The evolutionary biologist and noted atheist Richard Dawkins was caught up in a brouhaha after sharing on his Twitter feed a link to a video that mockingly depicts a commonality between the beliefs of Islamists and feminists. Dawkins’ tweet included the comment “Obviously doesn’t apply to vast majority of feminists, among whom I count myself. But the minority are pernicious.”
My favorite moment in the video is when the woman says:
Mohammed had sex with a child? Oh, that’s awesome! That means that every white cisgender heteronormative pedophile here in the West is guilty of cultural appropriation!
This bit brilliantly encapsulates the tone and language embraced by today’s extreme social justice warriors.
Twitter immediately went on the offensive, mischaracterizing Dawkins’ tweet as an assertion that feminists were in league with Islamists. Then it turns out that the female character in the video is based on a real person (Dawkins was unaware of this when he shared the link), a feminist writer named Lindy West. Dawkins and West engaged in a Twitter exchange where she accused him of believing that women he dislikes deserve rape and death threats, an accusation based on… well… nothing, near as I can tell. Dawkins was (erroneously) led to believe that the video led to violence being threatened against her, and deleted his tweet.
Of course, it didn’t end there. Dawkins was scheduled to speak at The Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, but the organizers “depaneled” him in response to his posting of the video. Skepticism is commonly associated with “freethinking,” so it’s quite humorous and demonstrably un-self-aware of the event’s organizers to depanel someone for sharing some free thought. Even among freethinkers, there are apparently thoughts that mustn’t be permitted.
Underlying all this is the utterly astonishing (to me, at least) tolerance that modern liberals and feminists have shown for the horribly illiberal and anti-woman attitudes found in Islam. Obviously, I’m not even remotely the first to notice this cognitive dissonance. The term “regressive Left” came into use a few years ago, first in observing that many refused to link Islamic terrorism to religion, and later in reference to the tolerance of illiberal attitudes and behaviors that derive from religious beliefs in order to embrace multiculturalism.
Given that Islam has over a billion adherents, it’s certainly too broad-brush to make any one particular representation of Muslim behavior and attitudes, and the laundry list of subjugations and worse perpetrated against women in some Muslim cultures can be offset by examples of fully Westernized Muslim women living fully Westernized lives. The existence of a population that’s not living under Sharia does not, however, excuse what’s being done to the population that is living under Sharia. Dress codes often enforced by violence, subjugation by and subordination to men, female circumcision, stoning deaths for adultery and for being raped, etc are all gross violations of individuals’ rights and direct affronts to the feminist messages of self-determination, empowerment, equality, and independence from men.
Then there are Muslim attitudes towards homosexuality. In many Islamic cultures and societies, homosexuality is a punishable offense. Some do not consider it a crime (e.g. Indonesia, Turkey, Albania, Jordan), but here we face the same situation as with the treatment of women i.e. we can find exceptions to the rule. The rule, however, remains, and societies that lack the fundamental respect for individual rights that we in America take for granted aren’t even part of the conversation in many other cultures.
That people who take outrageous affront at the slightest question or criticism of the modern liberal narrative when it arises domestically, and turn a blind eye to real, systematic and institutionalized oppression all over the world, is one of the great farces of modern liberalism.
How do we reconcile this?
Many elements are at play: proximity, ease of target, lack of fear of retribution, geocentrism, unconscious hypocrisy and, probably most importantly, the sort of racism that permeated progressive thought in the first half of the 20th century. Throughout much of America’s history, the belief that blacks were mentally and intellectually inferior to whites infested even “liberal” thinkers and the Great Emancipator himself. That idea didn’t fade with the rise of progressivism, it evolved. When progressivism began at the beginning of the 20th century, it spawned the eugenics movement, and it is in the core ideas of eugenics that we can find some explanation for why liberals tolerate illiberal norms in Muslim societies: They believe that Muslims aren’t capable of being civilized. So, they accept, tolerate and excuse their barbarity.
That sound you hear is any vestige of moral authority and adroitness the Left might have been clinging to swirling down the drain. Anyone who purports to speak in the name of “justice” in criticizing the relatively trivial and oft-fabricated affronts and “microaggressions” within American society without vocally denouncing and excoriating the gross affronts to liberty and to the rights of the systematically oppressed in other cultures is guilty of the sort of hypocrisy that cannot be dismissed and of a moral callousness that defenestrates any claim to empathy or caring for the oppressed.
Progressives claim to be the champions of the oppressed and downtrodden, but they ignore the plights of countless millions when they excuse barbarism and illiberalism in the name of multiculturalism. They find it easy to huddle together in their “safe spaces” and go fully aggressive against safe targets i.e. cisgender heteronormative people of pallor who don’t conform to their groupthink and groupspeak mandates, but don’t have the guts or intellectual honesty to speak up against the truly oppressive beliefs and actions of other cultures. In short, they’re cowards, and dubbing them “regressive” is being too kind.
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