Category: osculating the rump of faith

The Islam apologists, including Reza Aslan, smear Sam Harris by misrepresenting his words

June 28, 2017 • 10:15 am

All too often my brother Sam Harris gets the short end of the stick, especially when people determined to take him down misuse or misrepresent his words to smear him. The “ticking time bomb torture scenario”, for instance, which Sam floated as a hypothetical scenario to inspire thought, was distorted to make it seem that he was strongly in favor of torture. I could give other examples, but this latest, reported by both Hemant at The Friendly Atheist and Clarion, is a doozy. In this case, on Sam’s podcast with Maajid Nawaz, Sam played the devil’s advocate, making a case against Muslim immigration he doesn’t believe, just to get Maajid’s response. Here’s the beginning of that bit of the conversation. Click on this video; the bit that got distorted begins about 1:10:50 (if this doesn’t start there, go to 1:10:50):

As Clarion reports:

Harris and Nawaz, who wrote a book together called Islam and the Future of Tolerance, recorded a two-hour podcast (Waking Up, Episode 59) where they spoke about issues having to do with Islamic extremism and Muslim integration in the West.

Someone else took one minute of the show and broadcast it on social media. The one-minute segment is when Harris, to make a point, presents what he believes is the line of thinking of someone who is against Muslim immigration in the West. Harris presented this argument so he could ask Nawaz how he would respond to it.

Yet, the segment was presented on social media as proof of Harris’ “genocidal rhetoric on Muslims” while Nawaz “nods along.”

In the segment, Harris, assuming the voice of an anti-immigrant Western citizen, says how it’s rational to not want any more Muslims in one’s country, given the rampant Islamic terror taking place worldwide. Nawaz says “mmh, mmh” and, at the end, answers with a solitary “yes.”

In actuality, both men have spoken out against such rhetoric repeatedly in the past and, I imagine, will continue to do so in the future. As Harris said in response to this slander doing the rounds, “I’ve said on multiple occasions that I think we have a moral obligation to let in as many Syrian refugees as we can properly vet. I’ve also said that secular, liberal, tolerant Muslims are the most important people on earth — and that if I had control of our immigration policy, I’d move them to the front of the line for citizenship.”

. . . In other words, the one-minute segment presents Harris as believing almost the opposite of what he actually believes.

It takes a certain amount of mendacity to listen to Sam’s words, which are perfectly clear, and distort them to make it seem that Sam wants to stop all Muslim immigration to Europe and the U.S. But we see that mendacity in many apologists for Islam, and most notably in the odious Reza Aslan, whose reputation rests solely on whitewashing religion, especially Islam. Below is a tw**t from a person I don’t know, but is spreading lies on Twitter, and appears to have started the distortion. You can hear the out-of-context excerpt in the tw**t below. Do listen to it, but then listen to what Sam really said below:

Since the cowardly Aslan has blocked me from viewing his tweets (I’ve never engaged him on Twitter), I’ll give a screenshot of how he bought into this scam. Perhaps he was taken in and wasn’t deliberately distorting Harris, but remember that Aslan purports to be a “scholar”. Wouldn’t it be appropriate to do some checking before you start smearing? Here he links to Sacha Saeen’s tweet above.

And from Max Blumenthal, another creepy Islamist apologist

and from Dean Obeidallah:

Sam responded to this quote-mining with anger at The Friendly Atheist. Among other stuff, he says this (Hemant’s emphasis):

The most charitable interpretation of what followed is that the more prominent Muslims who circulated the clip were just intellectually lazy and guilty of confirmation bias. But there is far too much history here for that to have been the case. I’ve said on multiple occasions that I think we have a moral obligation to let in as many Syrian refugees as we can properly vet. I’ve also said that secular, liberal, tolerant Muslims are the most important people on earth — and that if I had control of our immigration policy, I’d move them to the front of the line for citizenship. As you probably know, I’ve also been very supportive of ex-Muslims and Muslim reformers and count several among my friends. And yet, Reza Aslan, Rula Jebreal, Dean Obeidallah, along with dozens of other “moderate” Muslims (and their Left-wing enablers) have spent years attacking me as a “racist” who favors a “genocide” against Muslims.

