I Want a New Left

Some Short Items

Israel and Pakistan

Here is a good article by Dennis Prager pointing out that if Israel doesn’t deserve to exist, neither does Pakistan. Pakistan was created about the same time Israel was, its creation produced lots of Hindu refugees, historically there never was a Pakistan, while Israel existed in the distance past as its own country, and finally Pakistan is the result of Muslim imperialism. Let me add that, as I noted the other day (here), some of the theological elite in the new Pakistan wanted to allow slavery.


97% of Scientists Agree on Global Warming, But Who Are These Scientists?

A letter to the editor in the local paper the other day mentioned this figure in support of global warming. The writer did not mention the pause in warming, but was mighty impressed by this consensus. However, we have to ask about these scientists. After all, I’m sure the writer would not approve of oil-company scientists because they are not disinterested, but then the scientists who agree on global warming may not be disinterested observers of nature, either. If they come to science with the belief that humans are destroying planet earth, then they are predisposed to look at the evidence so as to find something like global warming. They may be blind to their own biases.

Another point is that there was a little item in today’s Wall Street Journal on the op-ed page quoting from Time magazine back in the mid-1970s on the coming ice age. For today’s believers in global warming, what was the mistake that scientists made back then? If the evidence back then showed global cooling, how could it show steadily increasing warming just a dozen years later?


Violence in Baltimore

I’m not going to say much about this episode other than this: it will hurt the people at the bottom. That’s what happened in the 1960s when blacks rioted. The neighborhoods were destroyed as businesses left, property values went down, etc. But it makes rich liberals and leftists feel good as these people supposedly strike a blow against the power system. Therefore, leftist approval deserves to be called Rich People’s Leftism, that is, leftism whose main goal is not so much to help the poor as to help assuage the guilt of rich leftists.

Once Again, Muslim Leftists

I’ve been talking recently about Muslim leftists, and in today’s Wall Street Journal there is a review of a book by an Egyptian woman who I say counts as part of the Muslim left (here). The Muslim left occupies a strange place in the West today since it is vilified by Western leftists, who have chosen to side with the Muslim right. As Nick Cohen says in his book Waiting for the Etonians:

Before you go to a left-wing meeting, prepare yourself for the likelihood that everyone you meet will be standing on their heads. Do not be surprised to see communists supporting fascists, feminists throwing their arms around misogynists and liberals apologizing for tyranny. It has been like this since 9/11 turned the world upside down.... [p. 117; emphasis mine]

Somehow, feminists just can’t see that they are supporting misogynists, or if they can, they have been bullied into silence.

The Egyptian woman in question, Mona Eltahawy, talks of the plight of women in the Muslim world and even insists that no matter how bad you think it is, it is actually worse. She was born in Egypt and spent part of her childhood in London before her family moved to Saudi Arabia. It was there that she became a feminist, and one would normally expect that feminists in the West would support her. Instead, they vilify her and others like her as “traitors to their culture and handmaidens to the imperialist forces of Dick Cheney,” as the reviewer (Bari Weiss) puts it. They are “unsophisticated bigots who perpetuate stereotypes about Muslims and the Arab world.” I don’t necessarily agree with everything Eltahawy believes, but we’ve known for generations that women in the Muslim world are treated worse than they are here, and anyone on the left who is in denial about this is basically siding with some of the most reactionary people on earth.

Moreover, the rhetoric of the left these days that calls people like me “Islamophobes” is pure nonsense. The billion Muslims in the world occupy pretty much the whole political spectrum, which means that most us who are called Islamophobes can find someone in the Muslim world whom we either like or at least don’t hate. Therefore, to call someone an Islamophobe amounts to saying, “You don’t like the Muslims I like.” And I say, Why should I like the Muslims you like, especially when they don’t share the values of either of us? Even genuine Muslims have been smeared with this label. For leftists to use it amounts to an unwarranted attack on the West, an attack on people who have legitimate concerns about the direction our society is heading. These leftists would share these concerns if they would just stop being so empty-headed and figure out that the Muslims they are supporting are way over on the far right.

Comments on “Islam and the Abolition of Slavery,” by William Gervase Clarence-Smith

This book was published in 2006, but it has even more relevance today than when it came out, because of the rise of groups like ISIS and Boko Haram that have engaged in selling people they have captured in war and have done so on the basis of religion. This ought to have squelched all tendencies among leftists of accusing some of us of Islamophobia, but their reaction has been to insist that these people are not true Muslims.

Clarence-Smith’s book tells a different tale, and it is a book that should be read by every young person today, if only to counter the anti-Western and pro-Islamic propaganda they are being fed daily by our teachers and professors. Those who have adopted the simplistic notion that the West is bad while the Muslim world is good will find plenty in here that may shock them. Slavery in Islam isn’t just a matter of ISIS and Boko Haram, which they no doubt will explain by saying they were made crazy by Bush’s wars. No, slavery in Islam goes back all the way to the beginning, which is why they need to read this book.

It is true that the author has a small axe to grind, namely he doesn’t accept the “standard” line that says that Islam abolished slavery only because of the pressure of Western imperialists. But it is a small axe, and he is perfectly willing to discuss both the good and the bad on both sides (that is, the Western side and the Muslim side). Because of this, there is plenty in here to shock the sensibilities of the multiculturalist. His rejection of the standard line is due to his belief that things were more complicated than the standard line admits, that some colonial administrators were happy to let the institution of slavery continue, that others were so heavy-handed that they did more harm than good, and so on. Plus, he insists that although Islam was slow to abolish slavery, it questioned it sooner than others did.

Anyway, I had never heard of this standard line before, though I probably should have figured it out on my own. My line is a different one, namely that we are today being sold the story of Islam as the religion of the oppressed, that the West is evil and Islam is good, and that anyone who questions it is an Islamophobe. This book is a useful one in the fight against that story.

The book begins by giving a quick survey of slavery in the Muslim world, and his conclusion is that it was just as bad there as it was everywhere else. Our students seem to have been told that it was milder, but this seems to have come from some Muslims in the last two centuries who were embarrassed by Islam’s record and wanted to do whatever they could to justify it. It is pathetic that our students are now regurgitating excuses from what I would call the Islamic right. Later on in the book, he tells of the Muslim left, which engaged in no such excusing and wanted to eliminate rules from the Qur’an that had no relevance for today’s world (pp. 208ff.).

He also tells of the confused legacy of the Qur’an and the Hadith, for they on the one hand have Muhammad say that the seller of slaves is the most vile of people and that those who free slaves are acting virtuously, while on the other hand they never issue an outright condemnation of slavery. In the ninth century, “jurists developed the fateful theory that the inhabitants of Dar al-Harb, the abode of war, were all potential slaves” (p. 26). Dar al-Harb, of course, includes the West. This edict did not come out of the blue, but had been preceded by both the practice of commandants in the field and scholarly exegesis on the Qur’an. Still, what it meant was that every non-Muslim living in their own lands could be enslaved.

There was some resistance. We learn that the Druze decided as early as the eleventh century to abolish slavery (220), but they were an anomaly. More often, there were people who thought the institution of slavery was abominable, but were forced to put up with it. It happened countless times that a ruler would take steps to eliminate it, but the next ruler would re-instate the status quo. It wasn’t until the coming of the Western imperialists that things really began to change. Even then, change was slow, and as we have seen with the rise of ISIS and Boko Haram, there are still plenty of Muslims who think slavery should be re-instated. This was also the period when many excuses began to be offered. I have already mentioned the excuse that Muslim slavery was milder than it was elsewhere. There was also the excuse that Muhammad thought that slavery would disappear of its own accord, which I believe is also what Thomas Jefferson thought. Then there was the excuse that Islam couldn’t abolish slavery as long as their enemies kept it alive, for then they would be at a disadvantage. Also, because the Qur’an respects property rights, and because slaves were considered property, it was difficult to contemplate abolishing slavery without compensating the owners for their loss. And so on.

A Change in My Blogging Schedule

I'm going back to blogging on even-numbered days only. I've just gotten too busy trying to get my next book done, trying to market my latest book, and dealing with several other projects. I just don't have time for it all, it seems. So, my next post won't be till Sunday.

Bill Ayers, the Decline of America, and the Failure of the Left To Listen

Instapundit linked to this post on a talk Bill Ayers gave to students at the University of Oregon. I’m not quite sure why he shared the link since the post is from three years ago. Anyway, it’s still worth commenting on. Bill Ayers says that America is in decline and that another world is coming. Three years ago there was no ISIS, but there was Al-Qaida and the Taliban and the Muslim Brotherhood, among other groups. Who does Ayers think is going to prevent these groups from dominating this new world? He doesn’t say. Apparently, that kind of problem is a mere detail.

I didn’t watch any videos of his speech, so I’m relying on the excerpts from the link, but it often strikes me that what people on the right are saying never seems to get through to people on the left. The possibility that Europe will be overrun by Islamic fundamentalists doesn’t seem to have occurred to him. For that matter, Mark Steyn was warning about the dangers of uncontrolled immigration to Europe at least a decade ago, yet leftist elites talk and act as though they have never heard anything about any dangers. And despite the many times that Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has sneered at elites flying in private jets to give talks about those with large carbon footprints, they still keep doing it. Obama did it just the other day (here).

I don’t know if the failure to hear what conservatives are saying is because leftists live in a bubble, because the right is not saying things in the right way, or for some other reason. Maybe it’s just that having cultural power of the sort the left has means never having to actually listen to what the opposition is saying.

Very Clever

I wish I had thought of it. Here. One of the women saying that one ought to believe it when someone says she has been raped has now had the tables turned on her when someone insists that they were raped by her. Given the proposition she insists on, we must believe that she is a rapist.

A Note about Republican Rhetoric

An op-ed piece in today’s Wall Street Journal by William A. Galston inadvertently points up a failure of Republican rhetoric. The piece points out that talking about inequality in our society, the Democrats’ preferred talking point, is a nonstarter and should be countered with talk of growth. It is growth that will help people thrive.

No doubt. But surely the Republicans know that “growth” is a bad word for them to use, given the connotations it has with the environmentalists. For the environmentalists, growth is a bad thing. It is a process that causes environmental destruction, it is linked with overpopulation, and it is part of the title of an important book for the environmentalists: The Limits to Growth. Presumably, lots of people have been indoctrinated into believing that growth is bad, and their immediate reaction upon hearing Republicans talk about growth will be negative.

A better term to use is “job creation.” Job creation sounds good and doesn’t have any sort of negative connotations the way that “growth” does. And most people concerned about rising inequality will concede that creating jobs is what the unemployed need, while a redistribution of wealth, assuming it could even be achieved, might not be enough. Please, Republicans, stop talking about growth and start talking about job creation.

The Left’s Anti-Imperialism Policies

If you came of age as a leftist in the 1930s, you adopted certain ideas that were then current. A number of these ideas have fallen by the wayside. No one on the left talks about the proletariat anymore, and if they do, they are almost certainly a baby boomer or older. Nor do I hear any leftists, in our fevered Islamophilic atmosphere, insisting that religion is the opiate of the people. On the other hand, leftists still think imperialism is a terrible thing, and they accordingly think America is a terrible country for being imperialist.

I say that this is a holdover from an earlier era when it seemed obvious that imperialism was bad, but that times have changed, and we can now see that imperialism needn’t be as bad as was formerly maintained. I also say that the left’s anti-imperialist policies have not done the Third World much good.

Let me begin with the latter. Has the Third World thrived economically as a result of the left’s anti-imperialist policies? Not at all. The countries that adopted leftist ideas, like Cuba and Venezuela, are basket cases, while the ones that are thriving, like Singapore and Saudi Arabia, thrive either because they ignored what leftists were saying and used their own values or else because they got lucky and struck oil on their territory.

What about social relations? Is the Third World a place of peace and harmony now that they are ruling themselves? Hardly. In fact, things seem to be deteriorating fast in the Middle East and North Africa, and one thing that can be said is that the left has never encouraged the world’s Muslims to be peaceful and to respect their neighbors. They have never encouraged Muslim Gandhis to come forth for social and political change, and so Muslims have taken to violence as much as possible. Moreover, the left plays favorites in the Third World. It prefers Muslims over Christians, for example, and this is presumably because the West is dominated (or rather was dominated) by Christians, so those other Christians are thought of as just as privileged as the West’s Christians. So, when Copts are murdered by other Egyptians, the left yawns and says nothing. (The fact that Muslims are murdering Christians does not frighten leftists, most of whom are secularists, yet Christians are “people of the book,” and so often get a pass from Muslims, while secularists will get no pass at all from Muslims intent on murdering non-Muslims.) As for the Jews, we needn’t dwell on them since their plight in the Middle East is well known; moreover, Muslim violence against the Jews is now happening in Europe as well.

Perhaps the strangest point to be made about the left’s anti-imperialist policies is that they aren’t even willing to stick up for leftists in the Middle East when they clash with Muslims; leftists here in the West actually stick up for the Muslims and call the leftists “Islamophobes.”

Now let me take up the first question: is imperialism wholly bad? This deserves an extended answer, which I won’t give at this time, but I will say that after the Shah, whom leftists regarded as an American puppet, was evicted from Iran, the new regime turned out to be far worse than the old one.

In addition, one of the striking things about the world situation today in comparison with what it was back in the 1930s is that America actually looks a lot more progressive than many of the other countries in the world. Back in the 1930s, the comparison was always made with the Soviet Union, which leftists automatically regarded as highly progressive. But today we have some different measures of progressiveness, and how women and homosexuals are treated in a country are two of those measures. By those standards, America doesn’t look so bad. It is certainly less sexist and homophobic than any Muslim country. Accordingly, one has to wonder why leftists continue to speak disparagingly of imperialism. Isn’t the obvious conclusion that countries like Iran deserve to be colonized, simply for the sake of their women and homosexuals? That is a conclusion that the left has so far refused to draw, but one would hardly like to say that the left will never draw it. Recall what I said above that the left refuses to support leftists in the Middle East. Obviously, the left’s current anti-imperialist policies are crying out for changes. It is probably just a matter of time.

On Hating Corporations

This post from Legal Insurrection shows a bumper sticker from a leftist who complains about corporations being judged as people. The owner wonders why we can’t execute this “person.” This is typical of the attitude of people on the left. Does it occur to the owner that “executing” a corporation means laying off a lot of little people who depend on the corporation for jobs? More generally, where does she think people’s jobs are going to come from? Yes, I know, the government, and we have seen how well that worked out with the collapse of the Soviet Union and how well it is working out today with Greece. This is just another illustration of Rich People’s Leftism. It never stops to think that maybe, just maybe corporations actually have a good role to play in the world.

The comments, by the way, are good, though they don’t address my point. They point out that the driver is driving a car manufactured by a corporation and that if corporations aren’t treated as people, then it would be impossible to sue one of them. But that corporations provide a lot of poor people with jobs is the most important point to make against her.

Some Short Items

More on the Muslim Left and the Muslim Right

The other day I talked about how the left (in the West) has made an alliance with the Muslim right, while the right prefers the Muslim left. (See here.) This observation leads to a further one: almost anyone who is accused of Islamophobia can respond by saying that that isn’t true, that there are Muslims whom one likes, and that all the name seems to mean is something like, “You don’t like the Muslims I like.” Be prepared, though, to rattle off some names of Muslims you do like. Bassam Tibi should do for starters. Also, Asra Nomani, who wrote an op-ed piece in Time that inspired the post at the link above.
 

Muslim Immigrants Killing Christians

The incident in question happened on a boat traveling from Libya to Italy carrying a number of illegal immigrants from Africa in which some Muslims threw some Christians overboard (here). At this point, it seems unclear if the killings (or attempted killings) were religiously motived. Let’s say they were, and even if they weren’t, there have been plenty of other incidents in recent years one can dredge up. Can any leftist honestly say that they have worked for religious harmony between Muslims and Christians? I don’t mean something like having a “co-exist” bumper sticker, because I assume the sub-text of such a slogan is that Christians are a problem and need to be admonished, while Muslims are not a problem. If you are a leftist, point me to some specific rhetoric you have written proving that you have urged Muslims to respect Christians.


The Rich Get Richer

And this is true of our colleges and universities, too, according to this report in the Washington Post. However, when the left talks about the growing inequality in our society, they don’t seem to mean the universities, and so those institutions will be allowed to keep their money, even though all that wealth does almost nothing for the poor.


“Racism Can Only Be Applied to Whites”

At a moment when most people weren’t paying attention, the left came up with this slogan, which most people would object to. For example, see here for a liberal who objects to it. But more can be said. First, it will not be conducive to helping race relations since it allows anyone who is black to say anything hateful that they like, and it is very likely that whites who hear this hate speech, especially if they are at the bottom economically and so are not in a position to just shrug it off, will develop hateful feelings toward blacks. In addition, while one can see what the reasoning is, it is still wrong. The reasoning presumably is that a racist statement made by someone with power will be more threatening than one made by someone without power. But first, that consideration is irrelevant to whether a statement is racist or not, and secondly, the reasoning ignores the fact that power relations are much more complex than the left would believe. A large and physically powerful black could make racist statements against a scrawny white person, for example, and the fact that the white is a member of the powerful majority doesn't mean anything in that situation.

Another problem with claiming that the concept of racism can't be applied to blacks is that it ignores ethnic disputes involving different groups of blacks, such as American blacks and immigrant blacks. Finally, it involves extending the idea of racism beyond what it is supposed to be. It is supposed to be about having derogatory feelings about people of another race or ethnic group. Once you add in the concept of power, then most of us are going to say, “No, that isn’t part of the concept of racism. Period.” This is just part of the left’s practice of taking the concept of racism and extending it so far that nothing whites do will make them innocent, even if they use a seemingly innocuous term like “brown bag.” See here.

In a previous post (here), I responded to criticisms of analytic philosophy that it had not done what other disciplines in the humanities had done, namely gotten with the program of immersing itself in the issues of racism and sexism. I pointed out that if it had, it would have been done differently, and this is one of the topics that would have been discussed. Moreover, it would have been discussed carefully and dispassionately, with due respect for the rights and feelings of all, unlike the left, which goes off in whatever direction it likes just because it feels good.