One thing that really bothered me after the Manchester and London terrorist attacks was the tendency of some people to immediately express solidarity with Muslims rather than feel sadness for the victims and horror at the event. There’s nothing wrong with trying to prevent a terrorist attack from being used to demonize all Muslims, but to coddle the adherents of an odious religion before mourning the victims of its ideology—well, it rankles me. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about, sent out before the terrorists were even identified as Muslims:
https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch/status/871135279729561600
The other ones that bothered me were the calls to not become “Islamophobic” after the attacks. Well, if anything inspires “Islamophobia”, which I take to mean the fear of Islam and not bigotry against Muslims, it is such attacks. Each attack committed in the name of Islam makes me more Islamophobic.
The failure to face the implications of Islamic ideology that is taken seriously by its adherents is the topic of Jeff Tayler’s new piece in Quillette, “Manchester’s children and the Regressive Left“. Its theme is the refusal of the Regressive Left to take religious motivations seriously, and, indeed, to become more enamored of and defensive about Islam with each terrorist attack.
An example of this—and the main object of Tayler’s ire—is a piece by Islamophile Shaun King in New York’s Daily News, “We must never hate Islam, or Muslims, because of the violence of its fake followers.” Well, I disagree twice with just the headline: yes, I do hate Islam, as I hate all religions that have pernicious and oppressive doctrines; and the followers of those doctrines weren’t “fake”. Ask a member of ISIS, or those who slaughter apostates in Bangladesh, if they consider themselves “true” Muslims. After all, ISIS has said in its own magazine, Dabiq, that they are murdering primarily because Islam calls for the extinction of nonbelievers. After giving a list of reasons “Why we hate you and why we fight you” (of which the first four out of six are explicitly religious), ISIS says this—and read it carefully:
What’s important to understand here is that although some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent of what drives our hatred, this particular reason for hating you is secondary, hence the reason we addressed it at the end of the above list. The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay jizyah and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you. No doubt, we would stop fighting you then as we would stop fighting any disbelievers who enter into a covenant with us, but we would not stop hating you.
Yet King, the Big Expert on Islam, chooses to ignore the terrorists’ own stated motivation. choosing to call them “fake Muslims”. Here’s his ridiculous claim:
We should all be upset at what happened in Manchester, but what happened there is no excuse to slide into Islamophobia. Whoever did this is no more a Muslim than those who lynched African Americans during Jim Crow were Christians. Wearing the garb of a faith no more makes you a follower of that faith than me wearing a Steph Curry jersey makes me a Golden State Warrior.
. . . we must always resist the urge to throw an entire race of people under the bus even if we truly despise whiteness or white privilege or white supremacy.
Taylor readily notes that most Muslims are neither violent nor approve of terrorism, but he does say this:
So adherents to an ideology constitute a race? Islam is a faith-based ideology, with nothing biologically inherent about it. How would King account for (white) Taliban-combatant John Walker Lindh, or the thwarted shoe-bomber Richard Reid? What would he say of the European converts who joined ISIS? What about Muslim-majority Albania and Kosovo? By King’s illogic, we should declare red-state Republicans a race, since they mostly share a skin color and dogmatically professed beliefs. Religions are thought systems—thought systems conceived in ages of ignorance, asserted without evidence, and deployed to control human behavior—above all, female behavior.
(In a similar vein, imagine the storm of popular outrage that would erupt if any modern-day political party wrote into its charter sex-slavery, wife-beating, and clitorectomies; declared said charter to be immutable and sacrosanct; announced its headquarters stood on sacred ground; and promised to kill anyone who dared leave the party. Even the reddest of red-state Republicans would never go this far.)
And let’s be clear: King urges us to look benignly upon an ideology that does endorse taking female captives as sex slaves, instructs husbands on how to beat their wives, values women’s testimony as half that of men, and sanctions the barbaric butchery that is female genital mutilation. These tenets are matters of scripture, not distortions concocted by a few renegades from the faith.
King then produces the “fake Muslim” argument, including the unctuous “some of my best friends are Muslims” claim, which, even though it may be true, is irrelevant to Tayler’s point.
King:
Of all the friends I have, none are more consistently warm, peaceful, supportive, and kind than my Muslim friends. They are actual Muslims, though. In a day and age of fake news and fake politicians, perhaps nothing is more dangerous than fake Muslims and Christians — who cloak themselves in the accouterments of religion but do so for the asinine and insincere reasons.
Tayler:
. . . Is there an Islam-apologist who does not trot out the “no true Scotsman” dodge? (Apparently not.) In any case, who granted King the right to impugn the piety of the Manchester attacker, Salman Abedi, and on what basis does he do so? A committed Muslim who did not hide his faith, Abedi, we have every reason to think, believed he was committing an act of jihad, for which he would be rewarded with instant access to paradise. Jihad and martyrdom are fundamental tenets of mainstream Islam.
. . . Of all the friends I have,” King tells us, “none are more consistently warm, peaceful, supportive, and kind than my Muslim friends.” This line is too transparently silly to be worth refuting; no one is contending that Muslims are not nice as people. At issue, we recall, is the motivation of the Manchester attacker and those like him. For King, “fake Muslims and Christians—who cloak themselves in the accoutrements of religion but do so for the asinine and insincere reasons” amount to a grave danger. An editor at the New York Daily News would have done well to ask King to state clearly these “asinine and insincere reasons” as well as the criteria by which he so reliably discerns “fake” followers of religions from “true” ones. In another era, this was the business of the Holy Inquisition’s murderous sleuths.
Tayler’s piece contains much more, but go read it for yourself.
