Coyote Blog

I have never considered myself of the Left but like most libertarians I have made common cause with the Left on many issues.  in the past five or ten years the Left has gone of the rails on a number of issues, but none more than its attitude towards Islam.  Islam, as currently practiced in much of the world, is simply awful on any number of issues important to the Left -- treatment of women, respect for sexual heterodoxy, treatment of religious and ethnic minorities, authoritarianism, strongly patriarchal family organization -- all of it makes the things the Left marches in the street against here look moderate in comparison.  Readers know I am no fan of Trump but is there any dimension we criticize him on that Hamas or Iran or Gaza aren't substantially worse on?  Do current Republicans in the US or the Iranian state look more like the Handmaids Tale?

And yet the western Left has a love affair with Islam as currently practiced, with perhaps the weirdest example being the Gays for Gaza protestors last year.  By the way, I keep using the term "as currently practiced" because I am exhausted with retorts to criticisms of Islam that are something like "well, that is not true Islam"  (a strangely parallel statement to "that was not real socialism".)   I am not an expert on Islam and usually neither are the people using this argument, but it does not matter.  Islam as practiced in places like Gaza means treating women as one step above chattel and throwing gays off buildings.  Whatever the true nature of Christianity, none of us would have liked it much in the 13th century when it was leading Crusades and Inquisitions.

To this end I thought this X post from Tahmineh Dehbozorgi was a useful framework for trying to understand this odd hookup:

Islam, in Western progressive discourse, has been racialized. It is treated not as a belief system or a political ideology, but as a stand-in for race or ethnicity. Criticizing Islam is framed as an attack on “brown people,” Arabs, or “the Middle East,” as if Islam were a skin color rather than a doctrine.

This confusion is rooted in historical illiteracy. Western liberal media routinely collapses entire civilizations into a single stereotype: “all Middle Easterners are Arabs,” “all Arabs are Muslim,” and “all Muslims are a monolithic, oppressed identity group by white European colonizers.” Iranians disappear entirely in this framework. Their language, history, and culture—Persian, not Arab; ancient, not colonial; distinct, not interchangeable—are erased.

By treating Islam as a racial identity rather than an ideology, Western media strips millions of people of their ability to reject it. Iranian protesters become unintelligible. Their rebellion cannot be processed without breaking the rule that Islam must not be criticized. So instead of listening to Iranians, the media speaks over them—or ignores them entirely.

I can confirm from reading a couple of books on Persian/Iranian history and having had a number of Persian/Iranian friends that this is absolutely no better way to really tick off an Iranian than to call them an Arab.  Iran is a great example of why the Left is so befuddling on this issue.  There were a number of good reasons to have wanted the Shah gone in the late seventies, starting with his tendency to jail and execute critics.  But one of the most important causes for the Islamic revolution there was the Shah's granting of full civil rights and education opportunities to women, which really drove the hardcore Muslims crazy and created a lot of the anger that fed the Revolution.  In a sense, then, by defending the Iranian state the Left is defending a revolution meant explicitly to enslave women.

Postscript:  While I think the above is a pretty good take on the philosophical underpinnings of the Left's support for radical Islam, I have my own theory of how this got started.  I think it started in the aftermath of 9/11 when Republicans were particularly hawkish on countering what they saw as Islamic threats, particularly after we started a couple of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.   In what is a fairly typical historical pattern, the Left reflexively started to support Islam where Republicans were perceived to be against it.  And as often does, a desire to stop a bad war and reach peace morphed into rooting for the other side.

Just before inauguration day I wrote a post about the state of the world, saying in part:

To a large extent, US moral and intellection leadership post WWII on free speech and free trade has been critical to keeping these concepts alive around the world against the headwinds of authoritarianism.  Now, with a breakdown of support in the US for both, one wonders what future they have.

I held out some small hope that while it was depressing to consider that Trump was likely to further trash the notion of free trade (and he has certainly delivered on this bad promise), Republicans -- after years in the wilderness rightly complaining about government censorship and growing opposition on the Left to free speech -- might, just might, do something to make things a bit better. I thought JD Vance calling out Europe on its deteriorating free speech environment in his Munich speech was great. But its easy to call out other countries on this topic, much harder to remain disciplined in one's own country. It takes a lot of backbone to respect speech from people you really dislike and disagree with. And apparently this administration lacks such a backbone:

It’s been three days since the government arrested and detained Mahmoud Khalil for deportation. This afternoon, the administration finally stated the basis for its actions. Its explanation threatens the free speech of millions of people.

Yesterday, an administration official told The Free Press, “The allegation here is not that [Khalil] was breaking the law.” This was confirmed today by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who announced Khalil is being targeted under a law that she characterized as allowing the secretary of state to personally deem individuals “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America.”

WTF? Is that really a law? Some holdover from the Alien and Sedition acts? I can't believe it would stand up to First Amendment scrutiny and as a minimum any court should demand a LOT more due process before a green card holder was kicked out of the country. Heck had the Biden Administration dug up this particular chestnut they likely would have slapped the label on Trump.

The administration is wielding this standard — deportation for people whose activities could cause “serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” — to arrest and detain an individual graduate student. In explaining how he met this standard, the administration did not allege Khalil committed a crime. But it did explicitly cite the content of his speech,  characterizing it as “anti-American” and “pro-Hamas.” Protesting government policy is protected by the First Amendment, as is rhetorical support for a terrorist group (if not directly coordinated with it, which the government has not alleged here).

Disrupting college classes and harassing students is not protected expression, to be sure, and Leavitt stated that Khalil organized protests that may have done so. But the administration has not detailed Khalil’s specific actions with respect to those protests, so it remains unclear whether Khalil himself violated any campus rules against discriminatory harassment. Whether any such violation justifies detention and deportation is a separate question. In either adjudication, Khalil must be afforded due process. 

Congrats to the Trump Administration for taking a random asshole -- who few have heard of and many would disagree with and probably dislike -- and making him famous and likely far more effective in the future. Its like they never even heard of the Streisand Effect.

So my thin hopes that this Administration might have some positive effect on free speech are likely dashed. But that is no surprise. As I wrote in the article linked a the top:

I am not a Pollyanna -- I see threats and worrying trends in every direction, and will be writing about them.  For example, tomorrow we trade a President with an immense set of flaws for another with an immense set of entirely different flaws.  Perhaps I am not as disappointed as some by recent trends because I have always treated politicians and the media and academia with immense skepticism, so I am less surprised by their obvious failings.  I have always expected people in power -- government, corporations, wherever -- to abuse their power and believe the trick is to wire the system in a way that they cannot do too much damage.  In preparation for blogging again, and looking back over my old writing, one consistent theme I see is a disdain for solutions that boil down to "if only we replace their people with our people."  That's a hopeless approach.  We have flip-flopped the Coke and Pepsi parties in power more times in the last 50 years than we did in 100+ years before that, and its not making things better.  If anything its escalating a tit for tat power grab as each new administration pushes the precedent frontier forward more toward Presidential authoritarian power.  This is not a secret: Trump is bragging about it.