Superb analysis in City Journal by Pascal Bruckner outlining the fuckwittery that the regressive left is so complicitous with, and sadly, a disproportionate number of over-compensating virtue-signaling Jews buy into this dhimmitude under the guise of anti-Zionism. Also tiresome is when these nihilistically delusional dhimmies claim that there is no connection between Islam and terror. As Yahya Cholil Staquf has recently said: “Western politicians should stop pretending that extremism and terrorism have nothing to do with Islam. There is a clear relationship between fundamentalism, terrorism, and the basic assumptions of Islamic orthodoxy. So long as we lack consensus regarding this matter, we cannot gain victory over fundamentalist violence within Islam”.
There remains the mystery of the transubstantiation of religion into race. The racialization of the world has to be the most unexpected result of the antidiscrimination battle of the last half-century; it has ensured that the battle continuously re-creates the curse from which it is trying to break free. A great universal religion like Islam includes a vast number of peoples and cannot be assimilated to a particular ethnic group. The term “Islamophobia,” however, invites confusion between a system of specific beliefs and the faithful who adhere to those beliefs. To contest a form of obedience, to reject dogmas that one considers absurd or false is the very basis of intellectual life, but belief in the existence of Islamophobia renders such contestation impossible. Should we speak, then, of anticapitalist, antiliberal, or anti-Marxist “racism” or phobia?
But Islam benefits from a special protection. At the very time when Christian minorities in Islamic lands are persecuted, killed, and forced into exile—they are now threatened with extinction by the middle of this century—the word “Christianophobia,” despite UN officials proposing it, has not caught on, and it never will.
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.
Why this Islamic desire to be considered Jewish? The answer is clear: to achieve pariah status. But the analogy is doubly false. First, anti-Semitism was never about the Jewish religion as such but rather the existence of Jews as a people. Even an unbelieving Jew was detested by anti-Semites, due to his family name and his group identity. And second, at the end of the 1940s, there were no groups of extremist Jews slitting the throats of priests in churches, as happened at Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in France in July 2016, the deed of two young jihadists; there were no Jews throwing bombs in train stations, shopping malls, or airports, or driving trucks into crowds.
On the view of Islamic fundamentalists and many progressives, the Muslim should replace the Jew for another reason: the Jew has dishonored his status and become in turn a colonizer, with the creation of the State of Israel. The idealization of the Jew after the war prepared the subsequent smear campaign; in other words, the Judaizing of the Muslims entailed the Nazification of the Israelis. There is the good Jew of yesterday, eternally persecuted, and the bad Israeli who has taken hold in the Middle East, imperious and racist. Traverso makes the formulation candidly: in the past, he argues, Jews and blacks fought together as antifascists and anticolonialists; then the Jews broke through the color line and became “white”—that is, oppressors. Today’s true Jew wears the headdress and speaks Arabic; the other is an imposter and usurper.
How should we react to this semantic racket?
The point is not to make Europe Islamic but to make Islam European, so that it is one religion among others and might, someday, help spread tolerance and a renewal of critical thought to the rest of the umma.
France is attacked not because it oppresses Muslims but because it liberates them from the hold of religion. It offers them a perspective that terrifies the devout—that of spiritual indifference, the right to believe or not to believe, as Jews and Christians are able to do.
Thus, we have the reprehensible law enacted by the Canadian Parliament this March that prohibits criticism of Islam, while other confessions still can be denigrated without any problem.
We must beware when fanaticism borrows the language of human rights and dresses up as a victim in order better to impose its grip on power.
It cannot be the equal of other faiths, since it believes itself superior to them all. This is the core of the problem.
manwithoutqualities 