Read all about the recently held “Festival of Resistance” in Canada where Islamists and Marxists got to hold hands and find reassurance in the fact that someone out there is as deluded as themselves, the sheer lunacy of it all is sure to make you chuckle. (h/t Oh Canada)
“For atheists, considered worthy of the death penalty by Islamists, to team up with their ultimate opponents in attacking Canadian civic society, demonstrates the fundamental bankruptcy of these two political ideologies.”
Jonah Goldberg points out the absurdities and hilarities of a similar event in Cairo:
At the annual Cairo antiwar conference in Egypt, the hot panel discussion this year was “Bridge-Building Between the Left and Islam.” John Rees, a British Trotskyite, observed: “Where else can you sit down in a single evening and listen to senior people from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, people from the revolutionary left and the antiwar movement from around the globe?”
Gosh, it sounds great. I’m just sorry I missed the rollicking game of Pictionary between the Castroites and the jihadis afterwards.
[..]
In the 1960s, every would-be revolutionary called himself a Marxist, usually without any serious regard to what Marx wrote, said or believed. The specifics of the ideology didn’t matter, because Marxism was the oogah-boogah word radicals used to scare the fat, lazy bourgeoisie. In 1969, Stuart Schram, a specialist on Chinese Communism, wrote that “never in the course of the past century has the name Marx been so widely invoked; never has this name served to justify so many ideas and actions totally foreign to the genius of Marx.”
Today, Marxism has lost its oomph. Yuppies drinking five-dollar lattes put Che Guevara t-shirts on their private-school toddlers.
And because nobody thinks Marxists are scary anymore, radicals consumed with hatred for the status quo — for America, for Western civilization or for the plain old dreariness of their boring lives — don’t bother calling themselves Marxists anymore. It’s not that they’re any more or less Marxist then they were before. It’s just that Marxism won’t get a rise out of your in-laws the way it used to.
But Islamic radicalism? Hooboy, that’s where the action is. Of course, not everybody follows the John Walker Lindh route and actually converts to Islam, just as not every Black Panther supporter became a bank robber. But who can deny that this post-colonial, anti-imperialism, indigenous-peoples-and-the-suburban-revolutionaries-who-love-them-unite! stuff is in many respects just a magnet for the same riffraff and rabble rouses of yesteryear?
Sure, there’s much to fear in Jihadism. But there’s also something deeply pathetic about it, too. And that’s worth pointing out.
More on the great useful idiot tradition of the Left here.
Tarek Fatah is a Canadian Muslim who has been speaking out, despite persistent death threats, against the Islamists, as well as against the useful idiots on the far left who blindly ally with them (Toronto Star):
Tarek Fatah, a long-time left-leaning Muslim, jokes that maybe he’s just too good looking to be taken seriously as a representative of Islam. Certainly, the things he has to say about small-l liberals and the radical left in Western democracies – and their attitudes toward his faith – are anything but pretty.
“The liberal-left has a preconceived vision of what a Muslim is, and most of us don’t fit that mould,” says Fatah, a moderate leader in the Canadian Islamic community.
Clean-shaven himself, Fatah says many on the left expect Muslims to have dark, unruly beards and to be wearing unflattering flowing robes.
Fatah and many of his friends eschew both, but he’s known Muslims to rent robes when they meet with politicians or activist groups, in order to provide good visuals for the media.
But more disconcerting, he says, is a tendency he’s noticed among many on the left to embrace radical Muslims because they like the anti-U.S., anti-George W. Bush rhetoric of such people.
“They think they’re like the Sandinistas,” he says, referring to the Nicaraguan rebels of the 1980s.
Fatah’s frustration boiled to the surface this week as he prepared to fly to New York for a private screening of Islam vs. Islamist, a film cut from the line-up of the America at a Crossroads series of documentaries last month after PBS producers decided it was too alarmist.
For Fatah, the abrupt cancelling of a film looking into intimidation of moderate Muslims such as himself by conservatives is a symptom of something much more troubling he’s noticed in Western society – liberal guilt feeding liberal racism.
