Mark Steyn on the lessons from the Sir Salman uproar

Writing at the OC Register (which surprised me, because his usual Sunday venue is the Chicago Sun Times), Mark Steyn weighs in on the lessons the British government hasn’t learned either from America’s run-ins with Iran in 1979, which set the world up for the equally teachable moment when Sir Salman’s had his first public nexus with radical Islam. I’ve highlighted the language that, for me, sums up all of the problems we’re having with a violent subculture that has norms and demands completely antithetical to the Western Civilization we’ve so carefully and painfully developed over the past centuries:

So many of our problems with Iran today arise from not doing anything about our problems with Iran yesterday. Men like Ayatollah Khomeini despised pan-Arab nationalists like Nasser who attempted to impose a local variant of Marxism on the Muslim world. Khomeini figured: Why import the false ideologies of a failing civilization? Doesn’t it make more sense to export Islamism to the dying West?

And, for a guy dismissed by most of us as crazy, Khomeini made a lot of sense. The Rushdie fatwa established the ground rules: The side that means it gets away with it. Mobs marched through Britain calling for the murder of a British subject – and, as a matter of policy on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity, the British police shrugged and looked the other way.

One reader in England recalled one demonstration at which he asked a constable why the “Muslim community leaders” weren’t being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer told him to “f— off, or I’ll arrest you.” Genuine “moderate Muslims” were cowed into silence, and pseudo-moderate Muslims triangulated with artful evasiveness. Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who went on to become leader of the most prominent British Muslim lobby group, mused about the Rushdie fatwa: “Death is perhaps too easy.”

In 1989 Salman Rushdie went into hiding under the protection of the British police. A decade later he decided he did not wish to live his life like that and emerged from seclusion to live a more or less normal life. He learned the biggest lesson of all – how easy it is to be forced into the shadows. That’s what’s happening in the free world incrementally every day, with every itsy-bitsy nothing concession to groups who take offense at everything and demand the right to kill you for every offense. Across two decades, what happened to Rushdie has metastasized, in part because of the weak response in those first months. “Death is perhaps too easy”? Maybe. But slow societal suicide is easier still.

Yeah. What he said.

UPDATE: If you’re caught in a tangle of cultural relativism about Iran (“Oh, they should entitled to stand up for their beliefs, as should their minions, stooges and satellites all over the world”) Michelle Malkin, in concert with other bloggers, has a photo journal of the way in which Iran so often manifests its beliefs — painful, humiliating and bloody crackdowns against its own citizens. Interestingly enough, while everyone is willing to castigate America for Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, two anomalous American situations, you don’t hear a peep from the usual whiny crowd about Iran’s bad little habits. Could be because, in criticizing the first, you get fame and adulation; in criticizing the second, you get dead.