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UPDATE April 30! “Floyd Abrams Weighs in on Libel Tourism [Andy McCarthy]
The legendary First Amendment lawyer has a good op-ed in the WSJ today, making the case on why Saudi sheikhs should not be able to use British courts to undermine American constitutional rights. He also points out that today is the last day for Gov. Patterson of NY to sign legislation — approved by overwhelming bipartisan margins — that would curb the practice. [Underscoring BRF’s.]04/30 07:36 AM” from NRO’s Corner here.

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From Refugee Resettlement Watch (our next-door blog in Washington County, Maryland which monitors the abuses in the US refugee program), to Power Line to Roger’s Rules to Little GreenFootballs , Bruce Bawer’s “An Anatomy of Surrender” in City Journal gets good notices.

We at Blue Ridge Forum join this acclaim of Bruce Bawer’s article whose theme declares:

Motivated by fear and multiculturalism, too many Westerners are acquiescing to creeping sharia.

Bawer gives us some quick background here:

“Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method. What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Kho­meini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech.” [Underscoring BRF’s.]

One of the elephants in the Republicans’ national living room is the president’s apparently conflicted attitude on Islamists. Many conservatives who are (properly) quick to jump on the White House for a Harriet Miers nomination or on an entitlement expansion or on signing the McCain-Feingold bill, seem sheepish about calling the White House to account on their attitude toward sharia expansion - - - which is a very real peril.

Bawer explains:

Even military leaders aren’t immune. In 2005, columnist Diana West noted that America’s Iraq commander, Lieutenant General John R. Vines, was educating his staff in Islam by giving them a reading list that “whitewashes jihad, dhimmitude and sharia law with the works of Karen Armstrong and John Esposito”; two years later, West noted the unwillingness of a counterinsurgency advisor, Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen, to mention jihad. In January 2008, the Pentagon fired Stephen Coughlin, its resident expert on sharia and jihad; reportedly, his acknowledgment that terrorism was motivated by jihad had antagonized an influential Muslim aide. “That Coughlin’s analyses would even be considered ‘controversial,’ ” wrote Andrew Bostom, editor of The Legacy of Jihad, “is pathognomonic of the intellectual and moral rot plaguing our efforts to combat global terrorism.” (Perhaps owing to public outcry, officials announced in February that Coughlin would not be dismissed after all, but instead moved to another Department of Defense position.)

Counter-terrorism Blog’s Jeffrey Imm spells out the Administration’s required taxonomy here:

Now we officially know the answer - the U.S. Government states that America is definitely not fighting “jihadists”, based on new guidelines directing federal agencies not to even use the term “jihadist”. So who is America fighting? Defense Secretary Robert Gates tells us: “the enemy is extremism”.

Former Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy illustrates this Administration’s problem here:

The Soft [INSERT J-WORD WE’RE NOT ALLOWED TO SAY] Continues[Andy McCarthy]

As elements of the Bush administration continue their jihad against any discussion of jihadism (i.e. — as I outline in Willful Blindness — the ideology that fuels radical Islam’s war against the United States and the West), the State Department is reportedly funding the soft jihad being practiced by faux “moderate” Muslim groups.

Bawer’s conclusion, unfortunately, runs to US, not just European attitudes:

We need to recognize that the cultural jihadists hate our freedoms because those freedoms defy sharia, which they’re determined to impose on us. So far, they have been far less successful at rolling back freedom of speech and other liberties in the U.S. than in Europe, thanks in no small part to the First Amendment. Yet America is proving increasingly susceptible to their pressures. The key question for Westerners is: Do we love our freedoms as much as they hate them? Many free people, alas, have become so accustomed to freedom, and to the comfortable position of not having to stand up for it, that they’re incapable of defending it when it’s imperiled—or even, in many cases, of recognizing that it is imperiled. [BRF’s underscoring.]

Do we expect that Maryland college and university students who will face the consequences of militant Islam will be able to have frank and open exchanges of opinion about jihadism? Not likely - in the atmosphere of mandated “diversity” programs for Maryland universities and colleges which the General Assembly overwhelmingly approved this month. Readers can see the final General Assembly votes here and here. We also wonder how jihadism is presented (if at all) in the high school curricula of, for example, Anne Arundel, Montgomery, Loudoun, or Fairfax Counties?

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