When Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against “Satanic Verses” author Salman Rushdie in 1989 for “blasphemy” against Islam, the reaction was swift: Rushdie repented and killed the paperback edition of his novel, lest he be killed himself. As the BBC put it in 1990, “He renewed his faith in Islam on Christmas Eve and disassociated himself from the anti-Muslim sentiments expressed by characters in his book.”
Not that his obsequiousness did him any good. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khomeini’s successor, pronounced the fatwa a “divine ruling” that couldn’t be withdrawn even if Rushdie “repents and becomes the most pious man of his time.”
Since then, intolerance among Islamists in Europe has grown to the point that public figures are cowed by the constant threat of violence, often acted upon, should anyone insult the faith — “insult” being defined as disagreeing with its precepts or refusing to live by its mores.
Just last month, Muslim leaders in the U.K. demanded public holidays to mark religious festivals and to implement Islamic family law; they warned government officials that they wouldn’t be treated like “patsies” to publicly defend the war in Iraq or Britain’s policies in Lebanon.
Worse, this effort to legitimize the implementation of sharia (Islamic law) in a Western country was proclaimed as part of an effort to prevent further terrorist acts. Inayat Bunglawala, of the Muslim Council of Britain, said of his talks with Ruth Kelly, the government’s communities secretary: “We accepted on our side there are issues with extremism. However, we need better to understand how it is otherwise ordinary young minds are becoming radicalized.”
All of which is to argue that the disease is the cure: Give us radical Islam, which drives young people to blow themselves up in order to indiscriminately kill innocents, and we’ll stop the killing. And pneumoconiosis is the cure for coal mining.
Such bravado is encouraged when so many of Europe’s intellectual and political elites, steeped in philosophical nihilism and ridden with guilt for their own nations’ bloody histories, prove themselves incapable — or at best unwilling — to fight for the survival of liberal democracy.
More examples of Euro-casualties to Islamist demands abound. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch-Somali politician and apostate from Islam, was forced to flee for her life to a think tank in Washington.
Yet her fate is preferable to that of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who produced Hirsi Ali’s film “Submission” and was murdered by an Islamist, whose five-page note (left stuck into van Gogh’s chest with a knife) threatened Hirsi Ali with the same punishment.
And Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was murdered by a Dutchman who claimed to have acted for the country’s Muslim minority, of which Fortuyn was very critical. It’s unlikely that, absent Fortuyn’s calls for restrictions on immigration from Muslim lands, he would have met such a grisly end.
In Germany this week, the prominent German-Turkish women’s rights lawyer Seyran Ates announced she was quitting her practice because of death threats from militant Turks who resent her defense of Turkish women.
Few groups in the West need more protection than Turkish women, who are subjected to physical and psychological abuse and even murder at the hands of husbands, brothers and fathers, and who rarely learn German — the single most important assimilative act they could take. Ates is a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), but she told a Berlin newspaper that, “The SPD is still dominated by an immigration policy that plays things down.”
Radical Islamism’s enablers have other ways of making one not talk. When Professor Pieter W. Van Der Horst retired from teaching early Jewish studies at the University of Utrecht in Holland, he proposed in his valedictory address to trace the history of the charge that Jews eat human flesh from its classical origins to the modern Middle East. This would necessarily entail discussion of anti-Semitism in the contemporary Middle East, but he intended to offer no criticism of Islam itself.
Yet the dean of the faculty asked Van Der Horst to refrain from mentioning Islamic Jew hatred. As he wrote in the European Wall Street Journal, an internal committee sided with the dean, citing fear that his uncensored lecture would lead to “violent reactions” from Muslim student groups and harm relations between Muslims and non-Muslims. He had no choice but to comply, although his uncensored lecture was published in the Dutch media, which proved more courageous than Utrecht’s administrators.
Winfield Myers is a member of The Examiner’s Blog Board of Contributors and blogs at DemocracyProject.com and CampusWatch.org.
