Is questioning the militant triumphalism of jihadist Islam just as bad as packing Jews by the millions into cattle cars bound for death camps?
There are plenty of influential voices nowadays who eagerly answer yes, by golly – they’re just the same.
An all-encompassing, flexible term has been coined – “Islamophobia” – that’s posited as the moral equivalent of anti-Semitism. The political Left these days seems especially amenable to the notion. Among the “progressive,” not a few seem willing to discount, or even overlook, the public policy implications of Islamized political ideology as regards the rights and welfare of, for example, females and gays – concerns the Left otherwise is inclined to yap about without letup.
The Saudi-subsidized Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has built a pressure-group fiefdom upon the foundation of “Islamophobia.” Any who dare to question the policy or constitutional ramifications of Islam-infused agendas are subject to CAIR’s ever-handy verdict: “Islamophobe.” In sharp contrast, meanwhile, the Left vigorously – and not always unreasonably – encourages an alert wariness regarding the dogmatized political agendas of, say, traditional Catholics or fundamentalist Protestants.
From his online free-speech soapbox, “Spiked,” a British Internet magazine, Brendan O’Neill recently dared to note the trend to neutralize concerns about anti-Semitism by slapping down the “diversity” card of Islamophobia. The effort to establish an equivalence is “historically illiterate,” says O’Neil.
There are, yes, deplorable instances of prejudice against Muslims and occasional acts of harassment, or worse, against them, as there are against Jews, Bahai’s, Druze, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists and others. But anti-Semitism has a long and documented history of government-encouraged or government-perpetrated mass violence, from the pogroms of Czarist Russia to the Holocaust of Nazi Germany. (While many Christians, so-called, shrugged, averted their gaze or actively participated in it.)
Yet the voices of Holocaust deniers or minimizers are today prominent and loud in Islamic venues. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was awarded a PhD by the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences for his thesis stating that the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated and in any event was the result of a “secret relationship” between Zionist Jews and Nazis. The PhD thesis later was published as a book. Nevertheless, Abbas is now widely hailed as a “moderate” – and, compared to other Palestinian leaders, he may indeed be.
Meanwhile, nowhere on earth is there a Christian theocracy or a Judaic one – no, not even the Jewish nation of Israel – that belligerently proscribes Islam the way the Islamic theocracies – Iran and Saudi Arabia, to name just two – belligerently proscribe Judaism and Christianity. For militant Islamics, “diversity” is a one-way street that serves only them.
The Muslim Council on Britain took vociferous exception to a Holocaust Memorial Day in the United Kingdom, purportedly because it excluded the victims of “Islamophobia.”
O’Neill labelled this a “creepy” equivalence. He went on to observe: “I mean, if you’re going to balk even at the idea that the Holocaust was a uniquely horrific crime, the greatest crime of the 20th Century, then you have signed up, whether wittingly or not, for an effort at least to relativize anti-Semitism.” Relativize or minimize.
Hoisting the battle colors against Islamophobia, the Organization of Islamic Countries asserted “the right to advocate what is right . . . according to the norms of Islamic Shari’ah.”
According to those “norms,” there’s a “right” to carry out executions for the “crime” of apostasy, i.e., the “crime” of leaving Islam for another faith – a doctrine that enjoys whopping margins of majority support in many Islamic countries. (According to the Pew Research Foundation’s polling: Egypt, 86 percent; Jordan, 82 percent; Pakistan, 76 percent, and Palestinian territories, 66 percent.)
Meanwhile, big majorities across Europe are experiencing unease over growing Muslim populations in their midst, all to the great dismay of harrumphing establishment leaders. Fully 72 percent in Belgium, 71 percent in the Netherlands, 68 percent in France and 63 percent in the United Kingdom view their growing Muslim populations as “somewhat” of a threat or a “very serious” one. Only a mere 8 percent dismiss the matter as not a threat. (Szazadveg Foundation’s Project 28 poll.)
Such landslide democratic majorities, however, are brushed aside by the media and “mainstream” political parties as bigots of the far right gone bonkers. To accommodate more acceptable attitudes, the U.N. Human Rights Council adopted vague, weasel-worded resolutions allowing authoritarian crackdowns on criticism that irks thin-skinned Shia imams or Sunni prayer leaders. Meanwhile, invertebrate politicians in Europe and Canada, especially, have enacted free-speech-smothering “hate-crime” laws than can land you in the dungeon for what George Orwell once dubbed “thought crimes.”
Such stern authorities are, however, evidently willing to accommodate exceptions. The Koran, which purports to be literal and infallible, fairly throbs with sentiments that might otherwise run afoul of the censorious sanctions of the hate-speech hallway monitors. Thankfully many Muslims, though certainly not all, ignore Koranic pronouncements such as the one at 4.60: “Wherefore for the iniquity of those who are Jews did We disallow to them the good things…for their hindering many from Allah’s way.”
Continuing a Koranic refrain regarding Jews, 4.41 declares that “Allah has cursed them with their unbelief….” Elsewhere, at 2.83, the beliefs of Jews and Christians are dismissed as “vain desires.” At 2.113, Jews and Christians – infidels – are dismissed as “those who have no knowledge.” Those who fail to follow the Koran, adds 2.121, “these it is that are the losers.” “Surely Allah is the enemy of the unbelievers,” says 2.98. Returning to the anti-Jewish meme, 3.23 states that even though Jews were “invited to the Book of Allah,” they obstinately rejected it. 3.24 adds that the beliefs Jews adopted instead “deceive them in the matter of their religion.” 5.51 says: “Oh ye who believe: Do not take the Jews and Christians for friends…“Surely Allah does not guide an unjust people.” 5.60 – a favorite of many a firebrand militant – picks up on the point: “Allah has cursed and brought his wrath upon those of whom He made apes and swine…”
On and on this refrain goes. (Crack open the Koran and check it out for yourself.) It may be argued that such doctrine is no more exclusionary, no more us-against-them, than other faiths, Judaism and Christianity, say. The quoted verses do, however, at a minimum somewhat deflate the familiar, criticism-squelching claim hailing Islam as a “religion of peace.”
Yes, you can find nasty, truculent passages in the Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament, too. There is, however, nothing in all of Judaism and Christendom that’s remotely the equivalent of Al Qaeda, ISIS and myriad other jihadist groups, in either scale of operations or depths of intolerant ferociousness.
When such passages as the Koranic ones above are cited, CAIR predictably protests that the citations were selectively “cherry-picked.” Well, there’s in fact an abundance of cherries to pick.
The cited passages are ones often highlighted by Islamists themselves. But – shhhh! Best not to go on belaboring the topic, lest we attract the attention of the thought police.
~davidneese@verizon.net