Rogan and Dhimmitude

I’ve been on a journey. It bends time and distance. It dries the eyes. It tries the patience. It takes healthy brain cells and makes them moribund. But I have persevered. From Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper in the fall, to Joe Rogan and Darryl Cooper in the spring, then back to Joe Rogan and Douglas Murray and Dave Smith (boy, was Dave steamed when Darryl’s name came up again), and still the journey wasn’t over. I have now made my way through Piers Morgan and Dave Smith and John Spencer, staggering only a little.

I’m off the trail now. I confess that today I could not make it through Dave Smith’s video-“response” to Douglas Murray’s New York Post op-ed. Perhaps you will understand if I compare the Murray column to the Smith video in minutes, which is how podcasters measure things. Murray’s 1000-word-piece was readable in a couple of minutes, even if you move your lips. Smith’s response was 51-minutes-nearly-an-hour-long. That’s an awful lot of Dave Smith, on top of an awful lot of podcasting.

Why did I do this? My smart friends would tell me I was wasting my time becoming mired in Dialogue & Praxis, and no doubt they’re right. But I wanted to see what the Powers that Platform want us to see.

From Hitler (and the Jews) to Churchill (vs. Hitler and the Jews), to Gaza (and the Jews) to Israel (and the Jews) to morality (and the Jews) to war (and the Jews) to genocide (and the Jews), I think we find not a theme but a bludgeon: the Jews. I should probably mention that while trailing behind this passing virtual parade, I was seeking refuge of a sort in reading Stalin’s War Against the Jews by Arkady Vaksberg — I say “of a sort” because while the book is remarkable, the subject matter is grim as a chronicle of evil and insanity. Or is evil insanity? In any case, I have been learning much about Stalin’s psychotic strategies to deploy anti-Semitism kinetically (destroy Jews), the Jews who slavishly served him and were also devoured by these same strategies, and, throughout, the malignant cunning with which Stalin activated anti-Semitism in Soviet society to create Jews as enemies, foreign spies, and also “Zionists.” And yes, there are alarming echoes. Indeed, it seems to have been Stalin who turned the term “Zionist” into a slur, which is something to think of when listening to the Sheikh Yusef al-Qaradawi or Candace Owens.

But wait. There’s a bait-and-switch coming. When the podcasts are talking about the Jews via Israel, Hitler, Gaza, etc., what they are not talking about is the Jihad. They are not talking about the Koran that commands it, the Hadiths that model it, the Islamic clerics who preach it and distribute fatwas today They are not talking about Hitler’s admiration and deployment of Islamic forces, either (or, for that matter, Churchill’s condemnation of Islam as a “retrograde” force.) They are not talking about the sharia dictatorships that sponsor jihad — all former Soviet chess pieces, by the way — and they are not talking about how it is that the terrorist groups are carrying out jihad, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. They are also not talking about the global Islamic organizations, such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Muslim World League, or the Muslim Brotherhood, which support and advance jihad as the engine of their longer, deeper, wider existential war on the Jews and Christians, who, once upon a time, made the Western world.

That’s a lot not to talk about. And it’s a lot to talk around, especially once Douglas Murray appeared in the mix with his new book specifically about Israel’s current battle against the jihad in its war on Hamas, On Democracies and Death Cults. Descriptively but not informatively, Murray calls Hamas a “death cult,” which, alas, is a term straight from dhimmitude (more than below). Little wonder I have found consuming, as they say, these podcasts such a mind-numbing experience. They say very little that is real.

Let me underscore how it is that Hamas checks off all the boxes listed above. Hamas, a US-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), wages jihad. It is animated by the Koran, Hadiths. and Islamic clerics. Indeed, its own covenant, one long call to jihad, includes a very famous Hadith about annihilating the Jews. Further, Hamas receives support from sharia dictatorships such as Iran and Qatar, and is protected and encouraged by the global Islamic organizations; indeed, it is a “wing” of the Muslim Brotherhood (its charter says so). Indeed, the Hamas Covenant opens with that truly uplifting quotation of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it"

Doesn’t that remind you of our Declaration’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness not at all?

