe dropped the explosive Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights (UIDHR) into the cozy nest of universalism; in 1990, foreign ministers of the OIC trumpeted the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI). Both Islamic human rights documents are unadulterated endorsements of sharia, with the latter, for example, establishing sharia as “the only source of reference” for the protection of human rights in specifically Islamic countries. Not only are both Islamic documents by definition nonuniversal, they claim to supercede the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)—a supremacy, Littman reminds us, “based on divine revelation.”65 He continues:

The aim of those who drafted and approved of the UDHR was precisely to affirm [a] universal human identity, separating it from particular and religious contexts, which introduce and sanctify differences and discriminations. Any attempt to bring in cultural and religious particularisms would simply remove the specifically universal character of the [universal rights document.]

Neither the UIDHR nor the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam is universal, because both are conditional on Islamic law, which non-Muslims do not accept. The UDHR places social and political norms in a secular framework, separating the political from the religious.

In contrast, both the UIDHR and the [Cairo Declaration] introduce into the political sphere an Islamic religious criterion, which imposes an absolute decisive and divine primacy over the political and legal spheres. [Emphasis added.]66

Universal human rights versus Islamic human rights: Despite the seamlessly conciliatory rhetoric of the three “B”s (Bush, Blair, and Berlusconi), a real matchup would make for a resounding bang of civilizations—if, that is, the “universalist” side ever dared to mention the fact that sharia, the body of law derived from the Koran and other Islamic writings, and enshrined in the conception of Islamic human rights, is precisely the kind of theocratic legal code that secular Western democracies reject—as a matter of universal human rights—because it both sanctifies and institutionalizes the inequality of man.

Ruling more or less absolutely in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Sudan, sharia and its principles govern to varying degrees throughout the rest of the Islamic world. Even in American-liberated Afghanistan and Iraq, the democratic process has yielded constitutional provisions to ensure that no law may violate sharia. As an early result, for example, Ali Mohaqeq Nasab, the Muslim editor of Women’s Rights magazine in Afghanistan was sentenced in 2005 to two years hard labor for “blasphemy” against Islam. His “blasphemy” consisted of publishing “un-Islamic” articles criticizing the sharia penalties for adultery, theft, and apostasy (leaving Islam) of stoning, amputation, and death.

“Sometimes the whole religion and the rules of Islam were attacked,” explained Mohammed Aref Rahmani, who sits on Afghanistan’s council of Islamic scholars, referring to Nasab’s “crimes.” Attacked? “For instance,” Rahamani told the Chicago Tribune, “he [Nasab] says one woman should be equal to one man, as a witness in a case, which is completely against our religion.”67

Yes—those seismic vibrations rolling across your eardrums are the sound of culture clash. Under Islamic law, a woman’s court testimony is worth half as much as a man’s—another rank inequality Nasab’s magazine had oppposed—so I guess you could say that the Islamic scholar has an Islamic point. At the same time, such Islamic “crimes” equal Western virtues, a fact that left Aghan officials unimpressed: Kabul’s chief prosecutor went back to court, seeking the death penalty for Nasab. At this point, Nasab lost his fiery defiance. He publicly recanted his “apostasy,” apologized for it, and went free. Or did he go “free”?

Not long after Nasab dropped from world radar, another Afghan, Abdul Rahman, appeared on the Western media’s screen. Rahman, it seemed, had committed what counted for a felony in U.S.-liberated Afghanistan. He had not just criticized Islam, he had left it. In other words, Rahman had converted to Christianity, and an “apostate” living under Islamic law was subject to the death penalty. “Prosecutors say he should die,” reported the Chicago Tribune. (Indeed, the lead prosecutor called him “a microbe in society” who should “be cut off and removed from the rest of Muslim society and should be killed.”) The newspaper continued: “So do his family, his jailers, even the judge.” When the prosecutor offered Rahman a deal—he would drop his charges if Rahman would drop his Christianity—Rahman refused. When the case was dismissed on the grounds that Rahman was mentally unfit (only a fruitcake would convert to Christianity, right?), Rahman’s troubles were hardly over: With so many Muslim clerics still calling for his death, the Afghans at large seemed ready to do what the court would not and punish Rahman’s apostasy. (“‘We will cut him in little pieces,’ said Hosnia Wafaysofi, who works at the jail, as she made a cutting motion with her hands.”) And when the Parliament demanded that Rahman not be allowed to leave the country, it looked like the end. The next thing anyone knew, he turned up in Italy, where then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had offered him asylum.*68

