By now you are likely aware of the recent events at Brandeis University.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an Islamic apostate with a fatwa on her head, a fearless critic of Islam and a stalwart defender of women’s rights was slated to receive an honorary degree and deliver a commencement address at Brandeis. The degree was summarily revoked due to “past statements…inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali. (Image Source: Getty/Michel Baret/Gamma-Rapho)

Many folks have admirably opined on this matter:

John Podhoretz spoke with a candor sorely lacking in this age of intolerant “tolerance,” when he said that the decision by Brandeis President Fred Lawrence was “nothing less than the act of a gutless, spineless, simpering coward.”

Charles Cooke spoke incisively to the irony of the situation that Ms. Ali was targeted despite tending “to side with a favored group — women — against a favored foe — religion,” in one of the “peculiar outcomes” of the “Left’s hierarchy of victims.”

Professor Jay Bergman spoke passionately to the hypocrisy of the matter in light of the honorary degrees awarded to Tony Kushner and Desmond Tutu despite their respective anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic remarks, seemingly in direct conflict with the school’s “core values.”

All of these critiques are legitimate, but what underlies them is something more fundamental: dhimmitude.

Dhimmis are non-Muslim citizens living as second-class citizens under an Islamic state, subjected to various social, political, and economic restrictions, along with a tax called a jizya. Dhimmitude is a phrase coined by author Bat Ye’or to reflect as one author puts it, “an attitude of concession, surrender and appeasement towards Islamic demands.”

What Brandeis did in caving to the likes of CAIR (Council of Islamic Relations) — an unindicted co-conspirator with Hamas in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation case — whose primary work seems to be to smear as “Islamophobes” and drown out all those critical of Islam (including abused Muslim women themselves), along with Brandeis’ Muslim Students Association (MSA), an organization which  was founded in America by Muslim Brotherhood members in 1963, represents nothing less than the epitome of Western dhimmitude.

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