How Islam Got its American Privileges
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
What is Islam? The obvious dictionary definition
answer is that it’s a religion, but legally speaking
it actually enjoys all of the advantages of race,
religion and culture with none of the disadvantages.
Islam
is a religion when mandating that employers
accommodate the hijab, but when it comes time to
bring it into the schools, places that are legally
hostile to religion, American students are taught
about Islam, visit mosques and even wear burkas and
recite Islamic prayers to learn about another
culture. Criticism of Islam is denounced as racist
even though the one thing that Islam clearly isn’t
is a race.
Islamist organizations have figured out how lock in
every advantage of race, religion and culture, while
expeditiously shifting from one to the other to
avoid any of the disadvantages.
The biggest form of Muslim privilege has been to
racialize Islam. The racialization of Islam has
locked in all the advantages of racial status for a
group that has no common race, only a common
ideology.
Islam is the only religion that cannot be
criticized. No other religion has a term in wide use
that treats criticism of it as bigotry. Islamophobia
is a unique term because it equates dislike of a
religion with racism. Its usage makes it impossible
to criticize that religion without being accused of
bigotry.
By equating religion with race, Islam is treated not
as a particular set of beliefs expressed in
behaviors both good and bad, but as an innate trait
that like race cannot be criticized without
attacking the existence of an entire people. The
idea that Islamic violence stems from its beliefs is
denounced as racist.
Muslims are treated as a racial collective rather
than a group that shares a set of views about the
world.
That has made it impossible for the left to deal
with ex-Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or non-Muslims
from Muslim families like Salman Rushdie. If Islam
is more like skin color than an ideology, then
ex-Muslims, like ex-Blacks, cannot and should not
exist. Under such conditions, atheism is not a
debate, but a hate crime. Challenging Islam does not
question a creed; it attacks the existence of an
entire people.
Muslim atheists, unlike all other atheists, are
treated as race traitors both by Muslims and
leftists. The left has accepted the Brotherhood’s
premise that the only authentic Middle Easterner is
a Muslim (not a Christian or a Jew) and that the
only authentic Muslim is a Salafist (even if they
don’t know the word).
The racialization of Islam has turned blasphemy
prosecutions into an act of tolerance while making a
cartoon of a religious figure racist even when it is
drawn by ex-Muslims like Bosch Fawstin. The New York
Times will run photos of Chris Ofili’s “The Holy
Virgin Mary” covered in dung and pornography, but
refuses to run Mohammed cartoons because it deems
one anti-religious and the other racist.
The equating of Islam with Arabs and Pakistanis has
made it nearly impossible for the media to discuss
violence against Christians in those parts of the
world. The racialization of Islam has made Arab
Christians, like Bangladeshi atheists, a
contradiction in terms. The ethnic cleansing of the
Yazidi could only be covered by giving them a
clearly defined separate identity. Middle Eastern
Christians are increasingly moving to avoid being
categorized as Arabs because it is the only way to
break through this wall of ignorance.
While racialization is the biggest Muslim privilege,
race provides no protection for many Islamic
religious practices. Muslims then seek religious
discrimination laws to protect these practices even
if it’s often a matter of debate whether their
lawsuits protect their religious practices or impose
them on others.
Islam is a theocracy. When it leaves the territories
conquered by Islam, it seeks to replicate that
theocracy through violence and by adapting the legal
codes of the host society to suit its purposes.
Islamic blasphemy laws are duplicated using hate
crime laws. Employers are obligated to make
religious concessions to Muslim employees because of
laws protecting religious practices, but many of
these practices, such as refusing to carry out jobs
involving pork, liquor or Seeing Eye dogs, are
really ways of theocratically forcing behaviors that
Islam forbids out of public life much as Saudi
Arabia or Iran do.
Accusations of bigotry are used to outlaw ideas
that Islam finds blasphemous and religious
protection laws are used to banish behaviors that it
disapproves of. By switching from race to religion
and back again, Islamists construct a virtual
theocracy by exploiting laws designed to protect
different types of groups.
Religions in America traded theocracy for religious
freedom. They gave up being able to impose their
practices on others in exchange for being able to
freely practice their own religions. Islam rejects
religious freedom. It exploits it to remove the
freedom of belief and practice of others. When it
cannot do so through religious protection laws, it
does so through claims of bigotry.
Religions were not meant to be immunized from
blasphemy because that is theocracy. Instead
religions are protected from restrictions, rather
than from criticism. Islam insists on being
protected from both. It makes no concessions to the
freedom of others while demanding maximum religious
accommodation.
While race and religion are used to create negative
spaces in which Islam cannot be challenged, the
creed is promoted positively as a culture.
Presenting Islam as a culture allows it easier entry
into schools and cultural institutions. Islamic
missionary activity uses the Western longing for
oriental exotica that its political activists loudly
decry to inject it into secular spaces that would
ordinarily be hostile to organized religion.
Leftists prefer to see Islam as a culture rather
than a religion. Their worldview is not open to
Islam’s clumsy photocopy of the deity that they have
already rejected in their own watered down versions
of Christianity and Judaism. But they are constantly
seeking an aimless and undefined spirituality in
non-Western cultures that they imagine are free of
the materialism and hypocrisy of Western culture.
Viewing Islam as a culture allows the left to
project its own ideology on a blank slate. That is
why liberals remain passionately convinced that
Islam is a religion of social justice. Their Islam
is a mirror that reflects back their own views and
ideas at them. They pretend to respect Islam as a
culture without bothering to do any more than learn
a few words and names so that they can seem like
world travelers.
By morphing into a culture, Islam sheds its content
and becomes a style, a form of dress, a drape of
cloth, a style of beard, a curvature of script and a
whiff of spices. It avoids uncomfortable questions
about what the Koran actually says and instead sells
the religion as a meaningful lifestyle. This
approach has always had a great deal of appeal for
African-Americans who were cut off from their own
heritage through Islamic slavery, but it also enjoys
success with white upper class college students.
The
parents of those students often learn too late that
Islam is not just another interchangeable
monotheistic religion, that its mosques are not
places where earnest grad students lecture elderly
congregants about social justice and that its laws
are not reducible to the importance of being nice to
others.
Like a magician using misdirection, these
transformations from religion to race, from race to
culture and from culture to religion, distract
Americans from asking what Islam really believes. By
combining race, religion and culture, it replicates
the building blocks of its theocracy within our
legal and social spaces.
Separately each of these has its advantages and
disadvantages. By combining them, Islam gains the
advantages of all three, and by moving from one to
the other, it escapes all of the disadvantages. The
task of its critics is to deracialize Islam, to
reduce it to an ideology and to ask what it really
believes.
Islam is a privileged religion. And there’s a word
for that. Theocracy.