Category: Islamism

Pakistani Humanist Denied UK Asylum . . .

. . . after failing to identify Plato! Holy Guacamole! (HT: Karl White)

A Pakistani man who renounced his Muslim faith and became a humanist has had his application for asylum in the UK rejected after failing to correctly answer questions about ancient Greek philosophers.

The Home Office said Hamza bin Walayat’s failure to identify Plato and Aristotle as humanist philosophers indicated his knowledge of humanism was “rudimentary at best”.

This is very strange in several ways. For one thing, how could anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the divine Plato call him a humanist? Later in the piece we get a definition that is on the right track:

In a letter in support of Walayat’s asylum application, Bob Churchill, of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, said: “For many, the broad descriptive ‘humanist’ is just a softer way of saying atheist, especially if you come from a place where identifying as atheist may be regarded as a deeply offensive statement.”

My astute readers don't need it explained to them why Plato is not a humanist by this definition.

Perhaps the Pakistani man should be given asylum. But there is a far more important, an 'existential,' issue:

If the Brits had any sense they would curtail the influx of Muslims into their homeland, at least for the time being, until the Muslim world reforms itself.  (This assumes that Brits still care about their wonderful culture which is parent to our American culture.) Far too many Muslims, not having gone through the Enlightenment, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, retain their backward fanaticism, a fanaticism and 'true belief' that makes them extremely dangerous to civilized and skeptical and sometimes decadent Brits who are prone to doubt and therefore not inclined to defend their superior culture.  As we read:

Apostates are subject to discrimination, persecution and violence in Pakistan. In March last year, a student who had stated he was a humanist on his Facebook page was murdered at his university. 

Blasphemy is punishable by death under Pakistani law. In August, 24 British politicians wrote to the Pakistani government urging it to repeal its draconian blasphemy law, which has been used against religious minorities and humanists.

Immigrants bring their culture with them. If those with antithetical values are allowed to immigrate in huge numbers they will not assimilate, even if a few of them are willing and able to assimilate.  And then the Brits will have in their midst subversive elements who believe the evil nonsense described in the quotation immediately preceding. Eventually, the invaders will take over the host country.

Now how stupid is that?  No comity without commonality. Do the U. K. and Europe have a death wish?

Think about it. You have a superior culture that allows itself to be destroyed by an inferior culture that exploits features of the superior culture that make it superior. I am thinking of such classically liberal Western values as tolerance, religious liberty (which includes the liberty to be irreligious), and free speech. 

We must not allow our virtues to vitiate us. For then our virtues become vices. The values mentioned have limits. For example, does religious toleration extend to a religion which is also, and indissolubly, a destructive political ideology antithetical to Western values?

This is a crucial question, but have you ever heard anyone raise it? Now you have.

The Lapse of Laïcité: Cause and Effect

Alain Finkielkraut:

Laicity is the solution that modern Europe found in order to escape its religious civil wars. But contemporary Europe doesn’t take religion seriously enough to know how to stick to this solution. She has exiled faith to the fantastic world of human irreality that the Marxists called “superstructure”… thus, precisely through their failure to believe in religion, the representatives of secularism empty laicity of its substance, and swallow, for humanitarian reasons, the demands of its enemies.

I haven't read anything by Finkielkraut except the above and a few other excerpts translated and edited by Ann Sterzinger.  But that won't stop me from explaining what I take to be the  brilliant insight embedded in the above quotation.  

Laicity is French secularity, the absence of religious influence and involvement in government affairs.  It has had the salutary effect of preventing civil strife over religion.  But to appreciate why laicity is important and salutary one must understand that the roots of religion lie deep in human nature.  Religion is even less likely to "wither away" (V. I. Lenin) than the State. Leftists, however, are constitutionally  incapable of understanding that man by nature is homo religiosus and that  the roots of religion in human nature are ineradicable. 

The Radicals don't understand the radicality (deep-going rootedness) of religion. (Radix is Latin for 'root.')  In their superficial way, leftists think that religion is merely "the sigh of the oppressed creature" (Marx) and will vanish when the oppression of man by man is eliminated, which of course will never happen by human effort alone, though they fancy that they can bring it about if only they throw enough people into enough gulags.  Leftists cannot take religion seriously and they don't think anyone else really takes it seriously either, not even Muslims.  They don't believe that most Muslims really do believe in Allah and the divine origin of the Koran and the 72 black-eyed virgins and the obligation to make jihad.  They project their failure to understand religion and its grip into others.  See my Does Anyone Really Believe in the Muslim Paradise in which I report on the Sam Harris vs. Scott Atran debate.