. . . I want to point out something that many of our readers will not have thought about, but which all these Muslim apologists well understand: Spreading lies about a person’s “racism” and support for “genocide” is dangerous. We are nowhere near the terrain of good faith debate here. These are utterly irresponsible, malicious people, doing conscious harm to our public conversation — and doing whatever they can to destroy the reputations (and more) of those of us who, at considerable personal risk, attempt to have rational conversations about some of the most important issues of our time. This is asymmetric warfare: One side has few security concerns and no scruples. (None of these Muslims is worried about being killed by an atheist or a Muslim reformer.) The other is frequently threatened and does its best to abide by the highest standards of intellectual honesty.

These apologists are like creationists: they take stuff out of context to distort a person’s views and smear him or her—and to defend creationism. At least some of the slanderers above must be lying for Mohammed, just as creationists lie for Jesus. And instead of doing this in the cause of promoting creationism, they’re doing it in the cause of defending Islam.

Now you can argue that Sam should have known that his statements would be taken out of context, as this has happened time after time with him. Why didn’t he speak more carefully? But that’s crazy: you can’t micro-filter everything you say lest it be distorted, for then you lose your spontaneity and become timorous.

You may disagree with Sam on some issues (for instance, I take issue with his claim that there are objective moral values), but you have to admit that in this case he was badly wronged. As he says in the second paragraph above, this is done simply to smear him, a Ctrl-Left tactic used to destroy someone’s credibility. It shows the mendacity of those like Aslan who will defend the tenets of Islam at all costs.

“Show some damn respect for people’s religous beliefs”: Piers Morgan and the osculation of Islam

June 22, 2017 • 9:15 am

UPDATE: Gad Saad made a 5-minute video on the Morgan-Robinson fight: “Piers Morgan is an enemy of reason and an affront to human dignity.”

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Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, born 1982) is a shady character and almost certainly a bigot, though his rhetoric has tamed since he used to incite the masses against Muslims. (I’ve learned about him only recently.) He was head of the far-right English Defense League (EDL),  is now advisor and former UK leader of Pegida (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West). His main goal seems to be embodied in the Pegida acronym, but I’ve bridled at hearing his rants, and I think he’s not just anti-Islam, but anti-Muslim; that is, it seems that he wants to stop Muslim immigration into the UK. That’s bigotry. And I don’t really believe his claims that he despises Islam, not Muslims.  (See his comment in Part 2 of the video series below that all Muslims listening to his speech are complicit in the 7/7 attacks.) Robinson’s also been jailed several times for assault, mortgage fraud, and entering the U.S. with a false passport.) But his emphasis on preserving English “culture” or avoiding the self-segregation of Muslims in the West (an issue that Canada has admirably addressed with its integration program), at least deserves discussion, though it suggests that his problem is not just with Islam, but with Muslims.

I’m not going to defend Robinson’s views, but I have to say that when he appeared on the “Good Morning Britain” program the other day, and engaged in what they euphemistically call a “robust debate” with Piers Morgan (real name Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan), I can’t say that Robinson came off the worst, for Morgan lost it when he loudly damned those who criticize religion.

Morgan is also a piece of work: pro-Trump, anti-feminist, and head of the Daily Mirror during the phone-hacking scandal, which forced him to resign. As Grania said of Morgan, “He’s a bit like Anne Coulter, makes his career on annoying and angering people. Check out his twitter account if you want a brief synopsis of his style. He frequently manages to drum up outrage wars on Twitter.” But she also said of Robinson,  “He may not be as bad as the Ctrl-Left make him out to be, but he has some problematic views. I gather that he has revised and evolved some of his views, but I think his original involvement in far-right organisations in the UK has made him an ‘untouchable’ in terms of people who actually want to deal with him. This is, by the way, precisely why Piers Morgan (usually on the right himself) felt he could unctuously have a go at him.”

Here’s the bit of the show that got the media, social and genuine, all worked up. I don’t know the name of the woman co-host, but she and (mostly) Morgan had a real go at Robinson for jos “Islamophobia” (see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the exchange as well; Robinson’s criticism of the Finsbury Park Mosque is further evidence of bigotry: the mosque used to be radical but is not anti-extremist):

What I want to emphasize here is Piers Morgan’s demand that everyone respect not just Islam, but religion in general. (Robinson is a Christian, so he wouldn’t say the same stuff about the Bible, making him a hypocrite, for the Bible has its own nasty bits.) But Morgan is making an increasingly common argument that is the subject of this post: if you criticize Islam, or call out the Qur’an for inciting violence and promoting terrorism, or indict the faith for inciting terrorism, then you’re simply promoting more terrorism. Because criticizing Islam just causes more terrorism, as Morgan argues, we should just shut the hell up and have “some damn respect for people’s beliefs.” (It doesn’t help, of course, for people like Robinson to make false accusations about the Finsbury Park mosque, especially because its members were attacked three days ago by a bigot in a van, killing one person and injuring a dozen more.) But I have no desire to respect people’s beliefs, or avoid criticizing Islam because that incites terrorism. What enables terrorism is when people like Morgan capitulate to it by demanding respect for the theology that motivates murder, and when people get scared by things like the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, or the Danish cartoons, and fearfully mute their criticisms of a faith that promotes violence.

