The Paradox of Feminist Islamophilia

     When it comes to the pay gap, abortion access and workplace discrimination, progressives have much to say. But we’re still waiting for a march against honor killings, child marriages, polygamy, sex slavery or female genital mutilation.

     …when we speak about Islamist oppression, we bring personal experience to the table in addition to our scholarly expertise. Yet the feminist mantra so popular when it comes to victims of sexual assault — believe women first — isn’t extended to us. Neither is the notion that the personal is political. Our political conclusions are dismissed as personal; our personal experiences dismissed as political.

     That’s because in the rubric of identity politics, our status as women of color is canceled out by our ideas, which are labeled “conservative” — as if opposition to violent jihad, sex slavery, genital mutilation or child marriage were a matter of left or right. This not only silences us, it also puts beyond the pale of liberalism a basic concern for human rights and the individual rights of women abused in the name of Islam.  —Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Asra Q. Noman, from the New York Times

     The enemy of my enemy is my friend.  —old proverb

     This one is totally, painfully obvious. It’s so totally obvious that I shouldn’t even have to write about it. The bizarre thing is, though, that about half of the western world just can’t see it. They won’t see it, no matter how obvious it is. So I point out the obvious, and also the hysterical blindness of so many on the new left who refuse to see the obvious. The plainly, amazingly obvious.

     There are a great many strange ironies manifested by the new political ideology/religion/fashion trend of the new feminized PC left; and I may amuse myself someday by compiling and publishing a list of them. One of my favorites is that hysterical college students and other people demonstrating against “hate speech” are utterly oblivious to the plain fact that shrieking “Fuck you!!!” with one’s face distorted with rage is itself hate speech. It’s invariably more full of hatred than whatever it is they’re howling against. But this one may be even more outrageously obvious than that. This one is a real lulu. 

     It is, of course, as the title implies, the strange fact that first-world, third-wave feminists have allied themselves with followers of the most misogynistic mass ideology on the planet against some of the least misogynistic men on the planet, and against quite a lot of women also. If I were British I’d be gobsmacked by this (Americans don’t gobsmack so easily). It’s simply freaking amazing, and possibly indicative of some sort of mass insanity. It beats medieval tarantism all to hell.

     Not long ago I saw a video in which young people in England were protesting against the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, shortly after her failed attempt to secure a strong mandate of the people before beginning negotiations for Brexit. Because the results of the election she had orchestrated effectively eliminated the Tory majority in Parliament, she was constrained to attempt an alliance of the Tories with the Democratic Unionist Party, a pro-Brexit Northern Irish party presumably conservative and Christian in its views, to maintain a majority through a sort of coalition. The young protesters were vehemently opposed to this, being, of course, anti-Brexit and anti-conservative. When interviewed by a journalist, one young woman declared Prime Minister May to be “grotesque,” because the members of the DUP were “not even human.” And why? Because they are anti gay rights and anti abortion. The fellow who was interviewing her accepted this passively, either because he was trying to be a conscientious journalist or because he agreed with her; but it occurred to me, naturally, that he could easily have asked her, “Well, don’t most Muslims feel the same way?” Really, a recent poll shows that more than half of Muslims in the UK believe that homosexuality should be positively illegal, which is more extreme than the stance of the DUP, who simply are opposed to gay marriage. Also, traditional Islam is anti women’s rights, which is something I haven’t heard the DUP being accused of.

     Why oh why is it subhuman for a European to disapprove of gay marriage and abortion (which after all is the traditional Christian attitude), but quite all right for a brown-skinned Muslim, even one living in Europe, to disapprove even more vehemently? What kind of double standard is this? There are no fewer than ten Islamic countries to this day in which homosexuality is punishable by death, and many more where it is illegal and punishable by lesser means; and all traditional religious systems that I know of, including Buddhism, consider abortion to be a kind of murder. For brown people to endorse this intolerance is somehow beyond reproach, but for white people to adopt such an attitude, even in a moderate form, is subhuman, supposedly. 

