That
Atlantic piece on Daesh/ISIS that
Mike linked is getting sustained criticism from the academic left. They want you to know that it's really wrong to suggest that Daesh has
any sort of Islamic legitimacy, and that
suggesting otherwise is dangerous.
6 comments:
Ironic that the academic left is full of disdain for Christianity, yet defends Islam, which by all indications is a lot less tolerant than Christianity.
What the academic left doesn't realize is that the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
A further point: while they throw about the charge of "Islamophobia," nearly all of the academic left have a phobia about Christianity- especially those Christians who are not lib/pro Democrats. There are good phobias, and there are bad phobias.
Disclaimer: I am not a churchgoer.
I skimmed the article, looking for mention of the advertising campaign in the Hamas Covenant (and supported by the Saudi textbook material) to convince Muslims that they have an individual, religious duty to kill their neighbors. I did not see it. Perhaps I missed it.
This campaign has been going on since 1988, and it is stuffed with false history, fauxtography, and accusations against Israel of atrocities that were committed by the Palestinians.
There is a whole, different, parallel universe, where Muslims have justification for killing Jews, and Muslims a persecuted world-wide in places like France, Denmark and the US. It may be a pack of lies, but that does not stop people living far away from the events from believing it.
As for the business of the academic left deciding what is legitimate Islam, Muslims don't care.
Valerie
I too perused these articles, and both immediately fell into the exact tone that I suspected they would. "What the Atlantic article ignores is that most Muslims do not believe this." Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but a) that's irrelevant, and b) the article never claimed "most Muslims" do believe as ISIS does. It merely claims that ISIS believes it. And I say it's irrelevant, because even if most Muslims do not buy into ISIS's theology and justifications, the article in the Atlantic goes to great lengths to speak to ISIS supporters (like our old 'friend' Choudary) and they confirm that in fact they, and others like them do support ISIS's ideology and state that it is in fact the true interpretation of Islam.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say, both the articles linked in this post completely missed the point made strongly in the Atlantic article where ISIS agrees that most Muslims do not believe as they do. In fact, ISIS considers all the Muslims around them to be apostates. Hence all the killings. The problem is, in their rush to exclaim how very incorrect it is to point out that ISIS draws its justifications from very clear Islamic texts (we're not talking poetry like Revelations here, we're talking "behead these people, crucify those people, enslave these other people" type instructions), they're arguing against a Straw Man. What most Muslims do or do not believe is ultimately immaterial to the Atlantic article. The article is, at all levels, about ISIS, not Islam as a whole.
If I were to write an article to explain Jim Jones, it would not be an indictment of Christianity (even though it started as a Christian cult). And no one would really need to write any article decrying how "most Christians don't believe like Jim Jones did." But these folks on the Left just cannot bear to let an inconvenient fact stand unchallenged. And I'm sure that if you pointed out to them that the Atlantic article never does what they say it does, and point out (as i did) that in fact it SUPPORTS the claim that ISIS agrees that mainstream Islam disagrees with them, they'd still object on the basis that it gives "cover to Islamophobes" or some such nonsense.
If I were to write an article to explain Jim Jones, it would not be an indictment of Christianity (even though it started as a Christian cult). And no one would really need to write any article decrying how "most Christians don't believe like Jim Jones did."
Actually, it's a fair bet several folks on the Left would have written articles suggesting that Christianity sowed the seeds that led to the Jonestown massacre, and that's really the problem with religious faith in general: that it turns people into mindless, intolerant killers who revel in violence and the treating of nonbelievers as Other :p
It's only when it comes to Islam that the Left's longstanding deep distrust and hatred of religion are mysteriously suspended.
The Left's dirty little secret is that the vast majority of them are lazy non-intellectuals.
Valerie
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