I have come to believe that the Western way of life — which I’ll define in brief as life lived according to Judeo-Christian-evolved morality and liberty — is imperiled by the demographic spread and influence of Islamic ideology and laws. Notice I didn’t say the spread of “Islamism.” Or “Islamist-ism.” Or “Islamofascism.” Or just “Wahhabism.” Or “fundamentalist militant extremism.” Over the years, I have used most of these “ists” and “isms” in my column, trying them out one by one until I got to the point where I realized they were serving as a distraction, a form of verbal camouflage that turns our attention away from the ideology and laws of Islam itself.
In the cause of not-giving-offense — the highest cause of Westerners-turned-multiculturalists—we have prevented ourselves from undertaking a hard-eyed appraisal of Islamic ideology as a whole, jihadism included, and engaging in a serious discussion of how to contain it.
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Worth noting is that poll after poll in the Muslim world indicate that Muslims believe the “war on terror” is in reality a “war on Islam.” Are they correct? As the war is currently designed, I would have to say yes, they are — although this is surely not the president’s intention. If, however, you understand that freedom of conscience and sexual equality, to take just two basic ideals of the president’s democratization strategy, are seen as antithetical to Islamic law, it becomes clear that bringing such freedoms to the Islamic world would certainly appear to Muslim believers as being part of a war on Islam.
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I would describe PC life in a multiculti world as being marked in part by self-censorship based in fear — fear of professional failure, opprobrium or social ostracism. I would also describe this same self-censorship as a form of childishness. During one lecture on The Death of the Grown-Up, I took a question from a man who wondered, in a rather agitated way, if I were actually saying that multiculturalism is juvenile. I hadn’t phrased things that way, but, on quick reflection, I told him that, yes, that was indeed what I was saying. The fact is, buying into multiculturalism — the outlook that sees all cultures as being of equal value (except the West, which is essentially vile) — requires us to repress our faculties of logic, and this in itself is an infantilizing act.
I mean, it’s patently illogical to accept and teach our children the notion that a culture that has brought liberty and penicillin to the masses is of no greater value than others that haven’t. In accepting the multicultural worldview, we deceive ourselves into inhabiting a world of pretend where certain truths are out of bounds and remain unspoken — even verboten.
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In the nearly two decades since the Rushdie case, we have seen, to take just a few random examples, a British broadcast watchdog group note that “Islam was accorded far more respect on television and radio than other religions”; the EU racism watchdog shelve a report on antisemitism in Europe because it concluded Muslims and Palestinian groups were responsible for most of the incidents; a British Foreign Office minister apologize repeatedly for a line in a speech that called on British Muslims to choose between political dialogue and “the way of the terrorists”; and an American president end his “crusade” before it began and declare Islam a religion of peace. (I refer to President Bush’s early post-9/11 remarks: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.”)
Is this dhimmitude under Islam? Or PC life in a multicultural world? Or have the two worlds morphed?