     We needn’t even get into the traditional Islamic attitude toward women. It should be well enough known by everyone, including the politically correct masses who defend the Muslims as a sacred victim group. Some feminists have even claimed that the burqa, which covers a Muslim woman from head to toe, is empowering to women because it shields their body from the objectifying gaze of men. As though traditional Muslim women enjoyed physical autonomy. Feminists have conjured up the image of a pretty woman with her face made up with cosmetics, and her head covered with a stylish hijab, as a kind of meme for the wise empowerment of Muslim women; whereas if a woman who looked like that actually walked down the street in a traditional Islamic country she could easily be beaten up with impunity, especially if she were not being escorted by a male relative. But going into details is futile. The hysterical PC left just will not see it.

     So let’s move on to the reason why they won’t see it. Or for that matter, to the reason why so many feminists defend the most widespread and blatant systematized misogyny on the planet, and much prefer to crusade against manspreading and microaggressions. We can start with the question, What does the feminized PC left of the first world have in common with traditional Islam?

     If you think about it, you may find that they have extraordinarily little in common. Hitler and Stalin had more in common than these two groups. In fact it seems to me that there is only one major characteristic, just one, that followers of the 3rd-wave feminist social justice movement on the one hand, and Muslims on the other, have in common:— that is the urge to resent and condemn white men. That one is fairly obvious. If anyone out there can think of something better, then please let me know of it, because that, or some variation of it, is the only commonality I have been able to come up with. They both resent western men.

     The new leftist social justice movement, like classical Marxism before it, has to have a public enemy to rally against. The earlier socialists condemned the capitalist bourgeoisie; but history has shown that the working class has actually prospered under capitalism, more so in fact than under Marxist regimes. So, the new enemy has been changed to white men in general, the people primarily responsible for the prevailing unjust civilization, the “patriarchy.” White men are blamed for all the world’s troubles and injustices, or as many of them as possible, and the goal of the new movement is nothing less than an overthrow of western civilization—which of course was invented and maintained by privileged white male oppressors. The world of identity politics is divided into oppressor and victim (with a few groups like East Asians conveniently overlooked because they don’t fit the model so well); and the successful, prosperous people of Western Civilization, especially the dominant males, are the sole oppressor. Everyone else is the victim.

     (To those of you who refuse to see this—that white men are the new universal scapegoat for the left—and I know there are quite a few of you who just don’t see it—I would advise you to wake up and smell the potatoes O’Brien. They’re not keeping it a freaking secret. They really aren’t. Step outside of your peripheral, lukewarm, watered-down version of Progressivism and open your eyes, for crying out loud.)

     The traditionalist Muslims, on the other hand, have always been fairly satisfied when they are undisputed Number One. In the glory days of the Caliphate they saw their spectacular successes as so many signs of God’s favor, and as a great vindication of their faith and their lives. But now that scientific, industrialized western civilization has taken over worldwide and has effectively marginalized Islamic culture to a significant degree, they don’t like it. Many of them resent it bitterly. Many of them see the west as decadent and literally satanic, as a spiritually dead monstrosity which should be overthrown and destroyed, if at all possible. Thus, the unholy alliance between postmodern feminists and ideologically medieval misogynists is born. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

     Radical leftists appear always to have suffered from the great organic weakness of valuing their ideology more than they value empirical reality. (In fact, postmodern leftists have recently come up with the idea that there is no empirical reality, and that facts and logic are “tools of patriarchal oppression.”) They are idealists, whereas the political right come closer to being pragmatic realists. Thus when the ideology is obviously wrong, the followers of it will often go into flat-out hysterical denial in order not to question “the faith” which is giving their lives meaning. Traditional Islam really doesn’t fit the new feminist paradigm of white men bad, everyone else good; white men ruthless oppressors, everyone else innocent victims. Thus their amazing unwillingness to see plain reality in this case. It is against their religion. (Also, by now, especially in Western Europe, so many followers of traditional Islam have already migrated into the West that finally acknowledging some home truths about the ideology could easily unleash a shitstorm of epic proportions. I suspect said shitstorm is inevitable at this point, although the politically correct are understandably reluctant to do anything to trigger it.)

