D’Souza calls for the silencing of Islam critics

Dear Readers, I am truly sorry to keep emphasizing the Islam issue at this site far out of proportion to other pressing issues that also deserve to be covered, but the fact is that the most amazing and most appalling things keep happening on that front and compel me to put other things aside and comment on them. Thus I just found out, at Jihad Watch, that Dinesh D’Souza writes this in his book:

In order to build alliances with traditional Muslims, the right must take three critical steps. First, stop attacking Islam. Conservatives have to cease blaming Islam for the behavior of the radical Muslims. Recently the right has produced a spate of Islamophobic tracts with titles like Islam Unveiled, Sword of the Prophet, and The Myth of Islamic Tolerance. There is probably no better way to repel traditional Muslims, and push them into the radical camp, than to attack their religion and their prophet.

Those are two books by Robert Spencer and one by Serge Trifkovic, leading Islam critics in this country who are speaking the truth about Islam in the midst of an ocean of lies. And D’Souza wants them to shut up. Specifically, he wants them to stop saying that Islam is the problem, that Islam is the cause of Islamic extremism. He wants them to adopt, as he has done, some non-Islam theory of Islamic extremism, he wants them to say that Islamic extremism is caused by Western prosperity, or Western racism, or Western alienation, or Western imperialism, or American friendship with Israel, and, once Spencer and Trifkovic have surgically removed Islamic extremism from Islam, once they’ve lobotomized themselves, then they will become members of the respectable ecumenic mainstream which will proceed to make friends with Islam.

He wants them to lie about Islam, like himself, or to be silent.

Of course it isn’t just Spencer and Trifkovic who must shut up. It’s Bat Ye’or, it’s Andrew Bostom, it’s Diana West, it’s Hugh Fitzgerald, it’s the Norwegian writer Fjordman, it’s a handful of conservative websites, including this one, including FrontPage Magazine, including, even, last November, the American Thuggee, where the truth about Islam is spoken. This is the tiny band of voices in the wilderness that D’Souza wants to silence.

Now think how amazing this is. Has it ever happened in this country—I’m not talking about some totalitarian country but America—has it ever happened that a prominent “intellectual” called on leading writers on a subject of major importance to stop writing what they’re writing, because it would “offend” someone? No, this has never happened before.* It has never happened before, because it’s only in response to Mohammedanism that Westerners adopt the posture of pre-emptive surrender, which Bat Ye’or calls mental dhimmitude. Of all the social, ethnic, religious, political movements in the world, only Islam has the ability to evoke this eagerly cringing attitude, only Islam has this faculty of inducing people to surrender psychologically to it even before it has any actual power over them. (See further discussion of this point below.)

Truly, Muhammad was one of the great geniuses of history, a successful Hitler as I have said, to keep getting people, even fourteen centuries after his death, voluntarily to embrace his program of self-abnegation, the willing surrender of their mind and identity. It is fitting that Dinesh D’Souza—a man who in his recent photographs has taken on the faceless look of the total apparatchnik, a man who has sold his soul ten times over, a man who wouldn’t know truth if it smacked him upside the head and threw him off a pier—should be Islam’s emissary to American conservatism, the person who tells America it must shut off its freedom, shut off its intellect, in order to please our new “allies,” who in fact will be our masters.

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* I suppose there might have been leftists in the Cold War who said critics of Communism should be quiet, because they were only driving the Communists to be more extreme. But I don’t remember anything specific like that. I think pro-Communists just called critics of Communism names, rather than telling them to stop saying what they were saying, as D’Souza is doing. I can think of one instance in which a “conservative” said his fellow conservatives should not discuss a certain subject. It was Richard John Neuhaus, who said that conservatives should stop discussing race differences in intelligence. But he only stated it as a mild wish, not as a plank in an agenda, and it was only because he felt the discussion would cause racial tensions. It wasn’t because he was trying to convince us that our mortal foes would become our friends if only we stopped speaking the truth about them.

- end of initial entry -

Dimitri K. writes:

I have a feeling, though not sure, that Islam itself is nothing but a pure social conservatism without the belief in the higher reason. Therefore, non-believing conservatives can become the messengers for Islam.

Shrewsbury writes:

“Of all the social, ethnic, religious, political movements in the world, only Islam has the ability to evoke this eagerly cringing attitude, only Islam has this faculty of inducing people to surrender psychologically to it even before it has any actual power over them, etc.”

