This post is inspired by a statement in the musings of an Islamophile, Andrew March, in response to a leftist bothered by the left’s stance on Islamism. I have already devoted two posts (here and here) to their exchange, and this will be the last (maybe). In this post, I want to comment on the following statement from the Islamophile: “Who doubts that we are against these things?” (Here.) The things in question are killing apostates, mutilating genitals, and kidnapping schoolgirls. And earlier, he had insisted that “no one [on the left] thinks that Yazidis and Baha’is should be subjected to persecution or slaughter.” And I say in response to him and all the other Islamophiles, Lots of us doubt that you are against these things. In my last post, I pointed out that whatever leftists think they are saying to us about the Islamists, ISIS, and other groups, it is not getting through. What is getting through is that they don’t care about the average Joe and that they don’t care as much even about their non-Muslim supporters as they do about Muslims.
Consider the following reasons for doubting that they are against Islamic atrocities:
1. Leftists often accept cultural relativism, and cultural relativism will entail that even if leftists themselves condemn these foreign practices, they will still say they are acceptable for those living in other cultures. Strictly speaking, then, though they can say they are against such practices, it comes off as a much weaker expression of disapproval than does the disapproval of those who believe in absolute and universal moral standards.
2. Saying something in obscure places doesn’t count. For example, at the time of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, I felt that no one on the left cared. There may have been a few op-ed pieces slamming the fatwa, but I probably missed them. What I wanted to see was massive demonstrations, but there were none. But to get back to my point, I learned after the death of Susan Sontag that she had supported Rushdie. This was news to me. I had not paid any particular attention to Sontag during her life, but I thought of her as a reliable critic of the West. That was all that was coming through to me about her views. So, saying you hate ISIS in a footnote of the New Left Review, for example, doesn’t really count.
3. If you say it in a prominent place, but if your main point is something else, we are going to miss it. For example, if the main point of an op-ed or a speech is how much you hate the Republicans, and you also say, “Of course, ISIS is evil,” most people will miss it.
4. Even if you say something explicitly, if it is contradicted by other things you have said or done, we won’t really believe you. How many times have we heard “your call is important to us” and how many times do we actually believe it? If you have to wait on the phone for an hour, we aren’t going to believe the outfit saying that they think our call is important because if it were, they would have hired more people to deal with the calls.
Ever since 9/11, the left has shown in a million ways, some big and some little, that they don’t really care what happens to the average Joe and that their real concern is protecting Muslims. After all, it’s all our fault. They don’t even care about their own non-Muslim adherents in comparison to their concern for Muslims. And as far as their own adherents are concerned, their lack of concern goes all the way back to the Iranian revolution. As I have pointed out time and time again, Muslims butchered leftists after the Shah was evicted, but almost no one on the left talks about this, and the Islamophiles never do. Yet, under the circumstances, Iran should be seen as the left’s greatest enemy. The left should be doing everything they can to undermine that regime, but instead they treat it as a sort of ally. But even if they felt reluctant for other reasons to undermine the regime, how about at least talking about those murdered leftists? How about a day of commemoration for them? How about buttons saying “remember the murdered Iranians?” When you act in a way that is so contrary to normal human motivations, we assume that whatever you are saying isn’t to be trusted.
Let me digress and observe that leftists will probably say that the left needs Iran in its fight against American imperialism. Lots of things come to mind in response to this, such as, “With friends like those, who needs enemies?” When your ally butchers members of your own side, it is time to start re-evaluating who your real enemy is. Moreover, this episode shows that the Islamists have a very different reason for attacking American imperialism than leftists do. Leftists attack it because they think imperialism is wrong, while Islamists attack it because they think, as a non-Muslim nation, America has no right to be imperialist, but Muslim nations do. Finally, the episode shows what will happen to the left when American imperialism is destroyed: the left will be next in line for destruction.
To get back to my main point, the left is always blaming the victims for being assaulted by Muslims, saying that it’s all their fault, or anyway it’s all the fault of America. “Why do you think they hate us?” was the question they asked us after 9/11. It has become abundantly clear since then that they hate us because they hate everyone who doesn’t believe exactly the way they do, but leftists still cling to that theory. No one on the left wants to ask, “Why do they hate the Yazidis?” They don’t want to ask it because of course the Yazidis did nothing to deserve their treatment at the hands of ISIS. So, the left’s theory has to be stretched out of shape by saying that it is really the U.S. that is to blame. That’s right, the U.S. bombed Iraq and the Muslims responded by shooting Malala and turning the Yazidis into slaves. No one on the left seems to realize how absurd that sounds. But my larger point is that the left’s desperate clinging to the grievance theory shows how little they care about the rest of us.
The left’s message is also undercut by the massive amounts of denial they engage in. The silly insistence that ISIS isn’t Muslim achieves nothing except that it shows us that the left is more interested in protecting Muslims than it is in doing much of anything about the atrocities that Muslims commit. (And when denying they are Muslim doesn’t work, they can always fall back on the “it’s all the victim’s fault” ploy.) And there is the silly insistence that Islam is a religion of peace, that the primary meaning of “jihad” is an inner struggle, that Islamic Spain was wonderfully enlightened, that there never was any Islamic imperialism, and so on. There are also diversionary campaigns that engage in denial such as the Republican war on women or the rape culture on our campuses when the real war on women is in the Muslim world and a horrific rape culture has emerged in places like Sweden.
Another problem is the lack of commitment that the left has to the West. A leftist quoted in Pascal Bruckner’s The Tyranny of Guilt says that “the death of the West will not necessarily be the end of the world” (p. 10), and that statement seems to fit in with much else that the left is saying and doing. What will succeed the West seems to be (as the Islamists keep threatening) shari’a. Obviously, shari’a will mean the death of the left, yet no one on the left seems interested in saying to these people, “No, we are not going to tolerate shari’a here in America.” No one on the left has a button saying, “No to shari’a.” Instead, what you get is what Martha Nussbaum did in her book on Islamphobia, a sort of defense of a limited amount of it, because after all that’s a way of being kind to the Muslims, isn’t it? An absolute condemnation isn’t to be found.
The height of leftist prevaricating is the way they greeted the news that ISIS thinks that slavery is permissible. Forget about whether ISIS is genuinely Muslim or not. After hearing endless pontificating on the “horrible legacy of slavery,” one would expect this news to be greeted with loud shouts of disapproval and large demonstrations in the streets and on our college campuses. Instead, there was silence. Crickets. Demonstrations on our college campuses are the way the rest of us gauge what the left is most concerned with, and when we see no demonstrations against the re-introduction of slavery, the rest of us think the left doesn’t really care.
So, for all of these reasons and countless others, we do doubt that the left is against Muslim atrocities, and even when they say they aren’t, we doubt them. And even if we didn’t doubt them, we think they have higher priorities that mean they aren’t really committed to ending those atrocities. The left’s real commitment is to helping Muslims, and they don’t really care much about the rest of us. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, the left is like a battered wife who keeps making excuses for the beatings she gets from her husband. It’s just too bad that the rest of us have to live with their domination of our culture.