Jihad and dhimmitude

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/2007/08/017871print.html

August 22, 2007

Jihad and dhimmitude


Andrew Bostom reviews Diana West's superb new book in The Washington Times.

...The author's witty, evocative phrasemaking — "hair-trigger moderate [Muslims]," "mash of civilizations," "far from realpolitik, this is dreampolitik," "in denial there is defeat" — elucidates an infantilized American (and Western) culture, further immobilized by the pervasive fanaticism of the new "secular religion" of multiculturalism, to the point where it appears incapable of identifying, let alone adequately defending against, the resurgence of jihadist Islam.
Accurately portraying the central, uniquely Islamic institutions of jihad, and its corollary, dhimmitude, the author eschews the dominant, politically correct but ahistorical characterizations.

Jihad — as sanctioned by Islam's core texts, the Koran, hadith and sira, and actualized by the Muslim prophet Muhammad himself — is the eternal, aggressive quest for totalitarian Islamic hegemony, i.e., the imposition of Islamic law, over the entire world, including via terrorism and genocide. Dhimmitude is the permanent state of legal, social and psychological inferiority imposed, coercively or by threat of force (i.e., resumption of the jihad), upon the non-Muslim survivors vanquished by jihad war, and neither converted to Islam nor enslaved.

Julien Benda, in his 1928 classic "La Trahison de Clercs," decried with prophetic accuracy how the abandonment of objective truths abetted totalitarian ideologies, which led to the cataclysmic destruction of World War II. The author identifies the "Trahison de Clercs" of our time: The complete failure of Western intellectuals to acknowledge the heinous consequences of the living Islamic institutions of jihad war and dhimmitude.

Might Diana West's pellucid analyses help awaken Western elites to the existential threat they pose? One hopes these elites follow the admonition to rediscover and reclaim our shamefully derided Western cultural patrimony of "dead white males," including icons such as Britain's Winston Churchill and America's John Quincy Adams and Theodore Roosevelt, whose uncompromised wisdom on Islam is so desperately needed if our civilization is to survive.

TR, for example, wrote these words in 1916, presaging this book's advice: "The civilization of Europe, America, and Australia exists today at all only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization... [including] those of Charles Martel in the 8th century [over Arab jihadists] and those of John Sobieski in the 17th century [over Ottoman Turkish jihadists]. During the thousand years that included the careers of the Frankish soldier [Martel] and the Polish king [Sobieski], the Christians of Asia and Africa proved unable to wage successful war with the Moslem conquerors; and in consequence Christianity practically vanished from the two continents; and today nobody can find in them any 'social values' whatever, in the sense in which we use the words, so far as the sphere of Mohammedan influence [is]... concerned."
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"May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't." -General George S. Patton

Psalm 82-8: Arise, O God, judge the earth, for You inherit all the nations.