Link back to commentA few points in response to David's last post.
Firstly, I have not made a ‘sweeping condemnation of Muslims in the West and the Islamic world’. That is just a lie. I have repeatedly stated that I have no animus toward Muslims, that the majority of them are decent people who just want to get on with their lives, and are entitled to the same rights and civil protections as anyone else.
My problem with Islam is creedal, especially certain aspects of the Islamic religion that do not sit well in a liberal Western society, such as the scriptural mandate to fight to make Islam supreme, the doctrine that women are subordinate and inferior to men, and the principle that all laws and human rights must be subordinate to Sharia, as stipulated in the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam adopted unanimously in 1990 by all 57 Muslim majority states in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.
http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/instree/cairodeclaration.html
On the matter of free speech, for example, the Cairo Declaration states:
‘Everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the Sharia. Everyone shall have the right to advocate what is right, and propagate what is good, and warn against what is wrong and evil according to the norms of Islamic Sharia.’
Sharia, among many other things, prescribes the death penalty for blasphemy and apostasy, a view taken to heart by the throng who flooded the Twitter feed of the British historian Tom Holland when he made a film that questioned the traditional account of Islam’s origins. Your response when I pointed to this? To smear Holland, ignoring the real point which is that his life and that of his family was threatened for expressing a point of view.
I have raised the problems that can arise when such doctrines are actively promulgated by extremist preachers in the West, such as Taj Ed-Din Hilaly, former Mufti of Australia, who said this of ‘immodestly’ dressed women and girls:
‘If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats' or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.’
Hilaly had been preaching appalling things to packed audiences for years before the above statement leaked and led to his resignation, after which he continued to have a large following.
And the vastly worse problems that have arisen in Britain, where they appear to have scores of Sheik Hilalys, as revealed by a Channel 4 documentary based on a twelve month undercover investigation of mosques all over Britain. Wikipedia has a compilation of the truly appalling things being preached to packed audiences at multiple locations. Check it out for yourself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercover_Mosque
I have raised the steady encroachment of Sharia law in Britain, with over eighty Sharia Councils now operating, especially in the area of family law. Check out this article by Sufiya Ahmed, the title of which speaks for itself: 'No one talks about the fact that in sharia courts, British Muslim women have fewer rights than women in Islamic countries'.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/sharia-law-uk-courts-muslim-women-rights-few-compared-islamic-countries-religious-rulings-quran-a8064796.html
I have raised the appalling things that eventuate when ruling elites become so soaked in the ideology of identity politics that they become incapable of responding effectively when practices that should be anathema to any civilized society, such as female genital mutilation, start to proliferate, as in Britain where FGM has gone on unimpeded for decades despite a statute passed in 1985 that supposedly criminalized it with long jail sentences - rendered null and void by a near complete failure to enforce it.
These victims, numbering tens of thousands of young girs, are being shockingly mutilated, with lifelong physical and psychological effects. Yet the ideologues think this should be tolerated, maybe mitigated by some health or educational measures, out of cultural respect. Not for their own daughters, mind you, but hey, that’s their culture.
Hence we see the end result of identity politics - ‘progressives’ defending a lower level of protection for girls in communities ‘of colour’ than afforded to white girls. If the much-bandied term 'systemic racism' means anything at all, it's that - the racism of the anti-racists.
And the failure to tackle dreadful crimes like the sexual slavery gangs, euphemistically termed ‘grooming gangs’, that were allowed to proliferate for decades all over the UK with all the protective arms of the state paralyzed by fear of being labelled ‘racist’, like the Labour MP for Rotherham who stated that as a 'Guardian reading liberal leftie' he shied away from the issue, telling the BBC: 'I think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat if I may put it like that.'
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11059643/Denis-MacShane-I-was-too-much-of-a-liberal-leftie-and-should-have-done-more-to-investigate-child-abuse.html
All issues which you seem incapable of recognizing, let alone addressing. All you have are lies and silly caricatures of my position.
And as for your allegation that I am ignorant of Islamic history, good grief, it is you who betrays ignorance. When you made your spurious and completely unsubstantiated claim that all the pathologies of the modern Islamic world are caused by western meddling in the 19th and 20 centuries, I cited the early history of Islam to demonstrate that the impetus for jihadic conquest has existed from the time of Muhammad.
I cited the historically unprecedented series of conquests that saw, within a century of Muhammad’s death, the emergence of an Islamic empire that stretched from the Pyrenees in the west to the Indus river in the East, followed later by the Ottoman incursions into Europe that stopped at the gates of Vienna, the conquests of India that gave rise to the Mughal empire, and more.
I should add that this history is not merely academic – it is living history, providing inspiration to jihadists who study it deeply and aspire to replicate it today.
Your response? To demand a ‘long list of scholarly articles’ to substantiate it, when none of the factual claims I made is contested by anyone. I asked you which part of my historical summation you dispute, so we could then discuss sources. Your response: nothing, except another demand for a ‘long reading list', until you finally conceded there were no inaccuracies, switching to talking about the 'gloss' I put on it without specifying what you think the gloss is.
Then there is your insulting claim that I have not read any serious history of Islam, which you just made up. Actually, you know that is false: I cited an eminent historian, Efraim Karsh, founding director and emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, London, who wrote a history of Islamic imperialism from the religion’s founding to the present day.
Having actually, contrary to your claim, read a great deal about Islamic and Middle East history over the years, this was the most comprehensive treatment of this topic I have found. So you go looking for hostile reviews, and find some on the Wikipedia page about him, which you cite, without also citing the favourable reviews on the very same page. How scholarly!
What you seem to be completely unaware of is that, all over the Western world, the field of Middle East Studies is riven by ideological disputes, sodden with post-colonial theory, and the peak body in the field in the US, the Middle East Studies Association has in recent times morphed into an activist group.
Things got so bad that some of the most venerable figures in the field, including Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, broke away from MESA to form their own organisation, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa.
https://www.asmeascholars.org/
Then there is the wholesale compromising of the field by a massive influx of Saudi, Gulf, Iranian and Turkish funds into just about all of these centres. I document all this in another post, with references and sources showing how the scope to do genuinely independent research has been seriously undermined. Not much funding to be had for studies of Islamic imperialism, or Islamic slavery. Much safer to go with nice little niche topics, steering well away from any grand historical narratives.
https://blackheathphilosophy.org/entry/home/showarticle/657252?cid=12364
Of all this you obviously have not a clue. Your posts have alternated between priggish academic arrogance and personal smears.
There is an internet meme knows as Godwin’s Law that holds that the longer a web debate goes on the probability that someone will bring up a Nazi analogy approaches certainty, at which point all scope for constructive debate ends.
I think my exchange with you is just about at the Godwin point. A couple of days ago you posted a dialogue from The Great Gatsby about a fictional white supremacist, with the clear imputation that somehow I should be bracketed with such a character. In this post you go one step further and rabbit on about my ‘fascist measures’.
Fascist measures? And you accuse me of having a flattened view of history.