The issue at present is not whether religion is true but whether it answers to deep human needs that cannot be met in any other way.  My point is not that leftists think that religion is false or delusional, although they do think it to be such; my point  that they don't appreciate the depth of the religious need even if it is a need that, in the nature of things, cannot be met.

Not understanding religion, leftists fail to understand how important laicity is to prevent civil strife over religion.  And so they don't properly uphold it. They cave in to the Muslims who reject it.  Why don't they understand the dire existential threat that radical Islam poses to European culture?  I suspect that it is because they think that Muslims don't really believe in all their official claptrap and what Muslims really want are mundane things such as jobs and material security and panem et circenses. They cherish the foolish leftist belief that 'deep down' we are all the same and that Muslims want the same things that decadent Europeans want.

In nuce:  leftists, who are resolutely secular, fail to uphold the secularity that they must uphold if they are to preserve their loose and libertine way of life, and they fail to uphold it  by failing to understand the dangers of religion, dangers they do not understand because they fail to take religion seriously and to appreciate the deep roots it has in human nature.  Here is an even pithier formulation:

Leftists, whose shallow heads cannot grasp religion, are in danger of losing their heads to radical jihadi.  This is cause and effect of the lapse of laicity.

Two quibbles with Finkielkraut.  

First, it is not that leftists "do not believe in religion," but that they do not believe that religion is a powerful and ineradicable force in human affairs.  You don't have to believe in religion to believe facts about it. 

Second, if I remember my Marx, the superstructure (Ueberbau), though a repository of fantastic ideas devoid of truth such as religious ideas and the ideas of bourgeois law and morality, also contains all ideology and therefore the 'liberating' Marxist ideology as well.  It too is a reflection of the Unterbau, the social base and the means of production.  So not everything  in the superstructure is "fantastic," as Finkelkraut implies above.  This Marxian notion that all is ideology leads to relativism, but that's not my problem.

Related:  Alain Finkielkraut vs. the End of Civility

Islam in the Public Square

William Kilpatrick:

. . . Islam is now well on its way to controlling the public square in parts of Europe. And, were it not for the election of Donald Trump and the defeat of the Muslim Brotherhood-friendly Clinton machine, the U.S. would now be playing catch-up.

As has often been observed, Islam is a political religion. Some, like Dutch MP Geert Wilders, contend that it is almost totally political with only a thin and deceptive veneer of religiosity. Whatever the exact proportion of politics to religion, it’s hard to deny that the political dimension looms large in Islam. Muhammad, after all, was a warlord. He conquered all of Arabia, and within a relatively short time after his death, his followers conquered an area larger than the Roman Empire. Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi, one of the most important twentieth-century Islamic theorists, wrote that “Islam requires the earth—not just a portion, but the whole planet.”

In 1949, sociologist Jules Monnerot described Communism as 20th century Islam.  To which I add:  Islam is the Communism of the 21st century. Like Communism, it is totalitarian, with tentacles reaching into every aspect of life. And like Communism, it is internationalist in its aspiration and projected reach.

Some say that Islam is a political ideology masquerading as a religion. That appears to be the view of Geert Wilders mentioned above. I don't go that far. Nor can it be dismissed as a Christian heresy. I view Islam as a hybrid ideology in which religion and political ideology are combined. As such, it ought not be tolerated in the West, and not just because of its vicious hostility to Christianity and other genuine religions of peace, but because it includes no provision for mosque-state separation.

Is a reformed Islam possible, one that is respectful of American values and principles? The moderate Muslim Zuhdi Jasser thinks so, but he is in a tiny minority.  Maybe someday Islam will join the civilized world. Until then a moratorium on Muslim immigration is a wise course.  

The Leftist-Islamist Axis of Evil and Divine Sovereignty

James S. writes,

Your point about the twin threats coming from the Left and from Islam reminded me of an email I received from Fr. Schall some months ago when I shared a draft of the Syllabus with him.  He made the same point, as both the Left and Islam are voluntarist systems where will is exalted over reason.  He called the parallel between them the main issue of our time.  Many of the points in the Syllabus were paraphrases of an earlier Schall essay on voluntarism. 

