Rushdie may be brave, but I'm nervous

Submitted by Dave (United States), Aug 14, 2022 at 19:57

Salman Rushdie's relative insouciance towards his personal safety may be brave, but his dire experiences with Islamic Sharia and this latest attack should send a shiver up all our spines.
The injustices of Sharia stand in stark opposition to all the freedoms we hold dear. They are an affront to free speech, freedom of religion and many of the other basic human rights we take for granted in America. They have no place here, but the irony is that the very liberal values we so cherish have allowed us to host immigrants who do not cherish those same values. That puts us in the position of tolerating the intolerant, of endangering human rights under the banner of championing human rights.
Western civilization, as with other civilizations that have preceded it, is based on certain key concepts. We should not make the mistake of assuming that once people arrive on our shores that they will magically absorb those concepts. Other civilizations have made that mistake and have disappeared. Inclusion is a generous impulse, but charity, and cultural survival, start at home.
The fact is, the West is hosting more and more people like this attacker. He is in good company, and is celebrated as a hero in Iran. He represents a powerful collective force in the world, and is not just an aberration.
As part of that force, Iran is closely allied with Russia and China; it belongs to an increasingly menacing and aggressive coalition of authoritarian states. Refugees and potential immigrants from Iran and other extremist regions should be closely vetted before they can enter. The Biden administration's lax border policies and woke attitudes undermine that caution.
The other thing that we need to realize is that this act really qualifies as a religiously motivated hate crime. It may have political aspects, but it is part of a worldwide pattern of hate crimes perpetrated by Muslims. Groups like the PA, Hamas and Hezbollah and the various "terrorist" groups like ISIS are really just organized crime syndicates of demented hate criminals. Since these crimes are primarily religiously motivated and the perpetrators are "non-white", leftists and woke moralizers are less concerned about them than if they were racially motivated by "whites". That makes opposing them much harder than it should be.
When bad things like this happen, one may wonder if it is just a one-off, or part of a growing or receding trend. While the evidence shows that Islamism is decreasing in the Muslim countries, we should be taking much stronger measures to keep it out of the West, where it may actually be on the rise. That's very scary indeed.

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