So much for post-Taliban—and, come to think of it, post-Operation Enduring Freedom—life in Afghanistan. Maybe the more useful exercise here is not to wonder how the United States of America became midwife to a theocratic police state, but to see what may be learned from it. One thing is clear: wherever Islam is protected from so-called blasphemy, Western freedoms (freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, let alone women’s rights) are not. In “extreme” Saudi Arabia, it is illegal for non-Muslims to practice their religion;69 indeed, it is illegal for a Jew to travel to Saudi territory,70 and illegal for any non-Muslim to venture into Mecca or Medina, Islam’s holiest sites.71 But in “moderate” Egypt, Coptic Christians suffer harassment and discrimination that includes imprisonment and reports of forced conversions.72 In “extreme” Iran, girls may be married at age nine73 (nine was the age of Muhammad’s favorite wife74). In “moderate” Jordan, Jews may not become citizens,75 and so-called honor killings—the murder of women deemed unchaste—are often prosecuted on a par with misdemeanors.76

These injustices of the Sharia States are, of course, wholly irreconcilable with the provisions of “universal” human rights—which, in effect, is just what the Iranians tried to bring to the free world’s attention back in 1981, when it fired its salvo against the concept of universalism itself. Only by ducking has the West preserved its devotion to, indeed, its faith in universalism. Such evasive maneuvering, however, doesn’t change the fact that there is as gaping a gulf between Islamic and universal conceptions of human rights as there is between the Sharia States and the Free World. Now that there has been a massive influx of peoples from Sharia States into the Free World—migrations that became significant only shortly before the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran—the question becomes: What happens when Islamic human rights meet universal human rights in the West?

We received our first inkling in February 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran pronounced a death fatwa, or death sentence, on British writer Salman Rushdie for his critique of Islam in the novel, The Satanic Verses. The fatwa sent Muslims rioting over the book in Sharia States like Iran and Pakistan, but also in merry olde England itself. Few among us realized the significance at the time. I certainly didn’t; I couldn’t make sense of it. It didn’t help that I found Rushdie’s book unreadable. Undecipherable, really; the Islamic allegory is all but unintelligible to your basic infidel. Then there was the fact that the roiling protests, crazed rhetoric, book burnings, and bomb threats (and actual bombs) were somehow preposterously barbaric; Khomeini himself was a cartoon of evil. How could such crude exotica matter to the modern world?

Looking back, it seems clear that the Rushdie case was, as some have noted, the greatest freedom of speech case of our time. It was certainly the seminal case that set the formula for subsequent post–Cold War culture clash, pitting an aggrieved Islam against a contrite West. As author Ibn Warraq reminds us, the cruel and unusual death penalty against Rushdie—technically, a hukm, which doesn’t expire with the death of the issuing imam as does a fatwa—was greeted with a flurry of statements and articles “by Western intellectuals, Arabists, and Islamologists blaming Rushdie [emphasis added] for bringing the barbarous sentence onto himself by writing The Satanic Verses.”77 Rushdie himself apologized and went into hiding courtesy of British security—an ironic sidelight as the anti-Establishment writer became the ward of the Establishment. Some publishers postponed or scrapped the book’s publication. As Daniel Pipes has chronicled in his book The Rushdie Affair, most of the leaders of the Western world sounded, or, rather, mumbled retreat.

British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and the leader of the opposition, Neil Kinnock, “kept silent about the ayatollah’s threat for a full week,” Pipes wrote.

The newly installed secretary of state, James A. Baker III, limply characterized the death threat as “regrettable.”

Germany parsed the fatwa as “a strain on German-Iranian relations.”

Japan’s response was a haiku of surrender: “Encouraging murder is not something to be praised.”

Pipes continues: “International organizations wanted nothing to do with The Satanic Verses issue, for it polarized emotions and challenged the comfortable assumptions of a single order which underlie such institutions [emphasis added].”78 This is an apt summation: Without the “comfortable assumptions of a single order”—Universal Mush—international organizations would have had to face a genuine casus belli—Clash. At the United Nations, the silence on the Rushdie matter lasted for four years, and then was broken with only the most oblique reference.79 Meanwhile, the Europeans opted for Huff, recalling their top diplomats from Tehran in one. Significantly, no European country broke diplomatic relations with Iran. As Pipes tells it, there remained a general expectation that the Iranians would ultimately rescind the Rushdie death sentence.

