The first half of this decade has given us all an opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with the concept of appeasement and its consistent record of not just failing to deter aggression but of inviting more of it. But the history of appeasement is tied to geopolitics, and it typically describes how nations — even those under the sway of a single strongman — behave.

How might we describe a similar program of mollification designed to quiescently pacify an aggressive culture that might be unbound to national borders? At the height of the Global War on Terror and as the phenomenon relates to militant Islam, we did have that word. It described the impulse to respond to acute threats with supplication. We called it dhimmitude.

Admittedly, that was a somewhat flip appropriation of a concept from early Islamic history. The pejorative is derived from the Arabic word dhimma, which roughly describes the “covenant of protection” non-Muslims enjoy within a nevertheless wholly Islamized social covenant.

In lore, dhimmitude described the secure but subservient role minorities served in the early ummah. In practice, it was the name given to the second-class status reserved for non-Muslims that was often accompanied by humiliations, social and legal restrictions, and confiscatory tax regimes designed to keep the dhimmis down. And the practice had an intended psychological effect on its targets. Dhimmitude wasn’t just a status but a state of mind — one that was outwardly observable in the subject’s slumped shoulders, lowered eyes, shuffling gait, and fearful silence. It was servility enforced via the explicit threat of coercion, or worse.

Those of a certain age will remember dhimmitude as the slight directed at insecure Western Europeans and woolly headed American university presidents who would not defend the right of artists to offend a target of satire if the target was willing to draw blood in pursuit of redress. The term was bandied about when Westerners made excuses for murderers, operating on the unstated assumption that their tormentors’ violence was an instinctual or even rational response to provocation. It is an outlook that is absolutely allergic to displays of ethnic and credal chauvinism, save one conspicuous exception.

We don’t have the word anymore. It has fallen out of favor as the post-9/11 wars fade from memory. But we still have the concept it describes. Indeed, we have more of it today than we did when we had the shorthand vocabulary to identify it.

What was Australia’s posture in the run-up to the Bondi Beach massacre but one of abject supplication?

When the October 7 massacre was met with outright celebrations in Sydney within hours of the attack, police told court officers that such celebrations and those that would follow had “disaster written all over it.” But little was done. Indeed, subsequent forensic analyses of the event could not establish the fact that protesters chanted “gas the Jews” as alleged. Rather, what was chanted was the somehow less menacing phrase, “Where’s the Jews?” the authorities dubiously insisted, along with “other antisemitic phrases,” as the Sydney Morning Herald put it.

When a private chat group of Jewish creative professionals in Australia was leaked by “pro-Palestinian activists” — a leak accompanied by efforts to intimidate and harass those creatives and their families — Canberra responded by attempting to ban doxing. And when a father and son slaughtered at least 15 people, including a child, in this weekend’s attack, the Australian government concluded that its already restrictive gun laws weren’t restrictive enough.

These responses were designed to collectivize the guilt that should have been reserved for a limited and defined set of individuals who insist on accommodation for their bigotries — even in liberal societies ostensibly dedicated to political pluralism and religious toleration. It helped Australian authorities create a fiction that seemed a comfort only to them. “We’ve had synagogues that have been graffitied,” said Victoria Teplitsky, the daughter of one of the victims of that attack, in describing the harrowing experience long endured by Australia’s Jews. “We’ve had synagogues that have been bombed. This is not a surprise to us.”

It’s worse in Europe. In November 2024, Amsterdam erupted in an obviously premeditated orgy of violence as fans of the Israel-based soccer team Maccabi Tel Aviv descended on the city. Five of the club’s supporters were hospitalized as “men on scooters” ransacked the city searching for identifiable Jews to assault. “Supporters of Israeli soccer team Maccabi Tel Aviv were targeted for beatings by groups of thugs,” Reuters reported. Soon enough, though, European media outlets and officials described the violence as “locals reacting” to the provocative presence of Israelis. And as this weekend’s attempted pogrom outside a concert venue hosting a Hanukkah concert showed, it wasn’t the Israelis who were looking for a fight.

The same thing might have happened in England the following year, but authorities preemptively banned Israelis from attending their own team’s game. A subsequent investigation into the decision found that the evidence marshalled in support of it “changed to fit the decision” — a way of saying that British authorities sought evidence to justify their predetermined decision to mollify violent elements in their midst. The assistant chief constable in charge was later compelled to apologize for insisting that locals of all faiths, including Jews, lobbied to bar Maccabi fans from his city’s stadium. The truth of the matter would have been too hard for certain delicate ears to hear.

They’re literally canceling Christmas events in Paris. That far too on-the-nose metaphor for the phenomenon of cowed submission to religious intolerance followed the conclusion by Parisian authorities that an annual open-air Christmas concert on the Champs-Élysées was too likely to be a target for Islamist radicals (they pusillanimously blamed the prospect of “unpredictable crowd movements” for their cowardice).

None of these supplications earned Europeans or Australians a reprieve from violence. There is no “covenant of protection” on offer. If this campaign of vigorous prostration has had any real-world effect, it is to convince the liberals’ would-be killers that the soft targets they’ve selected are even softer than presumed.

We don’t need a new word for this. We already have one. It fell out of fashion when Westerners grew bored with the civilizational struggle that began in earnest on September 11, 2001, but it retains its usefulness. The status it describes — and, more importantly, the shame that should accompany it — deserve to make a comeback.