What prevents us from speaking honestly about Islam?

Robert Spencer writing at FrontPage Magazine complains that “political correctness” censors frank discussion of Islam. In a posted comment at FrontPage, I beg to differ. The problem, I argue, is not mere political correctness, but liberalism itself, the dominant belief system of modern society. My comment is reproduced below:

While I agree with Mr. Spencer’s overall take on Islam, I don’t agree with his analysis of why CBS/Infinity refused to run ads for his upcoming conference on radical Islam. In his complaints about CBS Mr. Spencer sounds naïve about the nature of modern liberal society. He assumes that rational people will see that of course this is a legitimate subject for a conference, and that only “political correctness”—a term he uses repeatedly—prevents them from seeing it. What he does not seem to understand is that such a conference is a threat to much more than political correctness. It is a threat to the defining belief system of modern America: the belief that all people are basically alike, the belief that cultural and civilizational differences don’t matter and can be easily surmounted, the belief that people from all cultures and backgrounds can assimilate equally easily well into America, the belief that the most immoral thing is to discriminate against people or exclude people or judge them negatively based on their background.

Why is Mr. Spencer’s conference a threat to those beliefs? The answer is provided in his own description of the purpose of the conference:

“I will show how jihad violence – in the words of terrorists themselves including Osama bin Laden – gains its impetus from core elements of Islamic theology mandating warfare against unbelievers, and call upon sincere moderate Muslims to confront and repudiate these elements of Islam.”

If core elements of Islam mandate warfare against non-Muslims, then Islam itself is a danger to all non-Muslims, and Muslims are a danger to the rest of us and need to be excluded from non-Muslim societies. To do this would require Western societies to do the very thing that they’ve been taught is the most evil thing: to judge, to discriminate, to exclude. It would require, not just stopping all Muslim immigration, but removing Muslims who are already here. This would not just be a violation of political correctness, it would be a radical step signaling an abandonment of “openness-liberalism,” the belief in non-discrimination, that defines the postwar West. Mr. Spencer goes after the straw man of PC because he’s not ready to admit that his real target is modern liberalism itself.

Mr. Spencer will reply that his conference is not seeking to exclude Muslims, but calling on sincere moderate Muslims to repudiate those elements of Islam that are dangerous. But he’s just said that the elements in question are core elements of Islam. Calling on Muslims to repudiate core elements of Islam is calling on Muslims to cease being Muslims. That also is a solution that is totally unacceptable to modern liberal belief.

Don’t get me wrong. I agree with Mr. Spencer on the substance. I think that Islam itself is the source of terrorism, not “Islamism” or “radical” Islam. But where I differ from him is in recognizing that protecting ourselves from Islam will require us to cease being modern liberals, that is, to cease believing that tolerance and non-discrimination are the highest values of our society. If we are to win this battle for civilizational survival, we need to be honest with people about the costs, not keep distracting them with complaints about the bogeyman of political correctness.

A reader writes:

In fact Spencer has written many times about the folly and error of thinking that “tolerance and non-discrimination are the highest values of our society.”

My reply:

If so then he should go after that belief, not after “political correctness,” which sounds like something silly or extraneous to our society, rather than something essential to it. I believe that it is the deepest and most authoritative beliefs of modern Western society that have opened us to the jihadist menace. If that is true, then we must be clear that the only way to save ourselves is to renounce those beliefs. When we tell people that it is only political correctness that is the problem, the message they take from that is, “Oh, the problem is with that stupid political correctness, not with anything that we believe. So we don’t have to change anything essential in order to solve this problem.” No. The problem is with ALL of us, with our whole society, with our belief that non-discrimination is the highest moral principle replacing the traditional idea of the Good. We can only solve the problem if we recognize what the problem is, and face honestly and rationally the costs of solving it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 10, 2005 10:48 PM | Send