Lars Vilks, "Gay Muhammad" and "Freedom of Expression"

This past week brings news of yet another fracas involving Swedish cartoon artist Lars Vilks (CNN.com):

When Vilks entered a classroom where he was to deliver a lecture to about 250 people -- all of whom had passed through a security checkpoint to gain admission -- about five people started protesting loudly, Eronen said.

After Uppsala uniformed and non-uniformed police calmed the protesters, the lecture got under way at about 5:15 p.m. (11:15 a.m. ET), Eronen said.

But as Vilks was showing audiovisual material, 15 to 20 audience members became loud and tried to attack Vilks, he said.

As police stepped in, a commotion started and Vilks was taken to a nearby room; police used pepper spray and batons to fend off the protesters, Eronen said. Vilks did not return to the lecture. [Video footage of the event].

Last March, an American woman who called herself "Jihad Jane," Colleen LaRose, was indicted in the United States for allegedly conspiring to support terrorists and kill Vilks.

In a 2007 interview with CNN he had drawn the cartoon of Mohammed with a dog's body in order to take a stand.

" "I don't think it should not be a problem to insult a religion, because it should be possible to insult all religions in a democratic way, " says Vilks from his home in rural Sweden.

"If you insult one, then you should insult the other ones."

His crude, sketched caricature shows the head of Prophet Mohammed on the body of a dog. Dogs are considered unclean by conservative Muslims, and any depiction of the prophet is strictly forbidden.

Vilks, who has been a controversial artist for more than three decades in Sweden, says his drawing was a calculated move, and he wanted it to elicit a reaction.

"That's a way of expressing things. If you don't like it, don't look at it. And if you look at it, don't take it too seriously. No harm done, really," he says.

When it's suggested that might prove an arrogant -- if not insulting -- way to engage Muslims, he is unrelenting, even defiant.

"No one actually loves the truth, but someone has to say it," he says.

Vilks, a self-described atheist, points out he's an equal opportunity offender who in the past sketched a depiction of Jesus as a pedophile.

Comedy Central needs a sense of humor

In a First Thoughts post yesterday, Jody Bottum noted:

Comedy Central—the origin of the South Park program that had its references to Mohammad censored— has apparently announced that it is developing a new cartoon about Jesus Christ, the premise of which will be that God, preoccupied with playing video games, loses track of Jesus, who moves to New York and tries to “adjust to life in the big city.”

There is much that could be said about all this, but here are two quick predictions:

1) It will be far more blasphemous about Christianity than the Danish cartoons were about Islam.

2) There won’t be any riots over it.

Indeed. The explanation might be just cowardice, as Bottum suggests. That smoking car they found near Times Square last week was a reminder of what we're dealing with. But I'm afraid it's also that Comedy Central sees no irony in the disproportion.

After all, it's not just that Christianity is safer to mock, for reasons the mockers don't seem to appreciate. To the worldly mind, the claims of Christianity make it more mockable than its competitors. I am reminded of a song that came out some years ago: "What if God was One of Us?. The writer/singer, Joan Osborne, had obviously not got the message that he has long been one of us in the only way that matters. Why didn't she get it? Well, for a post-Christian culture, it isn't enough that God the Son was born in a stable to a poor couple and died violently at a rather young age, a failure by the world's standards. No, he would only be one of us if he turned up as some shlub on the city bus. If he did, we wouldn't have to feel bad about mocking and patronizing him like the Roman soldiers who tortured and executed him.

They say that the essence of humor is a sense of the discrepant. Comedy Central could live up to its title if they mocked the media elite, including themselves, for the very discrepancy they're all generating. But first they'd have to realize there is one. Apparently that requires a subtler sense of humor than they have.

Getting jihad

Whether coincidentally or by design, Ruth Gledhill has answered my criticism that she and her set give a pass to militant Islam while holding an anti-Papist prejudice against a far less objectionable practice of the Catholic Church. Check it out. She has begun to express awareness of what today's jihad is really about: destroying the Jews, restoring Muslim purity, and conquering the West. My conservative friends should drink to Ruth for that post, especially if it is representative of what religiously progressive Western journalists believe as a group.

