Category: Regressive Left

Heather Hastie defends Ayaan Hirsi Ali against the SPLC’s distortions

November 5, 2016 • 2:00 pm

UPDATE:  Heather adds this:

When I did the post in support of Maajid Nawaz, I also wrote to SPLC. I got a response from them, the contents of which I found pretty appalling.

I’ve done a post which includes my email, their response, and what I think of their response:

http://www.heatherhastie.com/splc-responds-to-my-complaint-re-field-guide-to-anti-muslim-extremists/

*********

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has disgraced itself by putting out a “blacklist” of supposed anti-Muslim extremists, including on it the “extremists” Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  Both of them are Muslim reformers, and I’ve written before about the injustice of including these two on a list along with real bigots. (I now feel that the SPLC has no business issuing any such blacklists.)

Most of the criticisms of that list have defended Maajid Nawaz, a believing Muslim rather than an apostate Muslim like Hirsi Ali. But I call your attention to a good defense of Hirsi Ali in a post on Heather Hastie’s website, “Why Ayann Hirsi Ali Shouldn’t Be on SPLC’s ‘Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists‘”. “Ayann” is misspelled, but that’s clearly a typo because the spelling is correct throughout the post itself. (I’ve called it to Heather’s attention and am sure it’ll be corrected.)

It’s a particularly incisive post, with Heather demolishing every point that the SPLC leveled against Hirsi Ali when damning her as an inciter of hatred against Muslims. I won’t summarize it here, but I urge readers who want to skinny on Hirsi Ali to go read it.

As for the SPLC, I have no use for them. They are nothing to me now, just as Freddo became nothing to Michael Corleone.

Nick Cohen and others defend Maajid Nawaz, excoriate the SPLC

November 1, 2016 • 8:30 am

A few days ago I discussed the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC’s) descent into blacklisting, reminiscent of the days of Joe McCarthy. The SPLC compiled a “Field Guide to anti-Muslim Extremists,” which included the names of  Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz, both Muslim reformers, the former now an atheist and the latter a believer. I won’t reprise the SPLC’s stupid accusations and trumped up “evidence” against these people, but I urged readers to sign a petition removing these two from the list. At the time I mentioned that petition had 1952 signers, but now there are 7979.

Of course the SPLC will ignore the petition, but perhaps they’ll become at least dimly aware that they should be careful about whom they demonize—or about making blacklists in general.  Several readers objected in general to such blacklists, and I can see the point of their objections. As my friend Malgorzata commented:

I’m sorry but I’m not going to sign this petition. The idea that an SPLC took upon itself the right to libel and smear people is abhorrent as it is. To defend just two people listed there because their opinions are similar to my own would be the same as endorsing their right to issue such lists. There are other people on that list; I do not have to agree with everything they say to think that placing them on such a list is a scandal. The existence of this “hit list” should be condemned.

If you object to such blacklists in general (I’m on the fence, for while I see nothing wrong with calling out real anti-Muslim bigots, I now agree that an official “list” with the imprimatur of the SPLC is over the line), I’d urge you to email the SPLC directly at this link.

In the meantime, pushback against the SPLC’s bonehead move has begun. Yahoo! News describes many who have objected, including Nawaz’s own eloquent response in The Daily Beast and tweets by Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, and Michael Nugent. Nawaz’s eloquent column agrees with Malgorzata; an excerpt:

If there was anything we liberals should have learnt from McCarthyism, it is that compiling lists of our political foes is a malevolent, nefarious, and incredibly dangerous thing to do. And this terrible tactic, of simplifying and reducing our political opponents to a rogue’s gallery of “bad guys,” is not solely the domain of the right. As the political horseshoe theory attributed to Jean-Pierre Faye highlights, if we travel far-left enough, we find the very same sneering, nasty and reckless bullying tactics used by the far-right. Denunciations of traitors, heresy and blasphemy are the last resort of diminutive, insecure power-craving fascists of all stripes. Compiling lists is their modus operandi.

 . . . . Nothing good ever comes from compiling lists. And so I say to the Southern Poverty Law Center: You were supposed to stand up for us, not intimidate us. Just imagine how ex-Muslim Islam-critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali must feel to be included in your list of “anti-Muslim” extremists. Her friend Theo Van Gogh was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam in 2004. And back then there was another list pinned to Theo’s corpse with a knife: it too named Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
And so the SPLC, like many regressive Leftists, have joined the gay-hating, women-oppressing, apostate-demonizing forces of Islamism. I don’t suppose that the SPLC has made a list of the many imams in the U.S. and U.K. who preach genuine hatred on a regular basis.

