Why is it that, even when we’re being politically incorrect about Islam, most of us toe the PC line? A good friend and political author writes with regard to the Muslim irruption into the west: “As the father of a daughter and two granddaughters, I worry about our tolerism of the [Islamic] Culture of Rape…men whose culture makes them a serious threat to those daughters and granddaughters.” Islamic culture has a worrisome record, he goes on to note, not only in its treatment of women but also in its savage persecution of gays. I write back to him: “I am not only worried for my daughters. I am worried as well for my sons. Analogously, I not only deplore what may befall the gay community; I fear what will happen to the straight community.”
I confess parenthetically that my primary concern is not the treatment meted out to gays in Muslim countries. The preoccupation of good people like my friend with such abuse fits in well with left/liberal pharisaical compassion and tumid preachiness. Such commentary focuses more on violence against gays than on that against infidels and apostates, despite the fact that the numbers of the latter must far outweigh those of the former. Is it any more worthy of attention and denunciation that a man be murdered for his sexual orientation than for criticizing Islam or leaving the faith?
For that matter, why must it always be mentioned — often in tones of smarmy self-approbation — that the majority of Muslim killings are of other Muslims, as if that legitimizes our condemnation of Islamic practice? It appears all too clear that Muslim oppression and killing of gays or other Muslims — anything but Muslim attempts to undermine and conquer the West — offer attractive causes for conservatives because they may meet with progressivist approval, placing the conservative for once on the same unimpeachable moral plane as the progressive. It might also be noted that such solicitude seems hollow at the center. There has been little public outcry, for example, against the U.S. Army’s advisory to its forces in Afghanistan to turn a blind eye to their Muslim allies’ sodomizing of young boys. After all, soldiers were told, “it’s their culture.” Clearly, there is something almost ritually selective about our tendency to righteous outrage.
In any event, deplorable as it may be, the suffering of gays in the Muslim world is a side issue. It is not our problem. What is happening right here in our homeland is our problem. My friend is right, so far as he goes, to bemoan the growing epidemic of rape, forced prostitution and sexual molestation associated with the Muslim entry into western societies. The statistics detailing the sexual violence attending the Muslim infiltration of Europe are, to say the least, profoundly disturbing: the “grooming” and child kidnapping scandals in the UK — thousands of young girls sexually abused by Muslim gangs; the 1,472% increase in the incidence of rape in Sweden (Sweden is now second on the list of rape countries, surpassed only by Lesotho in Southern Africa); the problem in Norway where Muslims comprise 1.5% of the total population but commit 50% of the rapes. Almost every host society has experienced something similar. The Gatestone Institute report on Muslim rape statistics is definitive.
But in the bigger picture, rape statistics tend to distract us from the material issue we are inclined to avoid acknowledging. For it is the liberal culture of the west that is being raped in toto. Granted, the morbid fate of our daughters — and even the distress of persecuted gays — are critical concerns. Our focus on them, however, shows how our powers of argument have been usurped by the progressivist narrative, how uncertain we are about the legitimacy of defending western culture for its own sake, as a coherent entity deserving to be saved, not for the sake of girls and gays alone.
It is as if we believe that only on the grounds of violations of women’s and gay rights that a compelling case for defending our western cultural inheritance might be made — that our legacy of freedom, of individual rights and dignity, of democratic institutions, of separation of church and state, of individual conscience, of rough and tumble public debate, of legal traditions such as confronting one’s accuser, that all these are just so much relativistic dross when compared to the inarguable goods of female safety and gay liberation, that only what the Left tells us matters really does matter. Such concern with daughters and young women, no matter how legitimate, such fretting about gays and lesbians and transgenders, no matter how heartfelt, really misses the point. The fact is: all of us are in the crosshairs. The tears we expend upon the plight of daughters and homosexuals should be properly shed for all our progeny and for all our citizens of whatever gender. The 9/11 atrocity in which more than 3000 people were incinerated should have driven that lesson home long ago.
Muslims have carried out more than 25,000 terror attacks since 911, and although lunatics of all political stripes do embark on killing sprees — Anders Breivik’s the most notable of recent vintage — these pale into insignificance compared to Islamic terror. That is not to include the many Muslim-inspired terror plots that have been providentially foiled, several here in the soft underbelly of my own country, Canada. The sanctimonious absorption in the misfortune of only certain classes of victims tends to obscure the full spectrum of the dilemma we are confronting. Islam targets not only gays and young women, but every single one of us, straight men, the mothers and the fathers of jeopardized daughters, and their sons as well.
Instances abound. To cite just a few. A Dutch filmmaker will be shot and stabbed in the street. An elderly woman will be decapitated in her garden. A British soldier will have his throat slashed on a public thoroughfare. Two men will be killed and five wounded at a free speech event and a synagogue in Copenhagen. A mother and her son will be stabbed to death shopping at Ikea. A 15-year-old student screaming Allahu Akbar will assault his teacher in the classroom. Journalists will be gunned down in their offices. Jews will be murdered in a delicatessen. Over a hundred people will be killed in a coordinated series of attacks in Paris. Thirteen military personnel will be shot dead and thirty-two wounded at a Soldier Readiness Processing Center. Another four Marines will be murdered in a recruitment center and a sailor killed shortly afterward at another center. Two people will be fatally shot in a hostage taking in a Sydney café. A 54-year-old woman will be beheaded in a food distribution center in Oklahoma. A Canadian sentry will be killed on Parliament Hill in Ottawa and another soldier run down near a mall in a small Canadian town. A public event protected by the First Amendment will be attacked with mortal intent.
Such episodes are merely the grainy tip of the sand dune. They follow from the besetting vice of liberal thinking — what my aforementioned friend in an important book on the subject calls Tolerism — as it welcomes Islam into the body politic. And they will multiply as the Muslim surge increases. We should make no mistake about this. We all fall into the category of the kafir. There are no exceptions.
As the saying goes, let’s get real.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member