Hell in the Shari'a house

Bruce Bawer:

Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.

What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Kho­meini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.

The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.

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What is surprising to me is how many in the west accept this barbaric code from the middle ages as something worth considering rather than being banned for the inhumane abomination that it is. Its use of corporal punishment is designed to get compliance by cruel and unusual methods. It has to be the most inhumane legal system int eh world, yet human rights groups rarely challenge it and usually are among the groups pushing acceptance.

In a sane world the UN should be trying to ban Shari'a and individual states should reject it.

Bawer piece is long and worth reading in full. He notes how many in the western media have accepted the moral inversions of Shari'a and notes that the BBC is one of the worst. I noted earlier how the BBC program on the war on terror, MI5, in the first three episodes does not even deal with the Islamic religious bigots who are pushing the Shari'a agenda.

If they think the real threat is southerners from the US coming to the UK to bomb their abortion doctors then they are just completely out of touch. While at any one time there are 15 to 30 active plots by Islamic terrorist in the UK, I would be willing to bet that there has been no pro life bomb plot from the US launched on British soil, much less one by a Florida woman with an accent somewhere between Atlanta and Dallas. Anyone familiar with Florida knows they talk like New Yorkers anyway.