Dhimmitude in the Face of Muselmanic Aggression

The author Bat Ye’or has for several decades written about the existence of Dhimmies, Christians, Jews and sometimes other religious groups living under Muslim domination. If you are not Muslim, you are at least a despised second-class citizen in an Islamic society.
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The most controversial book Bat Ye’or has written is Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis of 2005. She has never claimed to have invented the concept Eurabia herself, of an increasingly more Islamicized Europe. This was the name of a French newspaper from the 1970s.
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As a dhimmi, one constantly lives under the threat of Muslim aggression and violence. Many Dhimmies change their behavior towards submission so as not to provoke Muslims in any way.
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The moment you change your behaviour, even in your own country, in order not to provoke Muslims, you have mentally started behaving like a dhimmi.
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The Danish government, led by Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, wants to introduce a law that will ban the burning and desecration of holy scriptures. This has not been a topic at all in Scandinavia until activists like Rasmus Paludan began burning copies of the Koran.
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Although the Danish government pretends to be something else, this is undoubtedly a new law that will specifically reduce the risk of Muslim aggression, violence and possible terrorist attacks against Danes.
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If this law is adopted, the Danish authorities have formally accepted that the Danes should have a status that diminishes under Muslim dominance. From now on, it is Muslim threats and Islamic religious law, Sharia, that decide what Danes can do in their own country.
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No doubt this is how many Muslims will interpret this. In my view this interpretation is correct. (Peter Sweden)

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Fear and the rhetoric of ‘unprecedented’ barbarity

Its not about fear, its about our ignorance, our unwillingness to face the facts, to learn from history, and our lack of resolve

By Mark Durie

Many leaders have been stating that the Islamic State’s actions are ‘unprecedented’, ‘extreme’, ‘unique’, or even ‘eccentric’.  Western leaders who are intervening in the Syria-Iraq conflict justify their actions by declaring the Islamic State to be uniquely evil.  In announcing military action and increased security measures, Australian Prime Ministry Tony Abbott said of the Islamic State that “To do such evil — and to revel in doing such evil — is simply unprecedented”. David Cameron stated that “ISIL is a terrorist organisation unlike those we have dealt with before.”  Barack Obama claimed “these terrorists are unique in their brutality.”

The actions of Islamic State’s adherents are morally repugnant in the extreme, but only by applying historical amnesia and selective vision could one claim that their evil is unique or unprecedented.

In recent decades, not dissimilar horrors have regularly been reported from around the world, for example the abuses of the ‘Lord’s Resistance Army’, or the genocide pursued by the government of  Sudan against the Christians and traditional believers in the Nuba mountains and  the Blue Nile region, and before that against tribal Muslims in the Dafur region.  Indeed for decades the Sudanese government has unleashed jihad – with all the atrocities of the Islamic State – against its own (black African) citizens, often assisted by jihadis from all over the Arabic world, just like in Syria and Iraq today.

The Islamic State’s actions are also not unique in history.  Quite apart from the horrors of Nazism and Communism, Andrew Bostom has rightly pointed out that the atrocities of the Ottoman Caliphate in exterminating Christians under their rule were greater in magnitude than what is currently being experienced in Syria and Iraq. He writes:

“Notwithstanding the recent horrific spate of atrocities committed against the Christian communities of northern Iraq by the Islamic State (IS/IL) jihadists, the Ottoman jihad ravages were equally barbaric, depraved, and far more extensive. Occurring, primarily between 1915-16 (although continuing through at least 1919), some one million Armenian, and 250,000 Assyro-Chaldean and Syrian Orthodox Christians were brutally slaughtered, or starved to death during forced deportations through desert wastelands. The identical gruesome means used by IS/IL to humiliate and massacre its hapless Christian victims, were employed on a scale that was an order of magnitude greater by the Ottoman Muslim Turks, often abetted by local Muslim collaborators (the latter being another phenomenon which also happened during the IS/IL jihad campaign against Iraq’s Christians).”

Bostom also points out that the Yazidi’s recent sufferings at the hands of the IS are nothing new, but are consistent with a a pattern of genocidal assaults against them which stretches back to Ottoman times.

What is so disturbing to Western people about the Islamic State is not the extremity of the barbarity, which is far from unprecedented, but the fact that so many Western citizens (Muslims) have been signing up with IS, and the psychological warfare being directed by IS against the outside world, including the West, manifested, for example, in the videos of beheadings, and the way some enslaved, raped women have been forced to phone their families to tell them about their abuse, even while it is going on.

What is unique for us in the West is the way the fear is now upon our doorstep: this is the fear that what is happening there will come back home to haunt us.

The challenge facing the West now is not simply stopping the Islamic State – as important as that is – but what to do about the fear.

Dropping bombs on the Islamic State will not do it.

Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.  His book The Third Choice explains the implications for Christians of living under Islamic rule.
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The Status of Non-Muslim Minorities Under Islamic Rule

Dhimmitude: the Islamic system of governing populations conquered by jihad wars, encompassing all of the demographic, ethnic, and religious aspects of the political system. The word “dhimmitude” as a historical concept, was coined by Bat Ye’or in 1983 to describe the legal and social conditions of Jews and Christians subjected to Islamic rule. The word “dhimmitude” comes from dhimmi, an Arabic word meaning “protected”. Dhimmi was the name applied by the Arab-Muslim conquerors to indigenous non-Muslim populations who surrendered by a treaty (dhimma) to Muslim domination. Islamic conquests expanded over vast territories in Africa, Europe and Asia, for over a millennium (638-1683). The Muslim empire incorporated numerous varied peoples which had their own religion, culture, language and civilization. For centuries, these indigenous, pre-Islamic peoples constituted the great majority of the population of the Islamic lands. Although these populations differed, they were ruled by the same type of laws, based on the shari’a.

This similarity, which includes also regional variations, has created a uniform civilization developed throughout the centuries by all non-Muslim indigenous people, who were vanquished by a jihad-war and governed by shari’a law. It is this civilization which is called dhimmitude. It is characterized by the different strategies developed by each dhimmi group to survive as non-Muslim entity in their Islamized countries. Dhimmitude is not exclusively concerned with Muslim history and civilization. Rather it investigates the history of those non-Muslim peoples conquered and colonized by jihad.

Dhimmitude encompasses the relationship of Muslims and non-Muslims at the theological, social, political and economical levels. It also incorporates the relationship between the numerous ethno-religious dhimmi groups and the type of mentality that they have developed out of their particular historical condition which lasted for centuries, even in some Muslim countries, till today.

Dhimmitude is an entire integrated system, based on Islamic theology. It cannot be judged from the circumstantial position of any one community, at a given time and in a given place. Dhimmitude must be appraised according to its laws and customs, irrespectively of circumstances and political contingencies.