Fr. Schall is right. But the issue may be a bit more complicated than the good father appreciates. As I say in Pope Benedict's Regensburg Speech and Muslim Insensitivity:

Benedict is not denigrating Islam or its prophet but setting forth a theological problem, one that arises within Christianity itself, namely the problem of the tension between the intellectualism of Augustine and Aquinas and the voluntarism of Duns Scotus. "Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?" Roughly, does the transcendence of God — which both Christianity and Islam affirm though in different ways — imply that God is beyond our categories, including that of rationality?

Perhaps a better way to put the question would be in terms of divine sovereignty. Is God absolutely sovereign and thus unlimited in knowledge and power? Or are there logical and non-logical limits on his knowledge and power?  For example, is a law of logic such as Non-Contradiction within God's power? In his 2012 Creation and the Sovereignty of God, Hugh McCann argues that God is not only sovereign over the natural order, but also over the moral order, the conceptual/abstract order, and the divine nature itself. That seems to give the palm to voluntarism, does it not?

I consider McCann's view to be highly problematic as I argue in my long discussion article, "Hugh McCann on the Implications of Divine Sovereignty," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 1 (Winter 2014), pp. 149-161. 

Related: Muslim Atrocities Against Christians and their Churches 

Time is Not on Europe’s Side

Another warning from William Kilpatrick.  Excerpt:

The Importance of Will

Just as conversions can accelerate after a tipping point has been reached, so can emigration. But there’s also a third factor that seems to have been left out of the Pew Center’s calculations. It’s difficult to measure, but it may be the prime factor in determining which culture predominates in Europe. The crucial factor is will. If they want their culture to survive, people must be willing to defend it, and they must be willing to bring children into the world who will carry on the culture.

You can call it “will,” or “cultural confidence,” or “fighting spirit,” but whatever you call it, Europeans seem to be losing it. The problem begins in school. As Melanie Phillips noted eleven years ago in Londonistan:

The British education system simply ceased transmitting either the values or the story of the nation to successive generations, delivering instead the message that truth was an illusion and that the nation and its values were whatever anyone wanted them to be.

It's probably too late for Europe and the UK.  But we still have a little  time, and with Trump in the saddle, a fighting chance.  Hillary, you will recall, refused even to name the threat.

If Islam is a Religion of Peace . . .

. . . why is it a provocation to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel? Here is how another penetrating article by William Kilpatrick ends:

So on the one hand, Muslim believers are ready to commit mayhem over an academic talk or the moving of an embassy, and on the other hand, Christians remain peaceful even though their brethren are being slaughtered and burned alive. How much longer, one wonders, will Church leaders collaborate in the false assertion that Islam and Christianity are equally peaceful faiths?

Religious and secular leaders are caught in a flagrant contradiction. They tell us that Islam is a religion of peace and justice, yet they warn us not to provoke its followers in any way. Don’t recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Don’t draw cartoons that might offend Muslims. Don’t wear religious symbols that might provoke them. Cover your women and your statutes. Don’t ring church bells in the vicinity of Muslims. Don’t criticize them for persecuting Christians because, as Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University told Pope Francis, such criticism is a “red line” that must not be crossed.

“Just stay quiet and you’ll be okay.” That’s what Mohamed Atta told the passengers on American Airlines flight 11 shortly before it flew into the World Trade Center. It wasn’t good advice then. And it’s not good advice now. As Islam expands its global reach, it’s becoming increasingly evident that the “don’t-do-anything-to-provoke-them” policy isn’t working, and never will. 

Why Don’t Catholics Fight Back?

William Kilpatrick:

The chief reason is that Catholics are receiving little guidance about Islam from their leaders. And what little information they receive is misleading. The hierarchy is still sticking with the message that Islam is a religion of peace which has recently been given a bad name by a tiny handful of terrorists who misunderstand the beneficent nature of their faith.

Meanwhile, while Catholic leaders have been pedaling this rosy picture of Islam, 90,000 Christians were murdered for their faith in 2016. Between 2005 and 2015, 900,000 Christians were martyred. In most cases the executioners were Muslims.

