There was no collective display of solidarity from the left-wing literary class either. To an ordinary observer, the fact that the prestigious PEN Freedom of Expression Courage Award went to Charlie Hebdo in 2015 would not be particularly surprising news, much less a moral outrage. Yet 204 members of the organization, including established authors like Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore and Junot Díaz thought so. They boycotted the awards, signing an open letter condemning Charlie Hebdo for making a “marginalized community” feel uncomfortable:
To the section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled, and victimized, a population that is shaped by the legacy of France’s various colonial enterprises, and that contains a large percentage of devout Muslims, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the Prophet must be seen as being intended to cause further humiliation and suffering.171
What suffering! What horror! Cartoons, published in a newspaper with a minor circulation that Muslims don’t have to buy if they don’t want to. I’m sure the friends and families of the dead Charlie Hebdo cartoonists feel thoroughly ashamed of their loved one’s actions.
The author Salman Rushdie, who faced an Iran-backed fatwa for the crime of writing about a forbidden area of Islamic theology, summed up the stance that the boycotters had taken.
The massacre of cartoonists, wrote Rushdie, was a…
…hate crime, just as the anti-Semitic attacks sweeping Europe and almost entirely carried out by Muslims are hate crimes. This issue has nothing to do with an oppressed and disadvantaged minority. It has everything to do with the battle against fanatical Islam, which is highly organised, well-funded, and which seeks to terrify us all, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, into a cowed silence.
These… writers have made themselves the fellow travellers of that project. Now they will have the dubious satisfaction of watching PEN tear itself apart in public.172
The boycott failed, and Charlie Hebdo got their award, presented to them by Neil Gaiman, who stepped in after other writers pulled out.173 I have to wonder how he must have felt to see so many of his peers in the left-wing literary establishment choose to attack murdered cartoonists rather than stand against the ideology that created their murderers. Embarrassed for the Left, I hope.
The reaction to the Charlie Hebdo shooting is just one example among many of the Left’s suicidal attitude towards Islam.
When Paris again fell victim to Islamic terrorism in November 2015, with over 100 slain in a series of attacks masterminded by the Islamic State, Salon published the extraordinary headline “We Brought This On Ourselves: After Paris, It’s Time To Square Our “Values” With Our History.”174
The article blamed the West “behaving horrifically in the Middle East for decades” for the deaths in Paris. In March 2016, after Muslims killed 35 in Brussels, Salon allowed the same writer to run virtually the same article under the headline, “We Brought This On Ourselves, And We Are The Terrorists Too.”175 Liberals blaming the West for the terrorist attacks has become depressingly predictable after each new atrocity.
What really cements the Left’s betrayal of its own values over Islam isn’t so much its opposition to wars in the Middle East, but its opposition to liberal Muslim reformers. Perhaps the best example of this is Maajid Nawaz, one of the few moderate Muslims making an effort to drag his religion kicking and screaming into the modern age. For his work combating extremism, supporting interfaith tolerance, and challenging bigotry in the Muslim community, he is rewarded with polite silence from the Left at best, and scornful disdain at worst.
New heights of absurdity were scaled in 2016 when the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) added Nawaz to a list of 15 “anti-Muslim extremists.” The entire list was ridiculous. It included women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Islam critics Daniel Pipes, Pamela Geller, and David Horowitz. But the addition of Nawaz, precisely the sort of moderate Muslim that anti-bigotry, anti-intolerance groups like the SPLC ought to be encouraging, summed up just how morally bankrupt the Left’s attitude to Islam has become.176
Is there—and perhaps this is just my gallows humor—anything more amusing than a religion so thin-skinned that cartoons designed to provoke it give rise to deadly shootings, as though precisely to prove the point of those French cartoonists?
Is there anything more preposterous than the phrase “The Religion of Peace”?
What an indictment of America’s supposedly “brave” comedians that not a single one dares to tell a decent joke about Islam on prime-time television.
HOW TO REALLY FIGHT BIGOTRY
The Left claims it opposes bigotry. Yet Islam, the most bigoted ideology that exists today, is given a pass.
Here are a few things that Muslims in Britain—who are often portrayed as one of the more integrated western Muslim communities—believe.
A Gallup poll of Muslims in the UK found that not a single Muslim in the 1,001 people polled thought that homosexuality was morally acceptable.
The same poll found that 35% of French Muslims and 19% of German Muslims thought homosexuals were morally acceptable. These polls were taken before Europe’s importation of hordes of young Muslim “rapefugees.”
As you know from the previous chapter, I have some sympathy for this point of view, even though leftists will scour me for saying so while continuing to hypocritically pander to Muslims. And yet, here are more unsettling poll numbers specific to British Muslims, from left-wing broadcaster Channel 4:
52% believe homosexuality should be illegal
23% would like to see Sharia law in England
39% believe a woman should always obey her husband
31% consider it acceptable for a man to have multiple wives.
When it comes to Islamic immigration, assimilation doesn’t seem to be an option. “When in Rome, rape and kill everyone and then claim welfare.”
Andrew Bolt on Sky News Australia, whose show I go on regularly because they get the lighting just right, perfectly encapsulated Islam’s integration problem in the West.
He recalled the case of Dr. Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, the grand mufti of Australia, who gave a speech explaining to Australians that they are wrong to think Muslims can’t integrate into Australian culture. There’s just one problem. The Grand Mufti, one of the foremost Islamic scholars in Australia, delivered the speech in Arabic. He had lived in Australia for 19 years, and his integration speech was in Arabic.
That’s what I call chutzpah.
There were 1.6 billion Muslims in the world as of 2010—roughly 23% of the global population—according to a Pew Research Center estimate. But while Islam is currently the world’s second-largest religion after Christianity, it is the fastest growing one.
The growth of Islam ought to be concerning for liberals. Here is a religion that sanctions forcing women into submission, a religion that sanctions the execution of gays, a religion that sanctions the killing of non-believers. And they’re spreading.