Thus Morgan and Robinson are both wrong: Robinson in his bigotry, true Muslimophobia, and wrongheaded attacks on the Finsbury Mosque; Morgan in his demand that we respect Islam and all religion, and treat their scriptures with respect. He’s also wrong in implying that we shouldn’t criticize Islam because that simply promotes terrorism. It may do that in part, but criticizing Islam is, in the long run, the only way to tame it—especially when the literalistic interpretation of that text is criticized by moderate Muslims.

Here’s a new piece by Brendan O’Neill, the editor of Spiked—a site that has a mixture of views I like and dislike (an example of former is its promotion of free speech, of the latter is its promotion of Brexit). A quote from “The mainstreaming of the terror prejudice” describes the fencing-off of Islam from criticism, and, at the end, mentions the Morgan-Robinson kerfuffle:

The response to the Finsbury attack has been striking for its double standards. Observers and politicos have done all the things they warn us not to do after Islamist attacks. After Islamist terrorism they instruct us not to get angry, not to hold any community or culture responsible, and not to fall for the apparently foul, racist idea that the Koran or certain imams might have inspired this violence. In fact, they ringfence Islam from criticism and frown on efforts to discover the possible scriptural source of the terror. They wield the insult ‘Islamophobe’ against anyone who suggests there might be a broader cultural problem behind such violence. ‘It’s just an individual with warped ideas’, they insist.

This time, in response to a suspected act of far-right violence, they’ve changed their tune. They’ve ditched their usual pacifying cry of ‘Keep calm and carry on’ in favour of inviting the nation to look in the mirror. This act of violence does have a communal base, they claim. It speaks to an ‘increase in Islamophobia all over the country’, one Labour MP insists. This violence does have an intellectual origin we should all worry about: it is the tabloid media’s ‘addiction to Islamophobia’ that nurtured it, we’re told. This violence does raise questions about certain communities in Britain, especially tabloid-reading ones, described by one columnist as ‘the vulnerable’, easily whipped into ‘crazed hysteria’. We know who they mean: the white working class.

Suddenly, it is okay to see an act of individual violence as a signifier of social and communal problems. It is bad, apparently, to raise any questions about Muslim communities after Islamist attacks. But after Finsbury it is absolutely fine, important in fact, to query the rank, media-fuelled prejudices that apparently lurk in certain communities ‘all over the country’. This amounts, pretty explicitly, to saying, ‘We must never criticise the Muslim community, because we might hurt their feelings, but we should definitely criticise the tabloid-addicted, “vulnerable” sections of society that refuse to respect religious difference’.

. . . The communion between Islamist and mainstream media thinking was perfectly captured in the figure of Piers Morgan yesterday. He had Tommy Robinson, founder of the English Defence League, on his ITV show Good Morning Britain. When Robinson criticised the Koran, Morgan blasted him, and was cheered by virtually the entire media for doing so. ‘To mock [Islam] and its holy book is an outrage’, Morgan said. ‘Show some damn respect!’ This is the Islamist outlook, too. In fact this is the thinking behind the Charlie Hebdo massacre: that it is an ‘outrage’ for anyone to criticise Islam. In responding to Finsbury by demonising people ‘all over the country’ as ignorant or hateful towards Islam and insisting the Koran should never be mocked, it is possible these observers have written the script for the next act of extremist, victim-politics Islamist violence.

That’s worth thinking about. Meanwhile, PuffHo (click on link to see article), also claims that it’s Islamophobia (what they mean is “bigotry against Muslims”) rather than Islam that is fueling terrorism:

An excerpt from the above:

When Brits see stories about Muslims on their newspaper front pages, they’re likely to see words like “radical,” “fanatical,” “fundamentalist,” “extremist,” and “militant” in all caps or boldface.