Didn’t happen. On the contrary, the Iranian parliament followed the diplo-vacuation with “a bill that stipulated a complete break [in relations] unless the British government declared ‘its opposition to the unprincipled stands against the world of Islam, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the contents of the anti-Islamic book, The Satanic Verses.’” Pipes wrote:

Prodded by feelers from “pragmatists” in Tehran, British leaders did what they could to satisfy Tehran. On March 2, Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe went on the BBC World Service to show foreign listeners that the government wished to distance itself from Rushdie. “We understand that the book itself has been found deeply offensive by people of the Muslim faith. It is a book that is offensive in many other ways as well. We can understand why it could be criticized. The British Government, the British people, do not have any affection for the book. The book is extremely critical, rude about us. It compares Britain with Hitler’s Germany. We do not like that any more than the people of the Muslim faith like the attacks on their faith contained in the book. So we are not cosponsoring the book. What we are sponsoring is the right of people to speak freely, to publish freely.”

Two days later, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made similar remarks.80

Hate to say it, but it sounds as if the Iron Lady herself went wobbly. In this power struggle between the reliably contrite and the perpetually aggrieved, the West was all struggle, ceding power to Islam. As maniacally bloodthirsty as the statements out of Tehran were, the leaders of the United Kingdom delivered unsettlingly good impersonations of show trial defendants recanting the Rights of Man. Tehran broke diplomatic relations anyhow because Rushdie remained alive and well—as alive and well as a man can be under an Islamic death sentence—and his books remained on sale, even if very often under the counter. Meanwhile, trade relations between the UK and Iran, Pipes noted, never missed a beat—or, better, shipment; the British, however, shut down a consulate, expelled a few Iranians, and managed to call the Iranian regime “deplorable.”

British Islamic scholar Mervyn Hiskett framed the impasse as coming down to the conflict “between Western, secular, man-made legal systems and the Islamic system, which is transcendental, based on [divine] revelation.” It is that transcendental nature of the Islamic system that Westerners overlook, even though it explains Islamic behaviors that lie beyond Western reason. Hiskett, an ardent admirer of Islam—only not in Great Britain—saw a problem in “the Muslims’ own often intransigent demand that Islam must be accepted uncritically as divine revelation by non-Muslims as well as well as by Muslims [emphasis added].” Muslims, he wrote, believe this uncritical acceptance “must be reflected in the structure and conduct of the state, and of society.” In other words, as far as Muslims everywhere were concerned, “democratic processes cannot be permitted to diminish the absolute authority of revelation.”81 No Mush here.

When it came to the right to life (Rushdie) and the right to call for death (Islam), this presented a problem. There was a bona fide divine rationale—if you were Muslim, that is—that made it an infringement on the Islam religion to oppose the Rushdie fatwa. And there was the law of Britain, if you were a loyal subject of the queen, that made it a crime to incite murder, religion my eye. Question for universalists: Is incitement to murder, or recourse to censorship, ever a religious right? The West has never so much as acknowledged this question, let alone answered it. Actually, that’s not quite right: in the Actions Speak Louder than Words Department, Great Britain ended up charging no one in connection with the Rushide fatwa with the crime of incitement to murder. Clash was averted, but that doesn’t count as a victory—at least not for the West.

When the foreign ministers of the Organization of the Islamic Conference met in Riyadh to discuss the Rushdie affair, they condemned not Iran, of course, for its barbaric call for the death of a British writer, but The Satanic Verses, concurring that the author was “a heretic.” (The OIC didn’t specifically endorse Iran’s death sentence, but it condemned Rushdie’s “apostasy”—a “crime” punishable by death under sharia.) The Islamic conference also appealed “to all members of society to impose a ban on the book and to take the necessary legislation to insure the protection of the religious beliefs of others”—other Muslims, that is, given the “religious beliefs of others” don’t require such protective measures as book banning. Saliently, the Islamic conference also declared that “blasphemy cannot be justified on the basis of freedom of expression and opinion.”82

