There's something I haven't been able to get out of my head: it's the idea that nations aren't conquered by force but by culture. I used to have an uncle (who is no longer my uncle after divorce) who told me in the mid 1980s that fortunes could be made by smuggling in suitcases full of blue jeans and Beatles tapes to Soviet Russia. By the time Glasnost was launched by the Communist Party's head of propaganda in 1986, it was basically a cope. The culture has long since shifted West. This wasn't just in practice—fashion, music—but in mindset. The Soviet imagination had been captured by the US and Western Europe. We're now seeing that kind of cultural capture in the US and the West, but it isn't leaning toward freedom and liberty.
In 1989, only a few short years after the beginning of glasnost in the USSR, a few years before the Soviet Union would fall, and just 6 months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, late President Jimmy Carter penned an op ed in the paper of record, the New York Times. "Rushdie's Book Is an Insult," the column was titled, and it criticized author Salman Rushdie for having "insulted" Muslims in his work "Satanic Verses." By 2024, Rushdie has been facing death threats over the book for more than 30 years. A fatwa was issued against his life, essentially it was a bounty put on his head, by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who offered $3 million for his head as well as the promise of an afterlife in paradise. At issue was a character in the book who Muslim extremists believed to be an insult to the Prophet Muhammad, the basis for their religion. Carter defended the Ayatollah and took issue with the free speech advocates in the US, saying that "while Rushdie's First Amendment freedoms are important" the book "is a direct insult to those millions of Muslims whose sacred beliefs have been violated..."
Now, the name Muhammad is surging in popularity in both the United Kingdom and New York City, hitting the top boys' baby names lists in 2024. It is not Christian or Jewish parents who are taking up this moniker for their little beloveds but Muslim parents, recent immigrant families and first generations, who are bringing their culture and religion to the West. To be sure, as an American, as a staunch believer in the Bill of Rights, I would never deign to tell anyone how they ought worship or practice their faith in these United States of America. But—and it's a big but—are we looking at something of a cultural capture of our America and the West at large?
American universities saw a rise of protest culture on their campuses in the wake of a pogrom carried out by Hamas terrorists in Israel in October 2023. Those protests were decidedly in favor of the terrorists. The protests celebrated the Oct. 7 massacre as a liberation of oppressed people, a righteous uprising against the settler nation of Israel. The campus protesters, which favored elite, expensive, liberal arts schools that have been considered the pinnacle of the American university system, donned the apparel of the terrorists, wearing Palestinian keffiyeh scarves. They brandished signs opposing Jews, Israel, and the United States for daring to have an ally in the only democratic nation of the Middle East—Israel. At Columbia University, students occupied administration buildings and claimed to be the inheritors of the 1960s anti-war movement, only instead of protesting against war they were justifying it, so long as the atrocities were carried out by their preferred side. All of this has been happening in the UK, too. Hollywood and cultural institutions have all fallen prey to this madness. Is that not a cultural capture of our alleged best and brightest by a terrorist ethos?
That capture did not start on October 7, when we saw the first videos emerge of Hamas terrorists butchering women, children and civilians, but long before. It began, to a certain extent, after September 11, 2001, another terrorist attack carried out against civilians by ideologues set on the destruction of America, Israel and the West. Almost as soon as the cloud of dust and debris had cleared from New York City, Islamic groups began to caution publishers, cultural institutions, and politicians against so-called Islamophobia. They claimed that Americans would be too quick to blame Muslims et al for the atrocities, for the loss of over 3,000 lives at the hands of Islamic terrorists. They wanted to nip that right in the bud, and so, in no time at all, text books began to equivocate, to blame the Jewish and Christian religions for their violence, citing the Medieval Catholic crusades or the fight the Jewish state of Israel has had to undertake to simply ensure its existence against decade after decade of assault by its Arab neighbors.
Relativism, the idea that there is no one morality, that there is no one truth, that all these things are subjective, has been pervasive in American education from grade schools through the universities and it has allowed for the American culture of liberty, individualism, and making your own destiny to be rewritten. Instead of liberty, there is groupthink, instead of individualism there is collectivism, and instead of making your own destiny there is a caste system based on your status as a victim or an oppressor. In the UK and Europe this ethos has also been pervasive. Marches of pro-terrorist sympathizers have been given a free pass by law enforcement while nationalist groups see members locked up over social media posts. Carter's column on Rushdie equated Christians’ critique of the novel and film The Last Temptation of Christ with the Ayatollah's call for death for the author of a book he didn't like. Those American Christians complained but believed in free speech. No such belief exists for Islamic extremists, who killed Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands over a feminist art project, who blew up the publication offices of Charlie Hebdo over a cartoon, who killed a French teacher over showing a portrayal of Muhammad.
We've given ourselves over to the blue jeans and Beatles tapes of extremist ideology because we've discounted and discredited everything we have to offer. We have relinquished our hold on our culture and subsumed it to a culture that embraces death and destruction, calling that liberation. There is nothing liberating about religious extremism that advocates for killing and hatred. Maybe being American doesn't feel as sexy and fun as it used to. Maybe now, with the MAGA right, it feels a little more campy than serious, but the basis of our freedoms rests in our embrace of our rights and privileges and the reason immigrants used to want to come to the US was to be part of that. Now we see Americans, like Shamsun-Din Jabbar, born and raised in Texas, aligning with a horrific ideology that seeks nothing more than the destruction of America and the non-Muslims. Leading up to his terror attack in New Orleans on New Year's Day, he said he wanted headlines after the fact to focus on the "war between the believers and the disbelievers."
It was with good intentions that Carter wrote his op ed in 1986. But his premise was fatally flawed. When faced with evil, there is no way to equivocate rightfully, no way to say "hey, maybe the other guy has a point." When it comes to the pogrom on Oct. 7, there can be no quarter given to those who carried out or defend the attack. When it comes to the sacrifice of our rights so as to not offend others, it is those who find themselves offended by freedom who must change, not those who embrace it. The culture of the West, of America, is better than that of our adversaries. Full stop. It's up to us to preserve it, to strengthen it, and not to let it be pulled out from under us by those who can't tell right from wrong.
