April 6, 2007
 
PARALLEL UNIVERSE: ‘Progressives’ Practice Double Standard on Islam, Other Faiths…Giving Pass to Caning Women, Executing Gays, Amputating Limbs
 
By David M. Kinchen
Editor, Huntington News Network
 
First, the photo grabbed my attention. It shows a woman, seated, in traditional Islamic garb. Standing next to her is a man brandishing what looks like a whip. In the background there is a mosque. The caption reads: “A Shariah official canes a woman after she was convicted of unlawful contact with an unmarried man, Indonesia, January 2006.”
 
Next, the headline in the story (link: http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009890) caught my eye: “The Trouble with Islam.”
 
Finally, the byline reached out: Tawfik Hamid, described in the shirttail at the end of the story in the Tuesday, April 3, 2007 Wall Street Journal as a “one time member…of an Islamist terrorist group.” He’s also a medical doctor.
 
It says a lot about our current state of political correctness – itself a “politically incorrect” phrase – that Hamid’s op-ed appears in The Wall Street Journal and not in the New York Times or The Nation. It’s Hamid’s view -- and mine -- that the so-called “progressives” – people who just the other day called themselves “liberals” – have a double standard when it comes to abuses by Islam and those of other religions.
 
Hamid: “It is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals – who unceasingly claim to support human rights – have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstruct unambiguous criticism of Shariah’s inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel.”
 
Exactly! I couldn’t have said it better and it’s better coming from Tawfik Hamid, an Egyptian Muslim, than from anyone else. Hamid provides us with a perspective similar to that of Nonie Darwish, another Egyptian, whose book “Now They Call Me Infidel” I reviewed last November and who I'm proud to call a friend. (link: http://www.bluefieldnews.net/columns/061116-kinchen-review.html)
 
Western “progressives” (I hate that term because it brings to my mind the excesses of the American progressive movement of the early 20th Century – abuses like the pseudoscience of eugenics, forced sterilization and a lord-of-the-manor racism exhibited by many intellectuals and politicians up to and including President Woodrow Wilson) don’t hesitate to point out at length – and rightly so – sexual abuses by Catholic priests and the visits of Protestant evangelists to gay prostitutes.
 
Chris Hedges writes about “American Fascists” and you can be sure he’s talking about Christians – not the Islamofascists that most people worry about.
 
Hamid notes that “progressive” Western feminists “duly fight in their home countries for equal pay and opportunity, but seemingly ignore, under a façade of cultural relativism, that large numbers of women in the Islamic world live under threat of beating, execution and genital mutilation, or cannot vote, drive cars or dress as they please.”
 
Apologists for Islam -- people like former Catholic nun Karen Armstrong -- may argue that Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked (an apt phrase) by extremists. Hamid suggests otherwise in his WSJ op-ed: “Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it. While there are many ideological ‘rootlets’ of Islamism, the main tap root has a name--Salafism, or Salafi Islam, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion.”
 
He continues: “It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the ‘end of days.’ The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong.”
 
Only in America – and perhaps Australia, as commentator Mark Steyn notes – can Hamid and Darwish and others enjoy the freedom to express their views. But even here, they’re often denied the forum of the whole wide mainstream media. Conservative talk show hosts like Glenn Beck and Laura Ingraham and truly outstanding publications like The Wall Street Journal are to be commended for giving Hamid, Darwish and other Islamic reformers a chance to air their truly “progressive” views.