Meanwhile, Nick Cohen, the unsung hero of true, non-regressive Leftism, let the SPLC have it with both barrels in his Spectator column, aptly titled “The white left has issued its first fatwa.” (Now that’s an attention-grabber!)

Cohen notes that, for the first time, he’s actually urged someone to take advantage of the British libel laws, and even gave Nawaz the name of lawyers willing to help. I’d love to see the SPLC have to defend their allegations in court, though I suspect this won’t come to pass. But clearly the SPLC’s petition can be taken, as does Cohen, to be a death list.

[The SPLC’s Mark Potok] and his colleagues have issued the white left’s first fatwa: a blacklist that could be a deathlist.

As Nawaz said,

“It’s not as if there’s any shortage of Muslim extremists who want me dead. They exist in numbers so plenty that former jihadists have even taken to calling in to my live LBC radio show to confess to once having made plans to assassinate me. Europe has witnessed around 6,000 of our fellow Muslims leave to join ISIS. Here in Europe, amid jihadist assassinations and mass terror attacks planned with military precision, we truly are in the thick of it. Meanwhile, from the comforts of sweet Alabama comes this edict that liberal Muslims working to throw open a conversation around reforming Islam today are somehow to be deemed ‘anti-Muslim extremists.’”

Do these jerks not think about the consequences of their rote-learned, pseudo-leftist bombast? Have they not heard that, across the world, lists circulate of ‘apostates’ along with invitations to the faithful to kill them when they can?

Maybe they have but do not care, and it will take drastic action to shake them out of their spiteful stupor.  A court action could do it. If Nawaz sues, SPLC’s work in fighting the white far right will suffer grievously. But, as it is so eager to be on the wrong side in the fight against the religious far right, I think we could call it evens.

Amen.

For another take on these issues, Heather Hastie has posted her usual thorough analysis of the Nawaz/Cohen/SPLC fracas.

h/t: Grania

A petition to remove Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali from the SPLC “hatemonger list”

October 30, 2016 • 10:00 am

As I noted yesterday, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has screwed up big time by including the names of Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali on its “field guide to anti-Muslim activists”, saying that these reformers “fuel the hatred of Muslims.” That’s simply not true, and is an outrageous accusation. If reform is to come to extremist Islam, it will be from people like these, who have no fear of criticizing not Muslims, but the oppressive parts of their faith.

Change.org has a petition directed to the SPLC to remove the names of Hirsi Ali and Nawaz from their list. Of course they won’t, but I think it’s important that the SPLC know that many of us support the reformist activities of Hirsi Ali, Nawaz, and the Nawaz’s Qulliam Foundation. If you found the SPLC’s inclusion of these two as odious as I and many readers did, please go over and sign that petition. As of this writing, only 1952 people have signed out of the first goal of 2500.

Thank you.

Folly at Tufts University: Cops could investigate questionable Halloween costumes, students could be expelled

October 26, 2016 • 1:45 pm

The College Halloween Costume Follies are spreading, and I can only imagine how ludicrous they will be next year. From The College Fix (you’re not going to read this in PuffHo), we hear about the costume policies of Tufts University in Medford, MA. That’s just outside Cambridge, MA, and the academic home of Daniel Dennett.

First, the Greek Life Council at Tufts (recall that the use of the word “Greek” in conjunction with fraternities and sororities was recently deemed a cultural appropriation) sent a letter to the heads of the university’s fraternities and sororities outlining the kinds of costumes that are verboten. You can see the full letter here, and this is an excerpt:

Greek Brothers and Sisters have worn costumes that appropriate cultures and reproduce stereotypes on race, gender, sexuality, immigrant or socioeconomic status. Outfits relating to tragedy, controversy, or acts of violence are also inappropriate. We need to set a precedent that people’s customs cannot and will not be our costumes. As you will agree, the values illustrated by such costumes do not align with the values of the Greek Community at Tufts. It is our mission to promote spaces that allow members of the Tufts community to have fun without feeling as though any part of their identity is being misrepresented or targeted. In order to accomplish this, we ask that you relay this message to your chapters. Please read this email to your chapter during your weekly meetings. When choosing a costume, be aware of the impact your costume might have on others, and be cognizant of any statements—including, but not limited to, cultural or violent messages—your outfit may make, intentional or not.

Tragedy, controversy, or acts of violence? No cowboys or Indians, no zombies or skeletons, no people with arrows through their heads? What are these people thinking?

The letter then adds a threat of reporting to the police, as per University policy. Note the last sentence, in which students are ENCOURAGED to report those wearing “inappropriate and offensive costumes.”