Many Western liberals prefer to ignore the fact that our enemy is not "terror" in itself. Our enemies are not just a scattering of religious fruitcakes who happen to commit crimes for their cause. Terrorism is a tactic in what they conceive as a generalized jihad. The tactic is employed to cow people into submission. Unapproved Muslim regimes are to be overthrown, Israel "wiped off the map," and the West ejected from the House of Islam. In due course, a revived caliphate will be established. It will move on to conquer the House of War, the world of the "infidels." That is the strategic vision of radical Muslim movements, whose motivations and aims are expressly religious. This is a multi-generational religious war that we will lose if we do not see it as such. Nor will we win by pulling punches, bestowing more foreign aid, and encouraging piecemeal democratic reforms. We can win only if the masses in the House of Islam adopt and pursue a different vision of Islam. They must be convinced that Islam should not be the violent, cynical scourge that al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the mullahs of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah have turned it into. They must eventually find that Muslim totalitarianism is no more to their liking than Western decadence. Given what Islam has historically been, we cannot ensure such a result by anything we do or become. We can only resist being cowed, defeat the jihadis in battle, and otherwise avoid making things worse. Ultimately, change will have to come from Muslims themselves.

Still, Ruth isn't quite ready to maintain the needed focus. Referring to the Holocaust-denying SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson, she writes:

The outrage in the West over Williamson is not motivated by anti-Catholic prejudice. We have been guilty of that over history and of course the persecution of Catholics in the past and in the present where it occurs is something needing repentance.

The Williamson episode signifies something far greater and more dangerous, and the above gives an indication of what that is. 'Never again,' is the slogan we should all adopt. And we must all say it, and teach our children to say it, again, again and again.

I agree with Ruth that the Catholic Church ought not to tolerate anti-Judaism. In fact, since Nostra Aetate she has not. The Vatican's refusal yesterday to accept Williamson's half-hearted "apology" is one more bit of evidence of that. Indeed, the current flap only confirms the view of many traditionalist Catholics, who are supersessionists to a person, that the Vatican has gone too soft on the Jews and compromised the Catholic Faith in the process.

What people like Ruth need to realize is that the Pope cannot please all the people all the time. What he does, and is doing, to calm Jewish fears will earn him the opposition of many Catholic trads and many Muslims. It also needs to be understood that the polity of the Catholic Church is not entirely like others.

People are not excommunicated just for being prejudiced against the Jews or anybody else. People are not excommunicated for being dotty conspiracy theorists. People aren't even excommunicated for being nasty people. People find themselves excommunicated for certain things they do. Typically they excommunicate themselves, by doing things such as cooperating in abortion or living in adultery; that's called excommunication latae sententiae. Sometimes they are excommunicated formally, or ferendae sententiae, by doing things such as getting themselves ordained without permission. Williamson was excommunicated in 1988 along with his fellow SSPX bishops because the founder of that society, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, ordained them against the express wishes of the Pope. His excommunication has been lifted for the same sort of reason that Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople lifted the mutual excommunications of the two sees that had occurred in 1054: to remove an obstacle to full communion between the SSPX and the Holy See. That is why Benedict XVI never bothered to consider Williamson's views on the Jews. They weren't seen as relevant to the issue at hand. And I don't think they should be seen as relevant to the issue at hand.

Again, this is not to say that anti-Judaism should be tolerated. It shouldn't be, and it isn't. Thus, merely removing the formal excommunication of SSPX bishops isn't going to restore objectively full communion between the SSPX and Rome. The real obstacles are doctrinal, and they're unlikely to go away. Supersessionism is one of those doctrinal obstacles; and the Vatican might want to use the Williamson flap as a way to emphasize that. But I believe it's far more important to confront Muslim-traditionalist anti-Jewishness than to confront Catholic-traditionalist anti-Jewishness. The trads don't want to see a new Dark Ages in Western Europe and elsewhere any more than we do; but if the West doesn't get its act together and stem the tide of radical Islamism, that's exactly what we will eventually see.

