But the official protests of the Pakistan and other governments are nothing less than ridiculous. Whatever the intrigue behind putting him up for the Queen’s honors – one suspects the departing Blair government was making a last obeisance to the always feisty and powerful left of the Labor movement – the British government has ever right to do so. After all, my reservations notwithstanding, Rushdie’s nomination as a knight had two things going for it: he has been a very successful English-language, British writer, both in critical and commercial terms, and he was for a decade innocently victimized by the Muslim extremists. I note that much of the media [what else is new?] glosses over the death warrant put out by Ayatollah Khomeini and his Mullah hoodlums inviting all and sundry “believing” Muslims to kill Rushdie. Only the brilliant performance of Britain’s security apparatus [at what cost one can only imagine!] and Rushdie’s hiding out, kept him from being another victim of the ritualistic throat slashing which has occurred on Dutch streets in broad daylight and in darkened hideaways in Iraq.

There is a good deal of talk these days among the chattering classes about learning to live with Islam. As so often happens with our muddled intellectuals [especially those living a featherbedded life as part of the tenuratti in academia], they have grabbed the issue by the wrong end.

The issue is not how the rest of us would or should live with Islam, but how Islam can and must adjust to the modern age and the rest of the world.

The Islamofascists have a recipe: it is violence against their own innocents [and not so innocent] to reestablish norms they can hardly define but which seek their origin in bigoted, ignorant, pre-industrial societies.

If we needed any proof of that, it was demonstrated in the bloody and nihilistic killing taking place in Gaza in mid June in this the 21st century. There Hamas hoodlums [wearing masks to ward off the probable coming retribution from their tribal enemies] flung opponents off the roofs of buildings, casually tossed grenades and machine gunned families of their adversaries.

But the worst of it was the fact there was almost total silence among official or unofficial Muslims elsewhere to another catastrophe, largely of their own leaders’ making, overtaking the Palestinians, the cause celebre of much of Moslem anti-Western propaganda. Note other Moslem states, including those luxuriating in oil revenues in the Gulf, have never offered more than support for the Palestinian killers. The bill for supporting Palestinian “refugees” not admitted to their dozen “Arab nation” neighbors has been paid by the Americans and the Europeans and the Japanese through the hate-encouraging UN organizations.

The few cries of shame and accusations of criminality among the Moslems who dared oppose this bestiality were drowned out by the ominous silence of the three dozen odd governments dominated by Muslims. Other than that, there was the usual advocates of “fundamental causes” telling us it was all the fault of the Israelis, or even the U.S. [with Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice running about like a chicken with its head cut off to try to pick up the pieces of “the peace process” which they generally do everything they can to sabotage.]

The outcry against the knighting of Sir-to-be Salman led not only to the usual demagogic and totally ineffectual mob burnings of effigies in the street and proposed attacks on innocent Westerners but was echoed by these same governments. Meanwhile, as Claudia Rosett has so wonderfully described, their highly paid [off the U.S. taxpayer in tithes to the UN or the American consumer at the gasoline pump, for the most part] were consorting with cynical Chinese and Russian layabouts on how to “organize” a new United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

The fact they have an echo chamber in the Western world is even more ludicrous.

The arguments for rationalization of tolerance of Islamic prejudice, oppression, and simple backwardness seems to have no limits. While Saudi Arabia prohibits any manifestations of foreign religious activity, either public or private, any protest in a Western city against infringement of zoning codes for construction of huge mosques it funds is taken up by our civil libertarians as a violation of Moslem rights. That Saudi money is put into hate-spreading preachers and so-called Islamic instruction in cities in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia is excused by those who rightly advocate the right of individuals in our society to pursue their own religious tenets and goals but mistake the message. An Ontario court flirts with the possibility of inflicting “sharia” – the law of desert violence of the 7th century – on Muslims living in a modern society. A German judge in the name of the universality of law and justice bases a decision on what must be her perverted [does she speak Arabic, know the history of Islamic disputation, etc.?] understanding and sense of values on Muslim residents of her own country.

It is true, of course, within boundaries, modern societies must make room for Muslim custom [more often than not, ethnic codes, rather than the universalism Islam professes]. Yet there are limits and there must be sophistication in making these accommodations. For example, some of our airlines cater kosher meals for Orthodox Jews as they might very well hallal for Muslims [although who is to pay in their present bankrupt states becomes a subject worthy of consideration]. But a public display of prayer replete with foot washing and rugs in an airlines waiting room by only Arabic-speaking men, acting coyly as a team, after 9/11 is just not acceptable.

When I was growing up in North Carolina in the 1930s, our local English-born Episcopalian pastor [and the Boy Scoutmaster], required female communicants for his high-church services to wear something on their heads at prayer. More often than not, it was a tiny little crochet piece held on by what we then called “bobby pins”. But this was a manifestation of an old and long since largely abandoned culture of requiring females to cover their heads before God [not unlike Orthodox Jews], especially among Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics. But it had long a substitute for prohibition to keep the women [who were the mainstay of the priest’s congregation] “in their place”. I doubt that the bench at the back of his little church, a replica of a red brick Tudor cottage, which originally had been constructed for the African-American household slaves who accompanied their masters to church, is still there. If it is, probably no one remembers what it was for. Thus time and progress, hopefully, march on.

The Islamic veil, however, in whatever its form, from the head to foot burkha of South Asia with only a slit for the eyes, or even the hejab in whatever its form, if only a headscarf, which has become fashionable in some Islamicist female circles, is another kind of symbol. It represents the repression of women in traditional Islamic societies [often based on their ethnic proclivities] -- their murder in “honor” killings by their own families [even today and in Western European expatriate Moslem societies as well as their homelands], their relegation to the status of chattel, their traditional victimization in myriad ways whether in endogamous child marriage or divorce at the whim of an abusive husband.

There can be no place for any ikon which represents this culture in a modern society, and no amount of political and pseudo-religious orthodoxy can excuse it. Perhaps outlawing it by fiat is not the way to go [as has happened in France, and while not actually enforced, in Turkey]. But in the absence of effective campaigns for its abandonment by so-called “moderates” in the Moslem world there may be no other route.

Entering the modern world has never been easy for any culture. Many of them continue to bare the scars. Even defining what that world should be is a constant challenge, no where more recognized than in the U.S., Europe and Japan. But there is where Islam must go; the world cannot accommodate to cruelty, inequality, and obscurantism which is what placating Muslin prejudice under whatever pretext would constitute.