An excellent book review by Islamic expert and researcher Andrew Bostom, on an important book by Professor Bruce Thornton [www.victorhanson.com], which describes the cultural suicide of Dhimmitude. Dhimmitude is not just a disease of the political-left and the lovers of pop-culture. Too many 'conservatives' are Dhimmis – base hypocrites who will defend the Arabian moon cult, and blame the US or the West for any and all Muslim aggression, hate, terror, war, violence and intolerance. Dhimmitude is a disease which emanates from cultural Marxism and it is a vial of cultural poison imbibed not only by the media, academics, Marxists, Communists and Greenists, but also those more intelligent and educated who should know better. Dhimmitude and self-loathing is wide and deep along the so-called 'Right' [the 'right' of a socialist-welfarist society is still 'left']. From Bill O'Reilly [mildy conservative], to most 'right of center' politicians such as PM David Cameron, many conservative careerists are openly ambivalent or even supportive of the Mohammedan cult which fuses church and state into an unholy mish-mash of fascism [in its true definition] and paganism. Elitist ignorance, or self-serving double-speak cuts across the entire political spectrum.

Andrew Bostom's review on Bruce Thornton's new book, 'The Wages of Appeasement:

“Classics professor Bruce Thornton is a courageous rarity within the academy — an unabashed conservative public intellectual. Rarer still, even when one considers the full universe of conservatives overall, is Thornton’s willingness to expound upon Islam in a scholarly but uncompromised manner.

In The Wages of Appeasement ^[1], Thornton combines his training as a classicist with singular intellectual honesty to interweave three historical case studies of appeasement: Athens (primarily) and the other Greek city-states that Philip II of Macedon sought to conquer in the 4th century B.C.; England confronted by Nazi aggression in the 1930s; and the contemporary United States and broader West, subjected to the global hegemonic ^[2] aspirations of resurgent Islam and particularly its most aggressive jihadist state sponsor, Iran.

....Huntington’s mid-1990s paradigm ^[4] of Islam’s “bloody borders” adduces convincing hard data in support of his contention: “Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors.” These germane observations by Huntington were confirmed — one could argue even amplified — subsequently in the wake of the cataclysmic acts of jihad terrorism against the U.S. on September 11, 2001, and their aftermath, punctuated by almost 17,000 ^[5] additional jihadist attacks worldwide since 9/11:

.....The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture.

.....Thornton’s second case study — the appeasement of Nazi aggression in the decade before World War II — demonstrates how modern “utopianism” and the accompanying malaise of cultural self-loathing exacerbate the timeless, siren temptation of appeasement firmly rooted in the human psyche. Case study three — the contemporary West’s largely supine response to resurgent global jihadism — reveals the grotesque persistence of post-World War I era delusive utopianism and destructive self-flagellation despite the still tangible horrors inflicted by 20th century Nazi and Communist totalitarianism.

The first and second case studies feature two orator-statesmen: the ancient Greek Demosthenes, and Winston Churchill. These men recognized what was (and remains) at risk, as described by Thornton:

.....Over two millennia later, in defense of the same foundational Western freedoms articulated by Demosthenes, Winston Churchill had to grapple additionally with what Thornton aptly refers to as “all of the interwar cultural pathologies” which enervated England in the 1920s and 1930s:

Pacifism, “war guilt,” internationalist idealism, hostility to the military, all the delusions that made a policy of appeasement seem not just expedient, but a moral imperative.

Churchill decried this mentality as suicidal when confronting the “bands of sturdy Teutonic youths marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for their Fatherland.”

He reiterated the existential threat posed by such “utopian” cultural self-hatred during a 1933 address to the Royal Society of St. George:

Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians. But what have they to offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible Utopias?

Churchill concluded the same speech with this moral lesson:

Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told. If, while on all sides foreign nations are every day asserting a more aggressive and militant nationalism by arms and trade, we remain paralyzed by our own theoretical doctrines or plunged into the stupor of after-war exhaustion, then indeed all that the croakers predict will come true, and our ruin will be swift and final.