The Lady Militant

No, I don't mean Sarah Palin, though I would enjoy applying that theme to her. I mean the Mother of God.

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, instituted by Pope Pius V in thanksgiving to Mary for the victory of the Catholic fleet over the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. All that victory did was save Western Christendom from conquest by the Ottoman Empire, which had extirpated the Byzantine Empire in the previous century. I have said my rosary today for victory over the culture of death in the West, which is a much bigger killer today than Muslim terrorists. Our Lady of Medjugorje is reported to say that the Rosary is the only way to defeat Satan.

Prof. Ralph McInerny says that the young should memorize GK Chesterton's poem Lepanto. For the convenience of the young of all ages, I present its full text here:

White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross,
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half-attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young.
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain - hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees,
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.

They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be;
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground, -
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk may hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done,
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces - four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not 'Kismet'; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth."
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still - hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.

St. Michael's on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that bath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.

King Philip's in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John's hunting, and his hounds have bayed -
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid.
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in a man's house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumed lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that swat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stairways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.

They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign -
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade. . .

(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

- G.K. Chesterton

Muslim scholars being ecumenical?

I see in circulation a open letter (PDF) to Christian leaders from an impressive roster of Muslim intellectuals. It says, among other things:

As Muslims, we say to Christians that we are not against them and that Islam is not against them - so long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them and drive them out of their homes.

I suppose that's the best we can hope for. But really, there's less there than meets the eye. The majority of Muslims seem to believe that hostility to Christianity from Muslims is currently justified precisely because Christians and, especially, Jews "oppress" Muslims and "drive them from their homes." Israel's displacement of Palestinians, and the West's de facto support for that, has been the longest-standing issue; but now we may throw Iraq and Afghanistan into the equation. Never mind that Western military force helped free Bosnian Muslims from Serbian oppression; never mind that the West pays staggering sums to Muslim countries for their oil; never mind that Egypt is the single biggest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel; never mind that the West supports a two-state solution for Palestine. Never mind that the Saudis see nothing wrong with building huge mosques in Western capitals while forbidding any churches in their country. Never mind, in other words, that the picture is mixed and can in no way be attributed to any desire to oppress Muslims for religious reasons. As long as we support the existence of the State of Israel, and as long as we have troops fighting Muslims in predominantly Muslim countries, the majority of Muslims will be hostile to us. To avoid such hostility, all we have to do is abandon Israel, withdraw our soldiers to their proper sphere outside the Umma, and tolerate Muslims in our midst much more than Muslims generally tolerate Christians and Jews in their midst. In other words, all we have to do is surrender.

I'm not buying it. To echo the Curt Jester's words: "you first."

Defining our enemies

Most serious Christians are what Luther said: simul peccator et justus, at once sinners and justified. I know I am. Luther's error was to hold, in effect, that that's the best we can hope for. By contrast, the more ancient traditions of both Catholicism and Orthodoxy maintain that we can and ought to be truly and progressively sanctified, with our free cooperation, by that grace which is nothing other than the Trinity's self-communication to us. But Luther's point helps to remind us that, once we are beyond childhood, our chief enemy in the spiritual life is ourselves. Our external enemies, chiefly Satan and his minions, have only as much power over our souls as we choose, consciously or no, to give them. The same goes, I believe, for what's left of Christian civilization today.

Pace the callow evasions of our political and academic élites, our chief external enemy today is militant Islam, which is committed to our destruction as a civilization and has openly said so. I shall not debate whether, in the final analysis, Islam can be anything other than that. I think it undeniable that it is not. For one thing, whether the means employed are violent or not, Muslims as such are committed to the "struggle" (jihad) to win the world for Islam. That follows from Islam's being an essentially missionary religion. But the same could be said of Christianity, which is also a missionary religion; hence militancy, in the sense operative in the phrase 'the Church Militant', is not what distinguishes Islam from Christianity. The distinguishing feature of Islamic militancy is that it seeks to make Islam, precisely as such, the explicit basis of political authority wherever it is the dominant religion. For a long time, to be sure, Christians were wont to do the same with regard to their own religion; but save in a few isolated pockets, that approach has been given up, as it should be if Christianity is true. We've learned our lesson. Yet the Muslim world, the Umma, has not learned the lesson. Nor do I think it can. That is the main, underlying reason why the Umma has such a hard time repudiating al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas. It is the main reason why "Islamic" parties are gaining ground even in ostensibly secular states such as Turkey and Indonesia. All over the Muslim world, we hear more and more calls for imposing sharia, even on non-Muslims when possible. Even now, Christians in Iraq are reduced to the options of oppression or flight; Sunnis and Shi'ites, who seem to agree on little else and continue fighting each other, seem to agree on that much. That's the attitude which is steadily gaining the upper hand throughout the Umma.

