Saudi Arabia shows more tolerance than some American campuses
CAIR recently succeeded in shutting down a screening of the film, “Honor Diaries,” at the University of Michigan, claiming that the film is ‘Islamophobic.’
In some respects this acts shows that Saudi Arabia is more tolerant than some of our college campuses.
Muslim women’s rights activist Dr. Qanta Ahmed explains in National Review Online.
…Crying Islamophobia, and thus slandering the movie’s backers, Muslim groups have demanded that universities cancel these screenings. Contrast this with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia last weekend, where my colleague Dr. Maha Al-Muneef was honored by President Obama for the humanitarian work she as a Saudi Muslim physician has performed in exposing the abuse of women and girls in her own country — work that won first the admiration and later the patronage of the Saudi monarch himself. If a country as religiously restrictive and theocratic as Saudi Arabia can tolerate educational and social campaigns exposing the violence against women and girls, why in a country as robust as the United States are Muslim groups permitted to stifle public discourse in the academic sphere?
The answer is that an underlying but easily spied agenda is dominating the conversation. Portraying American Muslims as a victimized, besieged group is politically useful to extremist groups despite the documented facts to the contrary: American Muslims are affluent, upwardly mobile, and empowered.
Calls of Islamophobia win political Islamists attention akin to that generated by claims of anti-Semitism, though the two are far from equivalent in historical, moral, or ethical terms. American universities, especially vulnerable to accusations of discrimination or even marginalization, are easily frightened and persuaded to do the bidding of entrenched political Islamists.
Political Islamism is a distinct and predatory beast, quite different in intention and action from mainstream Islam and its followers in all our varied manifestations. Central to political Islamism is the institutionalization of Islamist ideals that pursue Nizam Islami, an official “State” of Islam — a new world order — that prescribes supremacy of Islamist beliefs over all others. A reinvented version of Sharia is required for this goal, along with an evolution of classical jihad into terrorist jihadism.
Islamists actively pursue de-secularization as they seek to define purity and authenticity by Islamist standards — denigrating democratic pluralism and power-sharing as secular ideals that they oppose. They hope to use the ballot box, however, as an instrument to accomplish the institutionalization of Islamist ideals. But if they have their way, the ballot box will not result in democracy over the long term but in a brittle, poorly disguised political theocracy. Political Islamism is a variety of totalitarianism; while not based in Islam, it is very much nestled within Islam.
Comments
Much of what Qanta Ahmed says here is apologetic BS, such as this:
Islam is not like either Judaism or Christianity because neither of them have a political component. Islam is the inextricable intertwining of Judaeo-Christian heresy, paganism, and politics. The political cannot be divorced from the whole because it was the means used to propagate the whole–when preaching failed Mohammed slaughtered. What Qanta Ahmed said here is true of Islam as created by Mohammed. It’s intentions have always been supremacist. There’s no reinvention of sharia, it is what’s in the books.
The irony of the header of this piece is that Saudi Arabia is part of the funding apparatus for the noxious mix of Communists and Islamists on American university campuses. It’s part of the grand Islamic design to defeat us from within by perverting our own institutions and using our own laws against us. That you would describe the Saudis as more tolerant is therefore, at the very least, laughable: the people the Saudis fund to foment trouble and serve Islam’s cause create trouble at American universities and you praise the source for its “tolerance”.
I’m surprised that you don’t realize, Leslie, that it’s the old paradigm playing out. What can be said amongst Muslims is not the same as they want said to and of them. So, the Honor Diaries cannot be shown in the USA without significant protest, because it undermines the narrative they want the gullible to receive, but there can be some discussion about violence against women in SA.