The West, in large part due to Churchill’s courageous and clear-eyed leadership, belatedly rallied to overcome the Nazi menace. Soviet Communist totalitarianism — a threat Churchill also identified with prescience — was subsequently thwarted. But as Thornton points out:

.....Writing in 1916, C. Snouck Hurgronje, the great Dutch Orientalist, underscored how the jihad doctrine of world conquest and the re-creation of a supranational Islamic caliphate remained a potent force among the Muslim masses:

It would be a gross mistake to imagine that the idea of universal conquest may be considered as obliterated … the canonists and the vulgar still live in the illusion of the days of Islam’s greatness. The legists continue to ground their appreciation of every actual political condition on the law of the holy war, which war ought never be allowed to cease entirely until all mankind is reduced to the authority of Islam — the heathen by conversion, the adherents of acknowledged Scripture [i.e., Jews and Christians] by submission.

Hurgronje further noted that although the Muslim rank and file might acknowledge the improbability of that goal “at present” (circa 1916), they were:

… comforted and encouraged by the recollection of the lengthy period of humiliation that the Prophet himself had to suffer before Allah bestowed victory upon his arms.

Thus even at the nadir of Islam’s political power, during the World War I era final disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, Hurgronje observed:

......Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. All the countries conquered by Islam or to be conquered in the future will be marked for everlasting salvation. For they shall live under Allah’s law (Sharia). … Islam says: “Kill [the non-Muslims], put them to the sword and scatter their armies.” Islam says: “Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors (jihadists)!” There are hundreds of other Koranic psalms and hadiths (sayings of the prophet) urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all that mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim. … Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless.

......Ominously, the preponderance of contemporary mainstream Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia apparently share with their murderous, jihad terror waging co-religionists from al-Qaeda the goal (if not necessarily supporting the gruesome means) of reestablishing an Islamic Caliphate. Polling data released April 24, 2007 — from a rigorously conducted face-to-face University of Maryland/WorldPublicOpinion.org ^[8] interview survey ^[9] of 4384 Muslims conducted between December 9, 2006 and February 15, 2007, of 1000 Moroccans, 1000 Egyptians, 1243 Pakistanis, and 1141 Indonesians — reveal that 65.2% of those interviewed desired this outcome (i.e., “To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate”). This included 49% of “moderate” Indonesian Muslims. The internal validity of these data about the present longing for a Caliphate is strongly suggested by a concordant result: 65.5% of this Muslim sample approved a proposition: “To require a strict application of Shari’a law in every Islamic country.”

...[The dhimmi] is commanded to put his soul, good fortune and desires to death. Above all he should kill the love of life, leadership and honor. [The dhimmi] is to invert the longings of his soul, he is to load it down more heavily than it can bear until it is completely submissive. Thereafter nothing will be unbearable for him. He will be indifferent to subjugation or might. Poverty and wealth will be the same to him; praise and insult will be the same; preventing and yielding will be the same; lost and found will be the same. Then, when all things are the same, it [the soul] will be submissive and yield willingly what it should give. [Tafsir ibn ‘Ajibah.  Commentary on Q9:29. Ahmad ibn Muhammad Ibn `Ajibah]

At stake is nothing less than our nation’s survival, in body and soul.”

[edited from the original]

We have too many Dhimmi-Dhummies in our midst and the Dhim-Dhums are not just leftist ignorasmuses. The Dhim-Dhums encompass churches, their leaders, 'conservatives', cultural orders such as the Masons [who embrace Muslims as brothers], our civil servants and service personnel, and most anyone who suffered through a state managed education or who believes in the verities of pop-culture. We are rotting from the inside out. Civilisation is certainly at stake. As culture goes, so too goes the general society. If we disarm ourselves intellectually we cannot fight Islam. We will self-immolate on the alter of cultural Marxism.