A valuable statement. Have you noticed, this is the way fairly normal humans often respond to a crazy person, especially if the crazy person is part of their family. The latent potential for violence is no doubt part of the motive. And apparently the psychosis known as Islam is able to evoke a similar psychological response—one more reason to keep its seething minions the hell out of our living room. For not to accept the craziness when the crazy person, with some element of threat, is demanding you do so, seems to require a certain level of character and or intelligence which becomes perceptibly less common with every passing year….

Gedaliah Braun, the author of Racism, Guilt, and Self-Deceit, writes:

You are truly speaking truth to power. One point of disagreement. When you say that

“ … it’s only in response to Mohammedanism that Westerners adopt the posture of pre-emptive surrender, which Bat Ye’or calls mental dhimmitude. Of all the social, ethnic, religious, political movements in the world, only Islam has the ability to evoke this eagerly cringing attitude, only Islam has this faculty of inducing people to surrender psychologically to it even before it has any actual power over them”

that is simply not correct. All of the liberal “movements” of the latter 20th century—civil rights, antiracism, feminism, the homosexual lobby—involve exactly the same thinking: whites taking the side of blacks, men taking the side of women, heterosexuals taking the side of homosexuals, Israelis taking the side of Muslim Arabs, etc.

The difference, of course, is that civil rights, feminism and the like were not things which imminently and obviously threatened our very existence as Islamic radicalism does. But none of these movements could have succeeded were it not for the fact that in all cases the “guilty” party took the side of their adversaries well before these adversaries had “any actual power over them.” Indeed, it was the perception of them as being “powerless “victims”’ that was part of their attraction and called for our “help.” All of them equally rest on white guilt and self-hatred. Remember Robert Frost’s definition of a liberal as “Someone too broad-minded to take his own side in an argument“!

LA replies:

I don’t think I made my point clearly enough and I may have created some confusion. I wasn’t denying the reality of the Western liberal surrender to the Other. How could I, since I write about it all the time? Rather, I was referring to D’Souza’s explicit command to conservative writers, “You must stop saying that such and such is true about non-Western Party X, not because it is false (though it is false), but because it offends and angers non-Western Party X and gets in the way of the West forming an alliance with non-Western Party X.”

The standard liberal approach has been to attack conservatives as racists for saying true things about non-Western parties, with the aim of marginalizing the conservatives and scaring other people away from them and their ideas. An extreme such attempt occurred last September when Ralph Peters wrote his insane column describing the leading Islam critics as genocidal Nazis. That’s not what has happened here. D’Souza is telling the Islam critics, “You must stop making these arguments about Islam. The very thing that you think is most true about Islam and most important for people to know, that Islam is a system of conquest and oppression of non-Muslims, that Islam subjugates and destroys every people and culture it takes over, you must stop saying this and must never say it again.” And I don’t remember hearing anyone in America ever say such a thing before, in relation to any issue. This is something new in our experience, an American conservative writer telling conservatives to submit to intellectual dhimmitude. It is a sign of truly dark days ahead.

At the same time, there is this striking similarity between liberal guilt in general, which manifests toward every type of minority and “Other,” and dhimmitude, which manifests just towards Muslims. The similarity means that the liberal West, already geared toward surrendering to the Other, is the perfect target for Islam, the ultimate Other, the Other who doesn’t just traffic in white guilt and seek special favors and recognition for its culture, but the Other that is commanded by its god to seek our complete subjugation and our cultural and spiritual destruction.

As I wrote in my article, “Islam and the Liberal West: the Fatal Complementarity”:

In resurgent Islam the liberal West has met its fate. Islam is a non-Western religion set on conquering and converting non-Muslims, while liberalism is a Western ideology set on tolerating and including non-Westerners. They are predators, we are prey. This complementarity spells the death of the West, unless there is a radical awakening on our part to the true nature of Islam and a willingness to oppose it.

Peter H. writes:

D’Souza says “There is probably no better way to repel traditional Muslims, and push them into the radical camp, than to attack their religion and their prophet.”

As you’ve pointed out before, just how “moderate” are traditional Muslims (D’Souza, here, seems to equate “traditional” with “moderate,” as the alternative is “radical”) if the mere presence of these books can make such a great contribution to pushing them to become “radical” Muslims? This makes his entire statement ridiculous. Most Christians, for example, aren’t incited to murderous violence just by the knowledge that, for example, a “work of art” like Serrano’s “____ Christ” exists. Why should Islam be held to any lower standard of conduct?

LA repies:

Yes, blatantly, absurdly ridiculous.

Only a man totally lacking intellectual conscience would have the brass to advance such an argument.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 22, 2007 12:16 AM | Send