“It’s the racism of low expectations,” he says, adding the left is too willing to overlook the sexist and homophobic attitudes of conservative Muslims in hopes of gaining an ally against the U.S. administration.
Add to that liberal guilt for being part of the rich West, he says, and a situation soon develops in which the most outspoken Muslim critics of the West get the most attention.
“Moderate Muslims don’t have a place where they can speak, and the censoring of this film shows it,” says Fatah, who is featured in the film, produced by Martyn Burke.
Fatah lashed out at anti-war groups who march shoulder to shoulder with conservative Muslim groups to protest the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, without paying enough attention to the politics of the groups they are allying with.
[..]
A subject of numerous death threats for his criticism of conservative Muslims, Fatah says members of the left, by trying to be culturally sensitive, have at times become little more than apologists for those making the threats.
“The people who we hope in Western society would say, `How dare you make death threats,’ are saying, `Oh, we can understand, there’s a cultural disposition that permits people to be idiots’,” he says.
“They’re homophobes, but we understand.”
[..]
But for Fatah, the issues are much larger, a marriage of convenience between the left and conservative Muslims.
“Nothing makes them feel better than to say, `Those people who are being pissed on by George Bush, we’ll take care of them,’” Fatah says.
In so doing, he says the left may be falling into the same trap that the right once did – allying with Muslim fundamentalists to satisfy short-term goals, without enough attention paid to what those people believe.
“Toronto’s downtown war-withdrawers, Trotskyites march with the very people who would hang them,”
he says, pointing out that many on the left are atheists.
“The biggest crime in the eyes of Islamists is someone who denies the existence of God.”
Still on Progressive Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has long held that if Islamic culture is to change, if it is to evolve, if it is to undergo a Reformation, the key is the women of Islam. The key is their liberation.
Here are some positive signs that this process is indeed slowly but surely getting under way.
NEW YORK: Muslim feminists from around the world have vowed to create the first women’s council to interpret the Koran and overcome two stereotypes about their religion: that Muslims are terrorists and Islam oppresses women.
The women’s council was among the most groundbreaking ideas introduced at a weekend meeting of more than 100 leaders in the fledgling Islamic feminist movement.
Many in the newly formed group, the Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality, said strict sharia law was not divine because it was created by men and should be changed to incorporate women’s rights.
[..]
Daisy Khan, director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, said she hoped to create a fund to provide scholarships for Muslim women to study Islamic law so they could form a Shura Council of Women, the first with women interpreting the Koran.
Overcoming the “stereotype that Islam oppresses women” sounds a little contradictory if they feel the need to incorporate women’s rights into Sharia (indicating these rights are absent) and reinterpret the Koran, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one. Its only the start of a rather long road after all. But to quote Michael Totten, on the fact that burkas and veils are tools used by men to oppress women: “Spare me the excuses. I have heard them all and I’m not buying.”
Malaysia (from the same article):
Zainab Anwar, “executive director of Sisters in Islam, a Malaysian group working on women’s rights within the Islamic framework”, speaking at the above meeting:
“In our societies men hold power and they decide what Islam should mean and how we can obey that particular understanding of Islam,” [..]
“I can’t live with a God that is unjust,” she said. “The law is progressive, but those men controlling the law aren’t.”
Speaking at a conference in Gatineau, Que., Saturday, journalist-filmmaker Nelofer Pazira (Kandahar and Return to Kandahar) told the audience it is time for the Muslim community to start looking in the mirror.
Instead of complaining that the media only show fanatics and extremists, “we must look at ourselves and see how much we have contributed to that,” she said. Reticence and fear of being labelled have silenced too many moderate Muslims, Pazira added.
She was speaking at the 24th annual conference of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, which drew close to 200 women, and a handful of men, from across Canada.
Pazira spoke after morning prayers, the singing of the national anthem (full versions in both English and French) and a keynote address by noted Mideast expert Mai Yamani.
“I’m tired of all our complaints about the media,” she said, smiling. (Pazira works for CBC’s The National.) “We do not make it easy for the media to cover us.”
[..]
For Yamani an anthropologist who was the first Saudi Arabian woman to obtain a doctorate at the University of Oxford, and now a research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London the challenge is broad.
