Author: Robert Spencer
Publication: FrontPageMagazine.com
Date: August 1, 2007
URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=620ACAFA-13BE-42FD-95A2-B1C482571D54
A 23-year-old student at Pace University,
Stanislav Shmulevich, was arrested Friday and charged with two felony counts
of Criminal Mischief in the Fourth Degree as a Hate Crime. Numerous analysts
have been quick to recognize the cruel irony of these charges. Mark Steyn
quipped that instead of flushing the Qur'an, "obviously Mr Shmulevich
should have submerged it in his own urine, applied for an NEA grant and offered
it to the Whitney Biennial. But to that Michelle Malkin responded with the
grim truth: "Actually, no. The NEA would have turned Shmulevich in to
the police, too. Now, if he had submerged a Bible in urine or coated a Torah
in cow dung and submitted it for a federal grant, he'd be sitting pretty-and
facing rave New York Times editorials instead of time behind bars."
And that's why, as Christopher Hitchens said,
"This has to stop, and it has to stop right now. There can be no concession
to sharia in the United States. When will we see someone detained, or even
cautioned, for advocating the burning of books in the name of God? If the
police are honestly interested in this sort of 'hate crime,' I can help them
identify those who spent much of last year uttering physical threats against
the republication in this country of some Danish cartoons."
Indeed, it has to stop. For all the examples
of the double standard that he, Malkin and others have brought forth - from
Piss Christ to Chris Ofili's Turner-Prize-winning, elephant-dung and pornography-bedecked
Virgin Mary and the rest - emphasize the fact that the real agenda of today's
dominant politically correct culture is certainly not tolerance, or even anything-goes
moral relativism. Some things most emphatically don't go, as Stanislav Shmulevich's
two felony charges indicate. As a cultural movement, political correctness
and multiculturalism are emphatically anti-Western and anti-Christian. And
they are also suicidal.
But it is not going to stop. As mad as the
felony charges against him are, Stanislav Shmulevich most likely is not the
end of anything, but rather the beginning. We are unlikely as a society to
become a place in which disrespect or even hatred of Christianity comes to
be regarded as just as dangerous to the social order as disrespect or hatred
of Islam, and we are just as unlikely to return to a saner time when one could
not be prosecuted for disliking someone else's beliefs (in which case Shmulevich
would have to pay for the books, and for any necessary plumbing work, but
that would be all). We have become a society of sacrosanct protected classes
whose victim status places them above all criticism. Those individuals and
groups who do not enjoy victim status can be shredded with impunity in the
public square, and the shredders are hailed as "courageous," "iconoclastic,"
and "irreverent." But if the protected group is criticized in any
way, we are told that the criticism creates a climate of "hostility"
and "hate" that can culminate in yet more victimization.
The Council on American Islamic Relations
(CAIR) has worked assiduously for years to claim this protected victim status
for Muslims, and its reaction to this incident has allowed them to articulate
how they want Muslims in America to be regarded. CAIR-NY Civil Rights Coordinator
Aliya Latif said: "We must all be concerned when any actions cross the
line from protected free speech to acts designed to intimidate. Just as there
is a difference between someone burning a cross in their own backyard and
burning that same cross in the yard of an African-American family, there is
a difference between desecrating a religious text in a private setting and
doing so in a setting that will create a hostile learning environment."
Muslims are the new blacks, and CAIR is the new NAACP; this statement is of
a piece with CAIR's annual hate crimes report, which attempts, often in quite
imaginative ways, to project an image of Muslims as bravely going about their
daily lives in an American society that is inveterately hostile, racist, and
on the verge of breaking out into open violence against them.
Yet this is nothing more than a myth. A potent
one, to be sure, but a myth. Muslims are not being lynched, or persecuted,
or discriminated against in America. Time and time again breathless media-amplified
fears of "backlash" against Muslims prove unfounded, and Muslims
continue to practice their faith here with more freedom than they enjoy in
most of the countries from which they came. That's why Stanislav Shmulevich
and his flushed Qur'ans are a windfall for American Muslim advocacy groups:
he has now validated the victim status they so doggedly claim. And until the
American public discourse can dare to break away from the protected-victim
model and its subtext of white Christian guilt, these groups will experience
many more such windfalls, whenever someone acts obnoxiously or boorishly toward
any Muslim or Islamic object. The American public square today simply has
no apparatus for dealing with the possibility that the protected victims might
be perpetrating evil themselves. The cognitive dissonance regarding Muslims
since 9/11 is ultimately what has given birth to 9/11 conspiracy theories,
Reichstag fire analogies, and the like. Muslims can't be responsible, because
they are non-white, non-Christian, non-Westerners. It must be something we
have done.
Most ominous of all is the fact that policymakers
at the highest levels assume this. Western leaders routinely assume that money
will defeat terrorism: that alleviating poverty in the Islamic world will
end the jihad. This assumption rests on a further assumption: that the jihad
imperative doesn't arise from anything within the Islamic world that would
still be present even if the West somehow began to treat Muslims better. For
Muslims are victims, and Westerners are the guilty party.
That is the West's guiding myth. It is why
desecration of the Bible will continue to be celebrated as art, and desecration
of the Qur'an as a "hate crime." So also is an objective examination
of the elements of Islam that jihadists use today to incite to violence, for
that violence is all the fault of the guilty post-Christians of Europe and
America.
If the West is to survive the challenge of
the global jihad, this foundational myth must be brought out into the open,
repudiated, and decisively rejected.
- Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history,
theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of six
books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic
terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's
Fastest Growing Faith and the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect
Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad.
