Name It: Islamism!
"The administration has lapsed into unselfconscious ridiculousness. Asked why the administration won't say [after the Paris attacks] we are at war with radical Islam, [Josh] Earnest [White House spokesman] on Tuesday explained the administration's first concern 'is accuracy. We want to describe exactly what happened. These are individuals who carried out an act of terrorism and they later tried to justify that act of terrorism by invoking the religion of Islam and their own deviant view of it'."
Rich Lowry, essay, Politico
Political correctness uber alles. Stepping delicately on shards of glass. Muslims are well known to be easily offended. Muslim offence takes fairly violent overtures. What other religion in the world urges its faithful from the Friday pulpit to prove their faith by violent protests, threats and destructive rampages, after all? The issuing of fatwas, the exhortations by clerics for the stalwarts of the faith to fully demonstrate the level of their commitment to Islam by terroristic devices.
On the other hand, there's the political, diplomatic dimension of it all. Civilized societies and their representatives do not set out to offend. Civilized societies make an effort to accommodate, to demonstrate their willingness to tread lightly, not to have any undue expectations that other societies, particularly those under the rigid sway of theism must have the same values as democracies do. If such societies value violence as an expression of their faith, it must be respected.
Respect is due as well to those societies whose laws commit blasphemers or converts to other religions to death by beheading. As well as those societies who demand that their women be completely subservient to the males among whom they live; that said women be entirely covered in stifling black robes revealing eyes only; women to be quiescent, demure, enslaved. Societies for whom education in the Koran is sufficient unto the day.
Societies that react when perceiving slights by finding great joy in the news that those of the faith defending that faith have perpetrated mass murder on innocents. So to criticize those societies is tantamount to deliberately antagonizing them to greater heights of carnage, and the fault lies not with the religious zealots who equate faith with violent expression and repression, but the critics who fault their lack of reason and emotional destruction.
Muslim immigrants in Europe to whose countries they have migrated to escape the injustice, oppression and conflict that rages throughout the worlds of their ancestral homelands become restive and dissatisfied with the freedoms they become privy to, when those freedoms are inclusive of freedoms of thought, of expression, of ideology and religion while they remain rigidly wedded to the religious strictures they sought escape from.
Because their imams and mullahs and Islamist intellectuals teach them that it is forbidden to integrate into the secularized culture of which they have taken advantage for its freedoms, they remain separate and apart, and resentful, then begin clamouring for the 'freedom' to remove freedoms from the culture that accepted their presence. The 'freedom' to transform the indigenous culture and its values toward one reflecting their religion's all-encompassing laws is heralded as their right.
But heaven forfend that Western democracies that have absorbed more than their share of Muslims -- and now find themselves trying to balance their moderation with the stringent compulsion of religious purism in Islam which demands that its faithful continue to convince non-Muslims that Islam is the only way to god, and that jihad is the responsibility of all Muslims of inner faith, leading to violently frightening upheaval -- make fussy protests.
So, although the world wherever Islam exists is in a constant state of bloody massacres and social transgressions, one must never succumb to the temptation to point out that Islam's faithful represent the world's leading cause of blood-letting and the terrorizing of both Muslims and non-Muslims. To do so would be to break faith with the tolerance of the West and liberal democracies.
No one, after all, wants to be labelled an Islamophobe practising the dreaded Islamophobia. Those, for example, who are willing to name Islamism for what it is: fascist totalitarianism.
"[The] honour corps that tries to silence debate on extremist ideology in order to protect the image of Islam. [It] throws the label of 'Islamophobe' on pundits, journalists and others who dare to talk about extremist ideology in the religion."
"...The official and unofficial channels work in tandem, harassing, threatening and battling introspective Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere."
"...The bullying often works to silence critics of Islamic extremist."
"...They cause governments, writers and experts to walk on eggshells."
Asra Q. Nomani, The Washington Post
Labels: Aggression, Democracy, Islam, Islamism, Threats, United States, Violence
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, January 24, 2015
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