The Jihad on Free Speech
In France before Christmas, attacks in which cars were used as battering rams against crowds amid shouts of “Allahu akbar” were said by French authorities to be unconnected with each other.
Yet Muslim violence in France has clearly been out of control for years. Just look at the repeated Islamic pogroms against French Jews, which have driven thousands of them to emigrate. Yet none of those attacks provoked the kind of outrage that followed this atrocity. Is free speech more important than the lives of French Jews? More recently, two radical Islamists attacked the “Draw Muhammad” contest in Garland (Texas). But the West refuses to join up the dots while the media blames the victims rather than the perpetrators. Both the Charlie Hebdo attackers and the Garland shooters shouted “Allahu akbar” and “We are avenging the Prophet Muhammad.”
Yet Obama, Cameron, and Hollande condemned the attack as merely “terrorism,” carefully omitting to say what kind of terrorism this was. This follows their absurd statements that the Islamic State terrorist group has “nothing to do with Islam” and that “no religion” condones that kind of barbarism.
Really? What links Islamic State, al-Qaeda, Taliban, Hamas, and Boko Haram? It’s an ideology based on the most literal interpretation of Islam, subscribed to by the tens (if not hundreds) of millions of adherents around the world.
For sure, many Muslims are not only opposed to Islamist terrorism but are its principal victims. But to pretend that it is not rooted in a legitimate interpretation of the religion, backed up by the historical evidence of centuries of aggressive and violent Islamic conquest is ridiculous.
If the West cannot even bring itself to acknowledge what it is up against, then it will surely be defeated by it.
Both France and Britain in their different ways have given in to Muslim extremism. Multicultural Britain has allowed Islam uniquely privileged treatment: providing sharia banking, tolerating polygamy, and converting school kitchens to halal.
What the West should be doing is drawing a very firm line in the sand to defend its own values. It should be fighting Muslim radicalization by establishing what should be considered totally unacceptable.
At present, for example, it ignores the rabid anti-Semitism coursing through the Muslim world.Yet this is a driving force behind Islamist terrorists, who believe not only that modernity and the West must be destroyed, but that the Jews are behind both of them.
Muslims must confront the beliefs in their own religion and culture that swell the seas in which terrorism swims. And the secular West must start to teach Muslims the hard truths that will force them to do so.
The problem is that another Western core value is the desire to compromise – even with those whose agenda brooks no compromise, and who see such a desire as a weakness to be exploited.
If Western civilization hasn’t yet embarked on the straight path toward self-annihilation and still has the willpower and the capacity to survive and thrive, then it has to address its existential threat of enforced multiculturalism and stifling political correctness. The Islamists have been able to exercise so much power and influence in the West only thanks to their leftist liberal enablers. The only reasonable answer to this threat would be a firm stance for our true liberal and secular values which include not only the freedom of conscience but also the freedom of speech.