October 28, 2006
An Aussie Loon Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:20 PM EST An interesting story in today’s New York Times, picked up from Reuters, reports that Sheik Taj El-Din Hamid Hilaly—according to the Times “Australia’s top Muslim cleric”—has annoyed a fair number of Australians, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, by a recent remark on rape. This remark was intended as a defense of the veil and an insistence on the advisability women remaining in the home: “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it . . . whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem.” The sheik, who had previously glorified “martyrdom” rather generally and 9/11 in particular, usefully reminds us that multiculturalism can be a mixed blessing. The periodic reluctance to admit this fact and face it squarely is one of the peculiarities of our age, both in this country and in Europe, where drawing attention to this sort of thing is often pilloried as Islamophobia. Drawing attention to Islamist homophobia is even rarer than drawing attention to Islamist misogyny, possibly because the American right, although not always particularly keen on feminism, may find it peculiarly awkward to decry homophobia in one quadrant while simultaneously exploiting it, indeed whipping it up, in another (this latter propensity is visible this week in the much-expressed hope that after the news out of the New Jersey courts, anxieties about gay marriage may save the Republicans’ bacon). But an equally dispiriting fact is that events comparable to the description of conventionally-garbed women in the workplace as “uncovered meat” does not excite more fury from the left. Why is this? Probably because multiculturalism is a shibboleth on the left, and possibly because some on the left may have a subliminal instinct to assume that the enemy of an enemy is a friend. Sheik Hilaly, declining to resign his post, remarked that he might do so “after we clean the world of the White House first.” This may have briefly warmed some hearts among people who ought to know better. If you think that the White House is more of a threat to liberal values than are Sheik Hilaly and his ilk, you are a fool, but fools are a numerous tribe. The recent defenses of head-to-toe veiling in the left British press, or at least attacks on those who attack the practice, are a depressing example of this tendency. One fears that some think that if Tony Blair is against it, how bad can it be? In the long run, this reluctance to defend the values of sexual emancipation, one of Western liberalism’s great achievements, against Islamist attacks, because of a reluctance to appear Islamophobic, is probably going to be suicidal. In France, it is now swelling support for old-fashioned and very racist xenophobes, and it may wind up doing that in other places. It is always a very bad mistake to let the devil have all the good tunes.
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