Would any of this info, or the totality of this info, knock Dave Smith’s anti-Israel “morality” lectures off-kilter, or even elicit a “that’s crazy!” from Rogan? We’ll never know. But that’s Hamas, not Gaza, they might retort, singsong voices playing in their heads, From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free. No, dude, that is Hamas. That’s Islam. That’s Jewish annihilation, and, by the way, you’re next. Recently, on X, scholar of Islam Andrew Bostom (@andrewbostom) highlighted a crucial link, also never talked about in mainstream discourse, between supporting “Gaza” and supporting the jihad against Israel, which is just the “hottest” front in the wider jihad Islamizing the West. That link is the Islamic concept of the “waqf,” or “inalienable religious endowment”; that is, eternally Islamic property which is to be seized for the umma (Islamic world) through jihad. Guess what piece of property Muslims declare to be one big “waqf”? Israel, all of it, from the river to the sea, and all the Jews better flee.

This is nothing new. However, as Palestinian Media Watch (@palwatch on X) reports, on February 14, 2025 — Valentine’s Day, how sweet — a sharia judge in the allegedly secular progressive trans Palestinian Authority renewed this perennial war cry in no uncertain terms. In a Friday sermon broadcast on official PA TV (watch here), Judge Nasser Al-Qirem declaimed the following:

“The Shari’ah legal law of this land, for anyone who doesn't know, is that it is a waqf land (i.e., inalienable religious endowment)… from its [Mediterranean] Sea to its [Jordan] River, this is its Shari’ah law, from its sea to its river. The laws of this waqf determine that its status cannot be changed, not by sale and not by purchase, not by collateral and not by exchange ... not by addition and not by subtraction… As for the [end] date of this waqf: It is forever and ever, and for all eternity, until Allah inherits the earth and those on it.” [Official PA TV, Feb. 14, 2025]

Might some flicker, some glimmer suggest that maybe, maybe, it is not the dead baby in the Gaza rubble Dave Smith holds up (never the dead Bibas baby, however) to condemn Israel’s “morality,” but Islam that is the causus of continuing belli ? Could someone, Douglas Murray or West Point’s John Spencer, say so? To weigh this matter further, consider also the response to October 7 by the highly respected, completely mainstream Islamic authorities at Al Azhar University, a Sunni learning center and mosque, which Andrew Bostom points out, is the “de facto `Vatican of Islam on theological issues.’ ” On November 9, 2023, Bostom wrote:

Al-Azhar’s learned, authoritative Muslim theologians issued a fatwa, or Islamic religious ruling, October 19, 2023, pertaining to the ongoing conflict sparked by Hamas’ October 7, 2023 invasion of southern Israel. … [A]bsent any mention of Hamas’ jihad carnage—murdering, dismembering, torturing, raping, and burning some 1400 largely non-combatant Israelis, including infants, children, women, and the elderly—the fatwa ruled that all Israel’s citizens remained legitimate targets for such heinous jihad depredations. This Al-Azhar ruling was celebrated by Al-Qaeda, and came on the heels of an earlier official Al-Azhar statement celebrating the jihad depredations of Hamas as “the resistance efforts of the proud Palestinian people.”

The kibbutzes were smoldering, the body parts were uncollected, and the top Islamic authorities got out their “fatwa” ASAP to rule that all of Israel’s citizens, every man, woman, and child, “remained” legitimate targets of the Jihad. As always. Hey Dave, how’s that “morality” argument working for you? (That’s how they talk on podcasts.)

What would the Big Platforms say to all of this? We don’t know. Silence is the rule when it comes to the Islamic roots, connections, strategies, fatwas, sermons, convocations, support networks, and caliphate plans in the news media and shows of our postmodern public square. It is such omissions that turn those many hours of “debate” about Gaza (the Jews) into so much mental sludge, an extended and greasy arm wrestle over “moral” outrage or something I’ve seen described as “credentialism,” and whether one has bean to world hotspots. Speaking of wasted hours, what are the odds that podcaster Darryl Cooper explains these Islamic matters in his own thirty-hour-podcast-“history” devoted to Israel’s wars ? I am not going to bet the farm.

