In contrast to modern American conservatism which is a movement based on an idea, modern liberalism appears more a coalition based on a series of grievances. We on the right strive to promote policies which promote freedom at home and abroad. Those on the left seek to promote policies which punish (or otherwise constrain) the “oppressors,” be they corporations, Western militaries or white men in general, particularly those of the heterosexual Christian sort.
The dilemma for the left comes when elements of their coalition of the oppressed come into conflict. In the British publication, the Standpoint, Peter Whittle offers a hypothetical about a gay man teaching “in a state school in an area with a large Muslim population“:
It throws into sharp relief the dilemma which has petrified the Left and its fellow-travellers within the social, educational and cultural establishment. When two parts of your worldview collide, when your traditional support for gay rights conflicts with your staunch and uncritical support of ethnic minority cultures, what do you do? Relativism has tied your hands. You conjure the possible intellectual somersaults you could perform to justify your reasoning. And then you stay silent.
This silence, Whittle writes,
. . .ignores the widespread intolerance of homosexuality throughout the Muslim communities, which in Britain are growing up to ten times the rate of the rest. This community can only increase in power and predominance, especially when faced with a weak, vacillating establishment which will do anything to avoid making a scene, let along stand up for Western liberal values.
And it seems that for many gays on the left, those “liberal values” only kick in when the oppressor is not an approved “victim” group as, to many, Muslim groups have become:
Gays are pretty sensitive when it comes to detecting possible future persecution, which makes the relative silence about Islam — whether from denial or simple ignorance — all the more worrying. I’ve certainly found, when bringing up the subject on my travels around gay London, that one is usually met with the response: “Ah, well: it’s those Christian fundamentalists that worry me.”
Always those nasty Christians. They’re the bad ones. Well, Frank Rich notwithstanding, it’s not Christian fundamentalists who are beating up gay people in Europe’s streets. And because European Muslims are part of the coalition of the oppressed, all too many left-wing gays refrain from criticizing them. As our pal Bruce Bawer observes:
Solidarity proscribes criticism. Never mind that these ‘allies’ preach that gays should be executed. Under the reigning PC mentality, the only way in which most gays can bring themselves to criticise Islam is to do so as part of a blanket rejection of all religion.
Read the whole thing. H/t: Reader Leah.
The Left sees Muslims not as a religious group but as a non-white race and therefore grants all the privileges to Islam that it would give to Blacks. In the hierarchy of progressivism, race trumps all other considerations (as long as the person of color is not a conservative and therefore a traitor). Gays and women will continue to be thrown under the bus because of this rule. No surprise.
Other than Sir Ian, Sir Derrick and a few Tory and Laborite MPs, are there even gay activists in Europe these days?
This coalition of lefty grievance mongers can’t possibly hold over the long term. Gays are just one of the many victim groups that are going to have problems knuckling under to Muslim demands. How are all those feminists going to stomach being forced to wear a burka? How will secularists deal with sharia law being instituted for whole parts of Europe? How will all those liberal Jews deal with the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic attacks that flow out of the Muslim community?
Bottom line is that as the Muslim community gets larger and gains more influence in Europe (and more importantly gains confidence in the knowledge that their community can dominate the culture of Europe) liberals will either have to make a stand or flee to America. It will be interesting to watch.
1.The Left sees Muslims not as a religious group but as a non-white race and therefore grants all the privileges to Islam that it would give to Blacks.
EssEm, I’m not so sure that’s the reason. In fact, one of the criticisms of the left is the use of the label “Uncle Tom” when a black person is conservative.
Anyway, I am not sure why Muslims get a pass for things that others groups of persons do not get a pass for. Not to beat an already beaten horse, perhaps there is a relationship between the silence we see in Europe, and the double standard that Comedy Central and others regarding censorship of South Park. I can’t see any possible standard or reasoning that a depiction of Mohammed as a teddy bear is in any way as offensive as a statue of Virgin Mary bleeding from her a$$. Yet one episode is censored, and the other is shown in full.
So it is no surprise that we see criticism of just about any person or group of persons that is anti-gay, but silence when it is anti-gay bigotry from Muslims.
I know the left gets hit with such inconsistency, and I’m not sure why that is. Further, most people I know, gay or straight, liberal or conservative, do not give Muslims a pass on any issue, including anti-gay bigotry. But that’s only my circle.
Peter Whittle was a man of the left himself, maybe not so much anymore.
As for gay activists in Europe, what for? They have won the political battles, all the laws on the books in Europe protect them, they have marriage or civil unions in most of Western Europe. Europeans aren’t known fight for the plights of others, unless it’s the Palestinians – and that has more to do with the deep rooted antisemitsm of Europe than any love for those arabs.
Nowadays the gays in Europe are trying to figure out how to live their lives without upsetting their muslim neighbors, or even their homophobic European ones – laws on the books do not make a more tolerant society.
The last thing they will ever do is take a stand against the muslim invaders.
Meanwhile, an old time Laborite complains to Gordon Brown about immigrants from Eastern Europe and she is labeled a bigot. PC speech has shut down any chance of any kind of real dialog in Europe.
One piece of evidence: When leftists attack the critics of Islamism as “racists”. Happens more often than you’d think; never mind the dementia involved in believing that Islam is a race.
