The Submission - Amy Waldman [65]
Their leader, Debbie Dawson, looked like a poorly weathered Angelina Jolie. She had to be close to fifty, but her blog, The American Way, showed her in a see-through burka with only a bikini beneath. Today she was wearing a custom-stitched T-shirt that said “Infidel” and a rhinestone-encrusted PEACE around her neck.
It was Debbie who had called Sean to propose that their groups collaborate. “They’re trying to colonize this hallowed ground,” she said. “This is what they’ve done all over the world, all through history: they destroy something, then build an Islamic symbol of conquest in the same place. Babur tore down Ram’s temple in India and put up a mosque. The Ottomans conquered Constantinople and made the Hagia Sophia—what else?—a mosque. Here, one set of Muslims destroys the buildings and now another comes along to put a paradise there for his dead brothers. For all we know this was part of the plan all along.”
Sean didn’t get her and didn’t want her—he was having enough trouble managing his own crew. But her membership was growing, too—there were now five hundred SAFIs, if you counted the satellite chapters in thirteen states—and given Sean’s inspiration after his meeting with Paul, these numbers held new appeal. He agreed they should join forces.
Fifteen minutes into the meeting, though, he was deep in regret. He had imagined himself leading an even larger crusade against Khan’s memorial, but nothing about these women—Christians, Jews; housewives, retirees, real estate agents—suggested that they would be easily led. They would barely shut up for one another. Their knowledge of the Islamist threat far outclassed his. They told anyone who would listen about how Quranic chapters from Mohammad’s time in Mecca gave the illusion of tolerance by praising the “People of the Book,” while the chapters set in Medina showed Islam’s true, harsh nature: “Kill them wherever you find them.” Some of them toted copies of the book marked up with orange highlighter. The best of them had memorized the offending parts. They tossed around terms like “dhimmitude” as if they’d learned them on the high-school cheerleading squad: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, dhimmitude has got to go!” three women were chanting in the pews.
When Sean asked what dhimmitude was, Debbie, dismayed, called out to a chanter: “Shirley, please educate Sean—all these boys—on delimited.”
Shirley’s gray curls, glasses, and fuzzy cheeks invoked Sean’s elementary-school librarian; he wondered if she also smelled of menthol and stale books. “It’s the voluntary submission to being second-class citizens under Sharia law,” she called out. This didn’t exactly clear things up, but Sean kept quiet. “It’s being stupid,” she added. “Letting our own way of life be destroyed by liberal idiots as much as by Muslims.”
Debbie and Sean were standing in front of the altar. Their members, together, filled most of the pews. Debbie’s honk of a voice carried effortlessly down the nave. “What we have here, although it may not look that way, is a stroke of unimaginable luck,” she said. “Two years after the attack, Americans were getting complacent. This attempt to claim our most sacred space—it’s a wake-up call. This is what I’ve been trying to tell people: You think the violent Muslims are dangerous? Wait until you see what the nonviolent ones do! What’s next? The crescent over the Capitol? They’re trying to make this piece of land Dar al-Islam!”
“The House of Islam,” she said, with exasperation, at Sean’s blank look. “Make a cheat sheet, Sean. You can’t fight this threat if you’re not versed in the vocabulary.”
“Words aren’t the way to fight this,” he shot back, to applause from his members, who also seemed to have tired of Debbie’s schooling. “They want to police what we