If there’s one thing that 31,065 deadly Islamic terror attacks since 9/11 teach us, it’s that there is no way to foster a fact-based discussion of Islam in the halls of Western power.
That’s right — I said fact-based discussion of Islam. After 15-plus years since our Twin Towers burned and collapsed, I am still not talking about “Islamofascism,” “Islamism,” “Islamist extremism,” or any other figleaf-word made up by blushing Westerners to cover up the embarassingly appalling facts about Islam: its defining laws which can be as revolting as they are repressive; its history of violent conquest and “radical” religious and cultural cleansing; its totalitarian goals to apply “sharia” (Islamic law) everywhere to eradicate freedom of conscience, speech, other religions, and, oh yeah, rule the world.
In other words, exactly the things the Powers That Be will not talk about since even before George W. Bush rebounded from the shock of the Islamic attacks of 9/11 to realize that Islam was a “religion of peace.” In the land of the free and the home of the brave, Islamic blasphemy law rules.
Last week’s Senate hearing — even the title of last week’s Senate hearing — was more of the same.
Co-chaired by an affable Sen Ron Wyden and an angry Sen Claire McKaskill, the hearing was called: “Ideology and Terror: Understanding the Tools, Tactics, and Techniques of Violent Extremism.”
Notice no official mention of Islam. Or, more to the point, no official interest in Islam — except to protect it. Sen. Wyden, the “good guy” of the hearing for allowing that there might possibly be some teeny tiny slightly Islamist-ic thing about jihad (not that I heard the word), actually commended the two Muslim-born witnesses on the panel for “bending over backwards” to avoid tarring Islam with a truthful brush (or words not quite to that effect).
Meanwhile, the four Democrats on Team Violent Extremism, all women, ignored the Muslim born witnesses — ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Muslim reformer Asra Nomani, asking neither witness a single question. Instead, they focused obsessively on the non-sense of Mr. See-No-Islam, former NCTC director Michael Leiter (whom we last met here). Perhaps the Democrats saw the two women of Islamic heritage as impediments to the indoctrination in the “Ideology” of “Violent Extremism” that causes “Terror.”
But did the Democrat senators really have that much to fear? I ask this after having read the op-ed Hirsi Ali and Nomani wrote for the New York Times about their dismal experience; also after having then watched much of the hearing. I cannot now un-notice their obvious determination to avoid speaking forthrightly about Islam — same as the Left.
Hirsi Ali and Nomani write:
What happened that day [before the committee] was emblematic of a deeply troubling trend among progressives when it comes to confronting the brutal reality of Islamist extremism …
Here goes, one more time: This “brutal reality” they write about is a consequence of the laws of Islam. It is neither “Islamist,” nor is it a form of “extremism” within Islam. This brutal reality is all part of Islamic Normal.
The women note their own personal suffering growing up in “deeply conservative Muslim families”: genital multilation, forced marriage, death threats for their so-called apostasy.
Despite any and all “ists” or “isms,” such horrors and more are part of mainstream Islam.
Then they point out:
There is a real discomfort among progressives on the left with calling out Islamic extremism…
OK, but there is real discomfort in these two women when it comes to calling out the extremism of mainstream Islam. Just look how confused their discussion becomes on acknowledging fundamental conflicts between “universal human rights” and “Islamic law,” and on listing a series of what they call “Islamist ideas” which, nonetheless, come straight out of any authoritative Islamic law book:
The hard truth is that there are fundamental conflicts between universal human rights and the principle of Shariah, or Islamic law, which holds that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man’s; between freedom of religion and the Islamist idea that artists, writers, poets and bloggers should be subject to blasphemy laws; between secular governance and the Islamist goal of a caliphate; between United States law and Islamist promotion of polygamy, child marriage and marital rape; and between freedom of thought and the methods of indoctrination, or dawa, with which Islamists propagate their ideas.
In sum, whether it’s Claire McCaskill or Hirsi Ali, discussion and education about Islam is completely off limits. “Political Islam,” “Islamism,” “Medina Islam” and Violent Extremism become interchangeable threats to theworldcommunity, including the pink bunnies and buttercups that make up The Real McCoy Islam. The only problem, all agree, are those dwedful extwemists.