Liberal Inconsistencies: The Islamic Question

The Wall Street Journal published a very important and insightful editorial in Tuesday's edition. The author, Tawfik Hamid, is a former member of an Islamist terrorist group, now a medical doctor living in the West.

He makes many fine and thought-provoking points in his article. However, for my purposes, perhaps the most relevant are these two: Western moral relativism has removed our bases for criticizing Islamic inhumanity and barbarism, and; American feminists are more focused on relatively minor economic issues in their own country, than more profound issues of basic human rights for women in Islamic countries.

He writes, part,

"But indeed, there is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq....

Yet it is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals -- who unceasingly claim to support human rights -- have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah's inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western "progressives" pave the way for Islamist barbarity? Indeed, if the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror.

Western feminists duly fight in their home countries for equal pay and opportunity, but seemingly ignore, under a façade of cultural relativism, that large numbers of women in the Islamic world live under threat of beating, execution and genital mutilation, or cannot vote, drive cars and dress as they please.

The tendency of many Westerners to restrict themselves to self-criticism further obstructs reformation in Islam. Americans demonstrate against the war in Iraq, yet decline to demonstrate against the terrorists who kidnap innocent people and behead them. Similarly, after the Madrid train bombings, millions of Spanish citizens demonstrated against their separatist organization, ETA. But once the demonstrators realized that Muslims were behind the terror attacks they suspended the demonstrations. This example sent a message to radical Islamists to continue their violent methods."

These are eye-opening and very blunt statements by Hamid. If he had uttered them a few years ago, it would be one thing.

However, we are now in a position to take his statements in a different light. The US Speaker of the House is a woman. Where is Frisco Nan's outrage against the Islamic treatment of women? Where is her solidarity, not to mention that of her party's, with women across the Levant, as they are mistreated, physically abused, and treated as property?

Is it not grossly inconsistent for Nan and her minions to squawk over second-order issues of compensation equality, while their Arabic Islamic sisters are under threats of severe penalties for simply desiring basic human rights?

Further, the Democratic party, which champions the withholding of judgment from anyone's situation, from determining 'right' and 'wrong,' have now hobbled America's ability to appropriately judge the inhumanity of Islamic extremists. Hamid notes that the same liberal Americans who decry our involvement in Iraq, fail to apply similar standards to our enemies among the Islamists of the region.

Liberal Democrats are now reaping the whirlwind of what they have sown with their selective application of criticism, their relativism, and their politically correct views on so many important issues. Having stifled debate on so many critical issues in our own society, and demonized even the ability to express dissent and debate issues, they have lost their own ability to realize when Islamic extremists have gone too far. The Liberals' own capitulation on applying universal, unconditional standards of morality or human behavior have now trapped them into being unable to choose between extreme Islam as a protected 'minority,' and extreme Islam as destructive of basic human rights.

How ironic for the Liberal Democrats to have corrupted the old biblical aphorism about seeing the mote in your neighbor's eye, and not acknowledging the beam in your own, to missing the beam in your neighbor's eye, and mistaking instead the mote in your own for a tumor.

The only thing worse than having such "leadership" in the House, is if similarly-minded Democrats win the White House as well in 2008.