The Impact of Islam on Free Speech in America

Another outstanding essay by Diana West on the rise of Islam and the decline of the West.

FROM THE BRUSSELSJOURNAL:

The Impact of Islam on Free Speech in America
From the desk of Diana West
on Fri, 2009-06-26 08:29
Americans are proud, and rightly so, of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, which, among other things, protects speech from government control. The Amendment says in part: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
Increasingly, however, Americans seem content to regard the First Amendment not as the fundamental working tool of democracy, but as a national heirloom, a kind of antique to admire rather than put to use. I don’t think many of my countrymen perceive how profoundly their attitude toward free speech has changed. But there is a difference between having freedom of speech and exercising freedom of speech, one that has become glaringly and distressingly obvious to me since September 11, 2001. So, while it is true that the US government is not Constitutionally empowered to make laws that censor Americans, it is also true, I believe, that Americans have come to censor themselves. But why?

I speak today in regard to the effect of Islam on speech in America - Islam as it has entered our national discussion and debate – and, I must add, lack of national discussion and debate - since the heinous Islamic attacks on the US nearly 8 years ago.
You may recall that just days after the attacks, then-President Bush said “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” At that same moment, the Pentagon, just across the river from the White House, was a colossal ruin, there was still carnage and mangled steel in the Pennsylvania woods, and an acrid fire of souls burned at the bottom of Manhattan. But once President Bush uttered that word “crusade” a new fear seemed to grip Washington and the wider world: namely, the fear that the President would “alienate” Muslims, even so-called “moderate Muslims.”

I believe such a fear may be unique in the annals of peoples under assault and bears further consideration. The English word “crusade,” of course, harkens back to the medieval wars between Islam and Christendom, which Islam ultimately won, as we know. In the more than nine centuries since, the word has become a familiar metaphor for any moral fight for right: Long ago in America, Thomas Jefferson spoke of a “crusade” against ignorance; the feminist Susan B. Anthony called for a women’s temperance “crusade”; more recently Colin Powell referred to the “equal rights” crusade. And when Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote his memoir of World War II, he called it “Crusade in Europe.”

But after 9/11 it became instantly clear that there wasn’t going to be a 21st-century-“crusade” against newly expansionist Islam – not even against the most violent manifestations of jihad as exemplified by these bloody attacks on civilians and cities in the United States. Why? Muslims didn’t approve. Non-al Qaeda Muslims, presumably, didn’t approve of a “crusade” against al-Qaeda, and the leader of the Free World deferred. A White House spokesman quickly expressed the president’s “regret” that anyone might have been “upset” by the word “crusade.” After that, the word was effectively struck from the English language.

This may seem like a small thing, no more than a diplomatic nicety, but the significance of excising this rousing and storied word from the vocabulary of Americans at the onset of war can hardly be overstated, and must be understood as an early and decisive psychological victory for Islam over the West. In this early semantic retreat we can see the beginnings of the official American lexicon that now strives to avoid associating Islam and jihad altogether, that no doubt gives mighty encouragement to the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s continuing efforts to outlaw all criticism of Islam.

Let me explain. In acceding to the Islamic interpretation of the word “crusade” as something wrong and indefensible – and, worse, something taboo and also verboten - the president traded away a piece of our history and our language – and our understanding of our history through our language – for the sole sake of appeasing Islam. And truly, this was just the beginning.

Soon, the president was giving up other words, other pieces of our culture. Operation Infinite Justice, the Pentagon name for the assault on the Taliban, for example, was changed after Muslims complained that they believed only Allah dispenses infinite justice. The new name was Operation Enduring Freedom. Presumably, Muslims do not believe Allah dispenses freedom, enduring or otherwise (which is interesting), so that was all right. But in making the change, the US was again deferring to Islamic demands, Islamic understandings. In other words, as a military intelligence officer-friend of mine likes to put it, we were “outsourcing” our judgment to Islam. Indeed, the name “war on terror” itself was a generic sop to Islamic sensibilities, omitting any reference to the Islamic dimension of the struggle, namely the jihad that was and is underway.
In those early days after 9/11, President Bush also made it part of his job to serve as the nation’s head cheerleader for Islam as “the religion of peace.” Confusingly, this immediately put “jihad” in a box as something superfluous to Islam. This is now the conventional wisdom in America, from Left to Right: jihad has nothing to do with Islam. Or: “Jihadism is not Islam,” former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney obediently declared last month. People think Barack Hussein Obama is the first American president to promote Islam. The fact is, President Bush’s incessant declarations that Islam is a peaceable creed that terrorist-traitors had “hijacked” or “twisted” drove Abu Qatada, the notorious imam in Britain linked to Al Qaeda to comment “I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Koran that justifies jihad or violence in the name of Islam. Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Koran?”
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