DAR AL HARB/ISLAM: JEWS, CHRISTIANS & DHIMMITUDE

Requiem for a Righteous Muslim
By Sharon Chandler

Tashbih Sayyed called himself a Muslim Zionist. He fearlessly directed his great intellect and powerful voice to combat Jew-hatred and anti-Zionism, often at great personal cost. In befriending the Jews, he enraged his own community. Nevertheless, he never allowed an anti-Semitic comment to pass unanswered in his presence. Furthermore, he wanted Jews to educate themselves about the depth and breadth of anti-Semitism imbedded in his own culture and religion. He also wanted us to understand how the Muslim world regards non-Muslims and that the common perception of Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance is a lie.

No one could intimidate him into silence. His right to think and speak his mind was as sacred to him as his own honor and he devoted his life to defending it.

Tashbih understood the meaning of honor. In his culture, honor is everything and loss of face and humiliation incur grave consequences. Because he loved Israel, Tashbih favored any measure to elevate her status, and to spare her humiliation--especially, in the eyes of the Islamic world, which sees the Jews as dhimmi--a people to be humiliated.

The preeminent scholar, Bat Ye'or coined the term dhimmitude to describe the dhimmi condition of non-Muslim peoples subjugated by Islam. Dhimmitude is what gives eternal life to jihad--Muslim holy war--the deadly plague threatening all of civilization today. If jihad is like the cancer that invades the human body in order to destroy it, then dhimmitude is the compromised immune system that enables the cancer to multiply.

The religion of Islam denies equality between Muslims and non-Muslims. In lands subject to Islamic law, the dhimmi lives by the grace of the Muslim who is obliged to humiliate him in return for sparing his life. The non-Muslim must literally choose between dhimmitude and death.

In Christendom, during much of the last two thousand years, Jews faced a similar choice. They had no rights, lived at the whim of Christian authorities, and were subject to massacres, expulsions, confiscations, punitive taxation, the church-sanctioned kidnapping of their children, forced conversion, ghettoization, and perpetual humiliation. Many Jews of European origin harbor disquieting generational memories of atrocities inflicted upon them or their ancestors by Christians.

However, in Islamic lands, both Christians and Jews were and are subject to the same types of calamities. Moreover, Christian Europe itself has been terrorized by 14 centuries of jihad from her Muslim neighbors including the jihad that is being played out in real time today. Jihad against Europe never stopped, even if you include the 200 years of the Crusades.

I believe that whether we are Christians or Jews, we may be afflicted with the syndrome of unwarranted humility towards those peoples who are known to have persecuted us in the past. The nauseating and repetitive declarations of respect by American and European leaders for the religion that supplied the ideology for 911 are a choice example. Consider whether Jewish and Christian sympathy for Palestinian Arab terrorists is another.

Unwarranted humility constitutes dhimmitude-but, it is dhimmitude of the most degrading nature; degrading because it is voluntary. We non-dhimmi peoples are not being forced to choose between dhimmitude and death. However, we are being forced to choose between dhimmitude and human dignity. For dhimmis, the fear of the oppressor's fury, rejection and punishment is ever-present. Translate the word fear as "terror." I believe that the terror that is inseparable from dhimmitude is imbedded in our collective DNA and explains the West's pervasive tendency to embrace humiliation as a strategy of survival.

To understand my point, simply recall the chorus of Western apologies that ensued after the publication of the Danish cartoons. Global Muslim rioting, mayhem and murder served as an effective rejoinder to the exercise of free speech.

...



Pertinent Links:

1) Requiem for a Righteous Muslim