The Yahoo! blog about the Miss Hezbollah who became Miss America quotes Daniel Pipes as saying that the surprisingly high number of Muslim beauty pageant winners of late “makes [him] suspect an odd form of affirmative action.”

I first wrote about this odd form of affirmative action in 2002 for the Wall St. Journal, just seven months after 9/11, when I noticed an unmistakable spike in Arab-Americans and other Middle Eastern types dominating advertisements in a way they hadn’t previously. The piece was called “Manipulating the Mosaic: Why did Arab-Americans become chic after Sept. 11?” (A more complete version of the article, titled “Arab Chic,” appears on JWR.)   

But the update I’ve been meaning to add to my article, and now to Mr. Pipes’ “affirmative action” take, is that this is all part and parcel of the Stockholm Syndrome that Westerners have been undergoing ever more fiercely since 9/11. We’ve been developing a fondness for the enemy, and hoping that he notices and grants us a reprieve.

About Pipes’ comment, the writer of the Yahoo! blog scoffed that “Pipes didn’t theorize how shadowy beauty-pageant fixers might be greasing the skids for contestants…” But the whole point is that there doesn’t need to be any conscious manipulation to activate the “affirmative action.” Westerners have a natural tendency toward doing this to begin with, especially in our current Islamic trance, so it wouldn’t be surprising even if we learned that the judges were unanimous on Miss Hezbollah before they ever consulted each other. Such is the not-so-brave new world we live in.

Sorry if this comes as a shock to the willfully naive sensibilities that are required of anyone wanting to write for the mainstream, in this case Yahoo News’s Brett Michael Dykes. Dykes went on:

Foreign commentators, meanwhile, have seized on the whole Miss USA episode as a prime example of (as the Guardian’s Richard Adams calls it) “America’s weirdness.” You might look at Fakih’s victory as a certain kind of “triumph” of the West, the Spectator’s Alex Massie says, representing “a form of emancipation or at least cultural assimilation that might be thought useful (in as much as such contests can ever be considered useful).”

“Triumph” is precisely the opposite of what’s going on here. It’s submission. Muslims are not assimilating to our ways, we are assimilating to theirs. Americans, like other Westerners, are being open-minded and inclusive enough to make room for terrorism as something other than terrorism. A Hezbollah-associated Miss USA is apt indeed.

Mountain has come to Muhammad.