All that makes rational discussion virtually impossible
Jamie Palmer takes a long hard look at the pro-Islamist left and its shameful behavior to Maryam and other ex-Muslims, secular Muslims, apostates, refuseniks.
And so it was that when ISOC misrepresented the event as an unhappy tale of marginalization and Islamophobia, both the Goldsmiths Feminist Society and the LGBTQ+ Society quickly released statements pledging their support and solidarity with ISOC.
“We support them,” FemSoc soberly declared:
…in condemning the actions of the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society and agree that hosting known islamophobes at our university creates a climate of hatred.
Two days later, the LGBTQ+ Society came up with this:
We condemn AHS and online supporters for their islamophobic remarks, attitudes, and harassment. If they feel intimidated, we urge them to look at the underpinnings of their ideology. We find that personal and social harm enacted in the name of ‘free speech’ is foul, and detrimental to the wellbeing of students and staff on campus.
In a positively craven gesture, the Goldsmiths Student Union has since written to Namazie requesting that the recording of the event be removed from youtube. (She refused.)
Students, lefty students, siding with theocrats against their opponents and victims. Here’s a newsflash in the form of a generalization: theocracy can never be part of the left. Theocracy is inherently reactionary. Theocracy is all about arbitrary unaccountable power, and the left is all about resisting arbitrary unaccountable power. UK students really need to wake up and figure this out.
The dismal spectacle of radical queer activists, feminists, and sundry other progressives, professing solidarity with Islamists is at once fascinating and enraging. Whatever kind of higher education survives in ISOC’s utopian caliphate, it’s certain that no feminist or LGBTQ+ societies will be permitted to exist.
But for radical university students in the West, their lives of almost unparalleled opportunity, privilege, and comfort are a source of considerable guilt and anxiety. So conspiratorial notions of omnipresent oppression have been contrived against which they oblige themselves to struggle. This idea is supported by claims that liberal democracy is a sham, that objectivity is illusory, and that reason is elitist. And since all that makes rational discussion virtually impossible, debates about ideas are transformed into competing professions of woe, decided by whoever turns out to be subject to the greater degree of structural oppression.
And you know where that leads to? It turns out it leads to circular firing squads, where putative radicals purge their own radical colleagues while the actual oppressors sit back and laugh.
It would be bad enough if university activists were simply indifferent to Islamist ideology and its victims. But when they go out of their way to attack people like Namazie as a bigot and an oppressor, and to dismiss her arguments and experiences as therefore unworthy of consideration, they make the lives of all campaigners against fundamentalism considerably more difficult. Apart from the aggravation caused by having to deal with the abuse and defamation itself, it forces them to fight a war on two fronts.
I have seen Namazie speak a number of times, and on each occasion she has had to waste time explaining the exasperating moral blindness of people whose support for secularism and universal human rights ought to be a foregone conclusion. But those who recoil from politically incorrect music or an infelicitous joke find they have nothing to say about honor-based violence, forced marriage, the execution of gays and apostates, or the veiling, stoning, subjugation, and genital mutilation of women. Afraid to be seen to lend their support to racist and Imperialist ‘narratives’, they instead assuage their guilty consciences by denouncing those whose activism shames their silence.
Fortunately it’s not the whole of the left. Obviously it’s not: Maryam herself is very much of the left. The fight against theocracy is a left-wing fight. But while not the whole it is a dismayingly large fraction.
The term ‘pro-Islamic left’ is an oxymoron, this particular clique has painted themselves into an intellectual corner and then refused to admit it, perhaps it’s narcissism or monumental ignorance about Islam, who knows. I sometimes comment on on one of the so-called ‘anti-Islamophobia’ sites and when I challenged the party line the editor informed me that the issue was settled and that ‘Islam is a race’, although the sentence is grammatically incoherent, the ideology it expresses is clear.
The Left is progressive, however there’s always been an element which is attracted to totalitarianism from the Cold War to the present day.
“Theocracy is all about arbitrary unaccountable power, and the left is all about resisting arbitrary unaccountable power. UK students really need to wake up and figure this out.”
Hear, hear.
And the other problem is that theocracy can never be based on anything but might. You have to also believe that might makes right, which should be a bit too Attila-the-Hun for leftists. There is no objective way to choose between beliefs, neither using logic nor data. That’s why they’re beliefs. So whose belief gets to take precedence is purely a matter of power.
That’s a great article. I think (regarding the reactions from the LGBTQ+ Society and FemSoc):
“Frankly, I’d be astonished if they watched the video of the debate before publishing their statements of solidarity. Why bother? Since Muslims are considered a homogenous protected group of victims and atheists are numbered amongst their tormentors, ISOC’s claim to emotional distress was probably enough”
was on-point, and the most charitable reading possible. After all, if they HAD watched the video and posted those responses…
I hope both of those societies have members who are more clued up than the people issuing those statements.
I wish I found this surprising, but I don’t. My surprise came over a decade ago, when my oh-so-moderate Christian friends turned out to be working harder to silence me and convert me than my more rightwing Christian friends, who had given up on me in frustration and simply didn’t talk religion. I had more of my left wing friends insert themselves into conversations of which they were not a part to “intervene”, and I was accused of belonging to a hate-group by one of my most liberal friends when he found I belonged to the FFRF (a hate group? Dan and Annie Laurie are some of the most courteous and tolerant people I know!). This was particularly funny from someone who belonged to…wait for it…the Mormon Church.
During the Danish cartoon aftermath, I discovered that most of my left wing magazines were excusing the attacks and blaming the cartoonists. This seems to be just the logical extension of that mind set.
@3: The LGBTQ+ Society did watch it, and reiterated that the Muslim students were ‘mistreated’. They went on to criticise ASH and Maryam for publishing a video ‘filmed without their consent’ that makes them ‘appear as extremists’ and ‘leaves them open to hate’. Here is the quote taken from their FB page:
Goldsmiths LGBTQ+ Society
Goldsmiths LGBTQ+ Society From what I could tell, some of the brothers were rude, loud and disruptive, as well as being filmed without their consent, yelled at and racialized. We don’t have to like what they did to support them in the face of the mistreatment that followed.
Opening up that video to the public (which wasn’t necessary for the investigation AHS want), making them appear as ‘extremists’ and racializing them in the title- has left the brothers AND the sisters AND their friends open to islamophobic hate and harassment from across the globe. We’ve been getting comments from Montreal, Florida, Sydney, Seattle…
Given the media attention our union has received recently, making that video public has put our fellow students at risk and impeded our work and study.
Hence, solidarity in this delicate time.
December 4 at 2:13am
So yes, they watched it and still didn’t retract their initial statements.
BTW, does anyone know if any of Maryam’s colleages over at FTB have come out in support of her? I didn’t see anything, which quite surprised me given that she blogs on their network.
‘…The left is all about resisting arbitrary unaccountable power.’
Or so one would have thought. Western political poses are more about smug triumphalism wedded to enraged grievance than they are about ANY principal at all.
Worth remembering that a vast swath of ‘progressives’ in the West became pacifist, anti-interventionist, and even pro-Nazi on August 23rd, 1939, before the ink was dry on the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Those same heroes held to their ‘principles’ until June 22nd of 1941.
Left/Right politicking seems permanently poisoned by old Cold War clichés. I finally saw ‘The Battle of Algiers’ a few years ago. How did previous viewers fail to notice that the ‘revolutionaries’ dipicted were Islamist?