I’m one of those people who find a lot to admire in the writer Nick Cohen. He is a man of the Left but a thoughtful one, not a screamer of empty slogans. His book ‘What’s Left’ was inspirational for me and it diagnosed the moral hollowness that much of the political Left suffers from, especially the Left in the UK. However, I find myself very much in agreement of Ed Kozak’s criticism on Trending Central of the Spectator piece in which Mr Cohen doubts the existence of ‘Islamisation’ as a process.
Mr Kozak said:
“It’s far easier to put “Islamisation of the West” in quotation marks and dismiss it outright than it is to discuss instances of dog poisonings, teachers dropping the Holocaust from curriculums, women and men being segregated at leading British universities, Sharia courts, thousands of forced marriages and honour killings on British soil, and Muslim Brotherhood-linked organisations throughout the West presented as the ‘moderate face of Islam’, and prove that they aren’t part of a wider pattern of Islamisation.
Then there’s the accusation of racism. Of course one has to read between the lines to find said racism: “the racism in these circumstances does not lie in what the Right says but what it leaves out.” Cohen continues, “if you watch Silent Conquest you see dozens of white westerners… the film, like the dismal ideology it represents, cannot acknowledge that the main target of radical Muslims are liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims – not just in Iran but in the West too.”
Cohen’s assertion is that those of us in the ‘Islamisation of the West’ crowd purposely ignore the suffering of liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims in order to sustain our “gratifyingly horrific story of a white West under attacks from dark barbarians.”
It is practically an exercise in tautology to state that extremists’ own communities are the first to be threatened by said extremists. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the question of whether or not radical Muslims are in fact trying to Islamise Europe and the rest of the West. Mr. Cohen’s arguments reek of an ideological faith in liberalism and moral relativism. He talks about the “Muslims [radical Islam] claims to own” as if absent the existence of militant Islamist movements, these Muslims would overnight become good little liberal denizens of the West. The same Muslims who overwhelmingly support special privileges for their own communities, who attend Sharia courts, who subscribe to vile conspiracy theories about Israel, who across Europe are effectively using their PC ‘right’ to be offended to call for state-sponsored anti-Semitism, who believe, just as their more politically-vocal brethren do, that the Ummah will one day cover the entire world.”
Please read the rest of Ed Kozak’s article over at Trending Central
http://www.trendingcentral.com/islamisation-west-real-despite-lefties-might-tell/