Anyone still insisting that the answer to “Islamism” (a bogus term, there’s only Islam) is for Muslim leaders to embrace Islamic reforms, should be given a stiff arm…
A very long time ago before the West started to cave to Islamic demands (accepting the dhimmi mindset) a half-assed, plausible case could be made that “reform of Islam” was the answer. Much has happened since that time in the post-Christian West, which has steadily embraced the scenario of a robust Islamic presence in Europe. Islamic reform hasn’t occurred in spite of the nods from certain Islamic clerics and leaders, but one thing has happened for sure, the West has changed, for the worst.
Our fundamental inalienable right to speak our minds has been greatly curtailed, to the point of self-censorship just to keep one’s job and out of jail. The West has allowed the most fundamentalist of Muslim voices to supervise Western governmental agencies and civil enterprises for ”anti-Islamic/Muslim policies and rhetoric. The highly dubious term of “Islamophobia” is now being trumpeted as being a legitimate term, something akin to antisemitism/Jew-hatred, though in practice it’s a term meant to protect a highly political ideology, not a race of people.
We simply can’t allow our political leaders, supposed scholars on Islam, and assorted pundits and commentators to keep banging the same drum beat any longer. Totalitarian Islam is not compatible with Western-style democracy, and we surely can’t wait for it to ”reform” itself, for the West will no longer exist if we do.
THE RUSHDIE FATWA, THIRTY YEARS LATER
Who among us would dare to predict what the world would look like thirty years from now?
Thirty years ago today, the then ruler of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, sent a valentine to Salman Rushdie in the form of a fatwa.
Rushdie, born in 1947 in Bombay (now Mumbai), had attended Cambridge, settled in Britain, and become famous with his second novel, Midnight’s Children (1981). His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), featured a storyline about Muhammed and the Koran that was deemed blasphemous throughout the Muslim world, leading the novel to be banned in over a dozen countries. The fatwa condemned Rushdie, his publishers, and his editors to death, and called on “all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth.” Khomeini’s government announced that anyone who assassinated Rushdie would receive $6 million, if he survived, and instant martyrdom in Heaven, if he didn’t. The fact that Rushdie, an outspoken leftist, had joined many other cultural-elite types in supporting the overthrow of the Shah apparently didn’t impress Khomeini enough to keep him from ordering Rushdie’s murder.
At that time, the word fatwa was unfamiliar outside the Muslim world. Indeed, for most people in the West, the idea of the long arm of Islam reaching out from that primitive corner of the planet and into the civilized West was a relatively new idea – even though, in historical terms, it was a very old idea, dating back to Islam’s seventh-century founding. Even the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre was widely seen not as a strike against the Free World that was motivated by Islamic ideology but, rather, as an act of Palestinian Jew-hatred
There was also, of course, the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81, but that event, although it involved the detention of fifty-two Americans and had been in the news for 444 days straight, had occurred in Tehran, not in the West, and, in any event, hadn’t exactly been perceived as an act of terrorism. So it was that at the time of the Rushdie fatwa,terrorism was still associated in the Western mind less with Islam than with the Irish Republican Army, with FARC and other groups in Colombia, with Basque separatists in Spain, with Shining Path in Peru, and with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh.