Those are the five adjectives a University of Cardiff School of Journalism report said were most used to describe Muslims in the British print media, according to an analysis of articles from 2000 to 2008.

Of the stories analyzed, 34 percent specifically linked Muslims to the threat of terrorism, 26 percent suggested Islam is a dangerous or backward religion, 14 percent pushed a clash-of-civilizations narrative between Islam and the West, and 9 percent depicted the religion as a threat to the British way of life.

All told, only 17 percent of the stories talked about Islam neutrally or positively as part of a multicultural British society.

. . . “This kind of coverage, this one-dimensional coverage, almost gives people permission to hate,” Dr. Waqas Tufail, a senior lecturer in criminology at Leeds Beckett University, told HuffPost.

The attack at the Finsbury Park mosque “didn’t happen in a vacuum,” he said.

It happened, Tufail said, in the context of “long-term Islamophobia” in the U.K., where there is a “culture of anti-Muslim bigotry in much of the press” and in the rhetoric and actions of the government.

I reject bigotry against Muslims, and it may on occasion incite more violence. But as I said, in the long run it’s the criticism of their ideology, not abject “respect” for it, that will tame the faith.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t add The Wisdom of Homer to this argument, as well as to Morgan’s and others’ claim that terrorism perpetrated by Muslims has nothing to do with Islam:

More hijab-osculation

June 20, 2017 • 2:00 pm

As PuffHo says in its latest osculation of Allure magazine’s “first ever hijab-wearing cover model”: “Yes to all of this.”

But to all of what?  The wearing of a hijab—the Confederate flag of headgear—to ensure that you don’t excite the passions of men? The confusing juxtaposition of “don’t look at me” with “I’m on the cover of a fancy fashion magazine wearing a lot of makeup”? Click on the screenshot to go to the piece:

It’s not like they’re unaware of the modesty aspect of the garment, either:

One thing Aden does have to say about her hijab is that it allows her to spend less time worrying about her looks.

“I have much more to offer than my physical appearance, and a hijab protects me against ‘You’re too skinny,’ ‘You’re too thick,’ ‘Look at her hips,’ ‘Look at her thigh gap,’” she told Allure. “I don’t have to worry about that.”

Head to Allure to read the entire interview.

First of all, no, the hijab doesn’t protect you from comments about weight, shape, or thigh gaps; it’s a headscarf. Also, if the message is modesty and de-emphasis on appearance, why does Aden wear so much makeup? I believe those eyebrows are alluringly shaped as well:

Those lips aren’t naturally red, I think (and check out the Nike “swoosh” hijab):

Oh, and she’s making the “Latin Kings” gang sign. Totally rad!

Let’s face it: HuffPo’s recurrent adulation of the hijab is just virtue signalling. It’s the site saying “Look at us: we’re not racists or Islamophobes!” All at the same time worshiping a garment that’s the symbol of female oppression.

The unholy adulation of the Left for Linda Sarsour

June 16, 2017 • 11:30 am

I’m at a loss to understand the admiration of thinking liberals (the operant word is “thinking”)—and especially some Jews—for the odious hijabi Linda Sarsour.  Although she did help raise money to repair a vandalized Jewish cemetery, I’m absolutely convinced that this act was done simply to give her credibility. For in all other ways, her actions border on anti-Semitic: she’s anti-Zionist (and remember that Zionism is not approbation for all of Israel’s actions, but simply a desire for a Jewish homeland—the existence of Israel), a supporter of the BDS movement, whose implicit goal is to wipe Israel off the map, and a supporter of sharia law. And of course there are her odious tw**ts, including this one:

She had an arranged marriage at 17, covers herself out of modesty, and has touted Saudi Arabia’s sharia law multiple times, yet she calls herself a feminist—and people buy it! She was one of the leaders of the Women’s March on Washington, and is much beloved by the Regressive Left. Yes, she’s someone who says things like this:

Need I point out that in Israel women get 14 weeks of paid maternity leave—and they can drive there, too?

Below is a video of a student asking Sarsour about her Hirsi Ali tweet (which Sarsour deleted). Listen to her smarmy and evasive answer, in which she first questions the student’s right to even ask the question because he’s a “young white man,” then she says that the tweet “never happened” because it’s not on her Twitter feed (that’s because she deleted it). Then she says that she “did or did not tweet” what the man claimed. She slyly says she was in her twenties when it “might or might not” have appeared, and that young people do “stupid shit”, which is a non-admission admission. The woman simply can’t be honest. (By the way, the tweet at issue came out in 2011, when Sarsour was 31; she was not “in her twenties”. I think 31 is beyond the age of “doing stupid shit.”)