There are consequences for wearing an offensive costume. Mary Pat McMahon, the Dean of Student Affairs, described the consequences as follows: “The range of response for students whose actions make others in our community feel threatened or unsafe, or who direct conduct towards others that is offensive or discriminatory, includes OEO and/or TUPD investigation and then disciplinary sanctions from our office that could run a wide gamut depending on what is brought to our attention and the impact of these actions on others. Any complaints will result in full investigation by University officials and could result in serious disciplinary sanctions through Judicial Affairs.” We encourage all students that feel like they have encountered someone who is wearing an inappropriate and offensive costume to please file a report by filling out [this link].

Have a look at that link. It’s surely Big Brotherism in action! And while Tufts University disassociated itself from the letter, they then reassociated itself in a statement (my emphasis):

In a statement emailed Monday to The College Fix, campus spokesman Patrick Collins clarified that “Tufts University does not have a ‘Halloween costume policy.’”

“The letter was written by students, for students, to encourage a thoughtful and considerate celebration of Halloween within our diverse and inclusive community and to stress the importance of alcohol safety and sexual consent,” Collins said. “We commend the leaders of our Greek Life councils for proactively raising these important issues with their fellow participants in Greek Life and encouraging responsible behavior. As is the case at any time, students whose actions are discriminatory or threaten others can face a range of disciplinary sanctions. Depending on their seriousness, such actions, when called to our attention, can prompt investigations by the Office of the Dean of Student Affairs, the Office of Equal Opportunity or, in certain circumstances, the Tufts University Police Department.”

Stay tuned; Halloween isn’t here yet, so lots of students could face punishment.

U. Mass. Amherst creates “scream meter” to measure levels of offensiveness of Halloween costumes

October 25, 2016 • 10:00 am

This is how far it’s gone. As Business Insider and Campus Reform report, the Halloween Costume Police have gotten out of hand, and of course it’s at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where they simply cannot let people be adults and make their own decisions. Both articles appear to be the same, so I’ll just reproduce some of the text and the S.C.R.E.A.M. meter:

The University of Massachusetts, Amherst is posting “cultural appropriation” posters in each of the residence halls on campus featuring a detailed “racism evaluation and assessment meter.”

The initiative is being spearheaded by the Center for Women and Community, the Center for Multicultural Advancement and Student Success, and the campus’ diversity office, the Stonewall Center.

“Don’t be an asshole,” one display urges students, providing several leaflets to help them understand the effects of cultural appropriation.

The board also includes a poster to help measure the “threat level” of a potential costume using what it calls the “Simple Costume Racism Evaluation and Assessment Meter” (S.C.R.E.A.M.) which poses several costume-related questions, the answers to which take one to various points on a “threat meter” that ranges from green (low) to red (severe).

If one intends to represent a person on Halloween, the only way to get a “green” threat rating is for the person to be of one’s own race. If one represents a person of another race, the “threat level” increases roughly in conjunction with the amount of makeup that one intends to use.

Even representing a “thing/idea” is dangerous, though, the flyer says, warning against costumes that can only be understood in the context of “controversial current events or historically accepted cliches,” particularly if “these events or cliches relate to a person or people not of your race.”

But if “race” is a social construct, what, exactly, do they mean by “people not of your race”? Are Hispanics of a different race from Native Americans, or Caucasians?  If “race” means “ethnic group”, is it now not okay (as it used to be) to “punch up”, so that a black can’t dress as Batman, or an Asian as the Wizard of Oz’s Scarecrow? But the “offense meter” below indicates that you can’t wear costumes representing anyone “less powerful” or “more socially marginalized” than yourself, so one would have to have some hierarchy of oppression laid out to decide if your costume was inappropriate. As we know, the hierarchy of oppression is constantly under revision.

Here’s the S.C.R.E.A.M. meter, which you can enlarge and read for yourself.

umassscream

More from Business Insider:

Another display on a different bulletin board asserts that “cultural appropriation is an act of privilege, and leads to offensive, inaccurate, and stereotypical portrayals of other people’s culture.”

It then goes on to outline steps that students can take to inform their peers if a costume may be considered inappropriate or offensive, using Native American costumes as the prime example.

“No, it’s cool, it’s not like your ancestors killed them all or anything,” reads one flyer alongside a cartoon of two white women in headdresses. “Hypersexualized racism…is still racism,” states another flyer featuring pictures of women dressed in “sexy Indian” costumes.

