Many commentators have rightly criticized Barack Obama’s untenable assertion that the Islamic State is not Islamic, which came early in his foreign policy speech last Wednesday evening. The President’s blindness to any truth that contradicts political correctness—what other religion could the clearly-named group be following? These aren’t Quakers, believe you me—would deserve howls of laughter if it weren’t for the brutality exhibited, and threat posed, by these particular adherents to Islam.
What these writers have tended to miss, however, is that Obama’s “non-Islamic Islamism” proviso is not a matter of either confusion or careful rhetorical strategy. Nor, as Andrew McCarthy has suggested in National Review, does this centrally relate to Obama’s foreign policy maxim of supporting “moderate Islamists”: a lesser evil whose help can aid the defeat of more trigger-happy “extreme Islamists”. Rather, the belief that violence and persecution committed by Muslims has nothing to do with Islam, even when they say openly that their faith animates their action, is a central piece of today’s liberal multicultural ideology, which Obama closely follows.
Liberal multiculturalism is the polished-up successor to anti-colonialism, a movement that expressed vicarious rage for European imperial subjects through the decolonization of Africa and Asia, and believed Christendom to be wrought with moral poverty and wickedness. As this movement was later “mainstreamed”, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union (when Marxist ideas no longer carried the taint of the gulag), its rhetoric became softer and less explicitly anti-Western, giving its expositors a better opportunity to influence public argument and attain positions of power.
Yet despite this polishing job and the integration of multiculturalism into the centre-left, two fundamental beliefs from the original ideology remain. First, it is categorically wrong to utter criticism of foreign peoples or their culture, lest one be open to the charge of racial bigotry. Second, the appearance of barbarity by non-Europeans is ultimately explicable and excused by their maltreatment at the hands of Christian colonial powers, or by the perpetrators constituting a fringe minority—of equal significance to the “extremists” of any society, including our own.
It is simply not kosher for orthodox leftists to acknowledge, under any circumstance, that such actions as beheading journalists, commandeering and crashing airplanes for mass murder-suicide, and enslaving schoolgirls are the fruit of a fire coming from inside the house. Some other explanation must be found.
Of course, it was not only Islamic peoples with whom anti-colonialists sympathized. But they are a central constituency of today’s cultural left, perhaps because they provide the strongest test on one’s belief: many groups were subjects of colonialism, but only one has members who internationally terrorize for a religious purpose like jihad. It would be unthinkable for a group of Indo-Chinese people, bearing a grievance against America for the Vietnam War, to commit an atrocity such as 9/11. Yet when a worse crime is one day committed by Islamic fundamentalists, we will be fools to be surprised.
Islamic peoples also have a long-standing history of confrontation with the West. Events such as the Crusades—frequently invoked but rarely understood—are marshaled regularly by the descendants of anti-colonialism to suggest that hostility to Muslims is essential to Christendom, and that there is an equivalence between the two faiths. As a result, even good-faith efforts to oppose radical Islam on its own turf are portrayed as mere additional proof of Western oppression’s long history.
Ironically, however, the multiculturalist conception of Islam as essentially peaceful, secular, egalitarian, and corrupted only by the nefarious hands of imperialism results not from observing Islam itself, but rather from projecting the Islam that leftists wish to see. This might be described as “reverse orientalism”, given the complaints of the late anti-colonialist and literary critic Edward Said. He wrote that scholars tended to patronize Middle Eastern cultures by interpreting them through the bias of Western supremacy, instead of studying them as they actually were. Yet today’s multiculturalists simply do the opposite: instead of observing Muslim cultures as they actually are, they interpret them through the bias of Western inferiority and culpability, which invariably produces representations that contradict the evidence.
The idea that Islamdom is in some kind of struggle between religious and secular, moderate and extreme, progressive and reactionary, “true, peaceful religion” and “corrupted, violent religion”, amounts to simply placing of our own historical experience onto the Muslim world. Yet this is the very understanding upon which President Obama, as well as many co-thinkers on both the left and the right, base not only their speeches, but also their policies. The reality is much worse: a region at the heart of both the physical and spiritual geography of Islam is being thrown into a war of rival Sunni and Shia fundamentalisms, armed to the teeth and existentially opposed, except for their shared anti-Semitism, irrational hatred of the infidel West, and a belief that the ends justify the means. A more honest accounting of this is badly needed.
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Prince Arthur Herald
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