A new article by James Kirchick at Tablet ,”On Linda Sarsour’s politics of hate and the pathos of her Jewish enablers“, discusses not only Sarsour’s views, but why Jews and non-Jewish progressives buy into them. I’ll give two quotes from the piece, the first on Sarsour:

“If what is being asked of me by those who pronounce themselves and call themselves Zionist is that I, as a Palestinian American, have to somehow leave out a part of my identity so you can be welcomed in a space to work on justice, then that’s not going to be the right space for you,” Sarsour proclaimed in April at an event supporting the boycott, sanctions, and divestment movement against Israel. “We, as Palestinian Americans, as Arab Americans, as Muslim Americans, we will not change who we are to make anybody feel comfortable.”

Sarsour has been nothing if not honest about who she is and what she’s doing. Either she leaves the progressive movement or the “Zionists” do. She is able to get away with her crude intolerance—against Jews, women, “whites” and anyone else who doesn’t embrace her hatreds—because in the victimhood Olympics that overdetermines so much of today’s left-wing politics, Muslims are agreed to rank highest. In their quest to locate “authentic” Muslim leaders, progressives all too often behave like the “Orientalists” they claim to despise, settling on individuals like Sarsour to the exclusion of genuinely progressive Muslims, that is, those who don’t call for ripping out the vaginas of people with whom they disagree. And like many a self-appointed community “spokesperson,” Sarsour is starting to behave like a huckster, recently using her social media platform to raise tens of thousands of dollars on behalf of a Muslim woman in Ohio who claims to be the victim of a hate crime, an assertion at variance with that of the police. [JAC: see story here.] Sarsour’s sketchy behavior, furiously casting aspersions on the cops while tweeting “no one knows exactly what happened,” earned her a Twitter rebuke from Courtney Love, who called Sarsour “a vile disgrace to women and all mankind” as well as an “anti-Semite, anti-American fraud.”

As is her wont, Sarsour accused Love of “veiled anti-Muslim rhetoric”—illustrating how the accusation of “Islamophobia,” veiled or not, has become a catchall term promiscuously deployed against anyone who raises concerns about hate and bigotry, no matter how vile, on the part of Muslims, or criticizes any of the regressive attitudes and behaviors toward Jews, women, gays and other minority groups that are prevalent in Muslim countries and communities. The point of the term “Islamophobia” as used by Sarsour and her sympathizers is very often a self-interested and dishonest one—namely, to delegitimize critics by lumping them in with fringe racists and bigots.

And on the rising anti-Semitism in Europe:

For a specific example of what European Jews are worried about, consider a recent story in the London Times, which is hardly an isolated case. A 14-year-old Jewish boy—the grandson of Holocaust survivors—was “beaten and abused by Muslim classmates at a leading school in Berlin because he was Jewish.” Confronted by the boy’s parents to address this bullying, teachers replied that “his tormentors could not be blamed for their actions, which they said were the result of views expressed in their homes.” Rather than suspend the offending students, “teachers finally asked [the victim] not to enter the same classroom as one bully so as not to provoke him.”

Here we have a tragic example of how people who consider themselves to be progressives are downplaying if not ignoring violence against Jews so as not to offend the sensibilities of communities that proclaim themselves to be hostile both to Jews and the wider panoply of liberal values. It is indicative of a broader reluctance in many quarters to talk honestly about how Islam is changing Europe, a reluctance that stems in part from fear of being labeled “Islamophobic.”

One sees this mentality at play in the ADL’s skirting the question of Islam entirely in its poll on European anti-Semitism, in the Obama administration’s repeated insistence that the people murdered at a Paris kosher supermarket by an avowed Islamist in 2015 were victims of a “random” assault on “a bunch of folks in a deli,” in the French hesitation to acknowledge the anti-Semitic motives that animated the Muslim murderer of a 67-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman, in the 204 American writers who signed an open letter denouncing the murdered staff of Charlie Hebdo as racists. And it can also be seen now in the fact that so few on the left are willing to call out the people in their midst who are, unashamedly, bigots in progressive clothing.

