Radical Islam's Fellow-Travellers

September 2010

Her feminism comes from experience. She has described her own genital mutilation and the botched genital mutilation of her sister, her horror, as a girl, at seeing the women of Saudi Arabia for the first time, their faces hidden by veils and their black robes hanging so shapelessly that you had to see which way their shoes were pointing to know which way they were looking. She has written of the shelters for abused Muslim women in Holland, of the terrors of refugee existence and the double terrors of refugee existence for women. "All these passages express something that can never be detected in a certain kind of high-minded cerebral journalism today," says Berman. "It is a visceral anger at oppression...You do not have to wonder: where does she stand on the ques-tion of stoning women to death? Or on the obligation for husbands to beat their wives? Read one page by her and you will know the answer."

Liberals hated her for her moral clarity. Buruma and Garton Ash denounced her for being crude, zealous, strident, humourless, ineffective and contemptuous of others. She was an "Enlightenment fundamentalist", as bigoted in her insistence that women should not be stoned to death as those Islamist fundamentalists who insisted that they should.

Parallels with the 20th century struck me on every page. Susan Sontag, a former president of American PEN who defended Rushdie with a vigour her successors cannot match, scandalised leftish New Yorkers when she addressed a town hall meeting as the Soviet empire was starting to crumble under pressure from Poland's Solidarity trade union. Imagine, she told the assembled fellow-travellers as she tried to dissolve their illusions, "the preposterous case of somebody who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and somebody else who read only the Nation between 1950 and 1970. Who would be getting more truth about the nature of communism? There's no doubt it would have been the Reader's Digest reader."

Berman pays an unwitting tribute to Sontag when he concludes by noticing that Garton Ash had patronised Hirsi Ali in the New York Review of Books by implying that the attention she received owed more to her striking beauty than the quality of her thought. Why, Garton Ash snickered, Glamour magazine had made her its "hero of the month".

He left an open goal and Berman tapped the ball into the net. "I can't help observing that Glamour magazine nowadays offers a more reliable guide to liberal principles than the New York Review of Books," he replied.

If I were editing the New York Review of Books, I would take a long sabbatical if anyone had been able to say that about pieces I had commissioned. (Even Garton Ash recoiled at what he had done and apologised to Hirsi Ali.) But I would still protest that Ramadan, Garton Ash and Buruma might have a case when they said that only Muslims could reform Islam. It might not be true — wider cultural changes might be more important than disputes among the faithful — but at least it is not a disgraceful viewpoint, and that makes a welcome change. The New York Review of Books maintained that Ayaan Hirsi Ali ruled herself out of the argument because she manifested her intolerant "Enlightenment fundamentalism" by responding to the mutilation of her genitals, the murder of her friend and threats to her life by giving up on Islam and becoming an atheist. Unfortunately for them, at no point did they go on to say that across Europe, there remained avowedly Muslim politicians, writers, artists, journalists and activists who have tried to oppose Islamists and received death threats and physical assaults in response. Their cause ought to be a liberal cause, but the evidence from the New York Review of Books' most recent take on Ramadan, Hirsi Ali and Berman is that liberals have yet to learn that it is their moral duty to support them against their enemies.

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Ibn Rushd

October 5th, 2010
10:10 AM

Sad, sad piece of work. Ramadaan's actions, thought and work is not analysed in its own right, but in relation to others and what others have done. So, it is not surprising that it starts of with the Russian Revolution, Trotsky and communists and the supposed comparisons for Ramadaan and his supporters. Ramadaan is not criticised for what he says or writes, but in terms of what others say and his lack of commenting on matters that Cohen would like him to comment on. Cohen puts up a number of strawmen and finds Ramadaan guilty in terms of them. The agrument becomes vague and nebulous and does not deal with the merit of Ramadaan's own thought. Vague and crude terms abound, such as Islamism and Radical Islam, withou them being cogently defined, but you can be found to aid and abet them. You are guilty by association and without the defining what you are you are being charged with. Or, if you may, by not doing what others, like Ayan Hirsi, does or says, etc. Like I said, a sad article that serves soem other (ideological purpose?) and it does not help to explain Ramadaan's own thought and the merits thereof.

[email protected]

September 18th, 2010
1:09 PM

As with other major articles written by Nick Cohen, I had to take several breaks reading it, because what he says is so uncomfortably true. To oppose the tide of unreason and cowardice that he identifies means more than merely singing the words of the second verse of Jerusalem, it means getting up and doing them (morally, if not physically), of having the courage to stand against the tide of the cosy BBC/metrosexual narrative, sometimes to the embarrassment of friends and family. And courage is out of fashion these days, enfeebled by the steady drip, drip of liberal bromide and post-modern obfuscation. In 1938, the enemy was clear enough, and the remedy straight forward, if hard and costly - the Munich sell-out made the case clear enough for our leadership. The enemy today is more insidious, and is also among us. Despite even 9-11 and other horrors, we still only see the head of the snake that threatens everything we value - it is subtle, it is patient, it is insidious and many of our allies cannot see it through their rose tinted glasses. But face it we must, if to do so at the moment is lonely and courts unpopularity, even danger. Those who see clearly, like Berman, Cohen and others must stand firm and make the rest of us uncomfortable and to prepare us for the long struggle to come. Keep going, Nick

John

September 15th, 2010
7:09 PM

An excellent article, and a great exposé of the mindset displayed by the current crop of deluded liberals

Khalid

September 8th, 2010
8:09 AM

Isn't there something racist about leftists who support and apologize for rightwing Islamism - in that they are all white?

