The Islamic State and the left’s secret love affair with misogyny
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9374832/for-some-left-wing-men-the-misogyny-of-the-islamic-state-is-part-of-the-appeal/
Yet there are still a considerable number of people on the left making excuses for them — mostly at the Guardian, the house magazine of ‘the silly led by the sinister’, as the sainted Christopher Hitchens called the Not In My Name marchers. And with Isis so frank about its own foulness, I’ve come to the conclusion that certain strange types are so sympathetic to Islamism not despite the way it treats women — but, at least partly, because of it.
There are other reasons, of course. The western left has been a busted flush for so long, caught up in its own eternal infighting, that it must feel good to be on a side apparently winning with old-fashioned brute force. Then there’s our old mate paint-chart politics: choose the side with the darkest skin on principle, no matter how their belief systems actually treat people; thus democratic Israel, which gives full civil rights to women and gays, is worse than the countries which surround it, which don’t but are darker. In Darfur, of course, the left were thrown a curveball when it turned out that the Arab Muslims were terrorising the black Christians. Um, Islam good, Christianity bad but hang on, Christians darker here! DOES NOT COMPUTE!
Ever since the Black Panther Stokely Carmichael said in 1966 that ‘the only position for women in the struggle is prone’, it would have to be a very silly leftie lass indeed who has not cottoned on that sexism can beat in the most apparently comradely brother’s breast. The first sign that the metropolitan left (which had spent the previous 30 years telling white working-class people how stupid and backward they were for being sexist, homophobic and insular) could have a chronic crush on a belief which specialised in being sexist, homophobic and insular came when Ken Livingstone cosied up to the odious Yusuf al-Qaradawi in 2004. Livingstone is a man not averse to the idea of a man having several wives, one feels, having had five children by three women. Then there’s Gorgeous George Galloway, whose revolutionary spirit seems quite able to contain the contradictions of both sucking up to an ultra-conservative religion and saying, in 2012, of the Julian Assange affair, ‘Not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion.’ And they said romance was dead.
As Assange and Russell Brand (weirdly linked by the Muslim convert Jemima Goldsmith Khan, who was the bailswoman of one and the lover of the other) prove, many men believe that once you’ve ticked the Brotherhood of Man box on your spiritual census, this gives you the right to be as big a bastard as you like towards women. Yes, some of their collective cultural cringe is stupid guilt about being white and western — the sort of poltroon who, if they happened across their dear grey-haired old mother being ‘roasted’ by al-Qa’eda at one end and Isis at the other, would ask ‘What did she do to make these innocent young lads act in such an uncharacteristic fashion?’ — but a lot of it, I believe, is sheer sexual wish fulfilment.
‘But there are women involved, who choose to become Islamists? How do you explain that?’ I can hear Laurie Penny (like Khan, another privileged half-Jewish girl who briefly got a thrill from donning a hijab but is also now happily ensconced back in her world of freedom and privilege — unlike the millions of poor women condemned to life in a shroud) squeal indignantly. Well, let’s face it, all those copies of Fifty Shades of Grey didn’t buy themselves. Serial rapists and killers on Death Row are never short of female attention, regrettably. Whatever, this mixture of sadists, masochists, gangsters, dupes, fruit-loops and pimps is turning out to be one big happy Manson family.
Good luck apologising for them, all you gutless western lefties — but you can put your fingers in your ears and sell out other sections of humanity all you like, and squeeze your eyes shut like a child in a storm, determined to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil — and still that evil storm may come at you with hands like knives one day. Look what they did to an Islamic convert on a humanitarian mission to help Muslims. You think they wouldn’t do it to you?
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