This is a key concept, perhaps the crucial difference between Islam and the West: In Islamic society, “blasphemy”—a concept thoroughly outmoded in modern democracies—cannot be justified as a matter of freedom of speech or conscience. Period. This means that in Islamic society, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, cannot be justified, either (likely as they are to lead to “blasphemy”). Period again. In their Rushdie statement, the OIC ministers specifically declared that “religious belief”—Islam—requires legislative “protection” from “blasphemy.” This may help explain the existence of “blasphemy laws” across the Islamic world, from Pakistan to Indonesia, from Saudi Arabia to Turkey. It may also explain, taken with Hiskett’s point, the pressures exerted by Muslim populations in the West on the West to enact, or enforce, the spirit of such laws. But it doesn’t explain the de facto acceptance of such laws by the West. It doesn’t explain why a British prime minister dignified an ayatollah’s fatwa; why, twelve years later, an American president retracted his just “crusade”; why Burger King, UK, canceled an ice cream dessert in whose wrapper, Rorschach-like, may be seen the name Allah;83 why a recent West End revival of Christopher Marlowe’s 1580 play Tamburlaine the Great changed a climactic Koran-burning scene into an ecumenical book bonfire;84 why Fox television altered a 24 plotline about a domestic Muslim terror cell and cobbled onto the show public service announcements praising Islam;85 why an Australian hospital eliminated ham from its Christmas menu;86 why a once-proud Western free press self-censored a handful of Danish cartoons of Muhammad. And why, even as I write in 2006, both the EU and the UN are receptively considering an OIC drive to outlaw religious defamation, legislation that can only diminish the right to religious dissent and freedom of conscience.87

All these actions fall into line with sharia. They are even in accord with sundry declarations of “Islamic human rights.” They are anathema, however, to free societies. So far, free societies fail to notice, preferring to fall back on the cushy bromides of universalism. To return to Pipes’s rendition of the model Rushdie affair, this seminal scandal ended with a whimper.

A British official responded by attempting, not to explain that freedom of speech did indeed encompass blasphemy, but “to disassociate his government from Rushdie.”

Foreign Office Minister William Waldegrave went on the BBC’s Arabic Service to explain: “I would like to put on record that the British Government well recognizes the hurt and distress that this book has caused, and we want to emphasize that because it was published in Britain, the British Government had nothing to do with and is not associated with it in any way.… What is surely the best way forward is to say that the book is offensive to Islam, that Islam is far stronger than a book by a writer of this kind.”88

Exactly one month after the decision to withdraw top European diplomats from Iran, the foreign ministers met again and decided, under only British objection, to send them back.

Pipes writes: “The Iranian foreign minister greeted the decision as a ‘return to realism’ and ‘a realization of the importance of Islam; Khomeini took enormous satisfaction from this about-face. He described the Europeans’ returning ‘humiliated, disgraced, and shame-faced, regretful of what they did.’” Lamely, the French Foreign Ministry called this an “exaggeration.”89

The controversy disappeared from sight by the middle of March 1989.

And maybe from mind. But not from the unseen engines driving the culture. For the first time, the secular West and Islam had come head-to-head in a conflict at the heart of the West, changing not Islam, but the heart of the West. No longer could freedom of expression be taken for granted; no longer could freedom of expression be guaranteed. Henceforth, bookstores might become bomb craters, and publishers assassins’ targets. And not because the democracies had fallen to a dictator, but rather because a new, antidemocratic force had entered Western society, one intolerant of freedom of expression and conscience to a point familiar to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—but with a crucial difference. The intolerance of this new, antidemocratic force was itself tolerated, quite paradoxically, as the exercise of another democratic freedom—freedom of religion. Indeed, attacks on the intolerance of this new (to the West) antidemocratic force were themselves labeled intolerant, bigoted even, forcing what little debate that occurred to a frustrated impasse—or worse.

In Geneva, David G. Littman was watching as the flaccid Western response to the assault on the freedom of speech and conscience in the West gave rise to what he has called the “Rushdie Rules,” or, alternately, “creeping Islamism,” at the UN—home, of course, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “Emboldened” Islamic states, Littman wrote, “sympathetic to the enhancement of the Sharia, proceeded to try to introduce Khomeini-style restrictions on freedom of speech about certain political aspects of Islam to the United Nations itself. Thus did the ‘Rushdie Rules’ begin affecting UN bodies, and especially the Commission on Human Rights, eating away at international norms.”90 (Note: Littman’s “certain political aspects” is a tactful catchall covering human rights violations inside Islamic society—slavery, forced conversions, etc.—and outside Islamic society, including Islamic terrorism against the West.)