Here are those:

umasscostume7

umasscostume4

To be fair, there is one poster—just one—that says this:

“It’s not fair to ask any culture to freeze itself in time and live as though they were a museum diorama,” one poster quotes author Susan Scafidi. “Cultural appropriation can sometimes be the savior of a cultural product that has faded away.”

Indeed, and that undercuts much of the other messages, for many of the cultural products that have largely faded away, like Native American costumes or kimonos, are being admired, not mocked, by many kids who wear them. Further, cultural appropriation can not only preserve disappearing cultural elements, but can express admiration for the admirable parts of other cultures. What is good about America is how the various people who immigrated here have cross-pollinated each other’s cultures, something that is of course not unique to our country but especially noticeable here. So when someone claims “offense” if you’ve culturally appropriated something you like—perhaps because you don’t have a detailed awareness of what that culture has suffered—my response would be “go away.”

Now I’m not saying that no costumes are offensive, for some surely are. Blackface, for example, has bad historical connections with racism. What I dislike about these campus-wide efforts is the policing involved: one group takes it upon itself to arbitrate or censor the costumes of everyone else. It’s simply leisure fascism, and students, who after all are adults living in this world, can learn these lessons on their own—the process is called “growing up”—rather than being subject to arrogant and hectoring propagandizing by student Pecksniffs who flaunt their moral purity.

So although some Asians claim that they are a marginalized and oppressed group in the U.S., I’d have no patience for someone calling out a little girl, or a student, wearing a Princess Mononoke costume. We don’t have to accept (as U. Mass. apparently has) the dicta of groups like the Amherst Leisure Police, who succeed only out of liberal’s desperate fear of being called racists.

h/t: G. B. James

The University of Florida warns its students about their Halloween costumes.

October 19, 2016 • 12:00 pm

It’s almost Halloween, and you know what that means: the University Costume Police are getting ready to tell us all how we can and cannot dress. Here, from the Gator Times, is a notice from the University of Florida telling students they’d bloody well think hard about what they’re going to wear on Halloween, and should be careful about social media, too.  Note as well the generous availability of the Bias Education and Response team “to respond to any reported incidents of bias” and “to educated [read “‘indoctrinate’] those that were involved.”

h/t: Gregory
screen-shot-2016-10-18-at-1-41-16-pm

 

Liberal hypocrisy, the hijab, and the Iranian chess boycott

October 18, 2016 • 9:15 am

For my own sanity, I’m going to stop looking at the Huffington Post, as there’s nothing there of value unless you’re a Regressive Leftist or need your daily Two Minutes of Trump Hate. But I did want to mention one salubrious piece in that otherwise odiferous venue brought to my attention by Grania. It’s by Zubin Madon, and called “When chess grandmatster Nazi Paikidze said no to the hijab she also unveiled liberal hypocrisy“.

If you’re a regular here, you’ll know that American women’s chess champion Nazí Paikidze-Barnes is boycotting the Women’s World Chess Championships in Iran because the women players will be forced to wear the hijab (headscarf). FIDE, the international chess association, chose that venue and is supporting the hijab requirement, despite the fact that it violates their own rules against sex discrimination. The U.S., Danish, and British chess federations have also decried the hijab requirement and supported Paikidze-Barnes, who started a Change.org petition that now has nearly 16,000 signatories.

This was pretty big news, and even the New York Times had a piece on Paikidze-Barnes’s boycott. But the PuffHo? Ha! While they take every opportunity to laud hijabis, including Olympic athletes who wear it, they say nothing about women who reject the oppressive garment. I’ve searched on PuffHo for any mention of Nazí’s boycott, and found. . . nada. But of course they, and many others, were all over themselves praising the “bravery” of U.S. Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, who, after all, chose fencing simply because it was the one sport she could engage in while wearing a hijab.  Muhammad was not brave, nor a hero, and risked nothing by fencing while wearing a hijab. In contrast, Paikidze-Barnes risks her international chess ranking by standing up for women’s freedom of dress. She is the true hero.

But (probably due to an editorial error), Medon’s piece slipped into the PuffHo, and it tears the liberal media a new one for extolling hijabis while ignoring or even denigrating women like Paikidze-Barnes who refuses to wear a garment that is mandatory in Iran, enforced only on women, and comes from religious dictates about “modesty.”  Medon articulates what most of us have realized, but which is largely ignored by the liberal media: when there’s a conflict between women’s rights and the supposed oppression of Muslims (perceived as people of color), despite Islam’s generally oppression of women, the Left throws women under the bus. Unfortunately, those who oppress Muslims the most are other Muslims, who in many places subjugate half their population as well as gays, atheists, and those of non-Muslim faiths. Compared to that oppression, which effectively bars women from having any career aspirations and leads to the execution of gays and apostates, the “Islamophobia” loudly decried by places like the PuffHo (and that often conflates bigotry with criticism of Islam) is much less harmful.

