Why Liberals Refuse to Admit the Reality of Islamic Fascism

18 thoughts on “Why Liberals Refuse to Admit the Reality of Islamic Fascism”

1. Why are Muslims in the United States far less likely to to join terrorist cells or support radical expressions of their faith than their counterparts in Europe? The answer to this question demonstrates that there are economic and cultural forces at work, not just religion. It also buttresses some arguments made by American conservatives.

   First, Europe’s extreme secularism is as likely to offend the sensibilities of religious Muslims as it is conservative American Christians. Confronted by London’s crowds of unruly drunks spilling out pubs, or Amsterdam’s shopwindow prostitutes, or Frances, nearly nude beaches, Muslims in Europe are more likely to feel their religious values challenged in Europe than they are in the United States.

   Second, the United States is a nation traditionally more welcoming to immigrants (at least, legal immigrants, than is Europe.

   Yet one major difference between the United States and Britain, some say, is the United States’ historical ideal of being a melting-pot meritocracy.

   “You can keep the flavor of your ethnicity, but you are expected to become an American,” said Omer Mozaffar, 34, a Pakistani-American raised here who is working toward a doctorate in Islamic studies at the University of Chicago.

   Britain remains far more rigid. In the United States, for example, Pakistani physicians are more likely to lead departments at hospitals or universities than they are in Britain, said Dr. Tariq H. Butt, a 52-year-old family physician who arrived in the United States 25 years ago for his residency.

   Pakistanis Find U.S. an Easier Fit Than Britain

   While ethinic bigotry has become distasteful in the United States it is more prevalent in Europe.

   A more important factor in determining who becomes a militant is most likely the feeling of being stigmatized as less than equal, community activists say, noting that such discrimination remains far more common in Britain. It is probably compounded by the fact that violence against Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Lebanon feels so much closer there, they say

   .

   Pakistanis Find U.S. an Easier Fit Than Britain

   Lastly, many more Muslims in Europe are on welfare than in the United States. Europe’s Welfare state may be keeping large numbers of young Muslims economically margianlized contributing to their sense of alienation and estrangement. In England 1 in 5 Muslims in unemployed and on welfare.

   So Americans can feel proud, but should also be alert tha racist codewords like Islamic Fascistnot be used to allow racism and hate to rear it’s ugly head in our country.

   Mr. Mozaffar, the University of Chicago student, said he had grown up with revered Muslim role models like Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabar, but now there were none. He teaches religion classes for young Muslims, and the question inevitably arises whether the creed justifies using violence for political or religious aims. He emphasizes that Islam forbids killing innocent civilians, and community members here have said they will not tolerate a mosque prayer leader advocating violence.

   The attitude of the American government in adopting terms like “Islamic fascists” and deporting large numbers of immigrants, he said, makes Muslims feel marked, as if they do not belong here. “The society in the United States is much fairer to foreigners than anywhere else,” he said, “but that mood is changing.”

2. Father Greeley had some good comments on the phrase “War on Islamofascism” is so ridiculous.

   The “War on Islamo Fascism” is replacing the “War on Global Terror” as the favorite Bush administration buzz slogan. It is a good slogan because it appeals to the “nuke ’em” segment of the population as an election approaches and because it means nothing at all.

   The word is a victim of linguistic corruption. Since in some fashion we think with words, linguistic corruption corrupts our thought and indeed destroys thought because it eliminates the necessity and the possibility of thoughtful distinctions — just what knee-jerk right-wing haters want to do.

   Thus “War on Islamo-Fascism” enables both the vice president and the senator from Connecticut to lump the Iraq war with the plot to blow up transatlantic flights and blinds the victims of such slogans to the facts that in Iraq most of the killing these days is Muslim on Muslim and that there was no evidence of an Iraqi trying to attack the mainline United States or indeed any American until we invaded their country and messed it up. The transatlantic terrorists are English citizens of Pakistani origin who resent the way England treats them. The World Trade Center terrorists were mostly Saudis who resented American support of Israel and American presence in their country. Different people, different anger, different exploitation of a religious heritage. Does one have to say that most Muslims in England, Arabia and Iraq are not terrorists and don’t support terror?

