A Mesh of Civilizational Definitions

David Solway unpacks the new meaning of some golden oldies:

“Peace” means that we are no longer willing to fight for the principles and traditions that have raised us to the top of the dominance hierarchy and that we are ready or eager to submit to a clear ideological foe. “Freedom” means that we have accepted the growing likelihood of defeat and comparative servitude. And “justice” means the acknowledgment of the “rights” of our adversaries to game the social, political and legal systems of their host countries to their advantage, in other words, to insinuate their norms of conduct and cultural presuppositions into a way of life we have long taken for granted and are now prepared to surrender piecemeal to the claims of the “other.”

That's how we in the West now understand these words. To devotees of sharia law, however, they mean something else again: "Peace" is the state of affairs that will come to pass once the world accedes to the primacy of sharia; "freedom" is the freedom to submit to Islam and its law; "justice" is Islamic law and only Islamic law. (One would have to be feeble-minded not to notice how well the Western definitions dovetail with and help facilitate the Islamic ones.)