The degree to which the Islamic states have been successful is no rarified story of parliamentary maneuverings among the diplomatic niceties in simulcast translation. Rather, this is the story of the insidiously dangerous methods used by some international diplomats to erode, and others to accept the erosion of, freedom of speech and conscience in the name of freedom of religion—in this case, freedom of Islam. The strategy goes like this: Mention the adjective “Islamic” and the noun “terrorism” in the same phrase (as in “Islamic terrorism”) and trigger cries of “sacrilege” in the international arena—at least according to Pakistan’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, speaking on behalf of the OIC in 2005.91

Or, try reading the words of Muhammad—as taken from the 1988 Hamas Charter—into the record at the UN human rights commission in Geneva, also in 2005, and rouse Morocco, Cuba, and Pakistan to cries of “defamation,” also in 2005. (“I am quoting from the Charter of Hamas. I am not attacking Islam,” said Littman.92)

Or simply enter, as Littman did in 2004, into the UN record a lesson describing Muhammad’s teachings on the decapitation of infidels from a grade-eleven religious textbook (prepared under the supervision of the Al-Azhar Religious Institute and published by the Egyptian government), and drive Sudan to calls of blasphemy, and Pakistan to lecture “Islam was a religion of peace … and it was unacceptable that this religion be thus despised.”93

Or compile, at the behest of the human rights commission, a record of human rights atrocities in Sudan (killings, rape, slavery, forced conversions to Islam, death penalty for apostasy…), and point out the giant discrepancies between Sudan’s sharia-guided criminal code and sundry “universal” human rights convenants to which Sudan is a signatory. That’s what Gaspar Biro, UN special rapporteur on Sudan, did in 1994 only to be accused by Sudan of launching “a vicious attack on the religion of Islam.”94

Three years later, there was a similar case—this time involving the UN’s special rapporteur on racism. In his independent report for the human rights commission on racism—“against Blacks, Arabs, and Muslims, xenophobia, negrophobia, anti-Semitism and related intolerance”—Maurice Glèlè-Ahanhanzo, the rapporteur, included a section on anti-Semitism. In this section was a subheading titled, “Islamist and Arab Anti-Semitism,” which included the following quotation taken from an annual survey, Anti-Semitism Worldwide: “The use of Christian and secular European anti-Semitism motifs in Muslim publications is on the rise, yet at the same time Muslim extremists are turning increasingly to their own religious sources, first and foremost the Qur’an, as a primary anti-Jewish source.”

“Blasphemy.” That’s what representatives from Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, and Algeria called this passage. Indonesia, speaking on behalf of the OIC, elaborated.

This [passage] amounts to the defamation of our religion, Islam, and blasphemy against its Holy book, Qur’an. We are infuriated that such a statement has been included in the report of the Special Rapporteur. The Commission on Human Rights cannot become a silent spectator to this defamation against one of the great religions of the world. We, therefore, call on the Commission to express censure for this defamatory statement against Islam and the Holy Qur’an and ask you, Mr, Chairman, to express this censure on behalf of the Commission.95

Notice the Indonesian ambassador didn’t call the offending passage phony or even selectively misleading. How could he, with the words of the Koran, to take just one example, recounting Allah’s transformation of Jews into “apes and swine”96—a recurring motif in mosque sermons.97 And how could he, to take just one more example, when the hadith collections, the putative words and deeds of Muhammad, as transmitted by Islamic religious authorities centuries ago, provide Muslims with endless religious justification for anti-Semitism to this day—as may be seen in Article 7 of the Hamas Charter, which concludes with the words of a canonical hadith:

The Last Hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: “Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him.”98

For the Muslim representatives, simply noting the existence of Islamic religious sources of anti-Semitism in the UN report was itself “blasphemy” and “defamation.”