   There’s an old Latin saying, “Qui nimis probat, nihil probat” — he who proves too much proves nothing at all. If you lump too many phenomena under one label that is also a slogan, you create confusion for yourself and bar serious thought.

   When we call everything a ‘war,’ what do we call a real war?

3. Greeley is being dishonest here. He argues that those who use the term Islamofascist use it only to conflate all conflict under one umbrella to justify any conflict without distinction. This clearly is not true. Some might, and some undoubtably do, but most good thinkers don’t.

   Greeley, in characterizing all those who use the term as unreflective warriors incapable of making proper distinctions, falls into the same trap he decries. He wants the term delegitimized. He doesn’t want it applied to international terror like 9/11, the recent terror bombing plots uncovered in England, or even the recent demand that Muslims in England be allowed to live under Sharia law. In short, he wants to conflate Muslim terror with the Muslim numbers that (ostensibly) don’t favor terror.

   Greely is correct in that distinctions need to be drawn. In seeking to delegitimize the term however, he also seeks to redefine the imposition of Muslim religion and culture on the Christian West as something other than fascist. If the cultural overthrow involved persuasion rather than, say, commandeering civilian aircraft and turning them into guided missiles to take down buildings, or bombing public trains and subways, or blowing aircraft out of the sky, or bombing restaurants and embassies, he might have a point. But events should caution us otherwise.

   The truth is that Greeley doesn’t want to call terror by its name because he doesn’t want to admit the threat of Islamofacism against the West. Instead, he wants to prohibit the term “fascist”.

   (In that sense, he is consistent in his politically correct liberalism. As the threat increases, political correctness will morph from its focus on homosexual-heterosexual equity to some form of Muslim-Christian equity. Watch how the language shifts. More on this some other time.)

   Greeley’s right about one thing:

   If you lump too many phenomena under one label that is also a slogan, you create confusion for yourself and bar serious thought.

   Yet Greeley wants to label all Muslim revolution as benign (too many phenomena here). Clearer heads need to prevail. Greeley isn’t one of them.

4. And how does one square the fact that ‘Islamo-fascism’ is just good old fashioned Islam? Why do we need a term like this at all? How does ‘Islamo-fascism’ differ from traditional modes of Islamic governance which are totalitarian systems in and of themselves?

5. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote:

   There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’.

   Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defense. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general.

   For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel-a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance-and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle; these last lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.

   http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/~idris/Essays/Hedge_n_Fox.htm

   http://billmon.org/archives/002703.html

   Citing Islamo-fascism as the over-arching explanation for all events in the middle-east is hedgehog thinking. It is an approach that frightens me because it fails to take into account the random quality of human affairs which very rarely conform to cookie-cutter theories . In this case, it relies on negative premises and preconceptions that may, or may not, have basis in fact, and assumes an adversarial relationship that may, or may not not be inevitable, but may become more so given such an approach.

6. Dean, unwilling to hear what Islam announces about itself

   Dean, you are unwilling to hear what Islam announces about itself. You are unwilling to take into account what current Islamic clergy-leaders are saying today about Islam and the West. What I have been trying to communicate to you is that they-Islamic leaders-declare that Western civilization as we know it is incompatible with Islam and Islam is incompatible with Western civilization.

   You seem to have a virtually inpenetrable wall of denial on this. Please reflect on this.

   In the most sacred mosque in Islam, Sheikh Abd al-Rahman al-Sudais of the Grand Mosque in Mecca uses his sermons to call for Jews to be “annihilated” and to urge the overthrow of Western civilization. Al-Sadais is the highest imam appointed by our Saudi government ally, and his sermons are widely listened to across the Middle East. When he came to the UK in June of 2005 to open the London Islamic Centre, thouands of British Muslims flocked to him.