Such a totalitarian and ineradicable feature of Islamic militancy is the polar opposite of the ideology that now dominates the Western world: secularism. The core principle of secularism is not the separation of church and state as institutions; most of us believers in the West agree that such separation is good for both. I for one am glad that the papacy no longer has temporal authority and that I live in a country whose constitution ensures religious freedom. For when religion is not adopted freely, according to individual conscience, it is to that extent an obstacle to human flourishing; and that's why people brought up in any given religion ought to think critically about it if and when they can, so that they can make their choice in an informed and adult way, consistently with their God-given dignity. But I object profoundly to secularism. For the core principle of secularism as an ideology is what I call autonomism: the proposition that man himself can and ought to define the basis of the state's legitimacy, without any necessary basis in or reference to a moral law higher than himself. From that standpoint, appealing to any "higher law"—such as what the Declaration of Independence terms "the laws of nature and of nature's God"—as the basis of the state's legitimacy is an unacceptable infringement on freedom of thought and conscience. Of course it is rarely explained why we should consider that moral judgment binding if we happen to disagree with it; the few explanations I've seen are patently inadequate even on their own terms; for they can be and have been used to justify the worst sort of tyranny—always, of course, in the name of "the majority," or the Volk, or the oppressed, or something like that. Secularism is worthless as a political ideology because its autonomism reduces in turn to moral relativism, which can justify anything and therefore nothing. We cannot truly secure the dignity and freedom of the individual unless we acknowledge the Authority, the "Higher Power," that they come from, and why we have no right to defy that Authority.

Indeed, relativism is why the secular liberals of the West, especially in Europe, have such difficulty coming to grips with the challenge posed by militant Islam. As relativists they are reflex multiculturalists; as such, they instinctively believe that if we would just be nice to the Umma, giving ground and money here and there while fighting only the most violent of the terrorists, then the threat would gradually fizzle and we could all resume enjoying our comforts and gadgets. Such an illusion, if indulged long enough by enough people, is fatal. It undermines the will to resist, and that's just what our militant Muslim enemies are counting on. They are right to hate secularism—and right to believe that Islam is stronger than secularism. The former has a spiritual energy and motivating force that the latter cannot sustain. Resurgent, militant Islam is indeed the just scourge of the secular West.

Our primary enemy, therefore, is within: our desire to set things up for ourselves independently of that God who can be known in the natural light of human reason. That is true on an individual level; that's why we're sinners, to the extent we are, and we all are. On the collective level, it is that God, and only that God, who must be acknowledged as the basis of the state's legitimacy. Although the God of divine revelation is infinitely bigger than that, he at least that—and only respect for the laws of that God, the God of "ethical monotheism," suffices to preclude tyranny. But secularism won't even allow us that much of a foundation. Only if we defeat that enemy within can we find the will to resist our chief external enemy, our just scourge, for the right reasons.

Islam and Christianity

There's an excellent blog of the above title authored by "a Christian living in the Middle East." I know the man from Pontifications days to be highly educated and committed. His observations are generally trenchant and illuminating, though many would not avoid scholarly and/or polemical quibbling. Check it out.

The Rushdie thing

I was delighted to learn a few days ago that Salman Rushdie, a middling novelist with a glamorous young wife as famous as he, has been made a Knight of the Realm by Queen Elizabeth II. I was even more delighted when, amid the predictable outrage from the usual quarters, the British Government calmly rejected the suggestion that the Queen's act was an inexcusable incitement to what would be perfectly excusable terrorism.

