2008-05-03 An Anatomy of Surrender

2008-05-03 Bruce Bawer City Journal \Islamic cultural invasion\Muhammad/cartoon riots http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_2_cultural_jihadists.html An Anatomy of Surrender &ldquo;...the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Khomeini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech.&rdquo;  What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Khomeini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.

The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular – the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam's oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper's 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed – have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology – which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive – people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis – infidels living in Muslim societies.   