In the Name of Islam Anti-Semitism, Misogyny and Rights Trashing
By Ayaan Hirsi Ali, FirstPost.co.uk
Today, in the name of Islam, synagogues are vandalized
Take anti-Semitism in Europe. The sensitivity and guilt Europeans feel about the Holocaust is comparable to the sensitivity and guilt that Americans feel towards black Americans. A decade or two ago, it was unthinkable for Jews to be slandered openly and be targeted for no other reason than their Jewishness.
Today, in the name of Islam, synagogues are vandalized. There are open denials of the Holocaust. There is an active network of Muslim organizations lobbying to curtail or even get rid of Israel. There are incidents of Jews being harassed, beaten, even killed. All this is met with grim silence and rationalizations that it's not really anti-Semitic but anti-Israel. Can you imagine anything like this happening today in America to black people and it being met with silence?
Take the history of women's liberation in Europe. In the 1970s, women were burning their bras, abortion was legalized almost everywhere and rape in marriage was penalized. Today, more and more European elites, including some feminists, argue that it might, perhaps, just be better to respect the culture and religion of a minority.
Women's shelters have adapted their curriculum - instead of teaching the women who come to them how to become self-reliant, the shelters facilitate prayer rooms and employ mediators from the Islamic community. All this mediation serves only one purpose - that is, to return the woman to the circumstances of abuse she left.
Here is a system, which was a tool to emancipate, that has been completely transformed to serve the Muslim purpose of obedience. If the wife obeys, then the husband no longer needs to beat her. The matter is settled.
The same applies to gays. Ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable that anti-gay sentiment would pass without condemnation. In Holland, for instance, we pride ourselves on allowing gays to have the exact same rights as heterosexuals. Yet today, they are beaten on the streets of Amsterdam. To be on the safe side in certain neighborhoods in Europe, it's advisable to conceal your identity if you are gay or lesbian.
Muslims try to abolish freedom of expression using the vocabulary of freedom
The terrifying paradox about these developments is that Muslim immigrants were admitted into European borders on the basis of universal rights and freedoms that a large number of them now trample on, while others perhaps watch passively, or seek to defend only the image of Islam.
Even worse, those who lobby to abolish freedom of expression and to discriminate against Jews, women and gays do so while using the vocabulary of freedom and through the institutions of parliament and the courts that were designed to protect the rights of all.
American observers like Caldwell, Bruce Bawer, Walter Laqeur and many others who go to Europe and write candidly about these things can return to America, where they can write on another topic, keep their jobs and their social networks.
Europeans who do the same thing as Caldwell, often face a campaign of ostracizing from their own compatriots. They run the risk of losing their jobs or not being promoted or not getting invitations to the circles of which they are a part. The more stubborn, like Geert Wilders, get prosecuted, and access to a neighboring country is even denied.
In reality, if Europe falls, it's not because of Islam. It is because the Europeans of today - unlike their forbears in the Second World War - will not die to defend the values or the future of Europe. Even if they were asked to make the final sacrifice, many a post-modern lily-livered European would escape into an obscure mesh of conscientious objection. All that Islam has to do is walk into the vacuum.
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FIRST POSTED MAY 5, 2009
