War on the Homefront

It remains true that we are good at military campaigns, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our tanks and ships are better, and our bombs and soldiers are smarter. But these are not ultimately the most important battlefronts. We are in danger of losing this war without a shot being fired.

The British government recently announced that it would be issuing Sharia-compliant Islamic bonds, that is, bonds compliant with Islamic law and practice as prescribed in the Koran. As The Mail on Sunday put it, this innovative marks "one of the most significant economic advances of Sharia law in the non-muslim world."

At about the same time, The Times of London reported that "Knorbert the piglet has been dropped as the mascot of Fortis Bank, after it decided to stop giving piggy banks to children for fear of offending Muslims." Recently, for instance, a local government council prohibited its workers from having ornaments on their desk representing Winnie the Pooh's sidekick Piglet. As Pastor Martin Niemoller might have said, "First they came for Piglet and I did not speak out because I was not a Disney character, and if I was, I'd be more of an Eeyore. Then they came for the Three Little Pigs and Babe, and by the time I realized the Western world had turned into a 24/7 Looney Tunes, it was too late, because there was no Porky Pig to stammer, 'Th-th-th-that's all folks!', and bring the nightmare to an end."

What all these stories have in common is excessive deference to - and in fact fear of - Islam. If the story of the Three Little Pigs is forbidden when Muslims still comprise less than 10 % of Europe's population, what else will be on the black list when they comprise 20%? In small but telling ways, non-muslims communities are being persuaded that a kind of uber-Islamic law now applies to all.

And if you don't remember the Three Little Pigs, by the way, one builds a house of straw, another of sicks, and both get blown down by the Big Bad Wolf. Western Civilization is a mighty house of bricks, but you don't need a Big Bad Wolf when the pig is so eager to demolish the house himself.

As the famous saying goes, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. What the Canadian Islamic Congress and similar groups in the West are trying to do is criminalize vigilance. They want to use the legal system to circumscribe debate on one of the great questions of the age: the relationship between Islam and the West and the increasing Islamization of much of the Western world, in what the United Nations itself calls the fastest population transformation in history.




(Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.")