Two weeks after Nice, Germany was hit by a stabbing in Würzburg and then, a week later, a suicide bombing in the town of Ansbach, both at the hands of Islamists.
Two days after Ansbach, two Islamic State terrorists stormed a Catholic church in Normandy, slitting the throat of an 86-year old priest before French anti-terrorism police shot them both and rescued the remaining hostages. Ten days later, in Charleroi, Belgium, a man attacked police officers with a machete while shouting “Allahu Akhbar,” which translates to “Allah is the greatest.” One month after that, two police officers in Molenbreek, Belgium were stabbed by a migrant, also shouting “Allahu Akhbar.”
Three more ISIS-motivated stabbings would take place in Europe before year’s end: in Rimini, Italy; Scharbeek, Belgium; and Cologne, Germany.
The United States faced its own terror attack in 2016, in Orlando, Florida. 49 killed, 53 wounded at Pulse, a gay nightclub. It was the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11, and the deadliest act of homophobic hate in U.S. history.
I gave a speech outside Pulse, about the threat posed to women and gays by Islam. The recording has been viewed almost a million times on YouTube.166 Not a single cable or broadcast channel aired any of it.
It is a uniquely American trait to rely on foreigners to take the true stock of American culture. I am here now, with a warning from Europe. If America opens its doors to Islamic migrants as Europe has, Pulse will be just the beginning.
Islam is not like other religions. It’s more inherently prescriptive and it’s much more political. That’s why I, a free speech fundamentalist, still support banning the burka and restricting Islamic immigration.
Walter Berns’s famous essay Flag Burning and Other Modes of Expression, makes the point that speech and actions are different. But he also reminds us that the Founders were for unlimited speech on religious topics, but not on political principles, like advocating for tyranny.167 Everywhere Islam exists you find political tyranny. Islam is as much a political ideology as a religion, which is why limits on it are perfectly compatible with religious freedom and the First Amendment.
In electing Donald Trump, America may have saved itself. Naturally, he was attacked as a racist and a bigot throughout the campaign, both by Merkel-like establishment conservatives and by the American Left. But such behavior doesn’t really surprise me anymore. The Left has been selling out to Islam for years.
ISLAM AND THE LEFT
During my college talks, I’m often asked what arguments to use when debating with the regressive Left. I always have the same answer: Islam.
There is nothing else which better exposes the modern Left’s rank hypocrisy, their disregard for the facts, and their hatred for the West and all it stands for than their attitude to Islam. Every noble principle the Left claims to uphold, from rights for women to gay liberation, even diversity itself, dies on the altar of its sycophantic defense of Islam.
Karl Marx called religion the “opium of the masses.” If you look at the Left’s attitude to Christianity, you might think they believe in this message. The progressive Left’s comedians and columnists never miss an opportunity to belittle and denigrate conservative Christians, and yet, they defend Islam at the expense of every other minority. Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have all been frustrated by this question: Why is the Left refusing to lift a finger against the most radical, dangerous, socially conservative and oppressive religion on earth?
Author Sam Harris sums up the backwards attitude of this group with his characteristic clarity:
These people are part of what Maajid Nawaz has termed the “regressive Left”—pseudo-liberals who are so blinded by identity politics that they reliably take the side of a backward mob over one of its victims. Rather than protect individual women, apostates, intellectuals, cartoonists, novelists, and true liberals from the intolerance of religious imbeciles, they protect theocrats from criticism.168
Examples of this behavior are not hard to find.
Charlie Hebdo is a rare example of a leftist newspaper that understood radical Islam to be akin to the radical religious Right. Actually, that’s too mild, it’s really closer to the radical medieval religious Right. I know members of the radical Christian Right in the United States, and they are scary. But nowhere near as scary as Islamic terrorists. They’re the Westboro Baptist Church with machetes.
Charlie Hebdo had the temerity to stand against religious bullies. They published humorous cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, which made them prime targets of al-Qaeda. Charlie Hebdo’s editors correctly understood that allowing people to intimidate artists and writers by threatening violence was the first step on the road to a terrified, censored society.
On January 7, 2015, twelve employees of the newspaper paid for it with their lives, when two armed Muslim siblings forced their way into Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris and opened fire.
Charlie Hebdo is a leftist publication. Marxist, in fact. Their opposition to Islam flows from their opposition to the Right. They are just as strident in their criticism of the National Front as they are of Islam. I may happen to think the National Front deserves a more nuanced approach, but one could never accuse Charlie Hebdo of lacking consistency. They say they oppose bigotry, and they do—whether they perceive it in the European Right or in Islam.
So what did other leftists do when 12 of their comrades were gunned down by religious thugs? Did the old ideal of socialist solidarity finally kick in?
No, of course it didn’t.
As most of the civilized world adopted the slogan “Je Suis Charlie,” The New Yorker published an essay entitled, “Unmournable Bodies,” attacking Charlie Hebdo for “racist and Islamophobic provocations.”169
Before the month was out, a number of British student unions, including the University of Manchester, banned Charlie Hebdo under their “safe space” policies, arguing that it made Muslim students uncomfortable.170
It made Muslim students uncomfortable? Well, I’m not sure that’s quite in the same league as making non-Muslim cartoonists dead. That, in a nutshell, is the modern Left for you.