Reclaiming lost ideals

Nov. 22 - Holland is not a 60-year-old story anymore about Canadian soldiers and liberation from the Nazis.

These opening words of today's Ezra Levant column (Militant Islam rising) makes clear that we need to comprehend that the elegant, tolerant Europe we envision no longer exists but has become one that faces challenges that their leaders and media have been too slow to grasp:

For a generation, the public square in Western civilization has been systematically voided of any Judeo-Christian moral content. And into that void has come a competing set of moral values: Militant Islam.

Nature and politics abhors a vacuum. For a generation, Europe -- and Canada -- has been told that nothing is right or wrong, there ought not to be Judeo-Christian morality in public life, and that the philosophical compatibility and integration of immigrants is not important. That may have worked before; but it does not work in the era of Osama bin Laden and al Jazeera. These are not people coming to join things.

The other side of that coin are the numbers of Muslims who emigrated to Western countries in order to escape the harshness of some aspects of sharia yet have found themselves still subject to that rigid system due to the reluctance of Dutch and other governments to appear intolerant by interfering within what was judged to be community matters despite the cost to Muslim women who would chose to embrace Western lifestyles and aspirations.

Ghost of a Flea provides a link to the Theodore Dalrymple article Why Theo Van Gogh Was Murdered which argues that

more likely it resulted from his workÂ’s exposure of a very raw nerve of Muslim identity in Western Europe: the abuse of women. This abuse is now essential for people of Muslim descent for maintaining any sense of separate cultural identity in the homogenizing solution of modern mass society.

[...]

The abuse of women has often, if not always, appealed to men, because it gives them a sense of power, however humiliated they may feel in other spheres of their life. And the oppression of women by Muslim men in Western Europe gives those men at the same time a sexual partner, a domestic servant, and a gratifying sense of power, while allowing them also to live an otherwise westernized life. For the men, it is convenient; interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, almost the only openly hostile expressions toward Islam from British-born Muslims that I hear come from young women, some of whom loathe it passionately because they blame it for their servitude.

We urgently need a long overdue assessment of the extent to which Western society has failed Muslim women.

Ayyan Hirsi Ali is an outspoken (and fearless) women from Somalia who is a member of the Dutch Parliament but who is also under 24-hour guard due to the death threats she has received in tolerant Holland.

A Canadian Muslim woman, Irshad Manji, authored an article that is on the UPI page about Van Gogh's murder Challenging Islam is Risky which she points out that risky though it may be, at least raising questions in Western society doesn't involve incurring the wrath of the state:

... If Muslims in the West dare to ask questions about our holy book, and if we care to denounce human rights violations being committed under the banner of that book, we need not worry about being raped, flogged, stoned or executed by the state for doing so. What in God's name are Muslims in the West doing with our freedoms?

I know what many young Muslim would like us to be doing -- thinking critically about ourselves and not solely about Washington. Indeed, a huge motivation for having written my book came from young Muslims on American and Canadian campuses. Even before 9/11, I spoke at universities about the virtues of diversity, including diversity of opinion. After many of these speeches, young Muslims emerged from the audiences, gathered at the side of stage, chatted excitedly among themselves, and then walked over to me.

"Irshad," I would hear, "we need voices such as yours to help us open up this religion of our because if it doesn't open up, we're leaving it."

They're on the front lines in the battle for the soul of Islam. Whatever the risks to my own safety, I won't turn my back on them -- or on the gift of freedom bestowed by my society.

I have ranted (many times) before about the bankruptcy of both those who pretend to preach tolerance and today's feminist movement which either forgot or abandoned the notion of sisterhood and attributed such to partisan politics, but now I've come to realize that the problems run deeper and I can't expect much more from those who have also abandoned the notion that all people, including Muslim women, are entitled to freedom.

The founding ideal of the modern feminist movement in the '70s was to proclaim that we had the right to determine the course of our lives, but if we don't affirm that those rights extend to our Muslim sisters then we have betrayed that ideal and stand exposed as selfish hypocrites.

Posted by: Debbye at 08:55 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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