Guest
Column: Just Who Has to Adjust in the Name of Tolerance?
by Phyllis Chesler
Special to IPT News
February 19, 2015
|
|
|
|
Share:
|
Be the
first of your friends to like this.
Brookings
Institution Center for Middle East Policy Fellow Shadi Hamid recently criticized the West as "illiberal"
for refusing to accept the fact that Muslims, both in the West and
globally, are different from Westerners.
It was an unusual argument, one for which The Atlantic devoted
3,400 words.
Although President Obama insists that the "fight against terrorism
is not a religious war," Hamid seems to disagree with him.
According to a variety of polls, Hamid is right. For example, while a 2009 Gallup poll shows European Muslims overwhelmingly
reject violence, they are far more religious than those who live in secular
Europe (France, England, and Germany), and are more strongly opposed to
homosexuality than are secular Europeans. In addition, young, second or
third generation European Muslim men favor veiling for women, polygamy,
the execution of apostates, and favor prohibiting Muslim women from
marrying non-Muslim men.
Muslims are more likely to view "blasphemy as unacceptable,"
Hamid wrote. He described Muslims as "deeply conservative" and,
to varying extents, wanting "the application of
Islamic law."
The liberal West believes in criticizing everything, especially
religion, beginning with Judaism and Christianity. Extending this
right-to-criticize, satirize, or examine Islam has led to major Muslim
meltdowns.
Creative and scholarly exposures of Islam's history and practices amount
to shaming and therefore are impermissible, especially when infidels are
doing the exposing. Lawsuits, assassination attempts, lynch mobs, and political murders have been the radical Muslim response
to books, films, lectures, and cartoons
that detail Islamic gender and religious apartheid.
Documentation of normalized daughter-and wife-beating, child marriage,
forced veiling, forced marriage of adults, polygamy, pedophilia, FGM, and
honor killing has led to cries of "Islamophobia" and
"blasphemy."
In a recent conversation, Israeli Arabist and counter-terrorism expert,
Mordechai Kedar said: "Why would anyone get so outraged by a cartoon
unless they believe that the cartoon is telling the truth? They are angry
because it is the truth."
According to a 2006 Pew poll, 79 percent of French Muslims blamed the
2005 cartoon controversy on Western nations' "disrespect for the
Islamic religion." The general population blamed "Muslims'
intolerance."
This is completely foreign to the West's post-Enlightenment culture.
Many Muslims are very clear on this point.
Hamid writes that French Muslims are "more likely to believe that
attacks on the Prophet Mohammed and the Quran should be criminalized as
hate speech and incitement, much like denial of the Holocaust is."
This is a shocking but familiar false equation. Jew-haters and Islamists
minimize, disbelieve, but deeply envy the Jews as victims of the Holocaust.
But they covet the reverence for sacred victim status that they believe
Jews have—ostensibly via trickery. Islamists invented the false allegation
of "Islamophobia," positioned the Palestinians as the "new
Jews," and appointed the Jewish Israelis as the "new Nazis."
Unfortunately, many Europeans signed onto this lethal narrative in the
hope that doing so would appease their hostile, unassimilated Muslim
citizens. Also, latent European anti-Semitism happily found a new outlet in
anti-Zionism, which is the new anti-Semitism.
Are Muslims being falsely accused and even persecuted? Can one even ask
this question in an era when Muslim-on-Muslim, Muslim-on-infidel, and
Muslim male-on-female barbarism is borderless, boundary-less, and beyond
surreal?
Nevertheless, the false concept of Islamophobia – often defensively
raised when the discussion focuses on radical Islamic ideology – has become
equal to real concepts such as homophobia, sexism, and anti-Semitism.
Despite FBI verification that hate crimes against Jews are far
greater than those against Muslims, Muslims continue to insist that they
are being racially and religiously targeted.
Islamophobia is worse than anti-Semitism, according to Hatem Bazien, the
founder of Students for Justice in Palestine and the director of Berkeley's
Center for Race and Gender, in a 2011 report co-sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic
Relations (CAIR).
Bazian concluded that, on a scale from 1 (best situation for Muslims) to
10 (worst possible situation for Muslims), "Islamophobia" in
America stands at 6.4. One does not know how to greet such brazen
foolishness.
Globally, Islamists demand that the West, which has separated religion
and state brilliantly, accept and accommodate an aggressive and entitled
theocratic state—not only abroad but in its midst.
In Hamid's view, real "moral courage" in France would consist
of a "major political party" calling for "a rethinking of
laïcité [secularism], and for the broadening, rather than the narrowing,
[of] French national identity."
Challenging the "tolerant" West to accommodate an intolerant
Islam is the tried-and-true Islamist method of hoisting the West by its own
petard. Sophisticated Islamists are trying to use post-Enlightenment laws
to achieve the right to practice pre-medieval and barbaric customs. Western
political leaders and the intelligentsia are flirting with cultural suicide
and siding with barbarism over civilization.
Phyllis Chesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology
and the author of 15 books, including The New Anti-Semitism and An American
Bride in Kabul. She is a Fellow at the Middle East Forum, writes regularly
for Israel National News and Breitbart, and is the author of three
pioneering studies about honor killings.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment