Muslims Who Voted for Trump, and the Stupidity of Leftists

Yes, there actually were some Muslims who voted for Trump, and they are liberal Muslims who, like me, can’t stand the left’s stand on Muslims, which is to give as much support as possible to the ultraconservatives. (As I’ve been saying, it’s impossible to avoid supporting the right these days since the left insists on supporting ultraconservative Muslims.) See here and here (scroll down for Deniz Dolun). Hillary’s contempt for people who are racist, sexist, homophobic, and Islamophobic betrays her and her supporters’ confusion about whom they are supporting, because the Muslims they support are themselves sexist and homophobic. This is like accusing someone of hating both Jews and Nazis.

This confusion isn’t new. In spite of the persistent attempts by liberals and leftists to portray every Republican presidential candidate as Hitler and those who voted for him as Nazis, they themselves were confused about the Nazis from the 1920s to the early 1940s. In the 1920s and into the early 1930s, the Communists in Germany saw the Social Democrats as their big enemy and not the Nazis, and they inially thought of Hitler’s rise to power as basically a step along the way to their own rise to power. In 1936 in Spain, they were against the fascists, but by 1939, they had entered into a formal alliance with Hitler. It wasn’t until Hitler betrayed them that they became permanently anti-Hitler and anti-Nazi.

But getting back to Muslims, I say that liberals and leftists can get an understanding of the total revulsion I have felt for their actions by replacing every occurrence of the word “Muslim” with the word “ultraconservative.” Consider this timeline:

• Ultraconservatives Take Over Iran and Murder Leftists

• Ultraconservative Head of Iran Orders Followers To Murder Harmless Liberal Author

• Ultraconservatives Push To Take Over Afghanistan

• Ultraconservatives Hijack Planes and Crash Them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon

• Ultraconservatives Murder Film Director on the Streets of Amsterdam

• Ultraconservatives Threaten Cartoonists in Denmark

• Ultraconservatives Murder Cartoonists in Paris

• Ultraconservative Shoots Up Gay Nightclub in Orlando

• Ultraconservative Head of Turkey Pushes Country Away from Secularism, Arrests Thousands

This is how I see world events involving Muslims. There were, of course, lots of other incidents that I haven’t included, but this should give liberals and leftists an idea of where I am coming from. Whenever I hear of some outrage committed by Muslims, I push past the Muslim label to see if this was done by Muslims who are ultraconservatives or by liberal Muslims, and of course it is always the ultraconservatives who have done it. Accordingly, I feel perfectly justified in describing them in terms of the participants’ politics rather than their religion. And once we do that, we can see how stupid the left has been.

Here is a brief list (in rough chronological order) of leftist responses to the outrages:

• Leftists Ask Why We Think the Ultraconservatives Hate Us

• Leftists Worry about Backlash against Ultraconservatives After Murder of Leftist Filmmaker

• Leftists Insist Terrorism Will Stop When the Ultraconservatives Have No More Grievances against Us

• Leftists Insist That Criticizing the Ultraconservatives Is a Hate Crime

• Leftists Claim that Ultraconservative Terrorist Attack Was Nothing But Workplace Violence

• Obama Administration Says That Ultraconservative Brotherhood of Egypt Is Liberal*

• Leftist Denounces Protests against Ultraconservative Terror Attack in Paris as “Punching Down”

• Obama Makes Deal with the Ultraconservatives of Iran

• EU Leaders Bash President of Hungary for Not Wanting to Allow Entry of Ultraconservatives

I assume that this list shows perfectly well how stupid the left has been. I have spent the last fifteen years watching in amazement and alarm as leftists have systematically empowered people who are absolutely opposed to the values that leftists hold. Leftists of my generation strengthened secularism, but now they are supporting people who will destroy it. Leftists championed feminists, but now they are supporting people who treat women as second-class citizens. And so on.

Leftists are like the people in the Twilight Zone episode who assume that some friendly space aliens are good and decent when in fact they want to eat humans. Those people at least had the excuse that they didn’t have any reason to mistrust the aliens, whereas the murder of leftists by Muslims in Iran back in 1979 was reason enough to mistrust Muslims. Sorry, leftists, but you’ve been stupid. No matter how stupid you think the Trump voters have been, you’ve been even stupider. You think it’s the height of tolerance to admit Muslims into the West. I think it’s the height of stupidity to admit ultraconservatives into the West. You want me to feel guilty about the oppression of Muslims by the West. I say that given that most of them are ultraconservatives, they deserve to be oppressed.

Of course, you can question whether I am right in labeling these people as ultraconservatives. In support of my position are the Muslims who voted for Trump. Also, the book I have repeatedly recommended to liberals and leftists, Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here by Karima Bennoune, supports my position. So does the book by the liberal Muslim Bassam Tibi, Islamism and Islam. (If anyone knows a good book arguing against my position, I’d like to hear about it.) The fact that most Muslim regimes would have to be described as ultraconservative, given their treatment of women and gays and secularists (and even Muslims of the wrong type), is more support. Against my position is perhaps an unexamined belief that everyone in the Third World is a leftist, but any examination of that won’t hold up very well, unless they want to claim that ISIS, which has enslaved people, is on the left rather than the right. And I assume no leftists want to admit that leftists have recently enslaved people, given their constant talk about the horrible legacy of slavery in this country. Another unexamined belief is that anyone who is anti-American is leftist. However, there can be anti-Americans who are on the right, unless leftists want to admit that Hitler was a leftist (which I assume they don’t). Finally, there is the unexamined belief (a relic of Marxism) that history is moving in a certain direction, a progressive one. The election of Trump should prove to one and all that it isn’t.

* What was actually said about the Muslim Brotherhood was that it was mostly secular, which is a staggeringly absurd and incorrect claim.

Comments

[Charles N. Steele]

In part this highlights the meaninglessness of the term "conservative." "Conservative" Islamists have absolutely nothing in common with American Constitutional conservatives, who have nothing in common with British royalist conservatives, who have nothing in common with Stalinist conservatives in the USSR (e.g. Brezhnev), who have nothing in common with Biblical conservatives (American fundamentalists), who have nothing in common with Russell Kirk, who had (almost) nothing in common with Bill Buckley, who had absolutely nothing in common with Yukio Mishima.

"Conservatism" is an empty term, devoid of meaning.

[John Pepple]

I assume that conservatives are people who are generally happy with things as they. As I have suggested numerous times on this blog, the conservative Islamists have something in common with Christian fundamentalists (regarding treatment of women, gays, and secularists), except that they are ten times worse, which makes it a puzzle why anyone on the left would want them in the West.

[Charles N. Steele]

I don't think this is a useful definition of conservative. Conservatism isn't really "support for the status quo," and in many cases the people who are being labeled "conservative" are absolutely against the status quo.

There's a lengthy tradition in political philosophy that develops concepts of "conservative."

There's also the odd way the term is applied in American politics to apply to "economic conservatives" (who are actually heirs to the radical individualistic liberals such as John Locke and Thomas Jefferson), Christian conservatives (who at least claim to trace their thinking to Jesus), and patrician conservatives, who, if they were honest, would admit their intellectual lineage goes back to George III.

I do think the term needs to be carefully defined. One can't have useful discussion and debate if the terminology is confused. One of the worst crimes of the left has been to poison language (as you have repeatedly pointed out). We ought to double down on efforts to clarify concepts and reason with them.

[Charles N. Steele]

Relatedly, I've heard of studies in which self-described "liberals" (or progressives) and conservatives were asked to describes how the other side would think of these issues. The conservatives proved to be pretty good at describing the left-liberals' positions, while the liberals were much worse at characterizing what their ideological opponents thought.

I should try to find this study; it's perhaps relevant.

[John Pepple]

Well, it may not be a useful definition of conservative as far as conservatives are concerned, but this is a post that is basically aimed at liberals and leftists, and they aren't going to care about details. My point is that they are admitting immigrants into the West without looking at their politics or potential problems down the road.

[Charles N. Steele]

Given that qualifier, I fully agree.

[Harland]

It's useful to think of leftists not as really pro-liberal. Instead, think of them as anti-conservative above all. Whatever harms conservatives, they are for. Islam harms the West, ergo Islam is good and must be defended.

The outgroup of the Left is not Islam or any other foreign group. Their outgroup is ordinary Americans.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/