Saturday, January 2, 2016

The Shame and Disgrace of the Pro-Islamist Left

Via Instapundit: 

(And do visit Instapundit, who always has a great round-up of essays, quirky news stories and food for thought.)

Here's the thing, though: you cannot shame the shameless.

It means NOTHING to these people that they will get thrown off buildings and have their genitals gleefully mutilated by toothless old biddies with rusty razors.

The Islamic-Leftst alliance is as much of a menace to the West as was the Nazi movement and Communism. Note I said "Islamic" and not "Islamist" because there were no Nazists.

Read this entire essay.

It's painful, but the truth hurts.

On a micro level, it's the story of activist Maryam Namazie. On a macro level, it's about all of us. 

"The dismal spectacle of radical queer activists, feminists, and sundry other progressives, professing solidarity with Islamists is at once fascinating and enraging. Whatever kind of higher education survives in ISOC’s utopian caliphate, it’s certain that no feminist or LGBTQ+ societies will be permitted to exist."

"But for radical university students in the West, their lives of almost unparalleled opportunity, privilege, and comfort are a source of considerable guilt and anxiety. So conspiratorial notions of omnipresent oppression have been contrived against which they oblige themselves to struggle. This idea is supported by claims that liberal democracy is a sham, that objectivity is illusory, and that reason is elitist. And since all that makes rational discussion virtually impossible, debates about ideas are transformed into competing professions of woe, decided by whoever turns out to be subject to the greater degree of structural oppression."

"I have seen Namazie speak a number of times, and on each occasion she has had to waste time explaining the exasperating moral blindness of people whose support for secularism and universal human rights ought to be a foregone conclusion. But those who recoil from politically incorrect music or an infelicitous joke find they have nothing to say about honor-based violence, forced marriage, the execution of gays and apostates, or the veiling, stoning, subjugation, and genital mutilation of women. Afraid to be seen to lend their support to racist and Imperialist ‘narratives’, they instead assuage their guilty consciences by denouncing those whose activism shames their silence."

"But in the West too, cartoonists, writers, filmmakers, artists, and journalists are being assassinated or forced to live fugitive lives under security protection. And those not being threatened with Islamist violence are being traduced by campaigns of defamation in which ostensibly progressive people are eagerly participating. “Salman Rushdie” the writer Paul Berman observed, “has metastasized into an entire social class.”