Ghost of a flea: Call it a cultural surrender

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April 28, 2008

Call it a cultural surrender

The blindingly obvious deserves to be repeated. At least until it is no longer legal to do so. Writing for City Journal, Bruce Bawer discusses creeping sharia.

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.

Ten years ago it would have been unthinkable to imagine the re-introduction of blasphemy law in Canadian life, let alone blasphemy against a religion only a small minority of people in this country believe. Exemptions from equal conduct before the law, special access to public facilities and the media, and the imposition upon Canadian women of Dark Ages sumptuary laws. What next? Shall we resurrect slavery on the grounds it is sanctioned by the Koran? How long before the Toronto Star, the CBC or the Prime Minister's Office of Canada's "conservative" government find an excuse for a Canadian Barbary enclave?

Would that I were joking. We have seen time and again this past century how liberal polities can cede their freedoms to ludicrous, fascist nonsense practically overnight. Not only the obvious case of Germany and Hitler's Enabling Act - many of whose provisions may already find their direct analogy in Canadian law - but Spain, Lebanon, Iran, the descent into anarchy of Yugoslavia, and on and on.

The first victims of our surrender to sharia are, of course, Muslims; specifically those Muslims who came to the West to escape sharia. And especially those Muslims with the misfortune to have been born women; women who might reasonably have imagined feminists, progressives and human rights commissions would strenuously object to teenage girls strangled in the suburbs of Toronto for "shaming" their male relatives. Instead, the excuses. The transparent racism in abandoning these victims to their fate - throwing them on a pyre of our own self-loathing - should go without saying. But it too should be repeated for as long as it is still legal to do so.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at April 28, 2008 07:27 AM

Comments

An interesting point about who pays first (being Muslims who came to this country to escape repression). I wonder, how many is that? Does the number exceed the number who come bearing as a cultural gift the potent mix of medievalism and misogyny that they were nurtured in?

Posted by: Occam's Carbuncle at April 28, 2008 02:19 PM

It seems clear that whatever the percentage, those Muslims who come here seeking representative government, equality before the law, and some sort of ecumenical compromise in social life do not feel safe speaking out against the "tiny minority of extremists". I can think of one Canadian name - Irshad Manji - and one name alone. And Manji, of course, has received death threats for having the nerve to suggest a revival of ijtihad.

The only intervention I can think of in Manji's case by what I will laughingly call "the left" was public mockery on the part of journalist who - being a tough, bright woman herself - should have known better. No, it is left to us slandered as "cryto-Nazis" to defend the right of a Gujarati/Egyptian-Canadian feminists to speak her mind, to advance a moderate vision of a religion we are tirelessly assured is overwhelmingly composed of moderates.

Posted by: Ghost of a flea at April 28, 2008 03:05 PM

Ghost of a flea

April 28, 2008

Call it a cultural surrender

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