The Left Bows Low and Cries ‘Allahu Akbar’ Phil Shannon
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/islam/2024/05/the-left-bows-low-and-cries-allahu-akbar/
Odd bedfellows are often found in politics or war, but is the secular Left’s lovey-dovey relationship with the anti-Semitic, genocidal Hamas fanatics in Gaza and, indeed, Islam generally, really such an odd pairing? We are entitled to speculate because there appears no limit to what it would take for the woke Left to say, along with a majority of other Australians, ‘to hell with Hamas, to hell with Islam’. Neither the bestial nature of the Hamas terror attack on Israel and the imported Jew-hate that consequently erupted here in Australia, nor the Muslim teen jihadi’s stabbing of a Sydney bishop, have proved to be a threshold too far for the modern Left.
No matter what depths of depravity are reached by Islam, it remains ring-fenced by the impregnable force-field of ‘Islamophobia’, one of the top sins in the Woke catechism and zealously enforced by the Left, even though ‘Islamophobia’ should more accurately be called ‘Islamo-awareness’ rather than an ‘irrational’ fear of Islam. Whilst Islamo-Fascism has a long history (one common enemy in particular united both the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Fuhrer, for example), Islamo-Leftism is a relatively new phenomenon in a Left which has traditionally been wary of, indeed hostile to, ‘radical Mohammedans’ (in Trotsky’s words) and their milieu.
So, what is going on with the infatuation of the Left with the barbaric, Jew-killing, gay-hating, women-raping, head-lopping religious fundamentalists of the Islamic faith, and their often silently supportive, more ‘moderate’, brethren?
Islam’s demographic march
Like the rest of the West, Australia is beginning to undergo Islamicisation. In 1966, Muslims made up fewer than one in a thousand Australians (Islam did not statistically reach even the 0.1 per cent population needed to warrant its own religion category in the Census of that year). From that invisibly low base, however, the acceleration has been rapid. By the 2021 Census, Muslims in Australia had reached a population of 813,392 or 3.2 per cent of the total population.
Muslims have now reached critical social mass in Australia and exert an outsize influence on the culture and politics of the host country. In particular, they have shot up the identity politics league ladder curated by the Left, which has never seen a minority, especially a ‘non-white’ one, unworthy of being honoured as victims of a perennially racist Western and imperialist culture. Islam has consequently undergone a reappraisal by an historical materialist Left which, in the olden times, had no philosophical truck with any religion. Atheism was de rigeur for socialists, old and new, whilst Christians, although not actively excluded from left-wing parties, were exceptionally rare (I can not recall a single one in the three decades I moved in Left circles). The scalpel of ‘scientific socialism’ was wielded against not just Christianity but any system of religious thought. Indeed, there was a major political kerfuffle in one of the Trotskyoid grouplets I used to inhabit (I can’t remember which one – Socialist Action, or Socialist Alternative, or Socialist Alliance, or the International Socialists – they are sort of interchangeable even down to their similar and unoriginal names) when one article was published which included criticism of even the Rainbow Serpent and other myths of the Aboriginal Dreamtime religion, a woke sin which no number of Hail Marx’s could expiate these days.
Now that Islam has received favoured status amongst the religions that dare not be challenged by the woke Left, the creed’s many decidedly unprogressive social pathologies are also necessarily granted a sweeping immunity.
Islamic Terrorism
Top of the list for critical exemption is Islamic terrorism, which receives much special pleading by the Islamophilic Left in order to downplay or excuse it. Multiculturalist ideologues fervently believe (when they aren’t apologising for, or justifying, the ‘inevitable’ Islamic terrorist blowback against the wicked White West) that there really, truly is a ‘Religion of Peace’ which is followed by billions of pacific Muslims. As for what apologists present as a tiny, violent but inconsequential ‘non-Islamic Islam’, the Left would have you believe they have nothing to do with the religion whose more bloodthirsty counsel they follow.
This is fanciful thinking. For starters, the Islamic terrorists are perfectly clear about their religious motivations, as evidenced by their battle cry of Islamic supremism, ‘Allahu Akbar’. There are some 109 verses in the Koran commanding violence, often graphic violence, by Muslims against nonbelievers. The Koran is crystal clear that Muslims are the “best of peoples” (verse 3:110) and that ‘those who disbelieve are surely the vilest of animals in Allah’s sight” (verse 8:55).
As for Muslim terror being frowned upon by nearly all Muslims, numerous surveys have given the lie to this. Trevor Phillips, a former British Labour politician of African heritage who served for a decade as head of two impeccably woke liberal bodies (the Commission for Racial Equality, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission), and thus was one of the high priests of the politically correct ‘diversity’ elite, conducted a large survey (What British Muslims Really Think) in 2015 investigating British Muslims’ beliefs. He found that 32 per cent refuse to condemn those who ‘take part in violence against those who mock the Prophet’, whilst just one in three (34 per cent) would report to the police a fellow Muslim ‘involved with people who support terrorism’ (the other two-thirds, one gathers, would stay shtum). Most Gaza Palestinians, too, were head-over-heels delighted by the vicious Hamas assault on Israeli Jews last October.
