Diana West on “The New Blasphemy”

Simply put, Diana West is the most courageous and perspicacious journalist writing today on the dire, self-destructive synergy between  Western cultural relativism, and resurgent global jihadism. (Read her “The Death of the Grown-Up”.)

In a journalistic world with its head held on even by a single remaining strand of connective tissue, she’d be given a Pulitzer for her nonpareil oeuvre. But alas she is a shunned “Blasphemer” par excellence in our era of deathly political correctness, across the political spectrum.  

Read it all as the rather hackneyed saying goes, but imprint these comments in your brains, from Diana’s column today, 1/18/08:  

The fact is, to discuss blasphemy laws in Afghanistan and Iraq (Kurdistan, even) is to discuss Islam — specifically, its laws and doctrines. And we, as a politically correct people, don’t know how to do that. Instead, we act as though they don’t exist. And not just blasphemy laws. Jihad doctrine; Shariah (Islamic law); designs for a global caliphate through jihad (terrorism) and the spread of Shariah (Islamization): We pretend they are not factors in the free world’s experience with Islam. We certainly don’t discuss their implications for the freeness of the world. Look at what passes for “debate” among our presidential candidates: Republicans argue over who supported “the surge” first; Democrats argue over who will withdraw troops first.Such resolute blindness on Islam probably explains the institutional apathy — including (with few exceptions) conservative apathy — on the termination of Pentagon analyst Maj. Stephen Coughlin… The kind of negligence Mr. Coughlin is talking about, deriving from a PC ignorance of Islamic law, is quite evident in the strategies and tactics of the so-called war on terror that conservatives have widely championed — up to and including “the surge” in Iraq, which, for example, presupposes that American-won security will trigger a set of cultural behaviors and aspirations in Iraqi society best described as non-Islamic.In other words, we seem to have arrived at a strange junction where neither jihadist apologists nor surge enthusiasts want to hear the facts about Islamic law. You might say it’s become the new blasphemy.