I have read The Satanic Verses, the novel that earned Rushdie an assassination fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 and cemented the Umma's loathing for him ever since. It's a good read, but I wouldn't call it a classic either. The man obviously hates the Islam in which he was raised in Bombay, and used the novel to vent that hatred. I am told by a true man of letters that the quality of Rushdie's work has declined over the years. I don't doubt it. People animated by hatred generally spend their spirits, and therefore their creativity, if not in hate than in more subtly corrosive ways. So I can't blame Muslims for loathing him and resenting the honor that's just been bestowed on him. But that hardly matters. What really matters is that, with this act, the relevant powers-that-be have given notice that they are not quite resigned to being dhimmified.

Literary types support Rushdie almost to a person. Some have even complained that Rushdie was not honored in some fashion sooner. That's probably why the committee that proposes candidates for knighthood proposed him; indeed he's always enjoyed the support and protection of the British establishment. That is a good thing even though he's now living in New York, which has a lesser concentration of Muslims than London and thus fewer Muslims who would be happy to kill him. (The way New Yorkers generally feel about radical Islam as a result of 9/11 also gives him a congenial sea to swim in.) But why isn't this stick in the Islamist eye extended on other matters too? Too many among the well-educated, not merely the artistically inclined, still seem to think that while everybody should enjoy enough freedom of speech to blaspheme Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, it is unduly "insensitive" to blaspheme the Prophet Muhammad or even to support the right of Muslim women to marry non-Muslim men. To such folk and others, I say: use this occasion to wake up. Demand what the Pope calls "reciprocity" and settle for nothing less. If you don't, you may find that you've lost World War III before you knew it was being fought.

Remember: it's a religion of peace!

As evidenced by the fact that there was no violence at this occasion:



You gotta hear it to believe it, but it's far from uncommon. The speaker is Acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Sheik Ahmad Bahr from Hamas. You can get more details here.

HT to Pertinacious Papist.

Liberalism, fundamentalism and Islamism

Having quoted me largely with approval about liberal attitudes toward Islam today, Dr. Bill Vallicella of Maverick Philosopher raises a fair criticism. I respond here.

Here's what I said that he quoted:

Shouldn't liberals be the most concerned about Islamic fundamentalism, given that the things they profess to value are the first things they would lose under Islamist pressure? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this sort of liberal hates political conservatives and orthodox Christians more than he loves his own liberty. And he wishes to cling desperately to his own self-image as a defender of the poor, oppressed minorities, even when some of those poor, oppressed minorities would just as soon see him and his kind swinging from the gallows.

Bill commented:

Substantially correct. But if I may quibble, 'Islamic fundamentalism' may not be the right term. A fundamentalist, as I understand the word, is one who interprets the scriptures of his religion literally, as God's own inerrant word. Thus Islam, if I am not mistaken, holds that the Koran was literally dictated by God to Muhammad in Arabic. Whatever one thinks of fundamentalists in this sense, it seems obvious that they should not be confused with militants or terrorists. Although fundamentalists and terrorists are sets with a non-null intersection, there are fundamentalists who are not terrorists and terrorists who are not fundamentalists.

Bill certainly has a point, but I believe he's missing one I was trying to make. That's not surprising since I didn't make it clear. That is what I shall now do.

I used 'fundamentalism' rather than 'terrorism' for two reasons. First, almost everybody except terrorists abhors terrorism, and terrorists are a quite small minority of Muslims. But Islam today, whether in its Saudi-backed, Sunni-inspired Wahabbi theocratism or in its Iranian-backed, Shi'a-inspired theocratism, is effectively more "fundamentalist" than it's been in centuries. That is what I mean by "Islamic fundamentalism," which is perhaps better termed "Islamism." The vast numbers of Muslim fundamentalists or Islamists, whatever they may feel as individuals about terrorism, seem unable or unwilling to close ranks against the terrorists from their own ranks who claim to act according to Islam. Indeed, throughout the Muslim world, hatred of the West and of Christianity—indeed of almost any way of life that is not Islamist—is commonly preached and believed. That is a breeding ground for terrorists, not a basis for resistance to them on their home turf. But liberals seem unwilling to face the significance of that fact even when they acknowledge the fact in the abstract. They think that if we would just distinguish between the nice majority of Muslims and the small minority of nasty terrorists, treating the former as brothers and the latter as criminals, we could make the problem of Islamist terrorism go away. But the main root of the problem is Islamic fundamentalism itself.

