Since Michelle has so generously launched me into GuestBlog-dom as someone who, as she puts it, gave her a nudge “in the right direction on jihad and dhimmitude,” I’ll take the bait and hit the topic straight off. Above all else, understanding jihad and dhimmitude is crucial to understanding what we call the war on terror.

Jihad, of course, means “holy war.” Many Muslims will tell you that it also means “inner struggle,” which is nice and everything, but it’s “holy war” that we, in the non-Muslim world, have to deal with.

Dhimmitude is what follows every successful jihad–if, that is, you happen to be a non-Muslim “dhimmi” who finds himself living under Islamic rule. The term, coined by historian Bat Ye’or, defines a culture of fearful inferiority–legal, social and religious–inhabited by non-Muslims according to sharia, or Islamic law. What is particularly alarming about dhimmitude, as Bat Ye’or has also chronicled, is that this same pattern of deference to Islam has imprinted itself even in non-Islamic countries. Just think back to the craven reaction to Cartoon Rage when most Western media outlets submitted to Islamic religious law (dhimmitude) out of fear of attack (jihad) by not publishing the Mohammed cartoons. (But not fearless MichelleMalkin.com!)

Alas, we can now watch as a new progression of jihad-to-dhimmitude potentially unfolds by taking a look at what’s going on this week (basically non-covered by our MSM) in Great Britain.

OK. Last week, we had the disrupted Airplane Plot–an act of jihad averted. We had the ensuing police round-up of Muslim Britons. We had, and have, intense public panic, and an ongoing rupture in “normal” life–in a way, almost as if the plot had gone off as planned.

Then what? I would argue that what’s going on in GB today may be seen as an attempt by British Muslim leaders to use the ongoing threat of jihad by British Muslim terrorists to intensify Islamic influence, which necessarily deepens non-Muslim British dhimmitude.

Here’s how.
What you could (and should) call Mainstream British Islam–as represented by 38 British Muslim groups, three of the four Muslim MPs, and three of the four Muslim members of the House of Lords–took out full-page newspaper ads over the past weekend to declare in an open letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair that it was British foreign policy in the Middle East that provided “ammunition to extremists who threaten us all.” In other words, as Liberal Democrats deputy leader Vince Cable put it, the letter’s message might “give some comfort to the kind of people who say: ‘Well, change your foreign policy or we’ll blow you up‘”.

The missive didn’t go over too well with British officials. As Home Secretary John Reid told the BBC, “”No government worth its salt would … be supported by the British people if our foreign policy or any other aspect of policy was being dictated by terrorists.

“That is not the British way, it is antithetical to our very central values. We decide things in this country by democracy, not under the threat of terrorism.”

It is true that only 2.7 percent of the British population is, in fact, Muslim, but it is also true that some large segment of British Muslims would like to live under sharia, and that some other large segment actually supports the Other Side in the war on terror.

Moving right along.

In the wake of the Airplane Plot, The Independent reported today that Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott will meet with Muslim Labor MPs who are demanding “a change in Government foreign policy in the Middle East.”

In the wake of the Airplane Plot, the same story reported that Ruth Kelly, who is something official called the Secretary of State for Communities (sounds squishy), met yesterday with British Muslim leaders. They called on the government to sanction sharia for British Muslims in matters of family law and marriage as a means of preventing Muslims from becoming what are rather quaintly known as “extremists.” Of course, if sharia isn’t extreme, what is?

So here we are. Britain narrowly averts another 9/11 that was to have been caused by British Muslim terrorists, and British Muslim leaders take the opportuity to press forward a political agenda (ending GB-US cooperation abroad, and urging the adoption of sharia at home) that could only please the terrorists. What happens next will tell us how deeply into dhimmitude Great Britain really is.

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