What the Western Secular Left Knows About Islam

Obama gave a speech at the UN today and, as he takes great pains to do, repeated the progressive mantra that Islam is peaceful, and Muslims are peaceful, the massive amount of global violence committed by Mohammadans is some weird aberration committed by Muslims who apparently don’t know what it means to be Muslim.

The ideology of ISIL or al Qaeda or Boko Haram will wilt and die if it is consistently exposed, confronted, and refuted in the light of day. Look at the new Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies – Sheikh bin Bayyah described its purpose: “We must declare war on war, so the outcome will be peace upon peace.”

That latter quote seems to come from a Saudi Sheikh who issued a fatwa calling for the deaths of Jews and American soldiers, but putting that aside…

First thing, understand that the intended audience for the Great Islamic Scholar Barack Obama’s lecture was not the Mohammedan terrorists who… oh, by the way… sawed off another infidel’s head today. His words about the peaceful peacefulness that is Islam weren’t directed at the millions of Mohammedan terrorists around the world; and for that matter, neither were George W. Bush’s similar assurances. No, his words were intended to be heard by the bitter clingers in flyover country who might get “war fever” and start dragging every brown person with a foreign-sounding name behind their pick-up trucks. Because in Obama’s mind, that’s what every sister-lovin’ redneck hick in the mid-country (which is everybody outside NYC, DC, and San Francisco to these people) would do if not constantly warned not to by their social superiors.

But apart from that, imagine if Obama were instead pontificating about other religions. What if he said, “Roman Catholicism is a religion of choice, and real Roman Catholics reject the notion that the Pope is infallible and they support abortion.” What if he said, “Every real Jew knows the Orthodox Jews are a fanatical fringe and reject their literal obedience to the Talmud.” People might question his qualifications to make such judgments about religions.

When it comes to religion, the progressive left has two thoughts. 1. All religions are pretty much equal, but Christianity is less equal and 2. All religions are bullsh-t. And the progressive mind can’t move outside that box, and can’t conceive of Islam being other than what progressivism thinks Islam should be; another bullsh-t religion just with browner people and different food. A progressive cannot ask the question “Is there something about Islam that makes it more violent and oppressive than other religions?” This question cannot be asked on the left. It doesn’t compute. It’s like asking a normal person “What does purple smell like?”

The answer to the question about whether Islam is inherently violent and oppressive is actually quite important. I don’t know what the answer is, but I know that formulating an effective, long-term answer to the problem of Mohammedan terrorism depends on answering it correctly. Choosing an answer just because it suits our prejudices is not only intellectually dishonest, it could be fatal.