Soft Jihad

Roger Kimball notes that Muslims are waging a traditional jihad, but are finding much greater success with a soft jihad:

That’s the new mantra, you know: “for fear of offending Muslims.” We don’t give away piggy banks (to say nothing of other “pig related items”) “for fear of offending Muslims.” We don’t draw cartoons of Mohammad “for fear of offending Muslims.” We mustn’t publish articles pointing out the demographic disparity between the Muslims of Canada and Europe and other parts of the population “for fear of offending Muslims.” We mustn’t even publish books saying critical things about “Saudis and terrorists” “for fear of offending Muslims.”

It’s all part of the campaign of soft jihad. Traditional jihad is waged with scimitars and their contemporary equivalents, e.g., stolen Boeing 767s, which make handy instruments of mass homicide. Soft jihad is a quieter affair: it uses and abuses the language and the principles of democratic liberalism not to secure the institutions and attitudes that make freedom possible but, on the contrary, to undermine that freedom and pave the way for self-righteous, theocratic intolerance. Soft jihad is patient. It can add and multiply as well as Mark Steyn can (and here). It, too, sees the demographic writing on the wall and is content to wait a few years to occupy the West’s real estate—it’s so much easier, when you come right down to it, than blowing the stuff up and then finding yourself with a massive clean-up and rebuilding bill. Just sit tight and watch the infidels tie themselves into knots making excuses for you while, elsewhere in their lives, they embrace barrenness as an “environmentally friendly” alternative to Genesis 1:28.