Let those numbers sink in. Donald J. Trump would make a better pope than  Bergoglio the Benighted. 

Related articles
Islam and the Decalogue

Islam and the Decalogue

Earlier today I wrote that ". . . the Decalogue is common to the three Abrahamic religions." Then I received a note from Claude Boisson that referred me to Howard Kainz, Islam and the Decalogue:

Just as Islam teaches the reverse of the Golden Rule, it teaches the reverse of the last seven of the Ten Commandments, which have to do with morality . . . .

If Kainz is right, and he may well be for all I know, the argument I alluded to is not affected. My point was simply that the public posting of the Ten Commandments, which are found in the Old Testament, and are common to both Judaism and Christianity, and are therefore not specific to Christianity, cannot be reasonably taken to aid and abet the establishment, let alone establish, Christianity as the state religion of the United States in violation of that clause of the First Amendment that reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ."

I am sorry to have to say something so painfully obvious. But liberals, being the destructive knuckleheads they are, need to be hit over the head on a regular basis with simple truths that even they should be able to understand.  

Why Are Leftists So Tolerant of Radical Islam?

William Kilpatrick uncorked a powerful insight in a must-read piece to which I linked yesterday:

Because so many Americans still live mentally in a time when intolerance was considered the greatest evil, they have difficulty understanding that an indiscriminate tolerance can father just as many sins.

That is part of the explanation.

Related: Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam

Islam: The Religion of Submission

What follows are excerpts from a powerful and penetrating essay by William Kilpatrick who deserves an award for his insight and courage. Please read the entire piece.  Emphases added.

Submission. That’s what the word “Islam” means. Muslims must submit to Allah, and the rest of the world must eventually submit to Islam. Submission does not necessarily require conversion, but it does require that one acknowledge the superiority of Islam, pay the jizya tax, and, in general, keep one’s head down.

Europe is currently in the process of submitting to Islam, and America also seems destined to eventually submit. If you have young children or grandchildren, it’s likely that they will have to adapt at some point to living in a Muslim-dominated society. It won’t necessarily be a Muslim-majority society because, as history testifies, Muslims don’t need a majority in order to successfully take control of non-Muslim societies.

[. . .]

A culture war can only be fought by cultural institutions—schools, churches, political and civic organizations, and so on. As things stand, however, none of our cultural institutions have shown much evidence that they are equipped to fight a culture war with cultural jihadists. The chief reason this is so is that most of these institutions are still fighting the last culture war—the civil rights struggle and the concomitant war against intolerance, racism, and bigotry. This “old-war” mentality makes it nearly impossible for our cultural and civic leaders to resist Islamization. Because so many Americans still live mentally in a time when intolerance was considered the greatest evil, they have difficulty understanding that an indiscriminate tolerance can father just as many sins.

One way of grasping the vulnerability of our society to Islamization is to ask “Who’s going to stop it?” Where, exactly, are the forces of resistance?

The university? American universities are bastions of political correctness and mandatory tolerance. Most of them are already quite sympathetic to the Islamic point of view. A combination of intimidation (from both Muslim and leftist groups), Saudi money, and multicultural ideology has ensured that when push comes to shove, the universities will line up with the Islamist camp. If present trends continue, American universities will fold to Islam just as German universities once folded to the Nazis.

The media? The media is still trying to find a motive for the 9-11 attack. That’s because it still won’t make the connection between Islamic terror and Islamic belief. In general, media people see it as their duty to put the best possible face on all things Islamic. Scratch the media as a source of resistance.

The Church? As with college administrators, many Church leaders are deeply mired in multicultural ideology. They are constantly on the lookout for offenses against the “other.” Accordingly, American bishops seem to think that “Islamophobia” poses a grave threat to society. Many of them seem more concerned about anti-Muslim bigotry than about the victims of Islamic terror. To prove that they themselves are not “Islamophobes,” the USCCB operates one of the largest programs for resettling refugees from Muslim countries into the U.S. Besides facilitating Muslim migration, American, as well as European bishops, have facilitated the migration of Islamic beliefs. On numerous occasions, prominent clergy have pronounced these beliefs to be benign and peaceful, and thus deserving of a warm welcome. In general, Church leaders see themselves as friends and protectors of Islam. Given their current mindset, the bishops are unlikely to recognize an Islamic cultural putsch, let alone resist it.

