Dhimmitude Not Just An Islamic Concept

Good insights:

That was when the scales fell off my eyes. What’s all the fuss?

In fact, we have the same system here in the United States. Call it liberal dhimmitude. Every conservative lives under its oppressive yoke.

Disagree with the liberal line and you better expect to be attacked and humiliated. That’s how the system works.

The “progressive” left stirs up a conflict and blames the international middle class. Maybe it’s Marx blaming the bourgeoisie for the subsistence wages of the industrial working class. Maybe it’s Lenin claiming that every European is an imperialist. Maybe it’s liberals dividing black and white in the United States with racial quotas, or declaring upper-middle-class women the victim of the male of the species.

Now liberals are united in protecting Muslims from insult and tossing away our tradition of free speech. The only thing that matters is to make westerners—or Christians, or Americans—take the blame, to make them into dhimmi, second-class citizens afraid to stand up for the Christian God, the rule of law, and the bounty of the market.

If you read the Pope’s speech at Regensburg carefully you can appreciate the radicalism of the Christian message. The idea that God is a rational God, who invites us to discover His nature through an exploration of reason, is radical. It makes the claim that, in the end, we will find out that the universe makes sense.

It is the same claim that western science makes, that we can understand the universe by discovering its laws. Both Christianity and science are grounded in the same faith, that there are indeed laws that describe the universe.

But Islam and western postmodernism make a different claim. For them there is no “In the beginning was the Word,” the logos of reason.

There is only power: divine power or secular power.

The Chinese have a different take on the modern world. According to David Aikman in the book Jesus in Beijing, the Chinese have been wondering for generations what it is about the west that makes it so powerful. Now “Dr. Wu” of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences says that they have found us out.

“In the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful.”

That is also what Pope Benedict XVI is saying in different words.