By  Rabbi Aryeh Spero

The lawsuits and threats of litigation are coming fast and furious. This week, CAIR, a domestic Muslim organization, threatened a lawsuit against a conference of young people if they went ahead and included Robert Spencer among their speakers. Spencer is a scholar critical of radical Islam. Last week, CAIR demanded that felony criminal charges be brought against an individual who in private had flushed a Koran down the toilet where he attends university. Only weeks ago, CAIR and other Islamic organizations here filed suit against frightened airline passengers who had simply alerted the plane's stewards of highly suspicious and provocative activity by five boisterous immams just as the plane was ready to take off. 

Each of these law suits is challenging the most basic freedoms practiced by Americans: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, the freedom of self-defense. Spencer has a right to speak about a text and its sociology and those in the audience have a right to hear. When was the last time a person in America could wind up in jail because in the privacy of a bathroom he flushed down pages of a book -- be it the Constitution, Genesis or the Republican Platform? What is more un-American and callous than trying to block a citizen of his right to ask an officer to protect him and his children when he legitimately feels threatened? This has never happened before in America.

No ethno/religio group in America has so systematically and aggressively launched a series of rapid-fire lawsuits challenging our fundamental, democratic rights as those now coming out of CAIR and other Moslem groups. Welcome to the soft jihad. It has arrived in America.

Be it the hard jihad which uses terror and violence or the soft jihad which uses pressure and the legal system, both rely on the same element for victory: intimidation. In the case of soft jihad, the intimidation comes through lawsuits charging "Islamophobia", racism, hate speech or hate crime. Though hoping to win all their cases, CAIR knows that simply by threatening law suits they can silence writers, speakers, conferences, government agencies and make even grey-haired Aunt Betty unwilling to look out for her own safety if by so doing she is going to have to shell-out more money than she has when made a defendant in a law suit. 

If we cave to these threats, we will become a society where one can freely debate and express anything about any religion but Islam, a nation where one can burn the flag and Bible but not soak a Koran, neighborhoods where one can protect oneself against all threats but not against one emanating from a Moslem person since that would be "profiling" and a hate crime. We would be Saudi America. 

These cases are important not only because innocent Americans going about doing what Americans have always done are being charged with crimes but because, moreover, in the name of political correctness, some judges and universities are changing centuries of legal definitions in order to appease bullies who are now telling us what we can do and what we can't. Worse, Islamists are demanding we submit to a double standard where what is not allowable for us is allowable for them. For example, criticizing certain aspects of Islam is called hate speech and Islamophobia, yet somehow it is not a hate-crime when young and middle-aged Moslems in universities and at rallys publicly call for the death of Jews and Israel and raise signs on our streets threatening a Holocaust, here, against all non-believing "infidels". 

This whole country is based on equal justice under the law, not special justice and more rights for one group over the rest of us. This is not simply the capitulation of a legal system but, for some, a willing complicity in the destruction of everything we have heretofore believed in and died for. At stake is our very civilization and our morality. Centuries of developed wisdom is being thrown out, discarded. It is happening because of a suicidal, self-hatred among our elites for the Judeo-Christian ethos that early-on made our ancestors and shaped our parents and because those that lead our institutions are afraid.

Our political correctness, the self-hate among our elites for our American civilization, and the fear endemic among intellectuals is making the soft jihad much easier and granting it far more ground now than it could have achieved decades ago when America was guided by a more sane ethos and populated by people with more mettle. So-called intellectuals, as found in universities, have seldom been people of courage. Historically, intellectuals have always sided with the dictatorial bullies they fear -- they are afraid of those who will use their fists since they are unwilling to use their own. 

Academics will never admit to the fear which forces them to be "sensitive" to every Islamic demand while deaf to the victimization from it toward peaceful students. They have crafted new categories of justice and crimes on campus that mask their fear. When was the last time campus administrators composed entire school-conduct pamphlets regarding the crime of "Christophobia".  

The goal of the soft jihad is for Islam to be granted an unearned influence over Western countries and our institutions, an influence far surpassing its percentage of the population. Thus far, Islamic organizations are winning the day because most Americans do not like confrontation and would rather give-in than fight or be called a racist -- labeling each capitulation as "inconsequential". Americans don't want to "offend". Many good-willed Americans believe that CAIR, for example, is the Moslem version of the old NAACP and are reluctant, therefore, to question any assertion made under the banner "civil rights".

But the truth is that CAIR is not a civil rights organization but the domesticated side of the soft jihad designed to radically transform America by elevating things Islamic over everything else -- their Koran over our Bible, their right to public prayer over our right to it, funding their projects as "cultural" while outlawing ours' as "religious". If CAIR were truly concerned with civil rights and mutual respect, they would be out there denouncing their brothers spearheading rallies all over the country calling for Death to the Jews, labeling Jews as apes, and calling for the annihilation of Israel and its six million Jews. On this they are silent, just as they are after attacks on Western humanity.

Every Jewish and Christian organization I know, though primarily concerned with protecting and serving members of their group, have denounced any actions by its members that smack of bigotry against others and involve brutality. Can you imagine any Christian group remaining silent if its members held up signs "Kill the Jews". Yet CAIR ostracizes none of its David Dukes or Sayids who are worse than Duke.

CAIR's response that such is not their job is analogous to the one who says he can throw garbage on the street since his job is not with the local garbage department. CAIR and other American Moslem groups remain silent for, the truth is, they are satisfied with the outcome and climate these protestors are producing: namely, sowing fear and intimidation, resulting in people being silent and accepting that which is unacceptable: Jew-hatred, hatred of Israel.

People give respect and gravitate to those things in society that society venerates. In the past, it was Christianity and the American civilization. If, because of political correctness, we rasie the Koran above the Bible, as Pace University has done, cherish Moslem sensibilities over Jewish life, as San Francisco State has done, then our children will look to Islam for those things transcendant. After all, our courts and universities are telegraphing that message.