By Bart Wilburn
A clue to understanding the connection between progressivism and Islamophobia is Maureen Dowd’s article in the New York Times, September 15, 2010. Dowd’s article is a mix of ad hominem attacks on Newt Gingrich and assertions that Gingrich is wrong about Obama’s world-view philosophy, as described in his September 12, 2010 article commenting on an article by D’Souza, published in Forbes on August 27, 2010. If Obama is sent packing, Dowd’s article is the portent of an even more strident attack from the left than we saw against George W. Bush.
The dynamic between Dowd and Gingrich is this: The progressive left won't change; they will be desperate and will ultimately be ignored. They will be ignored because the progressive left will be marginalized by the majority of Americans now becoming immune to the progressive’s favorite denigration of being racists, knuckle-draggers, gun-slingers, and wing-nuts. Obama's progressivism simply didn't work, we know it, and they couldn't sell it. They couldn’t sell it because the culture of traditional America, the American Heritage, rests on principles of independence and courage and is simply too strong to be displaced by fantasies of what "ought to be," such as are the foundation s of the progressivism. The strength of America is that we examine what comes to our attention and reveal what we find. Fantasies and ill-founded ideologies cannot withstand unfettered examination. Socialism, now neo-socialism branded as progressivism, has been lurking around the edges of America for the last 50 years or more, but Obama brought it to the center of our attention and we examined it, questioned it, and now we find it lacking and are repudiating it. That kind of free examination and questioning is what connects in a not too surprising way with the related issue that has become a subtext of progressivism: so-called Islamophobia.
The left equates Islamophobia with racism, but in fact Islamophobia is a fiction created by the left to fend off enquiry. We have a growing concern with Islam in America, as does the rest of the Western world, but that concern is not fear or racism. What the left equates with fear or racism is the fact that our unfettered examination and questioning reveals the fundamental vulnerability of Islam threatening its success in American society, and the left shares that vulnerability. Islam brought itself to our attention and we accepted it provisionally as we always do – then we examined it. That examination and questioning is precisely what Islam cannot withstand. They presented themselves as a religion, but under examination we find that as a religion it is primitive to the Western mind both in practice and theology, and we question it. What kind of religion decrees mutilation and stoning young girls to death? What kind of religion employs deceit to spread its influence? What kind of religion decrees the death of the “infidel”? But Islam has no answers. It is not that they refuse to answer, they don’t have answers. Islam forbids questions lest Muslim clerics lose their authoritarian control upon discovery that they have no answers, and Islam is all about control. The coupling of having no answers to hiding behind the cover of fanaticism forbidding questions to the extent of decreeing death for apostates and ‘killing the infidels’ belies an anxiety of Islam. They fear their entire structure is fragile and will crumble under the slightest challenge leaving them meaningless. Fear of losing control is why Muslims and socialists cannot tolerate democracies, most especially the vigorous American democracy where they will be examined and challenged. Islam is an authoritarian social and political ideology masquerading as a religion bent on usurping control and, like the left, is vulnerable to examination.
Islam has never been subjected to examination because they were able to forbid it by force of the sword, but they cannot forbid it here. They cannot forbid it because America has a strong culture founded on the principles of freedom of thought and expression protected by the “sword” of our Constitution. The left and Islam share a common fear of our questions that might infect their followers with the courage to be free.
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