By definition, “blasphemy” includes irreverence, which the special rapporteur’s findings did not; and by definition, “defamation” includes a false statement, which the special rapporteur’s findings did not. But the words themselves—“blasphemy” and “defamation”—seemed to cast a spell, paralyzing the rest of the commission. No country rebutted or even investigated the OIC’s charges; on the contrary, all fifty-three members of the human rights commission, including the United States and several other Western countries agreed with the OIC. Talk about the enabling behaviors of codependency. Yes, the world’s human rights representatives said in unison, by all means we must censure this blasphemy, this defamatory statement against Islam (just don’t say anything to set them off, tick-tick-tick…). Citing Islamic religious sources of anti-Jewish invective—even Muhammad’s own words as recorded in the hadiths—was, indeed, blasphemy and defamation, they agreed. As the world human rights body, they decided:

1. … Without a vote to express its indignation and protest at the content of such an offensive reference to Islam and the Holy Qur’an;

2. Affirmed that this offensive reference should have been excluded from the report;

3. Requested the Chairman to ask the special rapporteur to take corrective action in response to the present decision.99

Please. “Corrective action” meant suppressing the truth. The “offensive reference” was ripped out of the report, leaving in its place a dangerous precedent for censorship. This precedent for censorship has brought about an even more dangerous rise in self-censorship. As Littman observed, for the next seven years, UN special reports on racism omitted any and all references to anti-Semitism in Arab countries, Iran, and elsewhere in the Muslim world, including in the Palestinian media, where it is well known to be rampant.

“There is a proper sensitivity to the belief systems of government representatives that is part of diplomatic culture,” Littman writes, “but sensitivity should not induce blindness.”100 Nor, of course, should “sensitivity” impose censorship. Nor should “sensitivity” excuse genocide. But that’s what’s happening. When the OIC set out in 1999 to pass a resolution at the UN human rights commission condemning the “defamation of Islam,” the resolution that ultimately passed was called “Combating the Defamation of Religions”; Islam, however, as Littman has pointed out, was the only religion mentioned. The operative paragraph of the resolution expresses “deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and with terrorism.”101 And this was two years before 9/11.

Is Islam really “frequently” or “wrongly” associated with terrorism? Having gagged and blindfolded itself, the international community (notwithstanding the occasional Berlusconi outburst) has done everything possible to avoid the question, functioning in a strange state of “sensitivity” that has, paradoxically, deadened the senses and blunted logic—a condition resembling not just appeasement but surrender. As “defamation” and “blasphemy” have become, like Pavlovian gongs, instant conversation-enders, Islam has become increasingly insulated not just from criticism (real or imagined), but also from the poking and prodding of analysis—from reality itself. This may be precisely the kind of “protection” from secular blasphemy (read: criticism) that Islam has long maintained it requires—remember the OIC statement on Rushdie—but the $64,000-question is, why are non-Muslims so obsessively doing everything they can to provide it?

*   *   *

The answer, promised many pages ago, is a complicated affair, closely linked to the confidence crisis of the West, the identity crisis of the perpetual adolescent, and to something else as well. That something else is the age-old relationship not between the West and the rest, but between Islam and the rest: namely, the relationship between Islam and the dhimmi, the millions of non-Muslims through the centuries who have lived in Islamized societies. To live as a dhimmi is to have an inferior legal status under sharia, a codified condition as old as the Islamic conquests of non-Islamic peoples. The Muslim-dhimmi relationship is, at best, a master-servant relationship, pitting an identifiable authority figure against an identifiable supplicant. This was often literally the case since, in many historical contexts, dhimmis were required by sharia to be recognizable by their clothes, the size and color of their homes, their modes of transportation (donkeys). The relationship’s “core element,” explains Bat Ye’or, the leading modern scholar of the dhimmis, “pertains to the premise of Muslim superiority over all other religious groups.”102

Bat Ye’or has introduced a term to the lexicon to describe a mode of behavior or state of mind fostered by sharia-sanctioned religious inferiority: “dhimmitude.” Forbidden to possess arms, own land, criticize sharia, or defend themselves either in a fight or in court against a Muslim (among many, many other prohibitions), dhimmis developed cross-cultural, cross-continental survival strategies that worked not for the fittest, but rather for the most deferential—self-abasement as self-preservation. A good example: Since criticism of sharia was severely punished, dhimmis “adopted a servile language and obsequious demeanor for fear of retaliation and for their self-preservation,” Bat Ye’or writes.103 In this struggle to survive were lost precious markers of the self: history and identity, truth and tradition. What was left were self-censoring societies, stunted by fear, compromised by fearfulness. Writing in 1918, Jovan Cvijic, a Serbian sociologist and geographer, described Christian society in Macedonia, which had long been subject to such fear.