Other Islamic social pathologies
Savage terrorism, of course, is the most acute symptom of Islamic pathology but terrorism, despite its spectacular grisliness, is far from Islam’s sole flaw. Islam is fundamentally incompatible with a broad gamut of political and social values, not least equality, tolerance, secularism, pluralism, religious freedom, free speech and democracy — principles to which the Left once pledged itself in theory if not in practice.
In both its ‘radicalised’ and ‘moderate’ forms Islam advances values alien to what has long been taken for granted in the West. The Philips survey found an alarmingly high percentage of Britain’s three million Muslims do not want to integrate and that their views aren’t remotely enlightened. Besides having a soft spot for terrorist violence, the survey found
♦ 52% of Britain’s Muslims think homosexuality should be illegal;
♦ 39% think Muslim ‘wives should always obey their husbands’;
♦ 31% think it is acceptable for a man to have more than one wife;
♦ 34% do not condemn Muslims who stone those who commit adultery, and
♦ 23% support the introduction of Sharia Law in the UK.
It is far worse, of course, in such fundamentalist Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq but it also exists in spades in so-called ‘moderate’ Muslim countries such as Indonesia, where a 2006 poll found 58 per cent of respondents in this model ‘moderate Muslim’ nation believe adulterers should be stoned to death (cited in Mark Durie’s Islam, Human Rights and Public Policy). In 2010, Pew Research found that 84 per cent of Egyptians, 86 per cent of Jordanians and 76 per cent of Pakistanis supported the death sentence for apostasy. So the problem with Islam is not just its active jihadists but also with ‘traditional’ Islamic beliefs and activities. Clitoridectomies, honour killings and throwing sodomites off tall buildings come immediately to mind.
Anti-Semitism, of course, looms large at the core of the Islamic belief system, but it is not just Jews who cop unhinged Muslim ire. As much as the Islamo-Left might pretend otherwise (nowhere better illustrated than by Turkeys for Christmas, otherwise known as Queers for Palestine), Islam has no tolerance for women’s rights, gays, Muslim apostates, Christians and followers of all other creeds.
And socialists too. Geoffrey Robertson in his 2012 book Mullahs Without Mercy notes how the Islamists who usurped power in Iran following the 1979 popular revolution against the dictatorship of the Shah turned their mass-murdering ways first upon 7000 jailed members of an Islamic-Marxist party, followed by thousands more of their godless socialist peers whose atheistic thought-crimes and refusal to adopt the religious rituals of the new theocratic state condemned them to whippings, torture and murder. No Islamic regime has ever lived peaceably with any left-wing domestic political parties, which makes its woke West allies all the bigger fools and suckers. All this Islamic animosity to the broad swathes of non-Muslim humanity should give the Left pause, but the woke imperative of supporting favoured victim groups (in this case, Muslims) must always take precedence.
Islam’s pernicious foundational flaws have proven remarkably resistant to reform since the territorial conquests in the seventh century AD by the Muslim warlord and self-proclaimed Prophet Mohammed. Islam’s contemporary problems are rigidly cemented in its unchallengeable texts — the Koran (purported to be Allah’s verbatim words transmitted to Mohammed via an angel and complete and perfect for all time), the Hadiths (the Prophet’s alleged sayings and deeds) and the Sura (the canonical biography of Mohammed by Ibn Ishaq). These three texts embody the mores and cultural values of seventh century society in the Arabian Peninsula and are, to say the least, a poor fit with modern Western civilisation.
Any attempt to textually cherry-pick the more ‘liberal’ references in these foundational sources has to confront the sheer weight of the ‘perverted’ bits such as:
♦ the divinely-ordained killing, enslaving and subjugation of Jews, Christians, ex-Muslim apostates or doubting Muslims,
♦ the abundant homophobia,
♦ the condoning of women’s oppression (wife-beating, under-age marriages, marital rape, genital mutilation, child marriage, forced marriage, polygamy, ‘honour killings’, etc.).
Mohammed is both the religion’s founder and the heart of his creation’s problem. Revered by all Muslims (whether hard-line or ‘reformist’), Mohammed is far from a model for all Muslims to follow. The “perfect man” began his religious-political career as a highwayman raiding desert caravans and, as a ferocious and highly successful warlord, he fought constant battles, beheaded 600 Jews in a single afternoon, pillaged towns, raped the widows of his victims, had fifteen wives (the youngest aged just six), sanctioned spousal necrophilia, and ordered the stoning to death of adulterers, apostates, homosexuals, blasphemers and anyone who personally insulted him.
