The West’s stand toward Islam is fully revealed

Diana West informs us that the Pentagon’s 86-page report on the Fort Hood Massacre, released this week,

doesn’t mention the words “Muslim,” “Islam,” “jihad,” “Sharia” (Islamic law), “Koran”—despite the fact that we know, among other things, that the killer, who initiated his massacre with a cry of “Allahu Akbar,” was a Muslim inspired by Islam to perform an act of jihad as sanctioned by Sharia derived from the Koran.

Let us be clear: this is not just “pre-September 11,” since in the 1990s, and at least as far back as the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the American government at least verbally acknowledged the reality of, even if it didn’t do much to oppose, Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic terrorism. So this Fort Hood report is beyond a mere “September 10” state of mind—it is off the planet. We of the West have an enemy, an enemy who is both waging war against us and who has a clearly expressed doctrine of war that he is following; yet the governments of the West refuse as a matter of policy to recognize the existence of this enemy and his openly expressed war doctrine.

Furthermore, Diana West continues, when a person in the West does speak plainly about the enemy and the enemy’s doctrine of war, that person is indicted for the crime of hate speech. Thus the Dutch politician Geert Wilders’s trial for “inciting hatred and discrimination against Islam” has begun this week—the same week that the Islam-free report on the Fort Hood jihadist massacre was published.

Forget about my usual explanation that this is all about liberalism and its prohibition on discriminating against nonwhites and non-Westerners. There is a much simpler explanation: the governments of the West and its main organs of opinion have already surrendered to Islam. Under Islamic law, criticism of Islam is prohibited.(e.g. the report on Fort Hood) and punished (e.g., the trial of Wilders). It is as simple as that. Western governments are now obeying and enforcing Islamic law—exactly as Barack Obama pledged to do in his Cairo speech last June, when he declared:

I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.

Law professor Afshin Ellian, a witness for the defense in the Wilders trial, gets to the real meaning of the anti-hate speech laws in general and of Obama’s pledge in particular:

If you cannot say that Islam is a backward religion and that Muhammad is a criminal, then you are living in an Islamic country.

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(In connection with the above, see also my January 11 entry, “We have already surrendered to Islam,” which is about how we accept living permamently under the threat of Islamic terrorism instead of taking action to remove the threat.)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 22, 2010 10:59 AM | Send