Kenan Malik is a prolific and influential writer who tackles any subject contrary to his heart with erudite conviction, but with such focus that he obscures the fact that he is on the extreme Left.
An example is Anti-Muslim Bigotry and Far-Right Terror[1] where his free-speech ideals allow him to vilify those he disagrees with. Along with many commentators on the Christchurch mosque massacre, he blames the far Right for an anti-Muslim, racist, white supremacist ideology. But I suggest that the cause is much simpler.
Greater understanding of the motive behind the mosque massacre can be found by considering the basic issue, progressive versus conservative. It becomes extreme when the progressive Left says that society MUST change, and conservatives say society MUST NOT change. As a means to achieve an end, both permit violence. However, extreme conservatives are not the same as the extreme Right, such as Nazis or Golden Dawn who wish to impose an ideology, since an ideology doesn’t exist for them. It may be doctrinaire, even tyrannical, but lacks the absolute certainty of the truth of an ideology or the popular support needed for implementation.
Bringing conservatives back from the extreme, we see a majority of a nation’s people opposed to the enforcement of diversity and incremental Islamic morality – an imposition of the extreme Left – but they have their legitimate reaction quashed by the extreme Left’s creation of an arbitrary moral high-ground, and the cultural repudiation and racialisation of Western civilisation.
The conclusion I draw from Malik’s essay and the comments is that anyone to the Right of Abimael Guzman deserves Alinskyite levels of ridicule. Yet all hit the nail on the thumb by ignoring the true cause of the responses of conservatives across the spectrum – the extreme Left’s control of discourse and direction. The response is a conservative REACTION with Tarrant et al at the extreme end, and not a cause inherent in Right-wing ideological thinking. This has much larger resources given Objectivism, neo-liberalism, anti-governmentalism, and authoritarianism, but extreme conservatism overlaps with innate racism, chauvinism, Identitarianism, nativism and other extremist ideologies. The conflation of conservativism and Right-wing is deliberate, again from Alinsky – “Pick the target, freeze it, personalise it, and polarise it,” where the target is any group or individual who opposes the Islamo-Leftist world view. If neo-Marxists persist in both pursuing their extreme agenda of diversity and Islamisation while failing to address the problems it causes, and marginalising conservatives and the Right, they will succeed in their goal of civil war.
The worst part for moderates either side of the centre is that the defence of Western civilisation – by far the greatest today and in history, as scores of civilisational indexes conclusively prove – is picked up by extremists who irreparably damage their own cause.
There are minor causes for criticism in this essay, for example the implication that “the claim that the Qur’an explains jihadism” is implausible when it emphatically does[2]; and Muslim ‘colonisation’ of Europe being a trope of bigotry when in fact it is the Islamic doctrine of hijra[3].
There are minor causes for criticism in this essay, for example the implication that “the claim that the Qur’an explains jihadism” is implausible when it emphatically does[2]; and Muslim ‘colonisation’ of Europe being a trope of bigotry when in fact it is the Islamic doctrine of hijra[3].
That Malik fails to express the danger that Islam represents to the non-Islamic world (as the Islamic world itself amply demonstrates) gives the clear impression of him being an Islamo-Leftist facilitator and a skilful and articulate contributor to its goal of the overthrow of all existing social conditions. This is what conservatives, centrists, and Leftists such as myself (a Fabian socialist) consider worth the effort of responding to those determined, wittingly, unwittingly or dim-wittingly, to bring Western civilisation to an end.
[1] https://kenanmalik.com/2019/03/25/anti-muslim-bigotry-and-far-right-terror/
[2] Koran 9:5: “Then, when the sacred months are drawn away, slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they repent, and perform the prayer, and pay the alms, then let them go their way; Allah is All-forgiving, All-compassionate.”
[3] Koran 4:100 “And whoever emigrates for the cause of Allah will find on the earth many [alternative] locations and abundance. And whoever leaves his home as an emigrant to Allah and His Messenger and then death overtakes him – his reward has already become incumbent upon Allah. And Allah is ever Forgiving and Merciful.”
