Wondering about the criteria
Reginald Harper wonders why the Manchester Students’ Union banned Julie Bindel and (later, after protest) Milo Yiannopoulos from a debate proposed by the Free Speech society, while allowing, indeed welcoming and promoting, Muslim Engagement and Development’s (MEND) exhibition on Islamophobia.
Abu Eesa Niamatullah, MEND’s CEO, has come under fire for comments he made on Facebook regarding women, such as, “Don’t try to understand women. Women understand women and they hate each other.” When feminists responded with outrage, Niamatullah responded that feminism was antithetical to Islam, and that he relished women’s anger over his comments:
For you, carry on burning in your rage. There is nothing that delights me more by God than making you mad. I hope you spend the rest of this entire week spending every second thinking about these comments and it freaking you out.
He says a lot more than that, and it’s ugly stuff. Let’s read some more.
I absolutely believe that feminists – with all the nuances of that title that I stated on my earlier comments today – are the enemies of Islamic orthodoxy and to refute them is a rewarded act. The reason for this can be seen in their corrupt and insincere approach with other people. My refutations and responses are done according to the level of their intellect. Thus, when you have an interlocutor who derives from the statement, “Don’t try to understand women. Women understand women and they hate each other”, that one is therefore legitimising or supporting or promoting the beating of women, or the rape of women, or the abuse of children, or FGM etc – as was stated by such a feminist – then one finds little other option but to descend into such stupidity and intellectual failure, and entertain them at their chosen level. To humiliate them. To expose their stupidity. To show how insincere and how irrelevant such feminists are when it comes to defending the rights of individuals who are oppressed and abused.
Also:
As for the feminists who were offended then I hope that your offence burns in your heart and causes you to wither and wiggle in rage. *Your* contention is not about personal opinion or taste. Or not liking a joke or not or thinking it went over the top or not. Your problem is far deeper. Look at the people who are picking up these comments: Islamophobes and journalists and all and sundry. Why? Ask yourself that question. Who are allies to who? You promoters of feminism and complainants thereafter are nearly always associated with secular humanist thought and tendencies. A brief perusal of your work will expose who makes Allah’s law their standard, and who makes their own intellect their standard. You are the people who are desperate to remove from our tradition any statement or mention of that which your ideological masters disagree with whether that be female circumcision, or the defining of the age of puberty for girls for marriage, or the institution of polygamy, or the parameters of hijab and jilbab, and so on from a thousand issues concerning female fiqh and indeed anything else you don’t like.
That’s what led up to the “burn in your rage” remark. That theocratic anti-humanist authoritarian garbage is what Abu Eesa Niamatullah stands for and promotes, yet the Manchester SU promotes him while banning Julie Bindel.
Wtf is wrong with everyone?
Reginald Harper continues:
MEND continues to promote views that are unequivocally antisemitic and anti-women. Azad Ali, Mend’s director of engagement, is an extremist who has given support to the killing of British troops. Yasir Qadhi, MEND’s speaker for their “Islam in Britain” events this year, is already controversial for claiming that the Holocaust was a hoax. In addition, he has also gone on record as saying that women should be entirely barred from the workplace:
Women should not be in the workplace whatsoever. Full stop. I simply can’t imagine how we will safeguard our Islamic identity in the future and build strong Muslim communities in the West with women wanting to go out and becoming employed in the hell that it is out there.
Qadhi thinks half of humanity should be denied fundamental human rights, yet he is welcome while Julie Bindel is called names and banned.
Why?
