The Muslims regard us as dhimmis, a status we imposed on ourselves

Introduction

The mainstream conservative media have been filled for days with disapproving, shocked, and hostile reactions to the Muslim threats and riots over Pope Benedict’s remarks. But, as I explain below, what the mainstream conservatives fail to realize is that the West itself created this situation. Over the last 40 years, the West has consistently and with ever-increasing devotion behaved as a dhimmi. The Muslims quite reasonably interpreted the West’s behavior as a constructive and even a literal pact of dhimmitude. But now, by openly criticizing Islam, the West is violating the dhimmi pact, and the Muslims are violently angry about this, as, under the rules of dhimmitude, they have every right to be.

If the West is to free itself from the Muslim yoke, it must first recognize its own role in creating it, and then take decisive action to end it, by abrogating and ceasing all manifestations of Western subordination to Islam.

* * *

Something strange is happening. Pope Benedict clearly and repeatedly said that Manuel II Paleologos’s thoughts about Muhammad were not his own. Yet it seems Muslim threats are only increasing. Thus 1,000 Pakistani clerics met and demanded that the pope be removed from office for his insults to Islam. They issued a statement saying:

The pope, and all infidels, should know that no Muslim, under any circumstances, can tolerate an insult to the Prophet (Muhammad)…. If the West does not change its stance regarding Islam, it will face severe consequences.

These characters do not seem to realize the message they are sending us. If, even after the Benedict dissociated himself from the statement that everything Muhammad brought was evil and inhuman, and even after Benedict reiterated the dhimmi Vatican II declaration Nostra Aetate and embraced all Muslims as adorers of the one God, the Muslims are still breathing forth threats and promises of death to those who insult Islam, then they are really not giving us any room for maneuvre, are they? If their loud and clear message to us is, shut up or die, then it becomes inescapably clear to us that either we remove any influence and power that Muslims can have over us, chiefly by removing Muslims from the West, or they will subjugate and kill us.

But we need to understand that the Muslims in revealing their remorseless hostility toward us and so waking us up are not being perverse or hot-headed; they are being good Muslims, obediently following the ancient patterns of Islamic law. Benedict, by criticizing the Prophet, even though he soon retracted the comment, broke the rule of dhimmitude, which is that if the dhimmi insults Muhammad, his “protected” dhimmi status is abrogated and jihad war recommences. And that is what has happened, not just in relation to Benedict but in relation to the West as a whole.

The Muslims are following the same rules they have always followed. It is the West that over the last four decades has acted perversely. The Western openness to mass Muslim immigration, the Western and Christian accommodation of Muslims, and the Western and Christian prohibition of any criticisms of Muslims have signified, from the Muslims’ point of view, a dhimmitude situation in which the West was abasing itself to Islam. The irony is that the Muslims did not, as in the past, impose dhimmitude on the dhimmi through the Muslims’ superior power; rather the dhimmi in this case imposed dhimmitude on itself. The West did not know that it was doing anything of the kind. Westerners had never heard of the Islamic institutions of sharia and dhimmitude, they thought they were just practicing the Western virtues of tolerance and non-discrimination. The West’s dhimmi status came into being through Western liberalism, rather than through Islamic jihad, but it came into being nevertheless, and, as such, it automatically activated the sharia rule that the dhimmi is protected from death so long as he keeps his mouth shut. (Note that the “protection” the Muslims extend to the dhimmi is not a protection from some dangerous third party, but a protection from the Muslims themselves. It is, quite literally, a protection racket.)

Which brings us back to the present. Now that the West is at long last starting to strain under the Islamic pressure and to criticize Islam, the Muslims—quite correctly, from their point of view—see this unwonted Western spiritedness as a violation of the dhimma pact, triggering the death sentence on the offending dhimmi. The Muslims have therefore launched open jihad against the West—a jihad made possible and legitimized only by the West’s previous, purely voluntary, choice to subordinate itself to Islam. It is, to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s description of World War II, the Unnecessary Jihad.

- end of initial entry -

Bat Ye’or writes:

You are right! It is exactly that.

Charlton G. writes:

An acquaintance of mine recently confided to me, “Frankly, I’d rather live as a God fearing Muslim than end up in the loony, secularist, multicultural hell-hole the liberals are preparing for me and my children.”

I thought about what he said and rejected it. Better to die, I thought. Although both visions of the future seem bleak, I could not see throwing over my civilization (and race) to avoid the ghastly twilight of liberal utopia. But the fact that others are considering Islam to be a better alternative to what is happening to us here in the West is disturbing. Naturally, I have no idea how many like this fellow there are. But there may be more than are willing to come forth and admit it, both here and in Europe. (Can you imagine how difficult it must be in Europe for a Christian traditionalist?) I’m just wondering out loud here, but it may very well have occurred to the Muslims that there are others in our midst who will not fight.

To paraphrase the old commercial: they would rather switch than fight.

LA replies:

That’s horrific that anyone would say that. Yet the same thing has happened over and over. Whenever the West lost to Islam, it was because of dissatisfaction and divisions within the West.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 22, 2006 09:52 AM | Send