There are regions where the Christian population has lived under a reign of fear from birth until death. In certain parts of Macedonia, they don’t tell you how they fought against the Turks or against the Albanians, but rather about the way that they managed to flee from them, or the ruse that they used to escape them. In Macedonia I heard people say: “Even in our dreams we flee from the Turks and the Albanians.” It is true that for about twenty years a certain number of them have regained their composure, but the deep-seated feeling has not changed among the masses of people. Even after the liberation in 1912 one could tell that a large number of Christians had not yet become aware of their new status: fear could still be read on their faces. [Emphasis added.]104

I don’t think we, at this point, can read fear on our faces. But I do think there are alarming similarities between dhimmi life under Islam and PC life in a multicultural world.

We have long lived in a self-censoring society, stunted by a kind of fear of political correctness—of opprobrium, ostracism, or professional failure—and have certainly been long compromised by fearfulness. Traditionally—because multiculturalism has been with us long enough to be characterized as a tradition—this has had nothing to do with Islam or the dhimmi. But that doesn’t negate the comparison. Indeed, it helps explain a seamless compatibility between dhimmitude and the multicultural mind-set that flourishes in a post-grown-up world.

Quite intriguingly, Bat Ye’or has demonstrated that dhimmi status under sharia in Islamic societies is by no means a prerequisite of dhimmitude. Indeed, definite patterns of dhimmi behavior exist not only in the Sharia States, but throughout the Free World. (Western dhimmitude is discussed at greater length in chapter 9.) For death-of-the-grown-up purposes, one aspect has particular resonance, or nonresonance: the silence of dhimmitude regarding Islam. It is the silence of the insecure society. Or maybe it is the silent insecurity of the post-adult, identity-less society, the one that never quite grows up into itself.

Maybe this hush of dhimmitude fell over the West during the Rushdie case, when the notion of “protected” Islam—“protected” from criticism on pain of death—was first communicated to a wide Western audience. And now? It’s part of our society. Roughly a decade and a half after Rushdie, a British broadcast watchdog group notes that “Islam was accorded far more respect on television and radio than other religions.” (Said Lord Dubs, chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Commission in 2003: “In portraying Muslims [writers] have held back, they have censored themselves, they are timid. I have seen them pour scorn on Christianity … followed, to a lesser extent, by Jews and Hindus.”105) Roughly a decade and a half after Rushdie, the EU racism watchdog shelves a report on anti-Semitism in Europe because it concluded Muslims and Palestinian groups were reponsible for most of the incidents.106 Roughly a decade and a half after Rushdie, a British Foreign Office minister apologizes repeatedly for a line in a speech that called on British Muslims to choose between political dialogue and “the way of the terrorists.”107 Roughly a decade and a half after Rushdie, an American president ends his crusade before it begins and declares Islam a religion of peace.

Not only does such dhimmitude protect Islam from truths about itself, it also protects Islam from the “offensive”—that is, non-Islamic—aspects of the world outside Islam. Norwegian authorities prohibit Jewish symbols—stars of David, Israeli flags—at an Oslo anniversary comemmoration of Kristallnacht to prevent “trouble” (this in a city that regularly hosts pro-Palestinian events).108 France’s chief rabbi warns French Jews against wearing yarmulkes in public to prevent violence.109 The British Red, um, Cross bans Christian content in store Christmas displays for fear of giving “offense.”110 The University of the Incarnate Word in Texas exchanges its crusader mascot for a cardinal (the bird, not the prelate), also for fear of giving offense.111 Swiss tourist brochures in Arabic omit scenic snaps of Tyrolean churches and replace a picture of a pork salami speciality with some local cheese.112 To be sure, churches are not mosques, and pork is not eaten by Muslims; but why does Switzerland, a country of churches and pork salami, want to pretend otherwise?