Why? Creeping Islamisation, that’s why! It happens wherever there is a significant minority of Muslims, because they make threats of violence, and fulfil them. It is said that at one time Indonesia was Hindu and Buddhist, and Muslims were not allowed to immigrate. But now Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world. The same is true throughout Southeast Asia. We may deprecate the violence, but it would be wrong to suggest that there is no reason for it. That is why there is violence against the Muslim minority in Burma, because Muslims will not allow others to live according to their beliefs. In Denmark, 77% of Muslims believe that the Qur’an’s instructions must be applied fully in Danish society. Let’s not kid ourselves, Islam really does believe that it has the final revelation, and that the whole world must bow down an honour it, and, wherever it becomes strong enough, Muslims will kill you to enforce that belief. The more devout Muslims become, the more vioolent they become. We are all, essentially, apostates, since everyone is born a Muslim. Seek no further for the why? The question is, how do we bring this process of to an end? I know, this will earn me the title of Islamophobe, but if that is not what is going on in Machester, I would like to hear an alternative explanation.
Off topic
Article by Jennifer Lawrence
http://us11.campaign-archive1.com/?u=a5b04a26aae05a24bc4efb63e&id=64e6f35176&e=1ba99d671e#wage
I simply can’t imagine how we will safeguard our Islamic identity in the future and build strong Muslim communities in the West with women wanting to go out and becoming employed in the hell that it is out there.
Safeguarding our Islamic identity is just crude code for ‘safeguarding my male privilege’.
@ Eric MacDonald.
I tend to agree with you. I can’t think of a single historical instance where Muslims have lived in harmony with non-Muslim for any length of time. The ‘other’ is tolerated only insofar as that tolerance advances the cause. There certainly are and were individual Muslims who’ve bucked this trend and who have displayed a commitment to pluralism, but they’re not the rule.
The fruits of 60 plus years of Cold War anti-Israel and anti-American propaganda is still being harvested. We have a couple of generations of ‘progressive’ believers who would accept Hitler as an ally.
As in fact they did in 1939. I still hear from people who think of Galloway as a plucky opponent of the Iraq war.
@Eric, John
Off topic , again.
Anecdotally , I bet that I am the only person among the three of us who has lived among Muslims (eaten with them ,attended their marriages, played cricket with them , gone to school with them) including through Hindu-Muslim riots and that I find that Hindu fundamentalists can easily match Muslim fundamentalists.
There is much to complain about Islam and Islamic practices especially towards women – But if I look at treatment of women in India – are they so much worse than Hindus? Jains? Buddhists?
And yes of course some Muslims are terrorists – Are they so much worse than the non muslim terrorists ?
http://scroll.in/article/718458/most-extremists-in-india-are-not-muslim-they-are-hindu
This idea that Islam has some special brain washing powers that other religions dont is laughable.
No.
Political correctness. Leftist breast-beating. Ignorance and sheer stupidity. These explanations are much more likely than “creeping Islamism.”
Muslims are a minority in the UK, often despised, and these chuckleheads at the MSU think criticism of Islam, or of Islamism, supports or increases prejudice against Muslims–the people who suffer the most from Islamism.
The MSU’s thinking, loosely so called, is very simple: Muslims oppressed, trans gender people oppressed, therefore speech that might upset members of either group is evil and must be suppressed. Trigger Warning!!!eleventy, and etc.
Somebody needs to ask Abu Eesa Niamatullah about trans people. Then we can take bets on which way the MSU will jump.
The “Muslims are a minority” isn’t a complete explanation though, because it for instance doesn’t explain why a student union would favor a reactionary, fundamentalist, theocratic, anti-feminist group as opposed to a liberal group. Why not British Muslims for Secular Democracy for example?
See “ignorance and sheer stupidity.”
I doubt they’ve thought it through. The liberal Muslim voices also draw criticism from the loudest voices in the Muslim community–the Islamists.
And those voices loudly appeal to multiculturalism and know which buttons to push. Is that creeping Islamism, though? I doubt it. But I could be wrong; I don’t live there.
In any case, women and their rights get shuffled aside. Again.
Correction: creeping Islamisation.
I neither know nor live there either, but then again, it’s possible that this is what Eric means by “creeping Islamisation” – students being misled by loud appeals to multiculturalism etc, and taking the theocratic Muslims to be more multicultural and “authentic” than the secular liberal ones. I do think it’s a thing, and one that we keep seeing, although I don’t think Islamisation is exactly the right word for it. For years and years and years the BBC turned to the MCB for comments on all Islam-related issues, and referred to them as representing “the Muslim community.”
