The Chris Moeller Archives

Our biggest challenge

The mass kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria is just an awful, awful story, one of the worst in the news in recent memory, and that's really saying something. It should remind every one of us, myself included, what a terrible menace fundamentalist Islam is to the world. The attack by terrorists on a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya last year was another recent reminder. These schools and public gathering places are indeed soft targets, and it makes one weep not just for the victims of the violence but for entire nations such as these in sub-Saharan Africa that have actually been so welcoming to refugees from the failed Islamist states to their north and east.

It's possible to hold both of these opinions in one's head at the same time: that it's self-defeating and immoral for United States covert forces to bomb Muslim weddings with robots, but also that liberals need to rid themselves of the popularly-held notion that there is an equality of cultural ideas in play here. It doesn't make one a racist to condemn the religion of Islam for the violence against and enslavement of women that so many of its adherents practice and that its holy and ancient guidebook boldly and repeatedly promotes. It is an undeniable fact that the Koran orders the death of infidels, a perpetual war against non-believers, and the total submission of women to men. It would be hard for you to convince me that Abubakar Shekau is misinterpreting the text he's reading. In fact, the argument could and should be made that true racism is turning a blind eye towards the violent crimes against brown and black-skinned women by the disciples of Allah when we know that in a million years there would never be such collective tolerance for intolerance in the West if the female victims were white.

---


In Oklahoma, a 4,000-acre wildfire rages and thousands are forced to leave their homes. A 56-year-old man dies when he refuses orders to evacuate his house. Climate change deniers, that man is you.

posted by CM @ 9:04 PM