In 1951, Bill Buckley wrote in “God and Man at Yale”: “I myself believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level. I believe that if and when the menace of Communism is gone, other vital battles, at present subordinated, will emerge to the foreground. And the winner must have help from the classroom.”
One can only imagine what he would make of the news that his alma mater is accepting a $10 million contribution from a Saudi billionaire, Saleh Abdullah Kamal—whose Islamic banks have been tied to jihadists, mind you—to fund an Islamic law center.
To the degree to which communism in the form of the Soviet Union was vanquished in a pseudo-conventional sense—for while it broke down its walls and restructured, whether its ideology was defeated is debatable—Buckley’s words have proven prescient. The vital battle of Islamic supremacism against the West has become foreground. Yale’s decision begs the question of which side the classroom is helping.
Allah, God Over the State
As Andrew C. McCarthy has written at Buckley’s National Review for years, Sharia is the legal system at the heart of theo-political Islam. Unlike the liberal Judeo-Christian foundation on which Western civilization’s secular legal and political structures are built, Islam not only does not permit the separation of mosque and state, the mosque is the state. As McCarthy puts it:
Islam’s sharia is a code premised on the principles that Allah has prescribed the ideal way for human life to be lived; that people are required to submit to that prescription; and that Islamic governments exist to enforce that requirement. Our Constitution, to the contrary, is premised on the principles that we are free to choose how we will live; the laws we make are not required to comply with the principles of any religion; and that government is our servant, not our master.
Sharia sanctions a litany of policies and actions antithetical to free society: The subjugation of religious minorities, women, and gays—notably including the murder of apostates and subjection of infidels to a jizya tax, conversion, or the sword; honor killing; jihad both covert and overt, ideological and kinetic as a means of forcing world submission to Islam; and Islam’s expansion by Alinsky-like tactics including strategic lying via taqiyya and kitman.
As McCarthy writes:
[C]iting an authoritative sharia manual endorsed by, among other prominent Muslims, the scholars at al-Azhar University (the center of Islamic scholarship for over a century), Islamic law rejects the premise that people are free to govern themselves as they choose, rejects freedom of conscience, rejects freedom of speech, rejects equality between Muslims and non-Muslims, rejects equality between men and women, justifies wars of aggression against non-Muslims, and rejects our safeguards of liberty and privacy – prescribing draconian penalties, often including death, for apostasy, homosexuality, sex outside of marriage, and other personal choices.
So why is Yale University, whose crest written in Hebrew and Latin translates to “Light and truth,” giving a platform to an ideology that blots out light and conceals or obfuscates truth as part of its greater mission for world domination? If all ideologies are equal in value, and if our own heritage is to be defined primarily in the Obama/Zinn milieu of The Crusades, Western imperialism, and slavery, then perhaps Yale’s decision is not only justified but represents a healthy dollop of redistributive justice. Even so, Yale is endorsing an ideology under which Yale itself could not exist, just as under communism the brightest useful idiots comprising the intelligentsia would be the first put to the wall.
Authoritarianism: What’s Not to Love?
In America’s evolution from Judeo-Christian idealism to secular materialism—an evolution Buckley courageously fought at Yale—perhaps it only makes sense that the next logical step would be an embrace of Islamic law. After all, it has the double benefit of contravening Judeo-Christian idealism while assuaging the guilt of secular materialists, all while providing a collectivist structure in which the state is G-d.
Scoff though you might at the notion of Yale or Georgetown or Columbia or any of a number of other campuses housing centers of Islamic thought, let alone Muslim Student Association chapters, the ideas perpetuated on college campuses have serious consequences. For the ideas our elites imbibe inevitably filter down to the people, since they disproportionately populate the government, media, and academia. Ideas shape our culture, and culture determines our politics.
There is also the matter of national security. Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, says the center “will enhance research opportunities for our students and other scholars and enable us to disseminate knowledge and insights for the benefit of scholars and leaders all over the world.” Further, according to the school’s press release, “The center will bring prominent scholars of Islam to the Yale campus for public lectures, seminar discussions, visiting fellowships, and visiting professorships, attracting students from the Law School and other schools at the university to its lectures and other opportunities for collaboration.”
Does anyone believe such a program would not be rife with opportunities to carry out influence operations, collect intelligence, or otherwise undermine our national security, beyond the fact that the subject matter itself subverts our Constitution? Would the America of the 1970s have created centers for Soviet law and civilization? Would the America of the 1940s have created centers for German, Japanese, or Italian law and civilization?
Capitulating Means Slow Suicide
While America remains financially and militarily the mightiest nation on Earth, it is losing the war Islamic supremacism is waging against her because it is chiefly an ideological one. We have the strength to defend ourselves, but we lack the knowledge and the will to defeat our enemies. We are morally relativistic and therefore unable to acknowledge that different peoples are different and that not all ideologies are equal or seek the same ends.
But people like Saleh Kamal surely understand us. In the conquest ideology inherent to Sharia—Islam compels Muslims to extend the Islamic sphere, the ummah, over all the world—America has found an enemy able to best take advantage of our deeply held freedoms. Sharia explicitly calls for the use of the very tactics against which America is most vulnerable.
As a consequence of our willful blindness (contrasted with Islamic supremacists’ comparable clarity), we are constructing Islamic law centers, inviting Muslims to immigrate by the hundreds of thousands without recognition that Hijra is a form of jihad, and, 14 years after 9/11, our top military minds are arguing that we back al-Qaeda against ISIS—that is, the newly “good jihadists” against the “bad jihadists.” For the coup de grace, we are actively aiding, abetting, and enabling Iran’s Twelver jihadist regime in its quest for nuclear domination of the Middle East and beyond.
Today America is a self-righteously suicidal nation. Our elite academic institutions are bellwethers of our plight, something William F. Buckley knew all too well. Somewhere, he weeps. And he laments that our nation’s leading academies are sowing the seeds of our own destruction.
