LIBERAL DHIMMIS

Instapundit brought my attention to this post by Nick Denton - in which he advocates an explicit tradeoff for acceptance of Muslims into Western societies - in effect, leave your Islam at the door.

Let's turn the system around. In the West, it is the Muslims who are the dhimmis, the tolerated minority; they should be free to practice, so long as their Islam is a diluted Episcopalian version, expressed in a sabbath on Fridays, holidays at unusual times of the year, traditional names for children, and an annual parade through Brooklyn.
In other words, Western governments should make clear that the toleration of Muslim minorities is conditional. The West is a package deal: the prosperity that has attracted Muslim immigrants is a function of the Western tradition. Fundamentalist Islam is not, as the morally ambivalent would have it, as valid as any other system. Here's the Western dhimma: accept the supremacy of Western humanist values -- equal rights for women and sexual minorities, freedom of speech, and family law -- or leave.

There are a number of major problems with Denton's argument. First, it is not the Islamic element of fundamentalist Islam that is incompatible with liberal values, it is the fundamentalist element. And the greatest threat to liberal values comes from the fundamentalism of the dominant religion in the country. The Ultra-Orthodox Jews of Brooklyn are no less hostile to feminism than those of Jerusalem. Its just that the latter feel empowered to push for separate seating by gender on public busses. Similarly, it is fundamentalist Christians that have fought the fiercest rearguard actions against the tide of equality for women and gays that has risen in the past three decades. Still, it goes against the very principles of America to condition citizenship on an uncritical embrace of liberal values. We rightly allow Southern Baptists and Hasids to retain their views on homsexuality and gender roles so long as they do not impose them on the rest of society. The condition we imose upon them is not an acceptance of liberal values, but of secular legal authority.

Even more critically, however, Denton is blind to the wide spectrum of religious observance that resides between the tokenism he supports and fundamentalism he rightly deplores. Deep religious commitment may place a believer in tension with liberal values, but it is not incompatible with them. There is no reason why a Muslim can not be both a scrupulous observer of the commandments of daily prayer, dietary restrictions, and donations to the poor and also adhere to the liberal principle of respecting the rights of those who observe different commandments or none at all.

Yes, we should be vigilant about the efforts of Islamism to expand in Western societies. It is absolute insanity to permit the continued influx of Saudi oil-money to spread the gospel of Wahabism. However, it goes against every principle of liberalism to treat Muslims differently solely because of their faith. We should treat them as we do any other citizen - as individuals who possess the full rights and responsibilities of the law.