Daniel Greenfield
Monty Python may have surprised us with the Spanish Inquisition, but today there is hardly anyone who doesn't expect the Muslim Inquisition. It is almost hard to imagine that there was a time not so long ago when it was possible to catch sight of Muslim terrorists in films and when it was permissible to crack jokes about Mohammed and the mountain.
Today a few strokes of a pen can put you on the run, not in Islambad or Ridyah, but as far away as Seattle. And the mere whisper of a mosque protest can put you in a jail cell for 'breach of peace'. Peace being another way of saying Islam. Ever since Mohammed couched his demand for surrender to the Byzantine Emperor with the words, 'Aslim Taslam'-- appeasing Muslims often comes gift wrapped as 'peace'. From the 'Peace Process' that condemns Israel to carve itself up to appease Muslim terror, to Terry Jones planted in a Dearbornistan jail cell for 'Breach of Peace' on charges of plotting to exercise his Constitutional right to protest-- the Religion of Peace finds ways to remind us that in the Islamic lexicon, peace is just another way of saying 'submission'. As Mohammed told Heracilus back in the day, the only peace to be found is under the rule of Islam.
Globalism, immigration and the internet have moved the blasphemy trial from the hinterlands of Islam to the rainy west coast. And it isn't just a few mullahs in dark garb writing out their fatwas anymore. The clerics may write the fatwas, but more and more it's the local justice departments of formerly free countries that enforce them. When a few angry Imams call for your head, you can always turn to the authorities for protection. But when the authorities are the ones calling for your head because you offended the imams-- who do you turn to?
You can't spell Socialism without Islam. And the difference between Sharia law as practiced in the formerly free West, from the one practiced in the minaret ridden slums of the east is that Western authorities don't lock away blasphemers because they believe that Mohammed was the final prophet of Allah and the Koran is his revelation to mankind. Rather they're afraid of the murderous offense taken by those who do.
It's bad enough when Muslims enact laws to promote the supremacy of a religion that they believe in, but what do we make of Western authorities who don't believe in their religion, but do abide by their definition of blasphemy. It's awful to be persecuted for your beliefs by authorities whose beliefs are at variance with yours, but even worse to be persecuted by authorities who believe in nothing at all. If Muslims have faith in Allah, they have faith in their own power to jail those who might give Muslims an excuse for kicking up a violent fuss.
Some call it the heckler's veto, but it's more like the Heckler and Koch veto. If the authorities were afraid of riots in the 60's, now they're afraid of massacres. And it's easier to put on the Dhimmi and pay out the Danegeld, than to stand up to the religion of the machine gun and the faith of the suicide bomb.
British authorities kept an open door and a warm meal ready for the friendless Islamist so as not to offend Muslims for fear of terror. In return, the civic leaders of Londonistan were rewarded with the 7/7 attacks. A bloody atrocity that did not in any way diminish the flow of bearded hostiles into Albion. After all, if this was how Muslims responded to not being offended, just imagine what they would do if you they really were offended.
Now England has become a nation where you can be arrested for a bad karaoke rendition of Kung Fu Fighting, but where Islamists cheerfully sit on the dole like so many murderous partridges in a rotten pear tree, composing their hymns of jihad, burning poppies and proclaiming that the end is near in Luton. It is perfectly safe to arrest bad singers and ex-soldiers who touch a lighter to the pages of a Koran. At least from the perspective of the authorities. But arresting Muslims is so much more dangerous altogether.
Spend enough time standing in line and you discover that there are two kinds of people. The kind who decide that lines may be uncomfortable, but they'll have to wait in them just like everyone else. And the kind who decide that only suckers wait in line and muscle their way through with violent tantrums daring anyone to stop them. The first kind have adapted to the discomforts of civilization, the second kind treat them like sheep, confident that people willing to stand in line at a bureaucrat's word don't have what it takes to stop them. And much of the time they're right.
Muslims are the violent queue jumpers of civilization, their violent tantrums putting not the fear of Allah, but the fear of violent disorder into the guardians of civilizations. The fragile order of the urban centers, chock full of multiculturalism and resentment, depends on everyone respecting authority. That has become the chief duty of all forms of law enforcement. Not so much to prevent crime, but to keep everyone properly respectful of all laws and regulations.
Most of the criticisms of the TSA miss the point. The blue shirted drones aren't fondling air travelers for any other reason than because frightened and humiliated people are how incompetent systems assert their authority in the face of problems that they cannot afford to tackle. You can grope a 6 year old and the only thing you have to worry about is Drudge pageviews. But try singling out Muslims for a rational airline security policy and the bureaucrats who make the policies are certain it will only increase terror. Grope an imam or grope a 6 year old? It's not a tough choice for the bureaucracy. It never is.
From throwing elderly preachers in jail to firing employees for burning korans on their day off to groping children-- the system is doing its best to protect itself from having to make difficult decisions. And the Muslim Inquisition has been outsourced to the overpaid employees of the modern socialist state. Their duty is not to serve or protect, but to keep the facade going for as long as possible.
We live in a world run by the smirking embodiments of the Peter Principle, screwups who have leveraged a screwed up system to get to where they are. The hereditary monarchies that Mohammed confronted in his day, have nothing on the parade of hopeless buffoons who are at the wheel today, insisting that there is no such thing as deficit spending, carving up their sole aircraft carrier before going to war, and insisting that the only way to stop terror is by surrendering to it. The authorities aren't mad, they're powermad. Smart enough to find their niche of power and stupid enough to cling to it at all costs with safe decisions and boldly inoffensive rhetoric.
The outsourcing of the Muslim Inquisition is now a depressing fact of life in the West. In the United States, the Constitution provides one last defense against the mandate of public order that has swept away the rights of citizen in Europe. But it is a defense unlikely to hold against the full tide. When the guardians of our public order insist that it is a choice between freedom of speech and dead soldiers in Afghanistan, you can expect that it won't just be Justice Stephen Breyer burning the Constitution on his lonesome.
There is a congruence between the public order mandate of the leaders of the declining west, and the imperative of the religion of peace. Both demand submission under the law. Not the law of men, but the law of systems. The law of the West has become the law of the system. A system that is more important than any law abiding individual in it. Maintaining the pretense that the system is working just fine is the sole duty of its administrators and advocates. It's the slow bus version of Orwell's Oceania, a system whose totalitarianism is offset only by its incompetence. Whose greatest secret is its own helplessness in the face of organized opposition.
Unscramble Socialism and you get Islam. As the line cutters of the West, Muslims have stumbled on the pathetic truth of the system. That it is every bit as weak as they were told. The system will buy them off with money, with privileges and by enforcing their doctrines against its own citizens. Everyone has learned to expect the Muslim Inquisition from the state, as sure as BBC license fees, the DMV and every other bureaucratic nightmare of oppressive incompetence. But they don't always understand why.
The 'Why' is because the system has a thorough contempt for its compliant citizenry and a deep seated fear of the arriving hordes of Muslim immigrants who will not comply and not obey. Its officers will browbeat and berate ordinary cooperative citizens, but treat Muslims with kid gloves for fear that they will stop "cooperating" with authorities. It will confiscate guns from Americans, but let Islamists with their armed training camps. It will toss anyone who might even think of offending a Muslim in jail for a 'Breach of the Peace', but let the Islamists run wild shrieking their hate. Burning a Koran is a criminal offense, but putting a lighter to the Constitution is the duty of the judiciary.
The Blasphemy trial has left Pakistan for Londonistan and Lebanon for Dearborn, to be enforced by a system that would rather impose Islamic law on the peoples of the formerly free world, than admit that it has lost control over the consequences of its own immigration and social welfare policies.
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