By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, December 16, 2025
The first half of this decade has given us all an
opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with the concept of appeasement and its
consistent record of not just failing to deter aggression but of inviting more
of it. But the history of appeasement is tied to geopolitics, and it typically
describes how nations — even those under the sway of a single strongman —
behave.
How might we describe a similar program of mollification
designed to quiescently pacify an aggressive culture that might be
unbound to national borders? At the height of the Global War on Terror and as
the phenomenon relates to militant Islam, we did have that word. It
described the impulse to respond to acute threats with supplication. We called
it dhimmitude.
Admittedly, that was a somewhat flip appropriation of a
concept from early Islamic history. The pejorative is derived from the Arabic
word dhimma, which roughly describes the “covenant of protection”
non-Muslims enjoy within a nevertheless wholly Islamized social covenant.
In lore, dhimmitude described the secure but subservient
role minorities served in the early ummah. In practice, it was the name given
to the second-class status reserved for non-Muslims that was often accompanied
by humiliations, social and legal restrictions, and confiscatory tax regimes
designed to keep the dhimmis down. And the practice had an intended
psychological effect on its targets. Dhimmitude wasn’t just a status but a
state of mind — one that was outwardly observable in the subject’s slumped shoulders,
lowered eyes, shuffling gait, and fearful silence. It was servility enforced
via the explicit threat of coercion, or worse.
Those of a certain age will remember dhimmitude as the
slight directed at insecure Western Europeans and woolly headed American
university presidents who would not defend the right of artists to offend a
target of satire if the target was willing to draw blood in pursuit of redress.
The term was bandied about when Westerners made excuses for murderers,
operating on the unstated assumption that their tormentors’ violence was an
instinctual or even rational response to provocation. It is an outlook
that is absolutely allergic to displays of ethnic and credal chauvinism, save
one conspicuous exception.
We don’t have the word anymore. It has fallen out of
favor as the post-9/11 wars fade from memory. But we still have the concept it
describes. Indeed, we have more of it today than we did when we had the
shorthand vocabulary to identify it.
What was Australia’s posture in the run-up to the Bondi
Beach massacre but one of abject supplication?
When the October 7 massacre was met with outright
celebrations in Sydney within hours of the attack, police told court officers
that such celebrations and those that would follow had “disaster written all over it.” But little was done. Indeed,
subsequent forensic analyses of the event could not establish the fact that
protesters chanted “gas the Jews” as alleged. Rather, what was chanted was the
somehow less menacing phrase, “Where’s the Jews?” the authorities dubiously
insisted, along with “other antisemitic phrases,” as the Sydney Morning Herald put it.
When a private chat group of Jewish creative
professionals in Australia was leaked by “pro-Palestinian activists” — a leak accompanied by efforts
to intimidate and harass those creatives and their families — Canberra
responded by attempting to ban doxing. And when a father and son slaughtered at least
15 people, including a child, in this weekend’s attack, the Australian
government concluded that its already restrictive gun laws weren’t restrictive enough.
These responses were designed to collectivize the guilt
that should have been reserved for a limited and defined set of individuals who
insist on accommodation for their bigotries — even in liberal societies
ostensibly dedicated to political pluralism and religious toleration. It helped
Australian authorities create a fiction that seemed a comfort only to them.
“We’ve had synagogues that have been graffitied,” said Victoria Teplitsky, the daughter of one of the victims of
that attack, in describing the harrowing experience long endured by Australia’s
Jews. “We’ve had synagogues that have been bombed. This is not a surprise to
us.”
It’s worse in Europe. In November 2024, Amsterdam erupted
in an obviously premeditated orgy of violence as fans of the Israel-based
soccer team Maccabi Tel Aviv descended on the city. Five of the club’s
supporters were hospitalized as “men on scooters” ransacked the city searching
for identifiable Jews to assault. “Supporters of Israeli soccer team Maccabi
Tel Aviv were targeted for beatings by groups of thugs,” Reuters reported. Soon enough, though, European media
outlets and officials described the violence as “locals reacting” to the provocative presence of Israelis.
And as this weekend’s attempted pogrom outside a concert venue hosting a Hanukkah concert showed, it wasn’t the Israelis
who were looking for a fight.
The same thing might have happened in England the
following year, but authorities preemptively banned Israelis from attending
their own team’s game. A subsequent investigation into the decision found that
the evidence marshalled in support of it “changed
to fit the decision” — a way of saying that British authorities sought
evidence to justify their predetermined decision to mollify violent elements in
their midst. The assistant chief constable in charge was later compelled to apologize for insisting that locals of all
faiths, including Jews, lobbied to bar Maccabi fans from his city’s stadium.
The truth of the matter would have been too hard for certain delicate ears to
hear.
They’re literally canceling Christmas events in Paris. That far too
on-the-nose metaphor for the phenomenon of cowed submission to religious
intolerance followed the conclusion by Parisian authorities that an annual
open-air Christmas concert on the Champs-Élysées was too likely to be a target
for Islamist radicals (they pusillanimously blamed the prospect of
“unpredictable crowd movements” for their cowardice).
None of these supplications earned Europeans or
Australians a reprieve from violence. There is no “covenant of protection” on
offer. If this campaign of vigorous prostration has had any real-world effect,
it is to convince the liberals’ would-be killers that the soft targets they’ve
selected are even softer than presumed.
We don’t need a new word for this. We already have one.
It fell out of fashion when Westerners grew bored with the civilizational
struggle that began in earnest on September 11, 2001, but it retains its
usefulness. The status it describes — and, more importantly, the shame that
should accompany it — deserve to make a comeback.
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