Big Business? Corporations also qualify as cultural institutions. Much of our understanding of what is culturally acceptable and unacceptable is picked up in the workplace. This can be a good thing and often was in the past. Unfortunately, many corporations now reflect and magnify some of the worst cultural trends: arbitrary speech codes, draconian diversity policies, transgenderism, and the like. Currently, several large corporations are using their leverage to suppress speech that is critical of Islam. Giant companies such as PayPal, Google, Facebook, and Twitter are actively trying to shut down websites and individuals that provide accurate information about Islamic cultural jihad. The media monopolies are playing the role that the Ministry of Truth played in Orwell’s 1984. All the really useful information about Islam that has been painfully accumulated in recent years is being quietly dropped down the memory hole.

Why are the counter-jihad sites being shut down? Because they supposedly are “intolerant” and “racist.” Here we come back to the “old-war” mentality. The corporations, the schools, the churches, and the media are ready to do battle with racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, and transgenderphobes, but they lack the mindset that would allow them to resist the long march through the institutions being conducted by determined and skillful cultural jihadists. In short, their energies are focused on evils that have long been in retreat or on non-existent evils (transgenderphobia, etc.). Meanwhile, the much larger threat posed by Islam draws ever closer.

The people who might be expected to fight this new culture war are scarcely aware of its existence. They are too busy championing the cause of newly invented “civil rights.” Fifty years ago they would have been on the cutting edge, now they are on the edge of irrelevancy.

Nowadays, the cutting edge is elsewhere. And when the “cutting-edge” cultural and business elites meet the cutting-edge of Islamization, they will almost inevitably submit to it. That is what they have already begun to do. And as the culture war with Islam heats up, the submission process will only accelerate.

"Cutting edge" is right. It's a good bet that the leftist enablers of Islam will be the first of the infidels to have their throats cut. They will learn the hard way, too late.

The Most Radical Form of Islam: Neo-Bolshevik Post-Marxist Islamo-Leftism

Pascal Bruckner:

And here is where the strangest factor in the whole Islamophobia controversy emerges: the enlistment of a part of the American and European Left in the defense of the most radical form of Islam—what one might call the neo-Bolshevik bigotry of the lost believers of Marxism. Having lost everything—the working class, the Third World—the Left clings to this illusion: Islam, rebaptized as the religion of the poor, becomes the last utopia, replacing those of Communism and decolonization for disenchanted militants. The Muslim takes the place of the proletarian.

The baton seems to have been passed at about the time of the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, with the resulting rise to power of Islamist revolutionaries, which was the occasion for enthusiastic commentary by Michel Foucault, among others on the left. God’s return on history’s stage had finally rendered Marxist and anticolonialist programs obsolete. The faith moved the masses better than the socialist hope. Now, it was the believer in the Koran who embodied the global hope for justice, who refused to conform to the order of things, who transcended borders and created a new international order, under the aegis of the Prophet: a green Comintern. Too bad for feminism, women’s equality, salvific doubt, the critical spirit; in short, too bad for everything traditionally associated with a progressive position.

This political attitude is manifest in progressives’ scrupulous idolatry of Muslim practices and rites, especially the Islamic veil: “modest fashion” is praised to the skies, so much so that, for certain leftist commentators, an unveiled Muslim woman who claims this right can only be a traitor, a turncoat, a woman for sale. The irony of this neocolonial solicitude for bearded men and veiled women—and for everything that suggests an oriental bazaar—is that Morocco itself, whose king is the “Commander of the Faithful,” recently forbade the wearing, sale, and manufacture of the burka in his country. Shall we call the Cherifian monarchy “Islamophobic”? Shall we be more royalist than the king?

It’s worth considering this Islamo-leftism more closely, this hope nourished by a revolutionary fringe that Islam might spearhead a new uprising, a “holy war” against global capitalism, exactly as in Baku in 1920, when Bolshevik leaders, including Zinoviev, published a joint appeal with the pan-Islamists to unleash jihad against Western imperialism. It was an English Trotskyite, Chris Harman, leader of the Socialist Workers Party, who, in 1994, provided a theory for this alliance between militant revolutionaries and radical Muslim associations, arguing for their unity, in certain circumstances, against the common enemy of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they transferred their hopes to the Islamists. (Emphasis added.)