Why?
Because Women. Do. Not. Count.
Among conservatives, among fundamentalists, among leftists, among way too many women in general, among librarians, among mountain climbers, among everybody.
Women. Do. Not. Count.
If there was a group promoting the “rights” of Fully Raw Cannibals, they’d be more important than women’s rights.
Ophelia @11
There is something in that idea. I’ve certainly been party to multiple discussions with people on the left (which is where I identify politically and socially), and especially left-wing activists, where it is clear that they feel some kind of guilt and shame for the West’s colonial past.
Personally I wont have a bar of that. I can acknowledge that my ancestors/society did something bad in the past and have a good faith discussion about what we should do to make amends, including an apology, without feeling personal guilt or shame. Guilt and shame for actions you could not possibly be a party to is pointless and counter productive.
I have seen so many people who feel exactly that guilt and shame bend over backwards to avoid confronting people who are behaving poorly, simply because they come from a group that has been historically wronged. There is also the attitude that ‘traditional’ cultures are to be protected at all costs and not questioned, even when the traditional culture involves behaviour that breaches the law (and also the social standards and mores of modern society). All this because to do otherwise is neo-colonialism or cultural hegemony.
Why?
You have to understand the current state of the “social justice” worldview (which, as self-imposed labels go, has become about as accurate as “pro-life”).
Islam opposes the West, and if the West is bad then whatever opposes it must be good. If patriarchy is a product of the West, then what appear to be patriarchal attitudes in Islam cannot be patriarchal attitudes because Islam is not of the West. If a Muslim says something about keeping women out of the workforce, just ignore it. There’s a war on, and Muslims aren’t the enemy.
This is the same general crowd (the student-y, Guardian-adoring British Left) that accuses gay activists of creating a rift between Islam and the LGBT community when they protest against imams who call for gay people to be thrown from the highest mountain, or against “gay-free Shariah zone” posters on public London streets.
While I’m prone to cynicism even I can’t support reasoning quite that reductionist. I think the current tendency of some on the left (many of them activists) is the product of many layers of events/threads of thought over decades. Combine a feeling that Something Must Be Done To Right The Wrongs with a compulsive desire not to give offence to the downtrodden and a lack of understanding of reasonably recent history and intellectual frame work of past activism and you have the groundwork for the current situation. It’s not just a young persons failing because it is based on the thoughts, feelings and actions of a couple of generations of activists, some of whom I debated as a youngster must now be in their 60’s at least. It would be interesting to know if they still hold the same views.
But “a compulsive desire not to give offence to the downtrodden” could and should apply as much and in fact more to the people trodden down by Islamists as it does to Islamists. That’s the part that makes no real sense. Why does a compulsive desire not to give offence to the downtrodden become a tendency to grovel at the feet of ferocious theocrats? The ferocious theocrats are the treaders down.
Oh I know! No argument from me. That’s why I have a problem with the woolly headed thinking that leads to this. Better to throw billions of women (some willingly) under a bus than give offence to some other group we treated badly in the past. [That statement is also reductionist and simplified and should not be taken absolutely literally – but there is a kernel of truth there]
Yes, but you see, lifting oppression from the Muslims is simply a step in the direction of lifting oppression from all of mankind (and “mankind” includes women… I guess):
Just substitute appropriate phrases for the strikethrough words in this beautiful quote from Ayman al-Zawahiri (I won’t bother; do it yourself) and you will obtain an answer, so perfectly acceptable to all of us.
I, for one, accept the message wholeheartedly.
Allahu akbar!Eat the rich!In the last excerpt, the quotation on women in the workplace attributed to Yasir Qadhi is actually by Niamatullah. Qadhi is also not a Holocaust denier, and I would not credit the fairness of any critique of Qadhi which described him as one. I should say that I despise Yasir Qadhi, whose supposed usefulness to the War on Terror has given him a pass that he does not merit, but it is important to be accurate.