Feminists and Multiculturalists: A Failure to Covenant Part II

Covenant Zone meets every Thursday, 7-9pm, in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, in front of Blenz Coffee. Look for the blue scarves. Please join us if you would like to discuss the health of the Canadian national covenant. Some potential material for discussion follows:

Don't watch this video unless you are prepared to witness acts of extreme violence towards women, a revelation into life for women under Islam (ht: Suicide of the West):


Writing about the murder of Aqsa Parvez, Barbara Kay argues:

We have this week two news items of tragedies involving girl victims. Both will serve to reinforce the belief of many Canadians -- count me in -- that the alliance of feminism with multiculturalism has created a two-tier sisterhood.

The top tier, Western women, have achieved full equality rights. Any and all male aggression against a top-tier woman triggers a public outcry and a million lit candles. The second-tier women -- those from other cultures -- are not so fortunate. Feminists exploit multiculturalism to justify their moral abandonment of the women who most need them: girl victims of dysfunctional or socially unevolved cultures
[...]
Multiculturalists would have us believe that the hijab is merely a religious symbol, like the Sikh kirpan or the Christian cross, freely embraced by the girls wearing them. It isn't, as many Muslim commentators, including Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hassan in these pages yesterday, have frequently explained. The hijab is rather a public sign of supervised sexual modesty, and marks those wearing it as chattel, leashed to their fathers and brothers as surely as if they were wearing a dog collar.

But you'll never hear a feminist murmur a word of complaint about these girls' lack of autonomy

Athos notes:

Ostensibly [Islam] claims revelation that supersedes both Judaism and Christianity; surreptitiously, Islam is a petulant, chip-on-its-shoulder "negative imitation" of both, always cocking an eye to see its model-rival in near-hilarious attraction/revulsion ... if it weren't so murderous.

But like all conventional expressions of the primitive Sacred, Islam cannot let go of its primary motivating force: the religious dread and awe of needing victims -- yes, human victims. Girard calls this essential element of conventional religion, anthropologically speaking, the "single victim mechanism" (Robert Hamerton-Kelly calls it the "Generative Mimetic Scapegoating Mechanism," and with good reason, but I won't get into all that now).

Needless to say, if the duck walks and talks and looks like a practitioner of human sacrifice, it is a form of quacking paganism. Period. Judaism long ago had to be pulled out of it -- ask the Major and Minor Prophets. Christianity has always ruefully dabbled in it, enjoying a good Sunday afternoon hangin' on the town square. But both listen to a biblical Spirit that says an unequivocal "NO!" to it as a raison d'etre.

There is too much gathering evidence that Islam is far, far away from such an unequivocal message. Especially when Mum and Dad want to take the daughter out back and slit her throat unless stopped by the authorities.

Islamophobia? you might say so...

Janet Levy on Lee Harris (ht: Dag):

The principle of honor is of primary importance in radical Islamic cultures. The honor of the community must be protected at all costs and far exceeds any notion of the individual or of individual rights. Religious leaders, who view the world across a long-term time horizon, operate for the good of the ummah, the propagation of Islam over time and the enforcement of Islamic law.

Tribal success hinges on the inculcation of a uniform system of steadfast shared values and of a sense of shame so deep and visceral that it is impervious to reason and makes death preferable to tribal code violations and the accompanying loss of collective honor. It solidifies a rigidly imposed “us vs. them” mindset in which “the other” is a cursed object of abject enmity. The faithful are indoctrinated and prepared to sacrifice themselves for furthering fanatic tribal goals. Martyrs for the cause are celebrated and elevated to a position of honor.

Tribal cultures thrive on the vacuum that chaos presents. It is a boon to fanaticism and totalitarian control. In a state of chaos, all behaviors become permissible and extreme measures are easy to enforce on desperate populations.

Against such beliefs and behaviors, the enlightened societies of the West are ill equipped to do battle, Harris says. In Western societies, like America, elites serve as critics of the status quo and are often opposed by the populace. They keep any impulses toward fanaticism by the masses in check. Chaos is anathema to reason or order, which must be maintained at all costs. Indeed, the fear of anarchy often leads to appeasement and repudiation of beliefs.

Harris defines America today as a “carpe diem feel good” society in which the happiness of the individual is placed above responsibility to the community, world or future. Rights are cherished above duties, the present valued more than the future, and material acquisitions deemed more important than hard work.