The term 'fundamentalism' in this context does not just mean acceptance of certain religious beliefs in their literal sense. To breed Islamism it is necessary, but not sufficient, that most Muslims believe the Qu'ran to have been literally dictated by God in Arabic. What I mean by 'Islamic fundamentalism' is still more specific: the belief that violent jihad against non-Muslims, and even against the wrong kinds of Muslims, is a duty of Muslims given today's geopolitical situation. The purpose of such jihad is nothing less than the conquest of the world for the strictest brands of Islam. Liberals, specifically secular liberals, seem incapable of taking such a threat seriously; indeed, they seem much more concerned with upholding a PC multiculturalism that would embrace Islam and everything else, except of course any form of traditional Christianity. That is the proximate reason why the Islamization of Europe is proceeding apace with only token resistance from the natives. This is why American liberals can call for withdrawal from Iraq, leaving Iraqis to an all-out sectarian war and bequeathing a playground for al-Qaeda, while at the same time believing that our enemies would be less mean to us if we did so.

So, I should say that liberals ought to be much more concerned about Islamic fundamentalism. But I agree that a different term would have clearer connotations. So, how about "Islamism"?

The two new fronts in the global war for freedom

Some Americans know, and all should know, something said by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." When passed, what that meant to people was that the Congress may not regulate or abolish established state churches, may not make any particular religion illegal, and may not require anybody to be religious. Since World War II, of course, the Supreme Court has made utter hash of the two quoted clauses, so that American jurisprudence has no coherently applicable criteria for balancing freedom of religion with freedom from religion. But that is, one hopes and prays, a temporary problem. The fact remains that both freedom of religion and freedom from religion are inherent human rights respected in principle by basic American and international law. They are so respected in virtue of that acknowledged dignity of the human person which makes it intrinsically immoral to force people to act against their consciences. Such rights constitute an irreducible element of human freedom. And it is just that freedom which is now under threat from both the religious and the irreligious in today's world.

During the Cold War, most people could and did recognize worldwide Communism as a threat to freedom. Despite the protests of pacifists and some major lapses along the way, U.S. policy toward Communist countries was designed to protect the freedom of our way of life. The verdict of history is that we succeeded. Nowadays, many recognize the so-called "war on terrorism" as another protracted effort to protect the same from violent Islamic extremists, who seem to be growing more numerous by the year. What many fail to recognize, however, is that we have but are failing to exploit the moral high ground in our war with the Islamists.

In most Muslim countries, non-Muslims do not have the same freedom of religion as Muslims. The world's largest Muslim country, Indonesia, extends considerable freedom to non-Muslims inasmuch as the country's size and diversity has bred a culture of relative tolerance between religions. But in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the public practice of non-Muslim religions is not tolerated; conversion from Islam to any other religion is punishable and often punished by death. And the majority of countries in which Muslims comprise a majority lie closer to the Saudi/Iranian end of the spectrum than to Indonesia's. Even in Egypt and Syria, where ancient Christian communities still exist and are tolerated to a degree, Christians are dhimmi: they live with certain legal, educational, and economic disadvantages making them second-class citizens. And in Palestine and Iraq, Christians are finding themselves having to emigrate in droves if they want to have decent lives at all.