   Your “insight” about “hedgehog” thinking is so detached from the reality that Islam has demonstrated itself to be and continues to announce itsefl to be that it amounts to willfill blindness.

7. Mohammed cartoons controversy—no free thought in Islam

   Fascism involves at a minimum, the control of thought by those in power. Islam combines political and religious power in the hands of a single government. Islam prohibits any thought, any writing any expression that in any way questions Islam, critiques Islam or its founder, Mohammed. After the Mohammed cartoon controversy, Muslim in Indonesia marched carrying signs in English stating “there is no free speech in Islam.”

   This is the quintessence of fascism: control of intellectual life, control of cultural expression and restriction of religious freedom.

   I sincerely doubt that Greeley has a clue about the true history of Islam or its basic tenets. Most clergy in the United States, regardless of their faith tradition, know beans about Islam, yet they feel they can pontificate on the matter.

8. Dean, am I a bigot if I find polygamy, forced marriages and religiously proscribed wife beating repugnant?

   Muslims have brought polygamy (de facto), forced marriages and wife-beating by religious right to the U.K. and everywhere else they go in the West. Am I a bigot if I find these practices distasteful?

   Should the state dictate that I must abandon my belief that Islam is a false religion and that its practices are barbaric and degarding? Am I allowed to think that? Would President Kerry have allowed me to think that?

   If a Muslim is offended because I am willing to criticize Mohammed should I be silenced to avoid “inter-religious strife?”

9. Note 4. Glen writes:

   And how does one square the fact that ‘Islamo-fascism’ is just good old fashioned Islam? Why do we need a term like this at all?

   Because the distinction can break through the unrelenting political correctness that imposes itself in monolithic and moralistic terms. It’s a way to break free of the sentiment that clear thinking about Islamic Jihad is inherently racist.

10. One secularist, I suppose you could call him, who has been extremely critical of Islam is Sam Harris, author of the book The End of Faith. Harris is an atheist who is very critical of all religion, but he sees Islam as a religion with an “arrested develoipment.”

    One of the things I find interesting in this venue is the constant criticism of “secularists.” But the only reason that Christians aren’t slaughtering each other to this day is because over the centuries Christianity has been moderated by secular and humanist thinking. Face it, the whole concept of “freedom of religion” is not a Jewish or Christian principle; it is a humanist principle.

    Anyway, here’s a little bit of what Sam Harris has to say about Islam:

    The religious hysteria [over the cartoons] has not been confined to the “extremists” of the Muslim world. Seventeen Arab governments issued a joint statement of protest, calling for the punishment of those responsible. Pakistan’s parliament unanimously condemned the drawings as a “vicious, outrageous and provocative campaign” that has “hurt the faith and feelings of Muslims all over the world.” Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, while still seeking his nation’s entry into the European Union, nevertheless declared that the cartoons were an attack upon the “spiritual values” of Muslims everywhere. The leader of Lebanon’s governing Hezbollah faction observed that the whole episode could have been avoided if only the novelist Salman Rushdie had been properly slaughtered for writing “The Satanic Verses.”

    Let us take stock of the moral intuitions now on display in the House of Islam: On Aug. 17, 2005, an Iraqi insurgent helped collect the injured survivors of a car bombing, rushed them to a hospital and then detonated his own bomb, murdering those who were already mortally wounded as well as the doctors and nurses struggling to save their lives. Where were the cries of outrage from the Muslim world? Religious sociopaths kill innocents by the hundreds in the capitols of Europe, blow up the offices of the U.N. and the Red Cross, purposefully annihilate crowds of children gathered to collect candy from U.S. soldiers on the streets of Baghdad, kidnap journalists, behead them, and the videos of their butchery become the most popular form of pornography in the Muslim world, and no one utters a word of protest because these atrocities have been perpetrated “in defense of Islam.” But draw a picture of the Prophet, and pious mobs convulse with pious rage. One could hardly ask for a better example of religious dogmatism and its pseudo-morality eclipsing basic, human goodness.