All Muslims, nevertheless, are obliged to believe their Prophet is the ‘Model of Conduct’, and have no difficulty with the modern-day moral standards set by someone who deflowered a nine-year-old, ordered the torture of a man to make him reveal where he had hidden valuables and had him killed when he did so, who commanded three assassinations for the ‘crime’ of mocking him, who himself took part in the killing of up to 900 prisoners of a rival tribe, and who declared ‘I have been made victorious through terror’. Given this example, the moral compass of the average Muslim, not just the extremist, is seriously off-kilter, even if latent most of the time.
If this Mohammed of the sword were to be cleansed from the holy texts to make them relevant to the 21st century, with a more peaceable and devout replacement cobbled together from a special and quite limited reading of the Islamic texts, this would, blasphemously, reduce the Prophet to a quite minor role and demolish the very foundations of the entire religion of Islam. Embrace Islam as it stands and you embrace Mohammed’s vices and unpleasant personality, recasting them as virtues and attributes to emulate.
Christianity’s Jesus, on the other hand, has subsequently, in various rewritings of the Christian canon from the time of the much-later-penned Gospels themselves, evolved into a harmless dispenser of moral maxims that secularists could easily live by, but Mohammed has shown no propensity for such ethical evolution.
Sharia Law
Sharia law is a Koran-authorised way-of-life instruction manual which micro-manages public and private life under Islam through over six thousand laws. Some of these Sharia laws prescribe, for example, religious observances such as worship, fasting, prayer and pilgrimage. They cover financial dealings, taxes, trade, banking and finance. They specify rules for marriage (including polygamy), divorce, child custody and inheritance. The mandate specific funeral and burial rituals. They include dietary laws such as the prohibition on pork and alcohol. They prohibit gambling. They include animal slaughter requirements which are incompatible with those used in the West.
They mandate a dress code, especially for women, who are considered second-class citizens. It is mandatory (verses 24:31, 33:59) for Muslim women to wear some headgear equivalent of a bin-liner to at least partially cover their hair and face to ensure the concealment and self-effacement of Muslim women. Muslim females’ head-and-body-covering attire are religiously justified because a psychotic seventh-century warlord designated women as vessels of sin designed by Satan to tempt men.
The hijab and the other black, shapeless ‘modesty’ garments of Islamic culture, are not simply a fashion choice for Muslim women, as feminist apologists for Islam assert. In strict Sharia-ruled Muslim countries, their wearing is imposed under penalty of arrest or worse. In the West, the Muslim wearers of these archaic garments are sending out a conspicuously visible message that they are not interested in integrating into wider, secular, non-Muslim society or interacting with non-Muslims. A Muslim woman’s headwear is anti-social, a big ‘screw you’ to her fellow Western citizens whilst, for the more left-wing of these, including in the ABC, a hijabbed Muslim is mandatory to illustrate ‘diversity and inclusion’ in every story.
The hijab and its female clothing cousins are totally at odds with female dress autonomy in the West. If any other community was forcing its women to dress in discomforting ways, there would be justified uproar by progressive opinion centres but when it’s the Muslim community treating their women as chattel, and dressing them as men decree, the West’s feminist elites, cloaking their approval under the rubric of ‘cultural sensitivity and respect’ and turn away, saying ‘Hands off the hijab! It’s part of their culture. So shut up’. Thus do woke feminists advertise their all-round moral goodness against the dark forces of the nativist, nationalist, populist right and their Trumpian Svengali.
The feminist betrayal of their Muslim sisters has been stark. Not so long ago, the feminist liberal intelligentsia was passionately opposed to the burka and the other variants of Islamic veiling. Now, however, they are silent because to voice support for, say, courageous protests against the veil by women in Iran would be ‘Islamophobic’ and ‘racist’. Yet, there are Muslim women in jail, tortured and dead, for refusing to obey the legal requirement to wear the hijab. There are also raped and murdered Israeli women, the victims of Hamas, whose brutalisation silently testifies to the weird double standards of the Western feminist left who are only too happy to #MeToo men of the non-Muslim kind into woke villainy.
That leftist women get their knickers in a knot over Islamic misogyny may not be so surprising, however. The way that ‘progressive’ women, who claim to value female dress and bodily autonomy, took to the state-imposed Covid mask with religious fervour should be a red flag. When it comes to the ‘progressive’ Left, don’t expect consistency of principle.
The Western, woke left is happy to go along with all the socially regressive tyranny of Islam and the ‘vibrant diversity’ it brings t the West. But be careful what you wish for, ‘progressives’, because you will be just a tasty entrée for the Islamic glutton when Sharia law and an Islamic caliphate come to a place near you.
We should all nod along with John Cleese who recently said: ‘Some cultures are superior to others, and we shouldn’t be frightened to say so’, adding that ‘a society that goes in for female genital mutilation is abhorrent and I happen to think that if people come to live in Britain, they should accept and adhere to our values’.
It’s hard to disagree, unless your politics are left-progressive.
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