Shaming is used as an effective tool in the enlightened West but with a different twist from that of the Islamic world. People are shamed into thinking the “right” thoughts and ostracized for intolerance and aggressive behavior. This serves to dilute cultural values and life-preserving warrior behavior necessary for survival. In America, people are generally unwilling to make the ultimate sacrifice and will do anything to avoid death and loss of property. The society operates under the notion that all differences can be resolved with negotiation rather than bloodshed. Potential warriors, such as alpha males are feminized, drugged and shamed out of existence. Essentially, mandatory multiculturalism enforces respect for other cultures and disrespect for American culture, Harris argues.

Harris further suggests that America’s Protestant tradition of independent thought and action has been replaced by programmed thought, further weakening our ability to deal with fundamentalist Islamic societies. America’s teachers are “salesmen of a particular ideological brand” and enforce a groupthink mentality of the “correct” opinions. For example, instead of critically evaluating multiple points of view about women in society, students are told that women are oppressed and that they must be purged of their anti-feminist views. Politically correct values and attitudes religiously demand tolerance for different points of view. It is deemed contemptible to view our American culture, our nation or any religion as superior and practically de rigueur to be tolerant of the intolerant and odious, such as Muslim fundamentalists and 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Thus, Western civilization is stripped of the notion that anything precious and worth protecting or fighting for exists.

In summary, the West is suffering from an insidious ideological assault from the outside by fundamentalist Islam that could result in profound societal damage, while at the same time we are, from the inside, undermining our core values and traditions. We are not experiencing a clash of civilizations, but an overt attempt to dismantle the worldwide status quo. The West is vulnerable, because it has failed to recognize that survival hinges on being intolerant to the intolerant and acknowledging the superiority of our way of life and the exceptionalism of America. We will probably be unable to change the Islamists and alter their three-pronged prescription for non-Muslims – death, subjugation or conversion – but we can prevent them from changing us. Through our “enlightened” democracy and lack of cultural protectionism, we are inadvertently aiding their cause. Our ability to fight has been severely weakened by the enlightened principles of tolerance and multiculturalism that we have grown to cherish and by a lack of group cohesiveness and respect for our common values and accomplishments. While we think short-term and teach our children to have contempt for our culture, the Islamists think long-term and teach their children to die for Islam.

According to Harris, our success in fighting the threat of radical Islam will depend on a willingness to defend ourselves against that most potent weapon for survival: fanaticism. Societies that are the most fanatical about their preservation will prevail. America’s best hope is that the struggle for our survival may cause us to awaken and recognize the nobility of our culture as something worth fighting for. We must return to our core traditions and values, take pride in our ethical superiority and exceptionalism and recognize a sacred duty to instill Western ethos in future generations and as widely throughout the world as possible.

Covenant Zone exists to remember the superiority of our Western way of life and to help us become better able to articulate and defend our stake in the covenant of Canadian nationhood.

Theodore Dalrymple:

The new atheists are quite right to see the threat of theocracy in Islamism. But in attacking all religion, they are like the French government which banned not only the wearing of the headscarf in schools, but the wearing of all religious insignia whatsoever, despite the fact that wearing a Star of David or a crucifix has and had a completely different social signification from wearing a headscarf. In the name of non-discrimination, the French government failed to discriminate properly: and proper discrimination is, or ought to be, practically the whole business of life. If there were large numbers of Christians or Jews who were in favour of establishing a theocracy in France, who had a recent record of terrorism, and who terrorised each other into the wearing of crucifixes and Stars of David, then the banning of those insignia would have been justified too. The wearing of the headscarf should be permitted again when Islam has become merely one personal confession among others, without the political significance that it has now.

In attacking all religion so indiscriminately, the atheist authors are, I am sure inadvertently and unintentionally, strengthening the hand of the Islamists. In arguing, for example, that for parents to bring up a child in any religious tradition, even the mildest of Anglicanism, is to abuse a child, with the natural corollary that the law should forbid it (for how can the law permit child abuse?), some of the authors are giving ammunition to the Islamists, who will be able with justice to say to their fellow-religionists, See, it is all or nothing. If you give the secularists an inch, they will take a mile. No compromise with secularism is possible, therefore; cleave unto us.

Islamism is a worthy target, of course, but by now one that has been pretty well aimed at (though I recommend very strongly the forthcoming book from Encounter Books, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan, by Caroline Fourest). To suggest, however, that all forms of religion are equal, that they are all murderous and dangerous, is not to serve the cause of freedom and tolerance. It is to play into the hands of the very people we should most detest; it is to hand them the rhetorical tools with which they can tell the gullible that our freedoms are not genuine and that our tolerance is a masquerade. It is to do what I should previously have thought was impossible, namely in this respect to put them in the right.

See also: the fate of street girls in Cairo