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Islam and the Left: an unholy alliance

Leftists are no longer proponents of atheism or secularism, as long as the religion concerned is Islam. From 'postcolonial feminists' to French municipalities, the Muslim faith has found favour in left-wing circles.

Published: January 5, 2019, 4:03 pm

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    Many people have already commented on the sympathy that Leftists all over the Western world feel for immigrants generally, and Muslim immigrants in particular. In the USA, the Democratic Party has become the preferred home of Muslims, with the Washington Post last year referring to The blue Muslim wave of candidates in that organisation. In Western Europe, socialist parties too have become enamoured of Muslim voters, continuing a Leftist tradition that may be traced back to Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia.

    Lenin famously said: “The socialist revolution will not be solely or chiefly a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians in each country against its bourgeoisie – no, it will be a struggle of all colonies and countries oppressed by imperialism, of all dependent countries, against international imperialism.”

    If one substituted “international imperialism” with “the West” or the more modish term “whiteness” in our time, it would sound as contemporary as any of the politically correct, multicultural clichés of today regularly uttered by left-wing politicians and commentators alike.

    Until a generation ago, most Leftists considered themselves atheists. They were against prayer at school and tended to promote secularism. Historically, left-wing movements may be traced back to the European Enlightenment and its egalitarian thinkers who were critical of both the aristocracy and the clergy.

    In France, which played such a large role in dismantling the power of the Church and where aristocrats were gruesomely guillotined, the notion of a secular country has become something of a dogma. Since 9 December 1905 when the famous French law on separation of church and state was passed under the left-wing government of Émile Combes, it has been forbidden for the French state to subsidise or promote any religion. Article 2 of that law states: “The Republic does not recognize, pay, or subsidize any religious sect. Accordingly, from 1 January following the enactment of this law, there will be removed from state budgets, departments and municipalities, all expenses related to the exercise of religion.”

    However, the secularism of the French state is primarily directed against Christianity. When it comes to the promotion of Islam, French Socialists have tried to circumvent the 1905 law by donating or making land available to Muslims at very low 99-year lease rates. Also, they have allowed Muslim states such as Algeria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Koweit and Turkey to finance the construction of huge mosques in France. In this way, the number of “places of Muslim worship”, which includes prayer halls, in France have grown from 1600 in 2004 to about 2500 now.

    Another way in which French municipalities are circumventing the law on French secularism is by giving financial guarantees to Muslim religious organisations who would then borrow money from French banks.

    The German government under Angela Merkel has, of course, done its utmost to import Muslim immigrants and even produced propaganda films glorifying Muslims for “being decent and law-abiding” while stigmatising Westerners and presumably Christians as “criminals”. One of these propaganda films came to light recently when the two young Scandinavian women were beheaded in Moroccco by radical Muslims.

    Earlier this year, a polemic took place between Angela Merkel and her interior minister Horst Seehofer of the Bavarian CSU after he had said Germans “must not give up [their] country-specific traditions and customs out of a false sense of consideration for other cultures… Muslims must live with us, not alongside or against us.”

    Merkel publicly rejected Seehofer’s statement, saying that “Muslims also belong to Germany, as does their religtion, Islam. We must do everything to ensure that religions successfully coexist.”

    Criticism of Islam or Muslims in the West is usually countered with the term “Islamophobic”. Leftists have mostly contempt for Western histories and traditions, and Christianity may be ridiculed and insulted, but anything besides sacred respect for Mohammedanism is deemed “Islamophobic”.

    At first glance, the position of women in Muslim society flies in the face of modern feminism which, among Leftists, is also de rigueur. Women should behave as men and compete with them in all fields, although as Canadian Jordan B Peterson recently tweeted, men are still overrepresented in all the most dangerous professions.

    Whereas a feminist would scream blue murder if a man had to open a car door for a woman or allow her to pass first through a door, as traditional manners suggest, she will not pronounce on the treatment of women in Muslim marriages, including, including polygamous or even child marriages.

    In a sense, the citadels of Western Leftism were the first “cities” to fall to the Third World invasion, long before Malmö, Molenbeek or Seine-Saint-Denis. Already in 1991, an Irish feminist who apparently belongs to the “postcolonial” school of feminism published an article in which she foresaw that Western Marxist feminists would henceforth have to listen and kow-tow to their non-Western, Afro-Arab “sisters”. Her piece was entitled “Third World Women and the Inadequacies of Western Feminism”. As long as Muslim women oppose or even terrorise the West, they are “true feminists”, she seems to argue. She writes:

    “Many young Muslim women choose to wear the chador, their traditional dress, to resist western sex stereotyping. Indeed El Sadaawi informs us that Algerian women, during their revolution, used the chador to hide weapons, to carry guns, i.e. they used a manifestation of patriarchy for revolutionary purposes.” (Trócaire Development Review, 1991: 52)

    The person usually credited with coining the term “postcolonial” is the Arab or Palestinian intellectual, Edward Saïd, who spent most of his life in the United States, surrounded by the delights of the oppressive Western culture he denounced in his books.

    At first Islamists and Leftists found common ground according to the principle, “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, their common enemy being Western conservatives, Christians, and the like. Increasingly, however, it would appear that Islam and the Left share a common rejection, not only of Christianity, but also of the European Enlightenment and what we used to think of as rational thought.

    Saïd’s term “postcolonial” is in fact just a euphemism for a “return to the origin”, a return to pre-modern customs and a kind of Islamicized Dark Age not too different to some of the excesses of the European Middle Ages, such as the Spanish Inquisition, for example.

    In a certain sense, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital has indeed been replaced by the Koran. In her lifetime Mrs. Angela Merkel went from being an enthusiastic member of the Communist Youth movement in the GDR to being an apologist for Islam and especially those of its principles that are not compatible with modern Western societies.

    The ideological divide that has fuelled political conflicts in the West, at least since the French Revolution, is no more. The conflict has become one between civilisations, and the Left has sided with those seeking to end the post-Enlightenment West as we know it.

    dan.roodt@app-6271a6d1c1ac18bb0c1965d2.closte.com

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