    It is time we recognized—and obliged the Muslim world to recognize—that “Muslim extremism” is not extreme among Muslims. Mainstream Islam itself represents an extremist rejection of intellectual honesty, gender equality, secular politics and genuine pluralism. The truth about Islam is as politically incorrect as it is terrifying: Islam is all fringe and no center. In Islam, we confront a civilization with an arrested history. It is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world.

    http://www.6thcolumnagainstjihad.com/archived_sam_harris.htm

11. “Greeley is being dishonest here….Greeley, in characterizing all those who use the term as unreflective warriors incapable of making proper distinctions, falls into the same trap he decries. He wants the term delegitimized….In that sense, he is consistent in his politically correct liberalism. As the threat increases, political correctness will morph from its focus on homosexual-heterosexual equity to some form of Muslim-Christian equity.”

    So, is this an internal conflict or is it merely a symptom of the liberal disease? What is it in modern liberalism (whether it’s materialistic or “religious” variety) that would have it deny such a large reality? My hunch is that rather than insulating itself to protect it’s world view (as the author would have it) it is more interested in continuing the battle against it’s old nemesis, Western Christian realism. In other words, most thinking liberals understand the Islamic threat but believe it is in the future and they can procrastinate dealing with it (and of course they hope time will instill western liberalism into Islamic peoples – a sort of historical necessity according to their world view). In the mean time, they can try to move the libertarian and socialist agenda forward in their immediate neighborhood…

12. The disease can be described in different ways. Solzhenitsyn called it a crisis of courage which drew from an complete blindness to God thereby making man the touchstone of moral truth. Malcolm Muggeride said a “death wish” lay at the heart of liberalism by which he meant an embrace of death/a denial of life (same thing) rooted deep in the heart (see: The Great Liberal Death Wish). Thomas Sowell has written on this too but from another direction I guess you could call liberal optimism in books like “The Vision of the Annointed.”

    But the rise of Islam may portend the crack-up of liberalism (leftism). For years the condescension towards all matters religious reigned supreme resulting in the elevation of materialism, the cultural Marxism, that has wreaked such social havoc as moral awareness dimmed. Now, face with an implacable religious foe, the spiritual poverty of materialism is becoming so evident that even some on the left are abandoning it. Others however, cling even more tenaciously.

    I heard Juan Williams on Laura Ingram this morning. I wanted to stand up and cheer. Finally a liberal not afraid of moral clarity! He is taking the same approach to black problems as Bill Cosby and placing blame squarely where it belongs: on the blacks themselves who eschew personal responsibility, the popular culture that teaches black women are not worthy of respect, and the poverty pimps like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who preach victimization while lining their own pockets. It’s a serious breach in the wall of political correctness, and the nation will be better because of their moral courage.

    Juan Williams will always be a liberal. Fine with me. There are a lot of issues on which reasonable people can disagree. But one thing we cannot abide as a nation is the moral corruption of our people, especially the young whether they are black, white, whatever. Williams understands this and has stood up in ways that will bring out the heavy artillery of the liberal establishment but he will also find the support of clear thinkers no matter what their politics are. Bravo to Juan Williams!

    I think though that fundamentally, the internal paralysis the leads to the dimming of moral clarity has a lot to do with arrogance. Pride is the most dangerous of all sins because you aren’t aware you are sinning. I think that the sense of moral superiority is so ingrained, so inculcated in the thinking, that no idea outside the established patterns of thought can break through. How else to explain political correctness, the attack on character rather than the engagement of ideas? It’s purely high pitched moral blustering, but those who engage in it really believe it is sound thinking.

13. Father: The historian Walter Russell Mead has a great article in Foreign Affairs magazine entitled “God’s Country?”, that I wanted to recommend to you.