     We all have heard something of the feminists’ point of view with regard to their designation of Muslims as sacred victims who can do no wrong (even to the extent of declaring that Islamism and the Islamic State have nothing to do with Islam). But I have seen approximately nothing in the media with regard to traditional Muslims’ attitude toward postmodern feminism. How do most Muslim traditionalists feel about these decadent western women who are practically idolizing them? I would be inclined to guess that they merely tolerate them for the present. In order really to approve of them, they would have to “reform” (or rather debase) Islam into a permissive, lukewarm mess such as western Christianity has become, and I see that as rather unlikely, rather fantastical even. If Muslims ever do gain power in, say, Western Europe, it is likely that these same tattooed, pink-haired Islam-adoring feminists will be some of the first to be ruthlessly punished for their shameless immodesty and immorality. Really, traditional Muslims have much more in common ideologically with the people who oppose their entry en masse into western countries, that is, the right-wingers. Who knows, maybe someday the Muslims and the political right will actually team up against the atheistic, amoral socialists. That would be rather less ironic than what we’ve got going now.

     

     Not so very long ago Geert Wilders, a right-wing anti-EU, anti-migrant Dutch politician, publicly stated that the closest thing we’ve got to Nazism in the world today is fundamentalist Islam. It seems to me that he was more right than wrong. The self-declared neo-Nazis nowadays are a relatively insignificant fringe movement, and have little political power, whereas fundamentalist Islam (not all Islam, but much of it) is fairly fascistic in certain important respects, with many millions of followers, and is a significant power in the world. Fascism may actually be a viable system so long as it doesn’t set out on a campaign of militarism or world conquest, and certainly not all followers of a more or less fascistic system are evil, probably not even most (most are just ordinary people trying to live their lives); but when you’ve got lots and lots of such followers migrating into Europe, or essentially invading it, it does not bode well at all. If Islam gains power and becomes more fundamentalist in Europe, most European Muslims will follow along. 

     I’ve said before that historical themes repeat themselves; and what we’ve got before us is pretty much a variation on what was happening in the west eighty years ago. Forerunners of today’s progressives, led by British PM Neville Chamberlain, were sincerely anxious to avoid another World War (with most politicians of that time being old enough to remember vividly the nightmarish bloodbath of the first one), and so, maybe because it was comforting, they assumed that the upstart Chancellor of Germany Adolf Hitler was deep down an honest, honorable, and peace-loving man such as they were, more or less; and thus they adopted the strategy of, “Let’s just give Mr. Hitler what he wants, and he’ll calm down and become a nice person.” Meanwhile, fellows like Winston Churchill were saying from the very get-go that Hitler was a maniac and had to be stopped, and the sooner the better, before he became too powerful. But Churchill was reviled by these progressives for his “hate speech.” He was a bigoted warmonger, practically a fascist himself. So Chamberlain’s party, or movement, or whatever, continued to gently remind Hitler that he really shouldn’t invade anymore countries, and continued to offer concessions and back out of mutual defense pacts with countries invaded, all for the sake of “peace in our time.” Finally, after Hitler invaded Poland and Chamberlain tried to explain to him that if he only were to withdraw his troops, everyone would pretend that it never happened, the charade became too much, Chamberlain was hissed and booed in Parliament, he resigned, and the reactionary spewer of “hate speech” Winston Churchill was required to step in and lead Britain to victory over the Nazis. 

     What we’ve got now is really not so very different, with Angela Merkel as the new conscientious, respected Chamberlain (“We must meet terrorism with compassion”; a version of “Let’s just keep being nice to them no matter what, and they’ll have to be nice to us”), motivated not so much by fear of war as by progressive, feminine compassion and wishful thinking, and her admirers vehemently closing their eyes to a fairly obvious reality, possibly until it’s too late. Desire for peace and justice has made war in Europe practically inevitable. But more about Hitler appeasement some other time, insh’allah.

There is nothing else which better exposes the modern Left’s rank hypocrisy, their disregard for the facts, and their hatred for the West and all it stands for than their attitude to Islam. Every noble principle the Left claims to uphold, from rights for women to gay liberation, even diversity itself, dies on the altar of its sycophantic defense of Islam. 

Karl Marx called religion the “opium of the masses.” If you look at the Left’s attitude to Christianity, you might think they believe in this message. The progressive Left’s comedians and columnists never miss an opportunity to belittle and denigrate conservative Christians, and yet, they defend Islam at the expense of every other minority. Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have all been frustrated by this question: Why is the Left refusing to lift a finger against the most radical, dangerous, socially conservative and oppressive religion on earth?—Milo Yiannopoulos