Western silence is the rule, fast becoming the law — Islamic law. And that is the case whether it is the apparent anti-Semite Dave Smith doing the talking, or the apparent philo-Semite Douglas Murray doing the talking. In Smith’s case, whether he knows it, he is engaging in the Islamic art of taqiyya, or deception, protecting Islam from honest scrutiny and censure. In Murray’s case — and I think he does know it — he is censoring himself, as he struggles against the G-force of dhimmitude brutalizing his native UK, where citizens and journalists (Tommy Robinson) go to jail and writers (Renaud Camus) are barred entry for expressing ideas that are crimes under Islam.

What is dhimmitude? I used to write about it all the time in my weekly syndicated newspaper column (2001-2015), in blogs, in books, until it came to seem there was very little point to explaining it all over again. As conceived by the great scholar Bat Ye’or, author of Islam and Dhimmitude and other vitally important histories, to live in a state of dhimmitude is to adopt Islamic strictures and speech codes to appease Islam. It is a capitulation to the sharia (Islamic law) in societies which remain technically free while buckling under Islamic pressures. Such pressures build with increasing Islamic immigration, which, naturally, even democratically, also builds a demographic in favor of Islamic law. (Such immigration also increases anti-Semitism in a society.) But tell you what: It was far more horrific witnessing the native-Brit dhimmi-enforcers of the sharia at the BBC rise up this week against Douglas Murray for two words he wrote in a column eight years ago after a Muslim terrorist attack in Manchester — he expressed a wish for “less Islam” for the UK — than it is to watch any raging sharia video posted by PalWatch. The pulsating animus of the BBC panelists reminded me of the psychotic machinations of the Stalinist purgers in the Vaksberg book.

As for Murray’s book, I appreciate his sincerity and diligence chronicling the October 7 attack in all its horror and in the de-stablizing aftermath — a geopolitical convulsion triggering a new, extremely dangerous cycle of global revolution. All of this feels very pre-planned, although that is another topic continuously and dangerously glossed over, even as the worst, I fear, is yet to come. While reading the book, however, I was also beset with considerable frustration over the absence of the essential Islamic context of the attacks, the aftermath, the war itself. I suspect editorial dhimmitude, the “business decision,” the determination to “Stay viable,” as the password of retreat goes. Douglas strongly supports Israel, an outpost of Western civilization, in this struggle; that is very clear. However, explicating the struggle outside its clear religious, ideological and strategic principles turns readers, or Rogan viewers, into mere arbiters of suffering or emotion. And then it all devolves into a propaganda battle, which We, the Good Guys, always seem to lose.

Which is where we are now. Arguing over nothing — churning, turning over little that is useful or enlightening. Dialogue & Praxis, indeed. But there is another bait-and-switch to take note of. The fixation on “the Jews” — morality proportionality existence Gaza Hitler JFK Epstein … — that has been forced upon us in this time of Marxist revolution and Islamic dhimmitude not only deflects from talking about “the jihad,” it deflects from fighting both the jihad and the Marxist revolution it is allied with. Now, the watchword has become “fighting anti-Semitism.” I, for one, am against such a fight. In a free society, anyone is free to hate anything; also, it is a giant pitfall waiting to be stepped in. In other words, it is a trap. It leads to division and worse. If you want to see less anti-Semitism in society, triumph over jihad, reverse Islamization, and throw off dhimmitude speech codes. This is the only strategy that guarantees a sweeter, happier society for Western peoples.

Similar thinking along the lines of rejecting the “Great Replacement,” stopping the Islamization of Texas, exposing the infiltration by the Muslim Brotherhood into the highest government councils finds expression only very far away from the bright lights of public discourse, whether we’re looking at so-called corporate media, or the most popular podcasts — which, by the way, are also corporate media (see Joe Rogan’s $250 million contract with Spotify, and HarperCollins’s, Murray’s publisher, audiobooks arrangement with Spotify). Congrats, then, are in order for the forces of dhimmitude. So constricting, so complete has been the encirclement, most people do not even notice that they are gasping for facts.