There’s an excellent article over at the centre-Left Harry’s Place site all about the love affair between Leftists and Islamists. The article also includes criticism on how the Left has married critical race theory rhetoric with political Islam.
However what caught my eye and forms the basis of today’s ‘Quote of the Day’ is from a below the line commentator by the name of Miles Meagre. This poster, discussing how muscular atheists like Richard Dawkins shy away from criticising Islam and from stating his view on the Shamima Begum affair said:
“……The deafening silence that falls over the western elites after one Islamist atrocity after another, is signal of the depth of sheer cowardice to face up to an existential threat to the west’s foundational culture. We are being herded by a fanatic cadre installed inside our own countries, unchallenged in any aspect of its repulsive ideology whatsoever. I don’t blame Prof. Dawkins from feeling he needs to fear Islam; he could be knifed as easily as the rest of us – author or shoppers on a London street or revellers in Paris or Nice, makes no difference.
No, what grates is the absolute cowardice that comes into play as soon as the liberal fashionable intelligence – so keen to demonstrate at other times its courage in the face of the open and plural society’s falling short of their radicalism, in the unspoken understanding such actions will result in near zero risk to them and their causes and certainly never of the kind that befell Mr Rushdie – when it has the opportunity to observe close up what real radicals who deal not in ‘messy’© debate but direct action in its fullest sense. The real victory over the smugorcracy is that they censor themselves without being requested to do so.
Spot on there Mr Meagre.
The West should have defended its liberalism and done so with the sort of muscularity that has been absent from Western political discourse since the original Rushdie Affair. Maybe, as one BTL commenter on the Harry’s Place piece suggested, we would not be in the sort of dire position where academics self censor criticism of the ideology of Islam, if Western media had published every rude Mohammed cartoon available and had expelled ten Islamic hate preachers for every author or artist attacked by Islamic extremists? That might have been the way to defend classical liberalism but this is not what happened. Instead what Mr Meagre called the ‘smugocracy’ self censored at first in order to avoid giving offence, but later did so for self preservation.