Medon:

This latest controversy confirms what I have suspected all along—publishing articles glorifying modesty-culture as empowering, have little to do with defending a Muslim woman’s right to choose. If it were indeed about defending women’s freedom, left-leaning media outlets would have eulogized Nazi Paikidze’s choice with the same eloquence as they did a hijabi fencer’s choice to cover-up. They didn’t. Which makes the Western leftist’s (well meaning) romanticism of the veil nothing more than a patronizing exercise in virtue signalling.

Defending women in headscarves in the West from anti-Muslim bigotry (“Islamophobia” is a non-word) does not require pandering to Islamofascists in the East; or dismissing the agency of a White woman exercising her own freedom to choose. By failing to show solidarity with Paikidze, Western liberals have also failed the vast swaths of non-observant Muslim women like Asra Nomani and Hala Arafa, who reject the idea that a scrap of cloth defines their cultural identity.

I have previously written about how the left’s apologism and double standards on Islamism are harming the very minorities they claim to protect. Fearing that right-wing bigots will co-opt any criticism of Islamic dogma, the left has unwittingly ended up pandering to the most regressive elements within these minorities. Their pseudo-liberalism is undoing the hard-won victories of Western feminists who have struggled for decades to bring about emancipation.

Part of the “controversy” mentioned by Medon refers to an op-ed by Azadeh Moaveni in the October 7 New York Times (Moaveni is described as “a lecturer in journalism at Kingston University and the author of “Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran”). Moaveni makes three insupportable statements: that the majority of Iranian women “wear the head scarf by choice”; that pressure from the West will not only be ineffective at changing Iranian law and FIDE’s dictat, but “plays into the hands of conservatives who claim that the West uses women’s rights as a tool to humiliate the pressure them”; and that change in Iran must come from Iranians, not dictated to the country by “outsiders.”

First of all, the evidence that most Iranian women choose to wear the headscarf is nil. Before the revolution in1979, turning Iran into a theocracy, most women did not wear the headscarf, and there were huge protests by Iranian women when the government made the hijab mandatory. The government put down those protests. Sites like #Mystealthyfreedom continue to show Iranian women (always anonymous) doffing their hijabs, eager to let their hair fly free.  Here’s just the most recent post:

screen-shot-2016-10-18-at-8-47-34-am

Further, nobody seems to even think about the simple fact that in a society where there’s social and familial pressure to be “good girls” or “good Muslims” by wearing the hijab—not to mention, of course, the religious policing and laws—the concept of “choice” becomes nebulous. What is a “choice” can only be seen in a society where there is absolutely no stigma attached to not wearing the hijab. 

Finally, there’s no evidence that pressure from non-Iranians will slow “progress” in the rights of Iranian women. I deeply resent the idea that “outsiders” aren’t allowed to criticize the oppression of women (or gays and apostates, for that matter) because such criticism slows progressive change. What that really amounts to is a call to retain the status quo, and an assertion that women’s rights differ between Iran and the U.S.(It reminds me of how the segregationist South resented the intrusion of “outsider” northerners with their ideas about integration.) It’s pure moral relativism, though to be fair Moaveni notes that many of her contemporaries don’t like the mandatory hijab.

It’s like saying we shouldn’t criticize the horrible injustices of North Korea because we must let the North Koreans change their own society. The problem is that in both North Korea and Iran, people aren’t free to object to the government. One could equally well make the case that the criticism of women like Paikidze-Barnes is heartening to Iranian women, giving them examples of nations where women have not only greater freedom of dress, but greater freedom to criticize their government.

The notion that we shouldn’t criticize Islamic oppression of women is argued in a similar editorial by Sarah Harvard at Mic.com 

“Iranian and other Muslim women have to be heard directly,” Keshavarz said. “Unless their own voices are heard and appreciated, what we know about them will remain second hand, diluted and often misrepresented and misunderstood. Boycotting an event that will recognize the abilities of the Iranian women and uplift them — in the name of supporting these women — is quite ironic to say the least.”

According to Keshavarz, there’s a white savior complex narrative inherent to Paikidze-Barnes’ boycott that permeates the media airwaves and leaves Iranian-women in a deprived position.

“White savior complex”? Give me a break. If there’s any complex operating here, it’s the “Let brown people oppress each other as much as they want” complex.