    Mead suggests that differences among Americans regarding foreign policy to a great extent reflect difference in faith and denomination.

    The three contemporary streams of American Protestantism (fundamentalist, liberal, and evangelical) lead to very different ideas about what the country’s role in the world should be. In this context, the most important differences have to do with the degree to which each promotes optimism about the possibilities for a stable, peaceful, and enlightened international order and the importance each places on the difference between believers and nonbelievers. In a nutshell, fundamentalists are deeply pessimistic about the prospects for world order and see an unbridgeable divide between believers and nonbelievers. Liberals are optimistic about the prospects for world order and see little difference between Christians and nonbelievers. And evangelicals stand somewhere in between these extremes.

    http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060901faessay85504/walter-russell-mead/god-s-country.html?mode=print

    Mead echoes many of your own comments regarding the problems of liberal Christianity. However I’m intrigued by his concept of Pessimstic Fundamentalist and Optimistic Liberal that reflects my own difference with Michael, Missourian and Christopher. I’m more optimistic about the possibility of reconciliation with Muslim world and the role of the United Nations while they tend to see both as lost causes.

14. Walter Russell Mead on reconciliation between Christians and Muslims:

    U.S. evangelicals generally seek to hold on to their strong personal faith and Protestant Christian identity while engaging with people across confessional lines. Evangelicals have worked with Catholics against abortion and with both religious and secular Jews to support Israel; they could now reach out to Muslims as well.

    After all, missionary hospitals and schools were the primary contact that most Middle Easterners had with the United States up until the end of World War II; evangelicals managed more than a century of close and generally cooperative relations with Muslims throughout the Arab world. Muslims and evangelicals are both concerned about global poverty and Africa. Both groups oppose the domination of public and international discourse by secular ideas. Both believe that religious figures and values should be treated with respect in the media; neither like the glorification of casual sex in popular entertainment. Both Islam and evangelicalism are democratic religions without a priesthood or hierarchy. Muslims and evangelicals will never agree about everything, and secular people may not like some of the agreements they reach.

    But fostering Muslim-evangelical dialogue may be one of the best ways to forestall the threat of civilizational warfare.

    http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060901faessay85504/walter-russell-mead/god-s-country.html?mode=print

15. Dean, this section of the article you quote: “Both Islam and evangelicalism are democratic religions without a priesthood or hierarchy.” gives me the answer to my question about hierarchy in another thread, if you believe it.

16. Dean, optimism must take fact into account, you consistently refuse to do so

    I’m more optimistic about the possibility of reconciliation with Muslim world and the role of the United Nations while they tend to see both as lost causes.

    Optimism is a frame of mind. One may be generally optimistic and still be in touch with the facts. One may be generally optimistic and out of touch with the facts.

    I like animals and I don’t care to see them abused or mistreated. As much as I like animals, however, I distinguish between those which can be domesticated and those which cannot. You cannot domesticate a tiger even if you raise that tiger from birth. You CAN, if you are professionally trained, establish a stable and safe relationship with a tiger, BUT, you cannot tame a tiger. These are objective facts and they exist independent of my personal state of mind.

    Over and over I have supplied you with documentation of facts which you consider inconvenient and choose to ignore. Just a few posts back I supplied you with accurate quotes from the Koran and the Hadith which clearly established that misogyny is more than “an attitude.” The inferiority of women is an established religious tenet of Islam originating with Allah communicated to mankind through the Angel Gabriel to Mohammed. Any Muslim would explain this to you, YET, you choose to ignore that.

    I believe that we can establish a stable and acceptable relationship with the Muslim world, however, that will not occur unless we understand Islam. Dean, you simply refuse to engage with anyone who argues that Islam is a different world view that is anti-thetical to Christianity and Judaism. Mohammed declared himself to be sent by God to replace Christianity and Judaism. Mohammed preached that Christianity and Judaism were spiritually corrupted.
    In order for two parties to reconcile, they must have been in harmony at some point in the past. Islam has never been in harmony with any non-Islamic body of thought, including democracy.

    The article you referred to is close to patent, ahistorical nonsense. Without the protection of the military of colonial powers, missionaries were and are in danger of their lives. Christians are being killed with impunity in Iraq now.

    I produced for you a direct and recent quote from man who is revered by millions of Muslims as a someone learned in Islam: Abu Bakr Bashir. Yet, you choose over and over to ignore what this MUSLIM leader says about Islam in favor with what some cosseted Western academic theorizes. Abu Bakr Bashir clearly stated that democracy is “shirk” or unbelief to a Muslim. You simply act as if my attitude is a produce of my “state of mind” rather than the statements of Abu Bakr Bashier.

    Willful blindness, dangerous willful blindness. Again, I believe that we can achieve a stable and acceptable relationship with the Muslim world but not without marshalling the integrity to demand fair treatment for non-Muslim in the Muslim world, something that every Western government has neglected and neglects to this day.

    Query, why haven’t the Copts, native to Egypt, been able to live free from persecution? What have the Copts ever done to the Muslim population except to refuse to renounce Christianity?

17. Dean, Abu Bakr Bashir knows more about Islam and democracy then Walter Russel Mead

    I’m more optimistic about the possibility of reconciliation with Muslim world and the role of the United Nations while they tend to see both as lost causes.

    Posted: August 25, 2006 | 12:48 pm

    First, I have repeatedly stated that I believed that it is possible to build a stable and acceptable relationship with the Muslim world, however, that relationship, in order to be stable, must be based on reality. You continue to reject the reality that I bring to this site over and over and over. You have refused to address the very relevant comments of Abu Bakr Bashir. They are inconveninet for your approach and you ignore them. I do not choose to ignore someone whom millions of Muslims consider a spiritual leader and a scholar of Islam. Walter Russell Mead carries no sway in the Muslim world and his observation about Islam and democracy is frankly ignorant, dangerouly ignorant.

    Your make reference to anti-female “attitudes” in Islam but absolutely refuse to engage the references that I have supplied over and over and over which establish without doubt that the inferior status of women is a theological concept delivered to mankind through the Angel Gabriel from Allah. Any Muslim on the street would explain this to you. Your “Persian-American co-worker” if he is a Muslim believes that he has a Koranic right to beat his wife. Muslims in Europe have already bring honor killings with them. They have started to work for exception to laws against domestic violence, through the adoption of Muslim family law.

    I genuinely want to understand Islam and therefore I give the words of Abu Bakr Bashier, the Koran and the Hadith more weight than some cosseted Western academic like Walter Russell Mead.

18. Dean, Walter Russell Mead ignores the most important fact about Islam

    Any Muslim will tell you that Islam envisions a complete union of the government and religion. Any Muslim will tell you that Mohammed brought to mankind a “perfect religion” which taught mankind how to live in every aspect of his life. The law that Mohammed brought was the Sharia. Sharia is the law that Allah intended humankind to follow. It is Sharia that governs an Islamic society. To suggest that a Muslim society should be governed by laws made by men is blasphemy. This is what Abu Bakr Bashir explained to you, this is what you are ignoring. They is why Walter Russell Mean is an idiot and his explanation is not worth listenting to.

    Remember academics have gotten things spectacularly wrong many, many times. Think of Freud, think of Marx, think of the highly placed academics that supported the Soviet Union long after there was an abundance of proof of the oppressiveness and brutality of that country. Walter Russell Mead disqualifies himself from serious consideration by his own misunderstanding of Islam.

    Again, we can establish a stable and acceptable relationship with the Muslim world but I suggest that we ignore Mr. Mead and pay more attention to ABB who leads tens of millions of Muslims. Mr. Mead is a nobody and a non-player in this conflict.

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