At first I found it impossible to believe that Obama called the Jews murdered in the Paris supermarket “a bunch of folks in a deli”, but, sure enough, here it is—and in an interview with Obama at Vox!:

“Look, the point is this: my first job is to protect the American people. It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”

And it wasn’t “random”, either: they were shot because they were Jews.

The admiration of Sarsour is a sure sign that Leftists have lost their way, for her Palestinian roots (she was born in Brooklyn to immigrants from Palestine) somehow efface all her regressive stands. If you hate Israel, especially if you’re a person of color (Sarsour really isn’t: look at her!), you’re golden. All that matters is that you can claim some connection to a group that can claim oppression. Of course, Jews never count as members of such a group!

Scott Simon interviews Richard Dawkins on NPR

May 27, 2017 • 11:00 am

While driving to the grocery store this morning, I heard National Public Radio’s Scott Simon do a short interview with Richard Dawkins, which took place the morning of Wednesday’s event in Washington, D. C.

Click on the screenshot below to go to the link where you can hear it. Of course it’s all about atheism and terrorism; there’s not a mention of Richard’s thoughts on evolution.

Simon asks the usual semi-aggressive questions, including why religious people show up at tragedies but “organized groups of atheists” don’t. The problem with this is that nonbelievers who do humanitarian work don’t have visible signs of their nonbelief, but a nun or priest does.

Further, Simon says (LOL!), “I do wonder. . . am I just not seeing the world correctly to see large numbers of well-motivated atheists lending their lives to better the world. Let me put it this way. . .  are they more concerned with just being right—intellectually? 

Now that is simply an ignorant question that totally misunderstands atheism and atheists. Richard answered it properly: “Oh I don’t think so at all. If I may say so, you haven’t looked hard enough.”

And Simon asks that question three times.  He’s incredulous that atheists could actually want to help people.

As I’ve written before, Simon is a bit of a faithhead, but of the worst kind: he tries to force himself to believe what he doesn’t really think is true. Here’s part of a conversation he had in an interview with filmmaker Sheila Nevins:

JAC comment: Scott Simon went into some detail about his personal theology in an interview on today’s show:

NEVINS: Do you know where you’re going? I don’t believe in heaven or hell. So…
SIMON: No. I know what I tell myself, but do I know that for sure?
NEVINS: What do you tell – what do you say?
SIMON: Oh, I – you know, I believe in a heaven and I’ll be reunited…
NEVINS: You think that?
SIMON: I’ll be reunited with my parents and with my lost sister and with, you know, every pet I’ve ever had and loved. And I’ll be up there waiting for my wife and children. Is that for real? Of course not. But that’s what I tell myself to get through the day.

I pity Simon if he can’t get through the day without trying to fool himself with superstition!

First Lady and First Daughter refuse to cover their heads in Saudi Arabia, but do so before the Pope

May 24, 2017 • 12:30 pm

I got an email from reader DrBrydon that said the following; I’ll quote it rather than just paraphrase his words:

Looking at the new first thing this morning, I saw photos of Donald, Melania, and Ivanka with the Pope [JAC: see below], and was immediately struck by the fact that both women were wearing head coverings. I was pleased that the Trump delegation did not kowtow to Saudi dress codes for women, but to turn around and abide by Vatican ones strikes me as being incredibly disrespectful to the Saudis, and to Muslims in general.

Only a few news outlets seem to have noticed, including The Telegraph. And I hadn’t realized that Michelle Obama did the same thing.

Melania and Ivanka in Saudi Arabia:

In contrast, with His Popeness:

This of course is a form of hypocrisy: kowtowing to Christianity—seen by many as the Official United States Religion—while slapping Islam in the face. If I had my way, no leader of a secular state would wear religious garb on any official state visit—UNLESS they’re visiting a religious site, in which case I have no big objection.  But if you’re going to osculate the rump of one faith, you’ll have to osculate the rumps of all of them.

 

UPDATE by Grania

Donning some sort of veil in Vatican City when officially meeting the Pope appears to be a choice. Some women don’t, thank goodness. That’s the former president of the Republic of Ireland, Mary McAleese in case you don’t recognise her.

It seems to be favored by the wives of Republican presidents, but even Michelle Obama wore one when she met her first Pope, but as you can see below, she decided against one second time around.

