Boreal

Who Are You Calling an Islamophobe?

(From Islamophobia, Boreal Books)

A great liberal betrayal is afoot… I call them regressive leftists; they are in fact reverse racists. They have a poverty of expectation for minority groups, believing them to be homogenous and inherently opposed to human rights values. They are culturally reductive in how they see Eastern—and in my case, Islamic—culture, and they are culturally deterministic in attempting to freeze their ideal of it in order to satisfy their oriental fetish.

While they rightly question every aspect of their own Western culture in the name of progress, they censure liberal Muslims who attempt to do so within Islam, and they choose to side instead with every regressive reactionary in the name of “cultural authenticity” and anticolonialism.

Maajid Nawaz in conversation with Sam Harris, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, Harvard University Press, 2015

In his presidential announcement speech Sen. Tim Scott said that hundreds of people on the terrorist watch list had attempted to cross into the United States from Mexico. A fact checker at CNN pointed out that he got the border wrong; that US Customs and Border Protection encountered hundreds of people trying to enter the United States in fiscal year 2022 who are in the Terrorist Screening Dataset, but most of them tried to enter the country from Canada not Mexico. In fiscal year 2022, border officials had 380 encounters with people who had records on the watchlist and tried to pass through ports of entry— 313 of those were at the northern border.

Canada's population grew by a record 1 million in 2022. That is twice the planned immigration level of 500,000 immigrants a year by 2025. It would have been impossible to properly screen half a million immigrants, let alone a million. A million people a year means that Canada will do the equivalent of replacing its entire population in approximately 35+ years instead of the planned 70+. Whatever scenario, this could represent a serious security problem for the United States (and Canada) since the vetting appears totally inadequate.

Not only does this extraordinary level of planned and unplanned immigration risk American (and Canadian) lives but, combined with aggressive multiculturalism, will elevate here the type of fear gripping France and other European countries of "becoming strangers at home" and further destabilize an increasingly fractured nation.

As we accept more and more refugees and immigrants whose values and beliefs are often at odds with our own, which one will change the other for the better, and who is to define what the better is? Today, to favour one over the other, even if you are Muslim, is to invite accusations of being an Islamophobe or of spreading Islamophobia by Islamists and Nawaz’s regressive leftists and reactionaries. A quisling-like collusion reached absurd heights in France, with all concerned accusing a respected Arab novelist and journalist of being an Islamophobe and inciting Islamophobia. The derogative label Islamophobe has become the go-to epithet to put a stop to any discussion that hits too close to home such as what happened in Cologne.

'No! You cannot touch me!': Newly-released footage from the New Year's Eve sex attacks in Cologne show how powerless the vastly-outnumbered police were in handling the out-of-control crowd. New footage from Cologne sex attacks reveals how women screamed at their attackers as police realised they are powerless to stop them. More than 500 women were assaulted or robbed by mobs of migrant men.

Daily Mail, Dec 15, 2016

Angela Merkel says Germany has lost control of the refugee crisis amid public anger over Cologne sex attacks.

The Telegraph Jan 11, 2016

German leaders condemned a “new dimension” of crime after scores of women reported being sexually assaulted as they passed through a group of about 1,000 men during New Year’s Eve celebrations in downtown Cologne.

Associated Press - Jan 5, 2016

Algerian novelist and journalist Kamel Daoud is a winner of the coveted Goncourt prize for a first novel "his Camus-inspired, The Meursault Investigation." The assault on his character began after his thinking-man's assessment of the Cologne sexual aggressions; Cologne - City of Illusion appeared in Le Monde. Following is a portion of the report by Hugh Schofield, BBC News, on what happened next.

On the one hand Daoud deplored the far-right "illusion" which treats all immigrants as potential rapists. But by far the greater part of his anger was directed at the "naive" political left, who in his view deliberately ignore the cultural gulf separating the Arab-Muslim world from Europe.

Thus, according to Daoud, Europe welcomes immigrants with visas and material sustenance - but without addressing what really counts, which is the world of values.

What Cologne showed, says Daoud, is how sex is "the greatest misery in the world of Allah."

"So is the refugee 'savage'? No. But he is different. And giving him papers and a place in a hostel is not enough. It is not just the physical body that needs asylum. It is also the soul that needs to be persuaded to change. This Other (the immigrant) comes from a vast, appalling, painful universe - an Arab-Muslim world full of sexual misery, with its sick relationship towards woman, the human body, desire. Merely taking him in is not a cure."

These were strong words, and the reaction came fast. In an opinion piece also in Le Monde, a collective of intellectuals and academics delivered an excoriating attack on Daoud, whom they accused of "feeding the Islamophobic fantasies of a growing part of the European population."

Daoud, the authors said, had based his argument on a discredited "culturist" analysis. In other words, he made Arab-Muslim culture the determining agent in the behaviour of individuals - turning them into little more than 'zombies'.

"Worse, his call for immigrants to be taught western values was a form of 're-education'. The whole project is scandalous, and not only because of the same old claptrap about the West's mission to civilize and its superior values. More than just the usual colonial paternalism … (Daoud) is effectively saying that the deviant culture of this mass of Muslims is a danger for Europe."

…

For some, Daoud is a hero for speaking unpleasant truths about the culture of North Africa and the Middle East - doubly a hero for saying it not from exile but from his home in Oran.

But for his enemies, Daoud is a self-hating Arab who prefers French culture to Algerian, and whose attacks on religion are part-motivated by his own erstwhile flirtation with Islamism (in the 1980s he was a young militant).

Worse, they say his arguments play into the hands of the anti-immigrants in Europe who can now use them to nurse their own 'illusions'.

Daoud says he has had enough. In an open letter to Shatz (a friend whose criticisms he respects), he denounces the academics and intellectuals who earlier denounced him.

"They do not live in my flesh or in my land, and I find it illegitimate - not to say scandalous - that certain people accuse me of Islamophobia from the safety and comfort of their western cafes."

Cologne is one example of what happens when you accept young men without regard to Daoud’s “soul that needs to be persuaded to change,” Paris is another.

Islam’s “sick relationship towards woman” finds its fullest expression in a revelation about women as fields to be ploughed at the discretion of the ploughman.

2:223 Your women are a tillage for you. So get to your tillage whenever you like. Do good for yourselves, fear Allah and know that you shall meet Him. And give good news to the believers.

This blanket dispensation to do with women what you will, despite the fact that God probably meant married women, undoubtedly influenced the groping of women in Cologne and the rape of girls and young women in Paris.

Samira Bellil wrote about a gang rape phenomenon In the Hell of the Gang Rapes—my translation of Dans l’enfer des tournantes—in primarily Muslim suburbs of Paris. The story is about her, but also about Muslim girls as young as thirteen, who dared to venture outside the home to live like normal Parisian girls and are befriended by young men whose intention is doing to them what they believe is their God-given right.

Rather than come to the aid of their daughters who have been raped, the mothers in Bellil's book defend the rapists. The girls must have deserved it, just like when they are raped and brutalized by their husbands.

There is a reason why a large number of young Muslim women in France choose to make their home their prison. Outside the walls, waiting, are dangerous young men with the Koran on their mind.

The revelation that females are yours to do with what you will may also explain what happened in Rotherham.

Amy was just one of at least 1,400 girls who were groomed and raped over two decades in Rotherham, a grim post-industrial town in northern England. Most of the victims were working-class. They were typically 12 to 14 when they were lured into a life of drugs, alcohol and abuse. Nearly all the abusers were Muslim men of Pakistani origin.

Margaret Wente, The unspeakable truth about Rotherham, Globe and Mail. Sept 4, 2014