Larry in Tel Aviv

September 6th, 2010
7:09 AM

Nick Cohen continues to do good work here on the Left's alliance with reactionary right-wing Muslim extremists and their slick front-men like Ramadan. But Cohen continues to not follow through on the implications of his own writings, he does not take it further to its logical end-point, since Cohen has drawn his line at 'radical Islam' and that is that. Ramadan is spouting taqiyya, he is a master at it. Where does Cohen acknowledge this? And why not? It is an integral part of sigh radical Islam after all, but that would beg further questions. And Cohen doesn't want to go there. How does radical Islam differ from the canonical texts of Islam itself? Will Cohen let us know? Which religious texts in Islam do radical Muslims misrepresent and misinterpret and how? Will Cohen let us know one of these days? I'm not holding my breath. An irony here is Cohen is not that much more clued up on Islam and radical Islam than the know-nothing dhimmis in Ramadan's Manhattan audience. At the end of the day, Cohen like Ramadan's naive audience, simply doesn't want to know. It shows you how bad things are in the West and how dhimmified we are, when Cohen (who skirts around the elephant in the room) is considered a brave maverick speaking politically incorrect truths that people don't want to hear. To a degree this is true, but only to a degree. Cohen cannot take the logical steps and do the necessary research, because at the end of the day he does not want to face a terrible truth, and it is the truth about radical Islam and its roots.

Gareth

August 31st, 2010
2:08 PM

Great post, Nick. But I would take issue with cowardice being the main motivation of today's fellow travelers. Isn't it more my enemy's enemy is my friend? And given there's been a shortage of such friends post-1989, the most unlikely people are liable to be roped in.

John L Murphy

August 30th, 2010
9:08 PM

A good corrective to Pankaj Mishra's 'Islamismism' in The New Yorker, 7 June 2010 critique of Berman on Ali vs Ramadan.

Jon da Silva

August 30th, 2010
8:08 PM

"Accusations of betrayal, of selling out or of becoming a craven compromiser flow too readily from leftish lips. Tony Blair was on the receiving end of this kind of abuse when he was in power." Blair never explained in his 100 revolving reasons for war that this is what he was opposing - indeed he settled on the palatable and rhetorically easy overcoming an 'evil' dictator. Indeed Labour pushed the patronising racist creed of multiculturalism (as opposed to its opposite multi cultural - never has a space made a bigger difference in a word or two). The Blair Govt did what you say we should not and cosied up to Muslim Council of Britain an organisation that pumps the kind of thing you write against here. Whilst many of us realise that the oppressive side of Islam needs resisting trying to jemmy us into supporting seemingly mindless military strategies those charged with pushing cannot or will not explain is not working. I would love it if the loss of our soldiers, however many civilians, drone strikes and collateral damage was serving an actual purpose to end the oppression of 10s of millions of women. Blair has never said he opposed Islamic fascism explicitly. Indeed at Chilcott his reasoning whether you agree with the policy or not came across as delusional rantings of a religious loon. The problem is not the analysis it's the way forward. Not more self aggrandisement trying to fill cracks in egos for supporting acts in the past.

Paul Owen

August 30th, 2010
1:08 PM

Superb piece, Mr Cohen. The confusion of so called liberals on the issue of Islamism is one of the most infuriating and perplexing of our time. Brave writers like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rushdie and yourself are to be applauded and encouraged. I shall be linking to this on my blog.

Mentat

August 29th, 2010
10:08 PM

In his excellent book, The Killing of History (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000)Keith Windschuttle says, among many other intelligent things, as follows: "The late Ernest Gellner pointed out the basic logical flaws in cultural relativism. In his book Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, Gellner showed that relativists are saddled with two unresolvable dilemmas. They endorse as legitimate other cultures that do not return the compliment. Some other cultures, of which one of the best known is Islam, will have no truck with relativism of any kind. The devout are totally confident of the universalism of their own beliefs which derive from the dictates of God, an absolute authority who is external to the world and its cultures. They regard a position such as postmodern cultural relativism as profoundly mistaken and, moreover, debasing. Relativism devalues their faith because it reduces it to merely one of many equally valid systems of meaning. So, entailed within cultural relativism is, first, an endorsement of absolutisms that deny it, and, second, a demeaning attitude to cultures it claims to respect." (p. 301-2)

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