It’s easy to see why dhimmi populations in Islamic lands would collude in “protecting” Islam from such “offense” or criticism; they fear the sharia consequences. But why do Westerners, in the media, the White House, the United Nations, or the tourist board collude in these same “protections”? Why the reluctance to acknowledge patent differences between Islam and the West? Why the refusal to examine whether Islam plays a central role in the so-called war on terror? Why the failure to study whether the “war on terror” is a defensive response to the latest manifestation of thirteen centuries of Islamic jihad? Why the cold-sweating fear over even asking the questions?

Bat Ye’or has described Western silence on Islam—today’s gruesome human rights violations, yesterday’s bloody conquests—as “the politics of dhimmitude.”113 The term is provocative, describing a framework of concessions to Islam that goes far beyond multicultural theorizing in a lecture hall, or PC politesse in the public arena. Indeed, the whole concept of dhimmitude—predicated on the historic abasement of non-Muslims in Islamic society—envisions a new conception of world affairs. Gone are the old paradigms of the great powers and Cold War rivalries; in their place, a complex power struggle between the West and Islam that plays out on a deeply psychological level that may make Cold War machinations look something more like a game of Red Light, Green Light.

Whether characterized as a courtesy, a favor, or appeasement, every Western wince, from Lady Thatcher’s concessions to the ayatollah to George W. Bush’s retreat on “crusade,” may be seen as a form of dhimmitude because they are clear manifestations of sharia’s influence on the West. So, too, the self-censorship of the media when it came to Cartoon Rage 2006 over twelve Danish cartoons of Muhammad. Such behavior indicates, as Bat Ye’or writes, an “implicit submission to the shari’a prohibitions of blasphemy.” This is seriously troubling. Islam must not be “disrespected,” says Islamic law; Islam is not “disrespected,” according to Western practice. There is more than etiquette at work when there is no criticism of Muslim oppression of Christians from Sudan to Nigeria to Pakistan to the Palestinian Authority to Indonesia; when there is no discussion of where religious tolerance of religious intolerance might end. There is fear. And where there is fear, there is silence. Of this silence—this tacit, noncomprehended acceptance of Islam’s dictates—Bat Ye’or writes: It “puts the Western public sphere in the position of conforming to one of the basic rules of dhimmitude: the express prohibition of Christians and Jews to criticize Islamic history and doctrine.”114

It fits. From the multicultural teachings of the politically correct classroom, we as a culture have learned to censor “incorrect” thoughts. In the absence of adults, we have found ways to sidestep taxing reponsibilities. As no-confidence codependents, we have conspired to rationalize away unpleasant realities. By chance or not by chance, dhimmitude is compatible with all of these destructive impulses. This is why the culture war is now so “real.” More than a syllabus is at stake; more than the ethnic makeup of college graduates is at issue; more than the feminization of the hard sciences is under consideration. Looking back, it becomes clear that there was a great luxury in fighting a culture war in a classroom or boardroom. But if the settings were somehow artificial, the hits taken were very real, disabling faculties of judgment and discernment, and undermining confidence and authority—traits, of course, associated with our lost maturity.

This has left the West ill-equipped to survive the real culture war. And who is public enemy number one, anyway? Jihadist terrorists or fanatical multiculturalists? It may be that the only faith on Earth more messianic than Islam is multiculturalism. Maybe that’s because its irrational faith in the chimera of universalism relies on a perpetual suspension of disbelief that contradicts inescapably Western traditions of logic and analysis. If distinctions between the West and Islam were articulated, if the “meeting of cultures” were recast as a conflict of cultures, if the incompatibility of Western secular logic and Islamic divine revelation were evaluated, if Islamization were perceived as a threat to the West—if, in other words, Clash were allowed to ring out—Islam itself would remain unchanged, very likely energized by the resulting breach. The whole multicultural project, however, would come tumbling down. And, to the multiculti priesthood, that would be apostasy, Western-style.

The penalty of such apostasy is not death (as under Islam), but the resulting abyss is an existential crisis that the multiculturalists will avoid at any cost. Better to put faith in “fruitful exchanges”; better to preach “universal values.” Better to tolerate the intolerant. Better to pretend. Better to lie. Better to barricade the public square, and station guards at synagogues and churches. Better to dispense bulletproof vests to civil servants. Better to guard public buildings with gauntlets of metal detectors and Jersey walls. Better to search granny’s purse. Better to search granny. There is an Orwellian logic to it all.

Down with Clash. Mush rules.

We are, after all, the world.

Because if we aren’t the world, who are we?