File this under "Strange encounters with the political right".
A hard-right colleague of mine thinks George W. Bush is the bees knees. He's not a fundamentalist Christian. He's not a corporate CEO. He's a scientist. The reason he thinks the Decider is the man to lead this country? Because "Islam is a dangerous religion which must be contained". And the example given - Dhimmitude.
Below the fold - what Dhimmitude is, and why we shouldn't care.
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First of all, I don't think I have to explain how odd it is for a scientist to support George W. Bush. Not only does he appear as if he's dumber than a bag of gravel, but his policies have slashed funding for basic sciences. If you're not building missiles, you've only got about a 20% chance of funding your research (at least in my geographic area). Thus, a scientist who supports Dear Leader must have some pretty strong reasons.
This associate explained to me one day that Democrats simply don't have the spine to stand up to the danger represented by Islam, and he cited me a specific example - the concept of Dhimmitude. He also gave me a book to read on the subject by Bat Ye'or.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have not read the book, nor have I read the Qu'ran, so I'm basing this brief analysis on his explanation of the concept to me. I have also since learned that Bat Ye'or is something of a whackjob conspiracy theorist islamophobe, and thus the book should be taken with a grain of salt. Even so, here's how it was explained to me (and I'm paraphrasing)
Dhimmitude is a concept of Islam which lays out how conquered people are to be treated. When a Muslim is in a foreign land, he is to be quiescent, not make a fuss, and accept the rules of that land. But those rules change when a Muslim is in what he believes to be a conquered land. When Muslims conquer an area, non-Muslims become second-class citizens. They are free to maintain their own religion, or practice none at all, but if they choose to do this, they are subject to a tax, which goes to profit Islam, building temples and paying for Islamic services and such, establishing religious tyranny.
Got that? Islamophobia, alive and well, verified as one reason the right wing likes what the President is doing. And I will mention, it's not as if this person is uneducated. He has both an MD and a PhD, and does fairly well in his chosen field. We're not dealing with a confederate redneck who thinks brown people are bad - this is a man with a reason for trying to contain radical Islam.
You can make your own arguments about how GW isn't actually stopping the spread of militant Islam, is making terrorism worse, etc. That's fairly well documented. I want to address this theory of Dhimmitude, and why it's not a good reason to fear Islam.
First of all, not having much association with Muslims in "conquered land", I can't say for certain whether this concept is even enforced. There's lots of crazy shit in holy books. The Old Testament endorses slavery and polygamy, as well as capital punishment for thinking the wrong thoughts, while the New Testament ritualizes symbolic cannibalism. A non-Christian reading those passages might get the same idea that Christianity is a very dangerous religion, and the spread of it must be stopped at all costs. After all, while Islam may have given us Jihad, Christianity gave us the Crusades. Islam brings us beheadings, Chrisitanity gave us the Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials. Point is, you have to take these things in context. Just pulling a page out of the holy book of a religion you don't like and using it to condemn the whole religion just isn't logically sound.
Second, to fear Islam because of this concept is hypocritical in the United States, because we're practicing our own form of Dhimmitude. The implications of Islamic Dhimmitude are that forcing non-muslims to pay special taxes and possibly identify themselves as non-muslims is psychologically degrading. Maybe we don't go that far in this country, but the root - paying a tax to benefit religion - is no different than funding faith-based initiatives with taxpayer dollars or trying to enforce religious views in the public sphere (eg, ten commandments displayed in a courthouse, intelligent design in schools ,etc). The only difference is the scale - Islamic dhimmitude forces a few people to sacrifice to benefit the majority, whereas the American dhimmitude forces everyone to sacrifice to a lesser scale to benefit specific religious organizations. Either way, the minority is paying for something they're not going to use. And as far as the "psychologically degrading" aspect, anyone who argues the term "atheist" hasn't already been demonized in the minds of many American Christians is fooling themselves.
So there you have it - even if Dhimmitude is an issue with radical Islam, it's hypocritical to condemn it when we practice a slightly different version of it ourselves.