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I’ve been watching this happen for several years now. It’s scary as hell, and perhaps the scariest thing about it is, it forbids you to talk about it.

It’s the Jihad on Free Speech.

If you read that, grimaced, and moved to click the Back button to get away from this racist screed, congratulations! You’ve taken the first step to Submission!

If you want to find out how your right to free speech is being eroded by religious fanatics who happen not to be Christians, read Bruce Bawer’s Anatomy of Surrender over at City Journal.

Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. 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. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.

The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.

The Western media are in the driver’s seat on this road to sharia. Often their approach is to argue that we’re the bad guys.

Oh, yes. Read the whole, ugly, sordid, thing. You need to know.

It’s long and detailed, but here’s the nut:

Britain’s Foreign Office has since deemed even [the phrase "War on Terror"] offensive and banned its use by cabinet members (along with “Islamic extremism”). In January, the Home Office decided that Islamic terrorism would henceforth be described as “anti-Islamic activity.”

Oh, that’s lovely. Brilliant. Note how that makes it impossible to fix responsibility for jihadist terrorism where it belongs. Anyone committing such an act is automatically considered separate from Islam–which therefor cannot be blamed for incitement.

In Britain, “Asian” is the accepted codeword for “Muslim”. In Europe, Muslim rioters are “disaffected youths”. Thus is the language debased, and made to hide the truth rather than reveal it.

Can’t be said often enough:

There is no God, especially not Allah; and Mohammed, may piss be upon him, was no prophet, but a child-molesting mass murderer. Islam is no “Religion of Peace”, but a violent warrior cult specially designed to enforce ignorance and hatred of everything other than itself.