Why Can’t We Talk About Islam Honestly?
26th November 2015
Because the people who are talking most about Islam are not honest talkers.
Islam is not a race. Islam is not an ethnicity. Islam is a religion and a political philosophy. And it is distinct from other religions and political philosophies.
An inconvenient truth.
Pointing this fact out does not make a person obsessed with hatred or racism. A Muslim might hold moderate views or he might hold extreme ones. If we act as if the color of people’s skin rather than their beliefs define them, we’re engaging in a curiously narrow-minded discussion about one of the world’s great faiths—one that is comprised of all races and many ethnicities.
Yet this is exactly the formulation many on the Left demand.
Because they don’t know how to talk about anything other than race and ethnicity. Idendity Politics, among the other deleterious effects that it has, makes it’s adherents act as if they were stupid.
It’s hardly un-American to believe that the foundational values of your society are preferable to the ones that make Yemen or Iran or Pakistan possible. We could spend days exploring the crimes committed against liberalism and decency by moderate Islamic nations without ever touching on the topic of ISIS or al-Qaeda. These crimes transcend ethnicity and race, but they all have something in common. Something we’re not supposed to talk about.
A factor not only of the Left’s fascination with The Other but also the Left’s religious adherence to the proposition that America Is Always Wrong.