Muslim women at the crossroads, she said, must choose between an open Islam that embraces the modern and a closed version that rejects the realities of our time. But the choices made will affect everybody.
“We are all at the crossroads Muslims, Christians, Jews and we have no option but to face the future together. We all share a humanity.”
The fundamentalist approach to Islam, both abroad and at home, came in for much criticism at the conference. The council, which does not claim to speak for all Muslim women, says its membership is mostly educated and professional women.
One woman raised in the West expressed her frustration at how the situation has developed here, where people should know better. Shahla Khan said conservative Islam has come into the West and is dominating the scene. She said she gets angry every time she goes to a mosque and has to enter through the back door, while her sons and husband go in through the front.
Her comments drew loud applause.
Yamani, whose books are banned in Saudi Arabia, said it is time for moderate and liberal Muslims to start speaking out more. “All the intellectuals and the more liberal Muslims have been marginalized and silenced.”
A female speaker gives a brilliant speech on the treatment of women in Islam, on honour killings, and on the need for Muslims to stand up against the Islamists. “We have to confront Political Islam full force”. I don’t know what conference she is speaking at, but it was held March 8th (International Women’s Day), this year:
(UPDATE) Iran:
Nobel peace prize winner and law lecturer at the University of Tehran, Shireen Ebadi, in a Q&A for the Times of India:
Q: You’re a Muslim arguing for dynamic interpretation of Islamic laws to make women equal before law. What’s your message to those who believe Islam condemns women to an inferior status?
A: I say, look carefully in the Koran so that the oppressors cannot mislead you with selective quotes. Don’t let people masquerading as clerics claim monopoly on understanding Islam. Allah created us as equal, and when we struggle for equality, we’re doing what Allah wanted us to do.
Q: Is it possible to follow every tenet of Islam in today’s world?
A: Many Islamic laws, like stoning to death, are not even there in Koran. But some laws need to be discussed. For example, Koran says during Ramadan a Muslim must fast from sunrise to sunset. It’s easy to do so in Iran or Saudi Arabia where the days and nights are almost equal. But if a Muslim goes to the North Pole, can he fast for six months, which is the duration of the day? So a third way is needed — and offered by Islam. The secondary laws say, implement the law in its spirit. In this case, divide the day(24 hours) into three equal parts, and use one part for fasting. By another law a rape victim has to produce four witnesses. This was to ensure no one will bring false testimonials. Today, the medical profession is such that it needs a single drop of blood to establish paternity. Surely it can serve in place of four witnesses!
Note that I’ve been using the term “Progressive” rather than “Moderate”, as is common in Western media. Here’s part of the reason why. Foreign Policy has published a study which looks at the different between Moderate and Radical Muslims, in an attempt at answering the question “What Makes a Muslim Radical?”. The study found that there is in fact very little difference. And when a difference exists, it is not in the way you may expect.
The study is based on a Gallup World Poll that included more than 9,000 interviews in nine predominantly Muslim countries.
Their findings:
“There is no significant difference in religiosity between moderates and radicals” and “radicals are no more likely to attend religious services regularly than are moderates.”
“The radicals were found to earn more and stay at school longer than the moderates.” Yep, you read that right. Poverty has little to do with radicalisation. In fact I’d say it is more likely the same forces, that drive large segments of the Western middle class towards idealist “mass movements”, like Socialism, drives the more well-off Muslims towards the mass movement of radical Islamism. Others are of course simply brainwashed. More on this below.
“More radicals expressed satisfaction with their financial situation and quality of life than their moderate counterparts, and a majority of them expected to be better off in the years to come.” Fits in well with my last comment.
“Both moderates and radicals in the Muslim world admire the West, in particular its technology, democratic system, and freedom of speech.” Perhaps it is themselves they hate?
“Although almost all Muslims believe the West should show more respect for Islam, radicals are more likely to feel that the West threatens and attempts to control their way of life. Moderates, on the other hand, are more eager to build ties with the West through economic development.” Again, seems like leftard paranoia to me. The West controls their way of life. In Australia leftards complain about the Liberal Party imposing “a fascist state” on them etc, while other people are happy for the economic opportunities presented to them. The G20 protests being a perfect example.
