A Leftist's Harsh Words for the Unholy Alliance
By Matthew Vadum
It isn’t often that a leftist thought leader calls out her comrades for aligning themselves with the Islamist enemies of the United States but that’s exactly what Meredith Tax does in her new book.
In Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights, published recently by the Centre for Secular Space, Tax claims that a fierce struggle is underway worldwide between Islamic fundamentalists and secularists who favor the separation of religion and the state. (Tax is U.S. Director and head writer for the Centre, which she describes as a London-based think tank “formed to oppose fundamentalism, strengthen secular voices, and promote universality in human rights.”)
If this is true, it is a fairly well-guarded secret. The secularists haven’t won many battles in recent decades. Church-state separation remains as strange and foreign a concept in the Islamic world as shareholder dividends might be in Stalinist North Korea.
Even the military ouster of Mohammed Morsi on July 3 isn’t necessarily a sign that Egyptians are embracing secular democracy. Egyptians didn’t like Morsi for a host of reasons but that doesn’t mean they won’t remain largely supportive of Islamization and the imposition of Shariah law in their country. Islamists won’t sit still while Egypt slips from their grasp.
These secularists that Tax writes of are those unicorns that in the West the mainstream media call moderate Muslims. We keep hearing about these people, and occasionally a few surface for TV cameras, but in most of the Ummah they have no real political power. Islam is not known for embracing pluralism. There may be some secularists in the Islamic world who struggle heroically for freedoms Americans and Europeans taken for granted, and we may admire their bravery and perseverance, but unfortunately in the end they count for little.
As the totalitarian Islamic juggernaut sweeps across Africa and Islamism becomes even more solidly entrenched in the Middle East (thanks in part to Obama administration policies), those who endorse Western-style notions of human rights are increasingly marginalized, terrorized, and liquidated by the powers that be.