“Muslims are the true feminists”: HuffPo lies to itself and its readers

May 16, 2017 • 11:00 am

UPDATE: This article appeared on the new HuffPo, and after writing this piece I realized I’d criticized the identical article a year ago, here. Well, so I’ve done it twice. My takes aren’t the same, so if you haven’t read the other one, read this one instead. Better yet, read both, as the earlier piece, which is shorter, has other information about the “feminism” of sharia law.  The piece shows that PuffHo is brain-dead, killed by Toxic Regressive Leftism.

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Well, I’m sorry folks, but, like a dog returning to its own vomit, I keep returning to the HuffPo, breaking my vow that I was done with them. The laws of physics dictated otherwise: I could not have done other than write this post. And my also-determined justification for returning to that odious site is that HuffPo may be the premier “clicky” source of news for Lefties, since it is puffier and takes less work to read than, say, the New York Times. Also, the Times is more objective, and even has conservative columnists, so if you’re a Trump-hater or Regressive Leftist who wants confirmation of your biases rather than exercise for your brain, you can reliably find that confirmation at HuffPo.

And here’s their latest, one of the most egregious pieces of doublespeak that I’ve seen, even on that site (click on screenshot to go to the article):

Doesn’t that remind you of headlines like “Assad is the true peacemaker” or “Trump is the true progressive”?

Author Gabby Aossey’s claim is that Muslims are the True Feminists because they choose to respect their bodies by covering them, while Western Feminists disrespect their own bodies by showing their skin. Why, there’s even a Free the Nipple campaign in the West, which according to Aoussey exemplifies the goals of Western Feminists: to show skin. As she says:

As American women, many of us have an idea of what feminists are; freelancing women with all the sexual freedom in the world. But this is exactly the problem with American feminism; it is all about sex and the liberation of our bodies. Certainly, things like abortion and contraception is a part of that freedom, but in today’s society the fight has taken on a much different tone.

Hip Feminist campaigns like Free the Nipple only encourage a gullible behavior of disrespect for our own bodies, leading to everyone else around us disrespecting our bodies as well. If we want to be respected as women and taken seriously in all our endeavors we should look to a new source; Muslim women. Muslim women, as well as Muslim men, see every body as a sacred temple, especially the female body. Opposed to exposing themselves, it is through modesty. When we think of modern feminists we should stray away from the new American trends and start looking to what we have always thought as a contradiction; Muslim feminists.

That’s a gross distortion of feminism in the West, whose goal is, for most, simple equality. While that equality includes the freedom to dress as one will in public, it also includes legal and moral equality: the right to be treated with as much respect as men, and to enjoy the same legal rights.

Now Aossey is willfully ignorant of several things. One, of course, is the fact that Muslim-majority countries, many of them governed by versions of sharia law—which DICTATES that women cover themselves—oppress women. But don’t take my word for it. Observe that in Saudi Arabia, a woman can’t go out with a man who is not her relative, or go out unaccompanied, must wear full covering (not just a hijab) when she does to out, and can’t even drive. In Iran and Afghanistan, women MUST cover themselves, and under sharia law have much more restricted legal rights than men (for one thing, their testimony in court is worth only half of a man’s).

And it’s not limited to those countries. Check out the 2013 Pew Survey of Muslim-majority countries (which didn’t even survey more repressive ones like Iran, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia). Here are some statistics showing the “achievements” of Muslim feminism in the Muslim world:

Even the notion that wearing a veil should be a woman’s choice (in principle, of course!) is universally accepted only in a few Muslim-majority countries, and is widely rejected in Africa and the Middle East (note the absence of Iran and Saudi Arabia):


 Here’s true equality!:

Women’s oppression is codified in most instantiations of sharia law. Here are the data on those who favor such a law for everyone in Muslim-majority lands. Feminism my tuchas!

To buttress her flawed argument, Aossey calls up the image of Khadija, Muhammad’s first wife, by all accounts a powerful and independent woman. But that was fourteen hundred years ago! Are women in Saudi Arabia and Iran allowed to have such power now? Are they allowed to say whatever they want? You know the answer. Pointing to historical figures whose personalities may be largely fictional is no way to justify Muslim women as feminists today. That much is obvious.

And what happens to Muslim women who become liberals, leave the faith, or speak out against Islam’s oppression of women: liberals like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Asra Nomani, or Sarah Haider? Are they heroes, like Khadija? You know the answer. They’re vilified—vilified for opposing the legal and cultural inferiority of women under Islam. People like Aossey ignore this in their mush-brained desire to claim that Muslim women are feminists.