On occasion, the double standard emerges from folks on the center and the Right. I suspect that with center/right folks, a “don’t say anything that could provoke the Islamists!” mentality is more at work, i.e. self-censorship out of fear. Although they may try to dress it up as some kind of superior moral sensitivity, the dress is usually see-through.
“Coalition of the Oppressed” I loooove that! New slogan for the Democrat party
AE, I got that expression from David Horowitz (or maybe it was the great Tammy Bruce).
perhaps there is a relationship between the silence we see in Europe, and the double standard that Comedy Central and others regarding censorship of South Park.
There has been a lot of arab money and influence flowing to those in high places for the past several decades. Europe has become anti-American, anti-western, anti-Christian, and even more so anti-semitic. It is not by accident. See ‘Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis’ by Bat Ye’or.
European Communities (EC) came up with and implemented the EAD (Euro-Arab Dialogue) as a global alternative to American power and enhancing Euro ‘integration’ anchored in anti-Israeli policy. Euros fulfulling their part by ‘a climate of opinion’ favorable to Arabs.
The left would sell their grannies for less than you think, nevermind some gay person or Heaven forbid, a woman. (I truly believe the left despises women as much as islam does).
We’ve seen what happens when these two groups clash back when “Red” Ken Livingstone was Mayor of London.
There were yearly demonstrations against involvement in Afghanistan/Iraq.
The first time the gay anti-war group marched they were set upon by Muslim marchers, beaten and threatened with death.
So….
Before the next annual march the gay coalition went to Livingstone.
They asked to be protected in the march.
The Muslim groups countered to Livingstone that they would kill gays if they marched. (Marching for PEACE, ironically enough.)
“Red” Ken took his time and finally decided.
He ordered the gays to stay away from the march.
And that’s what will continue to happen as Islam makes its move on Europe.
This thread began with an excellent observation by EssEm:
which was nicely backed up by ILC:
Yet Pat had doubts:
Of course, for leftists, any black person who disagrees with them is an inauthentic black and so his blackness doesn’t count. (The same goes for other minorities.) This answers Pat’s doubt, I think.
Still, Pat may have a point. Islam gets a pass from leftists not because of the race of most of its adherents, but because it is a non-European belief system. Whittle mentions this directly in his piece. Referring to Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept, he writes,
This explains everything here. (And a great deal of other leftist behavior as well.) In criticizing Christianity, leftists are attacking a European religion. Attacking an Asian religion like Islam, however, is out of the question. That would make them like the evil imperialist aggressors they so hate. And so:
Leftist logic is a beautiful thing, no?
The dhimmitude of the American Left is on its way to being as bad as that of their European comrades.
A leftist friend of mine has, of late, been spouting some of the vilest anti-semitic nonsense I have ever heard. Having been away from the “progressive” media for awhile (for the sake of my mental health), I was unaware of where she might be getting this stuff. She told me, “on good authority,” that ALL the Jews stayed home on 9/11 so they wouldn’t be attacked.
“Aren’t you ashamed to be repeating this stuff?” I asked her. She made it pretty clear that this rumor is making the rounds with her little leftist friends.
Last night, she treated me to a delightful diatribe about the horrible bigot Gestapo here (we live in Arizona) who will be terrorizing “ALL” immigrants now that the immigration bill has been passed. I asked her if she’d even bothered to read it.
Would anybody be terribly surprised that she said no?
Well that last story was nonsense. But I do agree with most of the posts on this article. There is a tendency on the left to reduce, for example, the palestinian/Israeli situation to “brown people being oppressed.” The problem is that in reality, Islam is not a race or a natural ethnicity. It is a religion. A (technically) voluntary and dangerously extremist ideology. It is in obvious conflict with the notion of liberalism – It is religious, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-sex, antisemitic, anti-free speech. Yet for the most part, the left, here in Europe, are aligning themselves with support for Islam. I don’t get it! There are sharia courts in the UK now for goodness sake! Just for the sake of multiculturalism!? Give me a break. If Islam was a political party, they would be driven out of the country. I can see that it is just as bad in the U.S. I agreed with Glenn Beck when he complained that despite gay protestors going after the mormon churches (and now Obama) when ahmadinejad visited the UN in New York, there was no sign of protestors.
Islam gets a pass from leftists not because of the race of most of its adherents, but because it is a non-European belief system.
CLD, I somewhat agree. I think it has more to do with that, regardless of whether someone thinks as Islam as a race.
On the other hand, it obviously is not universal. As I said, almost all of the liberals I know do not give Islam a pass. Also, I remember that there were plenty of protests by liberals before and during the Beijing Olympics. So I think there is something more that’s going on with Islam that they get a free pass from many on the left.
We are at war with Islamic nations. Not with all of Islam (before some troll tries to twist this) but certainly with countries that are predominantly Islamic.
This is like the Left’s fascination with all things Southeast Asian during the Vietnam War. If they are in any sense related to America’s enemies in wartime — culturally or religiously — then the Leftists are their friends.
Dhimmitude is related to every other form of fashionable disloyalty to this country. We are ALWAYS the oppressors, and whomever we fight against is ALWAYS the oppressed and innocent victim.