Damned if you do: Historians dare to criticize Islamic dhimmitude at Georgetown and pay a price

NRO ^ | 10/29/2002 | Rod Dreher

[Utah Girl]

Ping

[RonF]

Many radical Moslems decry the Crusades of the Middle Ages. The evil Christians invading the homelands of the peaceful Moslems. But, read your early Church history. Look at the names of the cities and countries. Jerusalem, Aleppo, Syria, all kinds of cities and countries with numerous Christians, vibrant and growing. Then, a few hundred years later, they're 100% Moslem. What happened? Polite young men going door to door with their Qu'ran? Nope. Fire and sword, convert or die. If you want to go back 1000 years to justify one, then let's go back 1300 years instead and ask what happened then?

[VOA]

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[Bigg Red]

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[3AngelaD]

The treatment of non Muslims in Muslim-occupied Spain is what finally propelled the Spanish to oust their Islamic conquerers, a long painful process that wasn't accomplished entirely until 1492. (It is impossible to truly understand the Inquisition without an understanding of what went before). Tolerance is a value peculiar to western civilization (and a recently developed one at that) which Islam does not share. The only time the Muslims among us support academic freedom and freedom of expression is when they can take advantage of it to insult us, advocate the destruction of the state of Israel and/or advocate the overthrow of our government and way of life, a prime example being these Islamic students at Georgetown, as well as Sami Al-Arian in Florida. Everything that occured on September 11, 2001 is part of that approach. They screwed up their countries and now they are here trying to screw up ours (while enjoying all the freedom and opportunity we have to offer in the meantime). Time for them to leave. (No one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.)

[onedoug]

The enemy is Islamism. That is, the advancing of jihad to impose sharia, or Islamic law, by force on the infidel.

"...when Muslim students became angry and emotional over her remarks.

This has an Islamist smell to me.

All American Muslims should renounce Islamism. If they don't, they are, "adhering to (America's) enemies, giving them aid and comfort."

That's Treason, plain and simple.

[RaceBannon]

Outstanding article!!

[TheConservator]

Islam today is pretty much where Christianity was 1350 years after its inception.

It took the Christian West about 200 years of constant and very destructive warfare to move from the conception of the Christian religion as a politically monolithic entity that physically suppressed other religions and internal dissent (Knights Templars, Teutonic Knights, Inquisition, etc) to modern notions of freedom of conscience in the marketplace of ideas.

The problem is, given the current state of technology, the World cannot afford to have Islam go through a similar process.

[Alouette]

We wanted an event that talked about authoritarian regimes and how they twist and distort Islam to justify repression against minorities.

They were sorely disappointed to find out that no twisting or distortion of true Islam was required to justify repression of minorities.

I have had it with these gutless, self-abominating, crawling, grovelling, Stockholmed-up-the-wazoo leftist Jewsies.

[ClearCase_guy]

When Muslim students in attendance reacted angrily to the speakers' presentations on jihad and dhimmitude, the Jewish students apparently changed their tune. "I don't think it was intimidation," says Rabbi White. "I think it was based on the fact that the week before, they had participated in a successful program on Jewish-Palestinian dialogue, and I think they must have figured it would endanger dialogue in the future."

These Jewish students were guilty of appeasement. They held themselves back because they wanted to maintain a favorable dialogue with Muslims in the future. Hah! Muslims do not allow dialogue that is favorable to anyone but themselves.

[dennisw]

Disgusting! What disgraceful commie-ass Jews caving into Muslim intimidation.

[MoGalahad]

I understand the point you are trying to make, Conservator, but I must disagree with your pithy summary of Christian History. Christian History couldn't be more different from Muslim History. Yes, Western culture went through growing pains during the middle ages; however to allude to this as 'Christian' History is not accurate. Western culture has always encompassed much more that Christianity. Muslim culture has no room for anything but Islam.
I do agree with your statement concerning current technology and its impact on the present world order.

[Dark Wing]

A Failure of will ping!

[Illbay]

Meanwhile in other news:Does Brigham Young University pose a threat to academic freedom?

Seems the Left wants freedom only for those THEY select.

[sheik yerbouty]

I cou;dn't have said it better! Send the jihadists to perdition.

[CatoRenasci]

I have all three of Bat Yeor's books on Dhimmitude and have read most of them (it gets hard, as important as the sustance is and as interested in it I am as an historian, her prose is pretty turgid). Her works were among a goodly number on Islam, its texts, origins and history, since 9/11/2001. The more I read, the more I become convinced that Islam itself is the problem. Its notion that Islamization is irreversible is reminiscent of the Soviet doctrine that once a country went socialist, it could not leave the Soviet orbit. After all, the Crusades, for all their brutality and the like, were a response to the Moslem conquest of the Near East and what had been Roman Africa as well as the Holy Land. Basically, since the Moors were stopped in the West in 732, the warfare has been ongoing. As late as 1683 the Turks were at the gates of Vienna. In the last 200 years, however, Islam has sunk into corruption and incompetence begotten of its own intolerance and rigid fundamentalism.

I would suspect the opposition to her work comes primarily because the Moslems simply will not look at anything relating to Islam through the sort of historical paradigm that the West has used for the past 200 years. Bernard Lewis speaks to this in his useful little book: What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response.

[Illbay]

Western culture has always encompassed much more that Christianity. Muslim culture has no room for anything but Islam.

I can't see how you can make this distinction. Have you ever had a college-freshman level Western Civ course? It's ALL about Christianity--from the rise of the early Roman Catholic Church to the Holy Roman Empire to the various schisms and heresies all the way up through the Reformation.

Western art (Michelangelo, Rafael), music (Gregorian chant, Palestrina, Bach), literature (Bunyan, Donne, Milton) and architecture (Leonardo, Wren) are completely subsumed by Christian tradition. In fact, they existed and developed solely because of the Christian religion.

It wasn't until the "Enlightenment" in the mid-to-late 1700s that Western institutions began to part ways with the Church to any extent--and even now, religion in the Christian world is as important a factor in its development as it is in the Muslim world.

I know you can draw many contrasts between Islam and Christianity, but you can also draw quite a few parallels. Islam was not ALWAYS the scourge and bane of the earth; there was a time when it was the repository and caretaker of the learning of the ancient Near East, and the contribution of Muslim Arabs in the sciences and mathematics is inestimable.

Of course, that was then and this is now. The poverty, ignorance and social backwardness of the Islamic world today has to be laid at the feet of that religion and especially, the "enlightened" potentates who use it to further their own ends, from Libya to Saudi Arabia to Iraq to Iran.

Let us engage the present threat, yes, of course, but let us not rewrite history to justify our doing so.

[Shermy]

The chaplain added that he wasn't sure that her voice belonged on a college campus

That says it all. Universities have become islands of repression and suppression.

[Re-electNobody]

This is eerily similar to David Horowitz' speech at Emory University.