Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Android |
David Introcaso is a healthcare policy consultant based in Washington DC. He worked for then house majority leader Stenny Hoyer and at Department of Health and Human Services, and he has consulted for the American Heart Association, the American Public Health Association and United Health Group. He has taught as a adjunct at the University of Chicago and at George Washington University.
*****
I was reading a piece called Unholy Alliance: Why Do Left-Wing Americans Support Right-Wing Muslims? by Yasmine Mohammed. She’s a former Muslim who, in her own words, ran away from the religious far-right world in which I was raised, and … made [her] way left towards values … like gender equality, free speech and LGBT rights.
And she continued,
Now, try to imagine the shock, betrayal and sadness I feel
seeing fellow liberals celebrating right-wing, conservative aspects of Islam.
On February 1, I was so upset over World Hijab Day that I spent the day in bed
with a migraine. Hijab Day? … Is there a Mormon underwear day? What about a
chastity belt day? I risked my life, and my daughter’s life, to escape from the
darkness into the light — only to find the light celebrating and fetishising
darkness.
That’s what she said, and I think she has a point. I know that
many Muslim women want to wear the hijab, and do so without harassment, but for
many others, it’s a symbol of oppression and submission. And, let’s be real
here, for many women, it’s a bit of both.
Now, I can sympathise with the feeling that women who don’t want
to leave the hijab behind, or don’t want to do that yet, they shouldn’t be
victimised, they shouldn’t be treated badly on that basis, and them wearing the
hijab shouldn’t be used as a proxy, an
excuse for racist or ethnic victimization. So, yes, defend the right of people
to wear silly religious garb if they want to do that, and it doesn’t restrict
the rights of others.
But there is a whole world of difference between that and saying
that wearing the hijab is a good thing, that it should be encouraged or
celebrated. Sure, some women in the west wear the hijab because they were
brought up with it, and they wouldn’t be comfortable going out without it, and to
an extent that is their choice.
But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the hijab
springs from a virginity hysteria in the deeply misogynistic culture that it
comes from. Yasmine Mohammed is right that it is absolutely absurd for American
liberals to be supporting it, or any other of the bronze-age traditions that
make up Sharia law.
But they aren’t the only ones who are being hypocritical. Let’s
look at many of the people who are setting themselves up who are loudest about
keeping the evil influence of Islam out of the west, the Breitbarts and the
Tommy Robinsons, the Nathan Damigos and the Black Pigeon Speaks, and all the
alt and not-so-alt right. Why do they want to do that? To preserve western
values, that’s why. To defend the enlightenment.
The only problem is that the people who are so anxious to
keep out Muslims for the sake of western values and the enlightenment are the same
people who care least about western values and the enlightenment. Between them
they have attacked everything from due process and the rule of law to religious
freedom, universal suffrage and democracy, and every individual liberty that has
made the western world what it is.
There’s an awful lot of hypocrisy out there. I can
understand Yasmine Mohammed being disappointed with otherwise-liberals doing
the apologetics for the equivalent of the Westboro Baptist Church. And I hate
to have to make the choice, but when I do have to make the choice between silly
liberals being too tolerant of a totalitarian religion on one hand, and on the
other hand, knuckleheads with keyboards dressing their racism up as concern for
something that I am actually concerned about … I hate to have to make that
choice, but I think I’d tip the balance in favour of people believing in
freedom and getting it wrong sometimes, than people believing in totalitarianism
and getting it wrong sometimes.
