http://www.urdesipk.com/

Very good points, I couldn’t have put it better myself. Have an up vote 🙂

*I* oppose Beit Din *and* christian “faith-based tribunals” *and” “sharia courts (or whatever you want to call them)”

GUIDELINES that discriminate against women!

Don’t you have the backbone to tell us your name, Imam?

Ah, so you’re one of those ‘leftists’ who, ever since the “end of the Cold War” in 1992, have been suffering from a sort of PTSD prompted by the apparent consigning of any form of liberal thought to the trash-can of history. Some of you, of course, have simply turned your coats inside out and joined the world’s Conservatives, while others have grasped like drowning swimmers onto the ‘shiny’ of post-modernist cultural relativism (the view that, as journalist Johann Hari once wrote, “the world is carved up among ‘cultures,’ and they should not try to comment critically on each other. Instead, they should be ‘respectful.’ You can criticize Your Own Kind, but not Foreigners, because they are unbridgeably different from you”).

Add to this a notion of anti-imperialism that is so badly defined that it is meaningless – including the misguided belief that islamism is *always* bred in poverty –and a fair serving of “European guilt” and we have a situation where we must hold our tongues or sit on our hands and excuse barbarities because “we’re not allowed to preach to ‘the Natives’ and tell them how to live their lives.” No wonder the ‘Left’ is something of a joke in most of the world.

It is not racist to defend equality or tolerance or social, economic or juridical rights for all. What *is* racist is to deny people the same rights and freedoms because they were raised in a “different culture.” And to say that people *choose* to live in a society where they must wear a mobile black tent to go out in public or where they can be stoned to death for love or have their throats opened for talking to a man to whom they are not related is an *insult* of the highest order – people live in such circumstances because those in power in those ‘societies’ (usually men) *benefit* from these shenanigans and convince their ‘societies’ that their imaginary friends have sanctioned it.

Nor is it “arrogant Western cultural imperialism,” or “neo-colonialism” – much less “Western decadence” – to wish to share those rights and freedoms with every human being on the planet. Yes, they arose in the context of the *European* Enlightenment and the capitalism that spawned it, but – just as capitalism was a huge step forward over slaveholding and feudalism – they can become the common currency of the human race and be used to create world-historic advances in human well-being.

To reject these ideas just because they first emerged in Europe is a particularly short-sighted form of nativism – any revolutionary worth the name doesn’t care that Marx was German, Trotsky a Russian Jew, Stalin Georgian or Mao Chinese, but only whether their ideas will be useful.

Moreover, before you folks on the ‘Left’ enthuse on how ‘progressive’ it is to support islamism against imperialism, you should take thought for the fact that islamism is a *creation* of imperialism. The British were happy to encourage islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia to stalemate Imperial Russian expansion in the nineteenth century, then in the Middle East in WWI to frustrate the Turks, and again in Central Asia in the wake of the Russian Revolution. After the First World War, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded under British auspices to counter Egyptian nationalism, and this rationale was inherited by the US after WWII, when ‘nationalism’ was equated with ‘communism’ (1) and islamist movements – from the anti-Soviet mujahidin in Afghanistan, to ‘al-Qaida’ and IS – have become the weapons of-choice for Washington to further its agenda of global conquest … and are, moreover, invaluable in scaring the population of the ‘Homeland’ into giving up their freedoms in exchange for a bogus “national security.”

Those who would be called ‘progressive’ should be willing to oppose reaction *wherever* it raises its head, and as happily speak and act against the islamic right as against the christian one.

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(1) John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, wrote, “The religions of the East are deeply rooted and have many precious values. Their spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and materialism. That creates a common bond between us.”