Even more significantly, you won't find most Muslim scholars willing to accept what the Pope calls "reciprocity." They don't think that Muslims should grant non-Muslims the same degree of religious freedom that Muslims generally enjoy in countries where non-Muslims are the majority. This is why, for example, they take for granted that they may, can, and should build mosques in Rome, but at the same time it is unthinkable to them that Christians be allowed to build churches in Mecca or even that the Jews rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Indeed, it is in the very nature of Islam to reject the idea of religious freedom as understood not only by the U.S. Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—to which many nominally subscribe—but by Vatican II's Dignitatis Humanae. And that is probably the major reason why we must fight the war on "terrorism," which is really a war with those Muslims who take jihad to entail violent as well as non-violent means of spreading Islam. There is virtually zero chance that Muslims will, as a whole and as a matter of principle, accept the principle of reciprocity even as they demand religious freedom for themselves.

We have ample historical precedent for this fight. Thanks to the courage of countless knights, peasants, and churchmen, most of Western Europe was never conquered by Muslim armies. The Crusaders simply went on the offensive, taking the battle to the Holy Land even though their greed and divisions eventually made their conquests unviable. Spain, which had endured some measure of Muslim rule for centuries, fought for centuries to drive Muslim satraps out of Spain and eventually succeeded. When the Ottoman sultans tried later to grab big bites out of Western Europe, they were repeatedly and sometimes miraculously defeated. At nearly every stage in the millennium-long struggle, everybody who was anybody knew the stakes and did what had to be done—even if they also did some things that needn't and shouldn't have been done. But I don't see that kind of insight and resolve today. Westerners on the whole do not understand that Muslims on the whole, while enjoying the benefit of Western ideas about religious freedom, will never subscribe to those ideas fully and hence will never be placated by the sort of "tolerance" that presumes a willingness to reciprocate. True, the so-called "terrorists" are not terribly popular among Muslims; but that is because of their means, not their ends. And there will always be Muslims willing to use those means.

That is why our politicians need to have the cojones to let people publicly say whatever they think about Islam, no matter how negative, even as absolutely anybody may now publicly say what they think about Christianity, no matter how negative. But only a few even in America have those cojones, and it gets them into trouble. In several European countries, saying such things about Islam will land you in jail—but not, of course, saying similarly nasty things about Christianity. Indeed and conversely, actively professing traditional Christianity on certain points, such as following the Bible in denouncing sodomy as an "abomination" before God, will get you prosecuted for a "hate crime" even if you win in the end. Even in my home town, New York, it is illegal to display Christian symbols on public property during Christmas but legal to display Muslim symbols during Ramadan and Jewish during Hannukah. We are in danger of becoming dhimmi by virtue of that "tolerance" which is intolerant of the majority.

Indeed, that trend reflects what's been happening among our secular, cultural élites. Recently the atheism industry has got more aggressive: there's been a spate of propaganda denouncing "religion" as evil largely on the ground that its "intolerance" causes violence and social stagnation. (See, e.g., Sam Harris' book The End of Faith and Richard Dawkins' TV series The Root of All Evil?) On the popular level, even Elton John has got into the act, insisting that "organized religion" has "always bred hatred against gays." Presumably he supports suppressing the freedom of his fellow citizens to profess publicly what the Bible and the natural law say about sodomy. So, religious freedom is also threatened by those who are only willing to tolerate forms of religion they deem sufficiently tolerant. At the same time, however, they seem willing to tolerate Islam, which is a minority religion in the West and therefore, in the liberal mythos, a fit object of tolerance. Hence the New York decision, made by secular-minded jurists. But apparently no form of traditional Christianity, even ones that renounce religious violence, is to enjoy the same degree of tolerance.

In the case of both Islamists and secularists, then, we confront a double standard that threatens the basic and inherent right to religious freedom: Islam is to be tolerated even when it is intolerant, and traditional Christianity is not to be tolerated even when it is tolerant. I can understand the double standard on the part of Muslims; they do not, after all, even pretend that they ought not to have one. At least they're consistent. But in the West, the double standard not only accelerates the erosion of morality in general and of the family in particular, thus weakening the moral basis of our society, but also weakens our resolve to resist the violent adherents of a religion that really is objectionably intolerant. Accordingly, one front in the new, global war for freedom is external: the war against Islamist violence; but the other is internal, against our own secularists. If we lose, the fifth columnists will have the society they deserve.