And then there’s the small matter of the hijab. Here’s Aossey’s take:

. . . it’s no surprise to see Muslim woman today modeling themselves after these prominent female figures. Muslim girls look towards these instances of strength for guidance in this scary, patriarchal society. These modern women are not afraid to go against the grain in the name of their belief like wearing the hijab to covey their religious devotion. Hijab is the headscarf that is worn by Muslim woman and no; it is not supposed to be forced on them by their fathers and husbands. Wearing or not wearing the Hijab reflects a Muslim woman’s own a personal choice.

What nonsense! In several countries wearing the hijab (or more covering) is the law, not personal choice, and if you refuse, the morality police will beat some sense into you. In other places, including the U.S. and Europe, social pressure by family and peers ensures that veiling is far from a personal “choice”. I’ve written before about what women’s dress was like in places like Egypt, Afghanistan, and Iran before veiling was either common or mandatory. Answer: women didn’t veil as much, and showed a lot more skin. See my posts here, here, here, and here. These days, women must go on websites like My Stealthy Freedom to covertly doff their veils, for they don’t want to wear them!

And remember why veiling exists: it’s based on the presumption that women have to cover themselves to avoid exciting the uncontrollable lust of men, men who would rape them if they saw a knee or even a stray wisp of hair. It puts the onus on women, not men, to prevent sexual assault, and that’s not feminism. In fact, feminists always make the point, correctly, that it’s not women’s responsibility to quash male lust, and they’re right. “Feminist” Aossey, however, has bought into the oppression side:

With all of the pressures in our American society to have a certain physical allure; to have long, luscious hair, a skinny yet curvy body, flawless facial beauty, woman go through hell. With this, we succumb to the pressures that we generally think we are free of; we oppress our natural womanhood with constant worry about how we look to others around us. We do not have the courage to stand up to this societal critique and say ‘my body is not to be ogled at’.

For many Muslim women however, they strive to achieve just that. In this way, they liberate themselves from these everyday pressures. They actually have the courage to say hey, I am not an object of pleasure, I am a woman that commands only respect for who I am and not how I look. They have the power to self-liberate as well as the courage to diverge from the American norms. And they do not get attention from showing off their figure, but they get attention by how they present themselves. Muslim woman get respect and are looked at beyond aesthetics; they are actually taken seriously in their communities.

Isn’t this what feminism should be? Don’t women deserve consistent respect and to actually be listened to without drools or criticisms over our bodies and looks?

That is what the results of feminism should be, but veiling doesn’t achieve that result. Read two articles (this and this) to see how covering a woman does not prevent sexual assault. As Grania said when she saw Aossey’s piece (which, by the way, doesn’t allow readers’ comments):

It’s the woman’s responsibility to protect her temple from the assault of the eyes of evil men who are such dogs that they cannot be trusted. What I want to know is why these candidates for a brain donation aren’t arguing for the full-on niqab? Surely that is the logical next step.

Indeed! Aossey finishes her piece with more nonsense, as if repeating lies makes them more credible:

I realized we have been conditioned to think that American women are the free and that Muslim women are the suppressed, but this is twisted to me. I finally understood who is really oppressed by a patriarchal society and it is us. Woman who wear hijab have freed themselves from a man’s and a society’s judgmental gaze; the Free the Nipplers have not. They have fallen deep into the man’s world, believing that this trend will garner respect.

So I urge my Free the Nipple gal pals to take a look at your Muslim sisters and collaborate with them to create a feminism that treats the female body as a temple and not as a toy. Let us see feminism in a different light—through modesty and the courage to savor our sugar. Let us call on the Muslim feminists of the world.

The female body is not a temple, nor is the male’s. It’s the product of natural selection—the same selection that made us desire members of the other sex.

And can Aossey go out alone, or have an unchaperoned date, or drive? I think so, for she lives in America, not Saudi Arabia. Can she wear anything she wants in public? I think so, for she lives in America, not Iran or Afghanistan. Is her testimony equal in value to a man’s in a court of law? Yes, because she lives in America, not the Middle East. By equating feminism with “modesty”—a modesty forced on women by MEN, often against women’s will—Aossey manages to at once misconstrue and devalue the kind of feminism that calls for simple freedom and equality for women.

I wonder why Aossey doesn’t move to Saudi Arabia, where she must wear a sack so she isn’t oppressed by the “patriarchy.” She’s made the HuffPo look even more stupid and regressive than it already is, and that’s a feat!

h/t: Patrick, Grania