What Makes Johnny Dhimmi Run Away?

Daniel Greenfield

We talk a lot about Dhimmis and Dhimmification but aside from the generic yielding to Islam, what exactly does a Dhimmi look like?

There's not much point in talking about the average man on the street, bullied into dhimmification by a political and cultural elite. We've talked before about the dhimmi impulse on the left and its cultural impact and we will again. But it's our leaders, the top rank of our nations and civilizations, who have willingly adopted the role of Dhimmi despite being in the power center of mighty nations. Or to put it another way, What Makes Johnny Dhimmi Run Away?

A closer look at the Dhimmi leadership will yield some surprises. These leaders of the Dhimmi class and of our own nations and cultural centers are occasionally left wing, sometimes liberal leaning but generally moderate. While their views may seem liberal to us, that's only because they lack any real views of their own. As the left's culture war has continued to push the center further and further to the left, views that were once liberal, become mainstream. And Johnny Dhimmi is a creature of the center, a true moderate in the sense that he moves with the herd of public opinion while pretending to be its shepherd. As a faithful worshiper of the status quo, Johnny Dhimmi is quick to adapt to whatever the dominant view appears to be.

Johnny Dhimmi may be President of a nation or a college, he may be Prime Minister or an Archbishop, he may be a corporate CEO or an army General. He does however have certain common denominators. He is not particularly smart or particularly honest, but he has mastered two core elements, people and organizations. Johnny Dhimmi is the Peter Principle come to life, promoted well and above his level of incompetence.

In person Johnny Dhimmi is generally congenial but with a sharp sense of humor that usually expresses itself at someone else's expense. He is not successful at any actual job or task, but what he is successful at is networking and making connections and then using them to climb the next step of the ladder.

Johnny Dhimmi does not have any ideas of his own but he excels at borrowing other people's ideas, breaking them down to the simplest common denominator and using them as a repetitive slogan. You couldn't argue with Johnny Dhimmi because he spends very little time thinking about things and ideas need to be conveyed to him in bite size form. At the same time Johnny Dhimmi is suspicious of excessively simple ideas, such as national self-defense or a clash of civilizations, as a natural born manager, he prefers an answer that will smooth out the bumps and keep business moving. While he is not above exploiting patriotic symbols or rhetoric and even believes them at the time, he never takes them too seriously, they are a costume he puts on and takes off when appropriate.

Johnny Dhimmi lives in a business oriented world. His friends are often businessmen and he may have even had a business background and even if he doesn't, thanks to his friends he likely has some business interests now. As a politician his policy agenda is colored by the impact of legislation on his business friends. This does not necessarily mean that he is pro-business in the conventional way, he may be pro-environment if his friends have plans to profit from environment related businesses. He may be pro-socialized medicine if his friends have interests in companies that expect to profit from the transition. He does not see this as hypocrisy, only good business... because he tends to define the public interest in terms of the business interests of his associates who to him represent the 'public', the 'ordinary' people he has access to on a regular basis. Often, like many politicians, he genuinely sees no contraction in this.

As a General, Johnny Dhimmi has very little interest in war. The military for him is an extension of business and political ambitions. He is often anti-war in private and prefers to avoid any conflicts, as they interfere with his comfortable position. After the military, he likely looks forward to a job as a lobbyist for the defense industry or perhaps a career in politics.

As a clergyman, Johnny Dhimmi has little in the way of religion. He believes in God in a formal sort of way and sees his job mainly involving making people feel better about their lives. He has no desire or interest to seek out God and while he is suspicious and hostile toward his co-religionists who do, he admires Muslims who seem so determined about their faith-- from a safe distance. His view of them is an uneasy mix of orientalism and the noble savage, but in public this emerges as admiration and interfaith fellowship.

The one thing that cannot be denied though is that Johnny Dhimmi possesses certain leadership skills or at least the facade of those skills. He is a decent public speaker but often even better on a one on one basis, capable of fathoming what others want and compromising and cutting a deal. Though he has poor decision making skills, these abilities move him up in business, politics and the military, sometimes all the way to the top.

Johnny Dhimmi has learned throughout his career that the safest approach is the mildest. He is capable of bold rhetoric and action when needed, he is not emotionless or a robot, but he is naturally static and has trouble coping with new ideas. He prefers accommodation to conflict and while he will fight politically for what he believes in, it will only be until he realizes that it is hopeless and then he will look for a way out. It may however take time for this understanding to sink in, often making him the last man on the Titanic to notice the big iceberg.

Johnny Dhimmi is not a bad man, often he is a moderately decent man. He thinks of himself as moral and in some ways he is. He makes an affectionate husband and a loving if somewhat self-centered father. But he also lacks any real ideas or character and when push comes to shove, he falls backward.

His response to the rise of Islamic terror is to look for easy solutions that work for everyone. His initial response is to ignore it. His second response is to accommodate the moderates while banishing the extremists. When this fails, he stalls and looks to someone else for answers. Finally he begins negotiating the terms of surrender for his country in order to get the best terms and limit the damage.

The destructive capacity of Johnny Dhimmi lies in his sheer uselessness and lack of mental agility and ability. Devoid of any spine, he folds easily. Things have come easy to him in life and his entire professional career has been devoted to convincing people to do what he thinks is best. And what he thinks is best, is what will keep business going.

Johnny Dhimmi is loyal, but not to a country. His first and foremost interest is not the nation, but that corner of it which consists of his friends' business interests. He is strongly loyal when it comes to his friends and what his friends want is for international trade to keep running smoothly. They are interested in new business opportunities from conflicts on occasion, but mostly they prefer that their country be viewed positively abroad, that trade run smoothly, that tourism move easily and that a large supply of cheap labor exist via immigration. They like the idea of government taking on many of their responsibilities and they strongly dislike excessively loud patriotism and nationalism, as it tends to scare away the foreign clients and offends their cynically comfortable lifestyles.

This is the face of Johnny Dhimmi, traitor without a clue, the man whose very hollowness undermines his country without ever understanding the how or why of it. Lacking principles and judgment, he sells out his country because he does not understand what he should be standing up for and why.