Bowing to Jihad

Dr. Charles Jacobs - Jul 13, 2007 familysecuritymatters.org

The global jihad is being fought today on many fronts. Economic threats, threats of violence, lawsuits, and political correctness are all weapons used to pressure non-Muslims to defer to Islamists – and to shun Muslim moderates and reformers. Too often it works. Free-thinking peoples who understand the enormous value of criticism in improving and correcting behavior reduce themselves to silence when the issue touches Islamic radicalism. Two recent examples:

In Thailand, the film “Persepolis,” about the problems of a Muslim girl growing up in Islamist Iran, has been pulled from Bangkok’s International Film Festival. Iran objected that the movie “presented an unrealistic face of the achievements and results of the glorious Islamic Revolution ….” The festival director said,” It’s a good film, but there are other considerations.” First, Thailand imports about 14 percent of its oil from Iran and last year signed an agreement to import natural gas.

The other “consideration:” Muslim terrorists killed three people in Thailand on June 27, four on June 24, four on June 23, one on the 22nd, seven on the 15th, three on the 14th, four on the 13th, and so on. Showing the film might make matters worse, so … no film. No exploration of the problems of Muslim girlhood in Islamist Iran.

Next: England knighted Salman Rushdie and protests broke out all over the Muslim world over Rushdie’s alleged insults against Muhammad in his novel “The Satanic Verses.” Iran announced that Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa demanding Rushdie’s murder was still in effect and could never be revoked. England’s radical Muslims were out in force burning flags, demanding Rushdie’s murder, and issuing not very veiled threats.

In Pakistan, leading politicians demanded the knighthood be revoked, that the country break diplomatic relations with England, and that suicide bombers should attack the West to defend Muhammad’s honor. And then it seems, somebody did. There were car bombs defused in Piccadilly Circus but not in Glasgow.

Reaction in the West always includes appeasement. A Conservative Member of Parliament said honoring Rushdie was “gratuitously offensive” and a Labor MP stated, “Anybody with common sense would have blocked this.”

Most upsetting is the lack of any sign of support from other writers in the West. Some British writers even called Rushdie irresponsible for accepting the honor. Yet Rushdie is another force pushing Muslims to confront Islam’s uncritical attitudes about religious texts. What he wrote pained some, but that’s the whole point of creativity: reform, improvement, modernizing, change are painful things.

Many Westerners know this truth. They simply won’t admit (even to themselves) that they are simply cowering. They say they are “being sensitive …” but only to those they fear. Buddhists, Jews and Christians don’t threaten suicide attacks every time someone insults Buddha, Moses or Jesus. Western appeasers especially ought to look inward: Cowering not only encourages jihadis, but it also abandons the people – the Muslim girls in Iran, Muslim intellectuals around the world – that their own principles teach them to support.

See Judiasm versus Deism and Gnosticism

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