Monday, July 29, 2019

An inconvenient truth about Islam and its critics.

Judaism has some atavistic doctrines that are repugnant but long discarded, if indeed they were ever enacted, and many other doctrines that classical liberals might condemn. But, it is not an evangelizing religion and certainly not one that preaches violence against unbelievers for being infidels. 

Christianity has doctrines more tolerant, but historical practice more brutal, also abandoned for want of power to enforce. 

Islam remains the only one of the Abrahamic religions that has not discarded its conquering totalitarian impulses, and in many places retains the power to enforce these doctrines. This is not to say anything about individual Muslims, many of whom have made their own adaptations to the religion for the modern world in which it is a lifestyle choice and not a system of obligatory laws. But the fact that many have not is cause for alarm given the numbers involved.

And yet to say this is to risk being branded Islamophobic because the multiculturalists have been seduced into thinking that the notions of individual rights and equality of individuals (notably men and women) do not apply to other cultures.