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A Civil-Rights Group That Once Took Klansmen and Neo-Nazis to Court Now Hounds Liberal Muslims for “Blasphemy”

Founded in 1971 to combat white-supremacist groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) won a number of important legal battles against the Ku Klux Klan, various neo-Nazi groups, and other opponents of desegregation. Now it generates materials like its “field guide to anti-Muslim extremists”: a list of fifteen individuals that includes the historian Daniel Pipes, the apostate Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the British Muslim critic of jihadism Maajid Nawaz. Among Nawaz’s crimes are having tweeted a cartoon portraying Jesus and Muhammad, “despite the fact that many Muslims see [such depictions] as blasphemous.” Nick Cohen comments on what he calls “the white left’s first fatwa”:

Nawaz . . . and his Quilliam Foundation have struggled against both the white far right and the Islamist far right. They have defended liberal Muslims and, indeed, all of us from lethal blasphemy taboos and the threat of terrorism. They respect freedom of speech, including the freedom of their enemies to speak. . . . They think they should try to stop young Muslims joining Islamic State, not just for the sake of the Yazidis they will take into sex slavery, or the civilians they will tyrannize and kill, but for the sake of the young Muslims themselves.

A significant faction on the left hates them for upholding the values they have forgotten, and will use any smear to denigrate them. . . .

In the liberal orientalist world view the only “authentic” Muslim is a barbarian. A battery of insults fires on any Muslim who says otherwise. They are “neoconservatives,” “native informants,” and “Zionists”; they are as extreme as the jihadists they oppose or, let’s face it, worse. In short, a section of the Western left has adopted the ideology of the Salafists, Khomeinists, and Islamists. . . .

Of course they could not leave alone Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who became an atheist and denounced the faith of her childhood, and is hated by a section of the white left for doing what they do all the time. That Hirsi Ali needs bodyguards to protect her from Islamist assassins in no way restrained our Alabama witch finders.

Read more at Spectator

More about: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ku Klux Klan, Moderate Islam, neo-Nazis, Politics & Current Affairs

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic