Thursday 25 August 2011

United in Hate: the mystery of the left's infatuation with murderous ideologies

From briarpatch magazine.  For Kassamali this
is a positive picture; it's supposed to entice
us to embrace our extinction
I was rereading parts of Jamie Glazov's excellent "United in Hate" -- subtitled "The Left's Romance With Tyranny and Terror".  This being something of a fascination of mine and no doubt many others of my era -- the sixties -- when we were all hippies, man, and leftie of course.  Support for miserable communist dictatorships like China, Cuba, the Soviet Union was de rigueur.
But some of that era, like David Horowitz, went from hard left to a rather more realistic conservatism.
And those that remain hard left: why is it that they support militant Islam, that stands for everything they're supposed to hate?  The radical Islamist is supremacist, misogynist, homophobic, anti-semitic, anti freedom of speech and conscience, yet many on the left are besotted. Why?
Jamie gives answers, for which you can read the book, or, if you want a short version, read the most-helpful reviews here.
Anyhooo, it got me thinking of an article I saw recently, I think courtesy bcf, by a radical left muslim feminist (if "muslim feminist" is not an oxymoron..), one Sumayya Kassamali in the briarpatch magazine, titled provocatively: "In defence of a Muslim takeover".  Well no doubt of the agenda there.  But just in case, it's subtitled: "Or, why we should welcome the extinction of the West".  Wow.
Actually, Kassamali makes no case at all for why we should welcome the extinction of the West; well not unless you consider the hastily tossed off "civilizational diffusion", as a good enough reason to toss off the centuries of achievements of the west.  She certainly does not address the issue of what would happen to people like her in an Islamic caliphate she envisages, that would take over the West.  Or just how we would get on in the world that is not made up of "the logic of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism".  Nasty things, those.  Let's diffuse them.  Let's replace them with vibrant, thriving economies like those in the Middle East.  Right. (Check out the Arab Human Development Report to see just how well they're working)
She ends with this half-baked and muddled "thought":
We must, as [Edward] Said says, be respectful of uncoercive communities – even as we sometimes struggle in opposition to their voices – and yet, anarchic in our capacity to imagine. So open the borders, let the Muslims have babies, and let us see where a radical future lies.
We don't need to see "where the radical future lies".  We already know it: the "future" is now. We see it most clearly in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. What is "uncoercive" about those societies is a mystery.  Why Kassamali would promote them is a mystery. But how long the likes of an outspoken and independent, if ignorant, woman like Ksassmali, would last in that "radical future" is most certainly not a mystery: not long at all.