-By Warner Todd Huston
The worst aspect of the Muslim invasion of the west is the alarming way that Islam is undermining Western culture using the west’s own liberal, democratic processes to do so. Muslims are using our own best philosophy against us and it is working to destroy our own culture, laws, and traditions, not just in the U.S. — where the effect has been less destructive to date — but also in Europe — where it has been more pernicious.
Overseas, creeping shariah has already damaged western societies. One example appears in England where the British have damaged their own legal system by setting up a parallel legal system allowing shariah-styled pseudo-courts to operate in Muslim enclaves where residents eschew the proper English legal system and are allowed to conduct their own courts. So much for equal under the law. In England it is now “our” laws for us and “their” laws for them. These parallel legal systems are begin pursued by Muslims throughout the west and destroys a cohesive society and undermines western culture.
Another example of the beginnings of the destruction of a western legal system has occurred on Australia. In a recent court case in Melbourne a PC infected judge cleared his courtroom when a female Muslim had to remove her veil in order to testify. Instead of requiring this woman to remove her veil and testify before the court in keeping with the more open western system as she should being an Australian citizen, this PC judge bowed to a foreign ideology allowing it to supplant his own traditions.
As far as the U.S. goes, though, creeping shariah is looming. A school system in Massachusetts, for instance, just announced that it will be instituting a “Muslim holiday” for its students starting next year. The school is not even choosing a particular holiday because it is not actually honoring Islam in particular, but bowing to a politically correct assumption that Muslims “need their own holiday” in the school’s holiday schedule.
This is simply a buckling under to a foreign ideology, one that undermines our own, and serves as the camel’s nose under the tent, if you will. Political Islam itself is wholly incompatible with western systems and any recognition of Islam by government sets us on the road to forcing the tenets of this anti-democratic ideology onto our own system.
Those liberals that claim that tolerance of Islam is the best way to defeat terrorism really misunderstand the entire problem of Islam and the west. It isn’t merely terrorism that we are confronting here, but the oppression inherent in Islam itself. Islam is an ideology that is wholly against individualism. It is against individual rights and freedom and if we begin to use government rules and institutions to honor Islam we are breaking down the barriers of our own, more tolerant system and allowing this essentially chauvinistic, authoritarian system to infect ours.
Tocsins have been rung by many about the war between civilizations, between Islam and western culture, in which we are so obviously engaged. Despite the warnings, though, many in the west cling to some vague notion that we should invest the ideals upon which western society is based to assuage those that want to advance political Islam, misunderstanding those very principles and how they should or even can operate in this case. Unfortunately, the very ideals many westerners think serve as the basis upon which their societies are built are also those that radical Islamists are using to defeat the west.
There is an old saying about the Constitution of the United States that goes: the Constitution is not a suicide pact. By this, of course, we mean that our laws aren’t supposed to be hewn to so closely that we end up killing ourselves over them. Abraham Lincoln is instructive here.
During the Civil War, Lincoln felt he needed to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and opponents said that the suspension itself would destroy the country. Lincoln replied to his detractors on July 4, 1861, saying, “To state the question more directly, are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated? Even in such a case, would not the official oath be broken, if the government should be overthrown, when it was believed that disregarding the single law, would tend to preserve it?”
The case is similar here. Are we to stand by and allow Islam to infect our system, destroy our culture, change our laws, create parallel legal systems, undermine our very ideological underpinnings just to make sure we save the religious freedom of Muslims in every last case? Can we allow one aspect of our system to be used as a bludgeon with which to kill us?
Like everything, there are exceptions to the rule and this war with Islam presents us with one of those exceptions — in fact, it presents exceptions to many of those rules.
So far, in the United States we have only seen the debate about how we should treat political Islam as compatible with American ideals and we are urged to act in strict compliance with our American principles of liberty and religious freedom. But, in our parent state, Britain, we have seen their problems progress past the mere debate stage and to the policy stage. Unfortunately for England, they have decided to commit suicide.
As far as liberals in the U.S. go, they claim not to be worried about shariah infesting our own system. They claim that the numbers of Muslims in America are too small to affect it. But this pooh poohing of creeping shariah ignores the outsized and pernicious influence that groups like the ACLU and CAIR have on our legal system. These groups aren’t interested in the democratic process, They are interested in using our legal system against us and wielding like a hammer the power of our out of control courts to do so.
The fact is, every little indentation that Islam can make into our system is one more step toward our demise and that is the ultimate goal of Islamists everywhere. Were we to allow it to happen in a mistaken belief that we are somehow adhering to our own principles is a conceit that will destroy us all.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.
One thing to consider is that the philosophies of Islamists and the progressive left are one in the same. Both are based on total control of the political and/or religious environment and neither are tolerant to opposite viewpoints. Of course the left would support Islamists.