In Britain this week, a former Royal Marine spoke out after the inquest into the 2010 IED death of Sgt. Peter Rayner to tell the Sun newspaper that soldiers were prevented from opening fire at Taliban in the act of laying improvised explosive devices so as not to disturb the local population. So as not to disturb … ?
From Iowa, where a community mourns the death of National Guardsman Terry L. Pasker, who, along with contractor Paul Protzenko, was killed in yet another attack by an Afghan army soldier last week, DesMoinesRegister.com reports:
“The U.S. military considered the area so safe that soldiers didn’t wear body armor, so as not to offend the friendly locals.”
So as not to offend … ?
Fear of giving offense has long been a salient feature of our culture, an expression of a self-deprecating if not self-loathing society. Since Sept. 11, however, this psychosis has had a new application — the ultimate point of my book “The Death of the Grown-Up.”
In today’s war zone, fear of giving offense is personally deadly, as noted above. But it also applies more broadly as a basic principle of “dhimmitude,” the twisted state of non-Muslims in thrall to Islam, a condition long observed and documented by the visionary historian Bat Ye’or.
The fear of giving Muslims offense is the most profound acquiescence to Islamic cultural pressures because it is driven, at base, by the conviction that self-preservation as a non-Muslim is itself offensive in a Muslim society.
The fact is, Islamic societies across time and continents have forced non-Muslims to pay a tax, the jizya, to remain non-Muslims, and inflicted all manner of humiliations, physical and mental, upon them as a matter of Islamic law, or Sharia, for doing so.
Where Islamic law is not officially in effect, Bat Ye’or explains, the de facto state of dhimmitude may still arise and flourish in the habitual appeasement of Islamic sensibilities in order to forestall the occasional violent eruption — the odd 9/11, 7/7, or thwarted Times Square bombing.
The net effect of all this appeasement, this dhimmitude, is the creeping — galloping — incursions of Islamic law into non-Islamic institutions and societies.
In Afghanistan, the same triggers are in place. We have an infidel army walking on eggs to placate, cajole and bribe an Islamic society into supporting what are, any way you cut them, infidel values and interests against those of the Islamic jihadist groups in the region.
To this end, Western military authorities now specifically ordain that the Koran must be revered (or else violence might ensue). They also in effect require that Islamic customs on polygamy, on the sexual abuse of children, be tolerated (or else violence might ensue).
The Danish cartoons, the Rev. Terry Jones, even freedom of speech must be denounced by the highest Western military officials — by Gen. David Petraeus himself (or else violence might ensue).
These capitulations on bedrock Western traditions of speech, conscience and human rights could only occur under a debased leadership, military and civilian. When the fear of giving offense to the local Islamic community (by shooting Taliban or wearing body armor) trumps self-preservation (by shooting Taliban or wearing body armor), we know the military’s dhimmitude is complete.
What I am describing, of course, is the counterinsurgency strategy to win Afghan hearts and minds — “trust,” as it’s usually called. Far from winning Afghan trust, hearts or minds, however, it is killing our troops and dhimmifying our military.
Taking off troops’ body armor so as not to offend “friendly” Afghans? Are they kidding? If Congress does nothing more, it should take the trouble to find out.
Examiner Columnist Diana West is syndicated nationally by United Media and is the author of “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.”
