Islamo-Chic

Another study in contrasts....

First, how Western multicultural elites relate to Islamic Fundamentalism:

So many of our problems with Iran today arise from not doing anything about our problems with Iran yesterday....

The Rushdie fatwa established the ground rules: The side that means it gets away with it. Mobs marched through Britain calling for the murder of a British subject – and, as a matter of policy on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity, the British police shrugged and looked the other way.

One reader in England recalled one demonstration at which he asked a constable why the "Muslim community leaders" weren't being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer told him to "fuck off, or I'll arrest you." Genuine "moderate Muslims" were cowed into silence, and pseudo-moderate Muslims triangulated with artful evasiveness. Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who went on to become leader of the most prominent British Muslim lobby group, mused about the Rushdie fatwa: "Death is perhaps too easy."

In 1989 Salman Rushdie went into hiding under the protection of the British police. A decade later he decided he did not wish to live his life like that and emerged from seclusion to live a more or less normal life. He learned the biggest lesson of all – how easy it is to be forced into the shadows. That's what's happening in the free world incrementally every day, with every itsy-bitsy nothing concession to groups who take offense at everything and demand the right to kill you for every offense. Across two decades, what happened to Rushdie has metastasized, in part because of the weak response in those first months. "Death is perhaps too easy"? Maybe. But slow societal suicide is easier still.

Versus how Western apostles of cultural "tolerance" treat evangelical Christianity:

Marriage is the foundation of the natural family and sustains family values. That sentence is inflammatory, perhaps even a hate crime.

At least it is in Oakland, CA. That city's government says those words, italicized here, constitute something akin to hate speech and can be proscribed from the government's open e-mail system and employee bulletin board. ...

Some African American Christian women working for Oakland's government organized the Good News Employee Association (GNEA), which they announced ith a flier describing their group as "a forum for people of Faith to express their views on the contemporary issues of the day. With respect for the Natural Family, Marriage and Family Values."

The flier was distributed after other employees' groups, including those advocating gay rights, had advertised their political views and activities on the city's e-mail system and bulletin board. When the GNEA asked for equal opportunity to communicate by that system and that board, it was denied. Furthermore, the flier they posted was taken down and destroyed by city officials, who declared it "homophobic" and disruptive.

The city government said the flier was "determined" to promote harassment based on sexual orientation. The city warned that the flier and communications like it could result in disciplinary action "up to and including termination."

You could almost say the City of Oakland issued a fatwa against the Good News Employee Association. Certainly they blatantly discriminated against the GNEA on the basis of religion, which is supposed to be against the law, right?

Not according to the hyper-oligarchist Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals:

In this case, the thought police got a large boost from the joke of the appellate courts, the Ninth Circuit. Amazingly, they determined that the GNEA's "vanishingly small" speech interest wasn't worth protecting. They approved of non-neutral content exclusions by a government agency that allows them to approve certain political speech while excluding others - setting up Oakland's government as an arbiter of acceptable political beliefs.

Admiral Morrissey expects the Ninth to be taken to the woodshed (again) by the SCOTUS on this case, and he's probably right. But for how much longer? After President Rodham packs Olympus with her brand of left-wing extremists, it'll be even more of a kangaroo court than the Ninth Circus.

Think the City of Oakland would have banned a Muslim Employees Association from posting anti-Semitic hatred and glowing tributes to Osama bin Laden and "Holy Tuesday"? Will you take a dime for every quarter you can stand on end?

This commenter to the Steyn column gets it spot-on right:

Figuring out the de-facto alliance of Islam and the Western left is the key to understanding our current predicament. Both see the individual finding meaning a part of a collective. They are natural allies against the rights of the person. By the same token Christianity and democracy are natural allies because they see the individual as having intrinsic rights and value. In both blocs there are huge areas of dispute and degree but the foundation, the core, is a philosophical outlook that divides the world. To me it seems obvious which outlook has done more for humanity. The issue is freedom.

"Sharia" is not the name of a pop singer. And when it's imposed, liberals will not escape the grim, grisly fate they've brought down on us all, and will express astonishment that our new Muslim overlords really meant what they've said for years about killing the infidels. Which has to mean those Bible-thumping "Christianist" fundies, and couldn't possibly refer to kind, loving, tolerant, peaceful, compassionate, understanding paragons of virtue like them.

When their heads roll, my tears will flow.

But not for them.