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Sharia law in Britian
Quiet crusading vs. soft jihad
By OnTheWeb Sunday, February 24, 2008Roger Kimball at Pajamas Media makes a modest proposal for resisting the spread of Sharia in Britain.
Quiet crusading vs. soft jihad
When the Archbishop of Canterbury assured everyone a week or two ago that that the establishment of sharia law in Britian was “unavoidable,” there were howls of protest (there was also a standing ovation for the Primate of All England in the General Synod, but that, after all, was the Church of England bleating). But why the howls? After all, it was only a day or two later that it was announced that the British government planned to issue “sharia compliant” Islamic bonds “to pay for Gordon Brown’s public-spending programme by raising money from the Middle East.” “The scheme,” a story in the Mail on Sunday reported, would “mark one of the most significant economic advances of sharia law in the non-Muslim world. It will lead to the ownership of Government buildings and other assets currently belonging to British taxpayers being switched wholesale to wealthy Middle-Eastern businessmen and banks.” Well, nobody really liked those buildings anyway.
Over at NRO, Andrew McCarthy has some breaking news from the London Times on another front in the progress of soft jihad. “Knorbert the piglet,” The Times reports, “has been dropped as the mascot of Fortis Bank after it decided to stop giving piggy banks to children for fear of offending Muslims.”
That’s the new mantra, you know: “for fear of offending Muslims.” We don’t give away piggy banks (to say nothing of other “pig related items”) “for fear of offending Muslims.” We don’t draw cartoons of Mohammad “for fear of offending Muslims.” We mustn’t publish articles pointing out the demographic disparity between the Muslims of Canada and Europe and other parts of the population “for fear of offending Muslims.” We mustn’t even publish books saying critical things about “Saudis and terrorists” “for fear of offending Muslims.”
It’s all part of the campaign of soft jihad. Traditional jihad is waged with scimitars and their contemporary equivalents, e.g., stolen Boeing 767s, which make handy instruments of mass homicide. Soft jihad is a quieter affair: it uses and abuses the language and the principles of democratic liberalism not to secure the institutions and attitudes that make freedom possible but, on the contrary, to undermine that freedom and pave the way for self-righteous, theocratic intolerance. Soft jihad is patient. It can add and multiply as well as Mark Steyn can (and here). It, too, sees the demographic writing on the wall and is content to wait a few years to occupy the West’s real estate—it’s so much easier, when you come right down to it, than blowing the stuff up and then finding yourself with a massive clean-up and rebuilding bill. Just sit tight and watch the infidels tie themselves into knots making excuses for you while, elsewhere in their lives, they embrace barrenness as an “environmentally friendly” alternative to Genesis 1:28.
