This willingness to indulge even the most anti-liberal beliefs and behaviour finds many of its roots in the general disdain many left-wingers and liberals seem to feel for Western democracy, human rights and individualism. But that does not explain why so many people, often decent people, are drawn to defend Islam, Islamic patriarchy, Islamic discrimination against women, violence and more, even when such defence is obviously anti-liberal in the extreme.
I have never known a liberal to say a bad word about a more prevalent and arguably more damaging imperialism: Islamic imperialism. There have been many more imperialist Muslim empires than European ones.
One might have thought that historical facts such as these would provoke human-rights activists to put the Muslim empires into the same category as the later European ones. Not a word of it. Nor do liberals mention another issue that should be close to their hearts: the Islamic slave trade.
Feminists are far from the only so-called left-wing or liberal group to betray their own basic principles out of a bizarre admiration for Islam, whether its history, its values, or its self-proclaimed victimization. Real liberals believe in human rights, women’s rights, racial equality, free speech, and more, rejecting extremism on both the right and left. However, the left in the UK and elsewhere seems to have abandoned those principles and betrayed the very people they had previously supported.[1]
This willingness to indulge even the most anti-liberal beliefs and behaviour finds many of its roots in the general disdain that many so-called left-wingers and liberals seem to feel for Western democracy, human rights and individual freedom. This disdain, however, does not explain why so many people — often decent people — are drawn to defend Islam, Islamic patriarchy, Islamic discrimination against women, or violence in the name of Islam, especially when such defence is obviously anti-liberal in the extreme. Examples are not hard to find, for instance feminists who urge Muslim women to submit to the veil and abandon their rights as free women in favour of Muslim men and their power over them.
What possesses so many Westerners to regard Islam, Islamic religion, Islamic law, and Islamic intolerance through rose-tinted spectacles that obscure the obvious and blind observers from seeing what is in front of them?
Another of the most notable examples is the virtually universal attitude toward imperialism. We might all agree that imperialism is a thing of the past and that, for the most part, it has brought considerable suffering on indigenous peoples who found themselves under British, French, Belgian, Spanish or Portuguese rule. No country in the modern West would seek to bring back an imperial system that, mercifully, was dealt a death blow by the First and Second World Wars. This change, however, does not prevent Marxists and others of a similar ilk from claiming that imperialism continues to this day, through the power exerted by strong nations in the West such as Israel or the U.S. Even the United Nations has been condemned as “a tool of imperialism”.
Mystifyingly, however, I have never known a liberal to say a bad word about a more prevalent and arguably more damaging imperialism: Islamic imperialism.[2] From the year 632 until 1918, there have been many more Muslim empires than European ones.