One of the things the above goes to confirm is that there is no great silent body of Moderate Muslims in the meaning that most Westerners attach to the term, although there is a small but growing number of Progressive Muslims or Democratic Muslims or Reformation Muslims or, as Wafa Sultan who believes Islam can only be transformed, not reformed, may prefer, Transformation Muslims. What there also is is a mass movement of Islamism, a utopian ideology like many before it, which has found extremely fertile ground in Islamic cultures. And that ground is extremely fertile for a mixture of cultural, religious and historical reasons, like the religious tradition of Jihad, a cultural obsession with honour and a visceral ly ingrained sense of victimhood. Unsurprisingly the leaders of the movement are from amongst the well off and educated, from sections of society that have been susceptible to the siren song of utopian ideology since concepts of power and possession first appeared amongst human beings.
I also recommend this article by historian Charles Allen, who traces the ebbs and flows and the current surge of the utopian political ideology embedded in Wahhabi and Deobandi (the sect the Taliban belong to) Islam. Extract:
(h./t Judith Apter Klinghoffer)
There is a widely held view in the West that the violence perpetrated by Muslim jihadists is a response to Western imperialism: a defence of Islam that will cease as soon as the US and its allies pull out of the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan (taking the Israelis with them). As a student of South Asian history I am bound to take a more sanguine view: that this violence has its roots in the perceived failure of Islam to achieve its destiny as a global religion, resulting in attempts to renew Sunni Islam and set it back on course to become the new world political order. The failure of our respective state departments to recognise the true nature of this revivalism has, I believe, contributed significantly to the West’s failure to get to grips with the phenomenon of Islamist extremism.
Long forgotten is the inspired campaign that removed a vicious dictator in three weeks. Nor is much credit given to the idealistic efforts to foster democracy rather than just ignoring the chaos that follows war — as we did after the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan, or following our precipitous departure from Lebanon and Somalia. And we do not appreciate anymore that Syria was forced to vacate Lebanon; that Libya gave up its WMD arsenal; that Pakistan came clean about Dr. Khan; and that there have been the faint beginnings of local elections in the Gulf monarchies.
Yes, the Middle East is “unstable,” but for the first time in memory, the usual killing, genocide, and terrorism are occurring in a scenario that offers some chance at something better. Long before we arrived in Iraq, the Assads were murdering thousands in Hama, the Husseins were gassing Kurds, and the Lebanese militias were murdering civilians. The violence is not what has changed, but rather the notion that the United States can do nothing about it; the U.S. has shown itself willing to risk much to support freedom in place of tyranny or theocracy in the region.
Instead of recalling any of this, Iraq is seen only in the hindsight of who did what wrong and when. All the great good we accomplished and the high ideals we embraced are drowned out by the present violent insurgency and the sensationalized effort to turn the mayhem into an American Antietam or Yalu River. Blame is never allotted to al Qaeda, the Sadr thugs, or the ex-Baathists, only to the United States, who should have, could have, or would have done better in stopping them, had its leadership read a particular article, fired a certain person, listened to an exceptional general, or studied a key position paper.
Today, everyone blames the neoconservatives. It reminds me of a remark by Daniel Defoe in the early 18th century that the apprentice boys of London have very little idea of what a Papist is, but thousands of them are more than happy to go out and break his windows. Who in Britain knows that neocons are a phenomenon of the Left and that neither George W. Bush, nor Dick Cheney, nor Donald Rumsfeld has ever been one? Indeed, devilishly clever though neocons may be, they can’t be very good at PR, for they were responsible for about five per cent of the action in Iraq and have attracted about 95 per cent of the blame.
It is not mad ideology that got us into this war – or rather, the madness and the ideology come from our opponents, not from ourselves. If we do pull all our troops out, mock Blair and Bush, and hail some deal with Iran as “peace”, we shall have a few weeks of self-congratulation, but that is all.
The Islamist movements that wait to cheer our withdrawal are not militarily strong, but
