Islamists and Leftists share common free speech anathemas

Submitted by Dave (United States), Nov 3, 2020 at 21:37

Under Sharia, blasphemy against Islam is a capital offence. Thus does Islam violently defend itself from criticism, ensuring its perpetual intellectual stagnation.
Blasphemy is a very broad concept, encompassing a wide range of offenses from outright insults, from cartoons or openly ridiculing Islamic doctrine, to more subtle and inadvertent slips of the tongue or seemingly innocuous social media comments.
As the West hosts ever greater numbers of Muslims, Islamic mores have become ever more present, even if only in subtle ways. For example, note the strange commonality of blasphemy laws and politically correct strictures, particularly at universities or in other leftist strongholds, such as the media.
Instead of accusations of blasphemy, we have accusations of racism. As with blasphemy, these accusation not only are directed at obviously vulgar and offensive speech, but also at inadvertent, far more subtle instances where the offender has in no way intended to denigrate race or ethnicity. It's quite common to read where someone was fired from a job for making a security check on a suspected person who was a minority. Guilt was strictly circumstantial rather than proven, but that's enough. And isn't it common to hear President Trump or other conservatives to be called racist with no evidence other than their desire for secure borders or support for law and order? And even moderately conservative public speakers are virtually guaranteed to be shouted down at a university on the grounds of "racism".
It's hardly surprising that major security lapses have occurred thanks to the chilling censorship of this sort of secular Sharia in the name of racism. And that's just the beginning of the ills that the pandemic of Islamism has begun to spread. The violence of BLM and Antifa are eerily reminiscent of the rioting and violence of the "Palestinians", those quintessential victims of racism and darlings of the Left who are subconsciously emulated. Of course, Islamism and Leftism may share many methods, but they have very different core philosophies. As the experience in Iran in 1979 demonstrated, the leftists were quickly liquidated by the Islamists. In lieu of that sort of drama, intellectual conformity and censorship may just slowly kill freedom and creativity in the West.

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