Home How Islam Got its American Privileges
Home How Islam Got its American Privileges

How Islam Got its American Privileges

What is Islam? The obvious dictionary definition answer is that it’s a religion, but legally speaking it actually enjoys all of the advantages of race, religion and culture with none of the disadvantages.

Islam is a religion when mandating that employers accommodate the hijab, but when it comes time to bring it into the schools, places that are legally hostile to religion, American students are taught about Islam, visit mosques and even wear burkas and recite Islamic prayers to learn about another culture. Criticism of Islam is denounced as racist even though the one thing that Islam clearly isn’t is a race.

Islamist organizations have figured out how lock in every advantage of race, religion and culture, while expeditiously shifting from one to the other to avoid any of the disadvantages.

The biggest form of Muslim privilege has been to racialize Islam. The racialization of Islam has locked in all the advantages of racial status for a group that has no common race, only a common ideology.

Islam is the only religion that cannot be criticized. No other religion has a term in wide use that treats criticism of it as bigotry. Islamophobia is a unique term because it equates dislike of a religion with racism. Its usage makes it impossible to criticize that religion without being accused of bigotry.

By equating religion with race, Islam is treated not as a particular set of beliefs expressed in behaviors both good and bad, but as an innate trait that like race cannot be criticized without attacking the existence of an entire people. The idea that Islamic violence stems from its beliefs is denounced as racist.

Muslims are treated as a racial collective rather than a group that shares a set of views about the world.

That has made it impossible for the left to deal with ex-Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or non-Muslims from Muslim families like Salman Rushdie. If Islam is more like skin color than an ideology, then ex-Muslims, like ex-Blacks, cannot and should not exist. Under such conditions, atheism is not a debate, but a hate crime. Challenging Islam does not question a creed; it attacks the existence of an entire people.

Muslim atheists, unlike all other atheists, are treated as race traitors both by Muslims and leftists. The left has accepted the Brotherhood’s premise that the only authentic Middle Easterner is a Muslim (not a Christian or a Jew) and that the only authentic Muslim is a Salafist (even if they don’t know the word).

The racialization of Islam has turned blasphemy prosecutions into an act of tolerance while making a cartoon of a religious figure racist even when it is drawn by ex-Muslims like Bosch Fawstin. The New York Times will run photos of Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” covered in dung and pornography, but refuses to run Mohammed cartoons because it deems one anti-religious and the other racist.

The equating of Islam with Arabs and Pakistanis has made it nearly impossible for the media to discuss violence against Christians in those parts of the world. The racialization of Islam has made Arab Christians, like Bangladeshi atheists, a contradiction in terms. The ethnic cleansing of the Yazidi could only be covered by giving them a clearly defined separate identity. Middle Eastern Christians are increasingly moving to avoid being categorized as Arabs because it is the only way to break through this wall of ignorance.

While racialization is the biggest Muslim privilege, race provides no protection for many Islamic religious practices. Muslims then seek religious discrimination laws to protect these practices even if it’s often a matter of debate whether their lawsuits protect their religious practices or impose them on others.

Islam is a theocracy. When it leaves the territories conquered by Islam, it seeks to replicate that theocracy through violence and by adapting the legal codes of the host society to suit its purposes.

Islamic blasphemy laws are duplicated using hate crime laws. Employers are obligated to make religious concessions to Muslim employees because of laws protecting religious practices, but many of these practices, such as refusing to carry out jobs involving pork, liquor or Seeing Eye dogs, are really ways of theocratically forcing behaviors that Islam forbids out of public life much as Saudi Arabia or Iran do.

Accusations of bigotry are used to outlaw ideas that Islam finds blasphemous and religious protection laws are used to banish behaviors that it disapproves of. By switching from race to religion and back again, Islamists construct a virtual theocracy by exploiting laws designed to protect different types of groups.

Religions in America traded theocracy for religious freedom. They gave up being able to impose their practices on others in exchange for being able to freely practice their own religions. Islam rejects religious freedom. It exploits it to remove the freedom of belief and practice of others. When it cannot do so through religious protection laws, it does so through claims of bigotry.

Religions were not meant to be immunized from blasphemy because that is theocracy. Instead religions are protected from restrictions, rather than from criticism. Islam insists on being protected from both. It makes no concessions to the freedom of others while demanding maximum religious accommodation.

While race and religion are used to create negative spaces in which Islam cannot be challenged, the creed is promoted positively as a culture. Presenting Islam as a culture allows it easier entry into schools and cultural institutions. Islamic missionary activity uses the Western longing for oriental exotica that its political activists loudly decry to inject it into secular spaces that would ordinarily be hostile to organized religion.

Leftists prefer to see Islam as a culture rather than a religion. Their worldview is not open to Islam’s clumsy photocopy of the deity that they have already rejected in their own watered down versions of Christianity and Judaism. But they are constantly seeking an aimless and undefined spirituality in non-Western cultures that they imagine are free of the materialism and hypocrisy of Western culture.

Viewing Islam as a culture allows the left to project its own ideology on a blank slate. That is why liberals remain passionately convinced that Islam is a religion of social justice. Their Islam is a mirror that reflects back their own views and ideas at them. They pretend to respect Islam as a culture without bothering to do any more than learn a few words and names so that they can seem like world travelers.

By morphing into a culture, Islam sheds its content and becomes a style, a form of dress, a drape of cloth, a style of beard, a curvature of script and a whiff of spices. It avoids uncomfortable questions about what the Koran actually says and instead sells the religion as a meaningful lifestyle. This approach has always had a great deal of appeal for African-Americans who were cut off from their own heritage through Islamic slavery, but it also enjoys success with white upper class college students.

The parents of those students often learn too late that Islam is not just another interchangeable monotheistic religion, that its mosques are not places where earnest grad students lecture elderly congregants about social justice and that its laws are not reducible to the importance of being nice to others.

Like a magician using misdirection, these transformations from religion to race, from race to culture and from culture to religion, distract Americans from asking what Islam really believes. By combining race, religion and culture, it replicates the building blocks of its theocracy within our legal and social spaces.

Separately each of these has its advantages and disadvantages. By combining them, Islam gains the advantages of all three, and by moving from one to the other, it escapes all of the disadvantages. The task of its critics is to deracialize Islam, to reduce it to an ideology and to ask what it really believes.

Islam is a privileged religion. And there’s a word for that. Theocracy.

Comments

  1. Anonymous10/6/15

    To get a glimpse of the totalitarian nature of the Islamic ideology. Consiser this.
    Muslims believe
    1. The world was created by Allah.
    2. Allah is all powerful and makes no mistakes.
    3. Allah's creation was meant to worship Allah.. follow Islam.
    4. Jews, Christians, Hindus were all created as Muslims.
    5. BUT because of error, evil, and denial men have rejected their innate
    identity as Islam.
    6. Forcing conversion is just returning apostates to their original Allah given status. as Muslims.
    7. Those who will not recognize Allah, will not submit and even fight Allah are
    are Gods enemies, and the enemies of all right thinking men. and their ingratitude deserves death.

    And there you have.it. Your existence is act of aggression. You are to blame for your own death, Not the Muslim that kills you. He is merely fighting Satan as all good Muslims are bound to do.

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  2. Anonymous10/6/15

    The only thing that has ever contained Islam is ruthless tyrants back home, and western armies when if ventures beyond its borders. When Islam is instead met by full blown Liberalism it literally explodes. Liberalism is the perfect enabler or accelerant for Islamic fanaticism There has been no more deadly combination in history than this mixture. It is a chemical reaction so violent that it will consume the world.

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  3. ManchesterLad10/6/15

    An interesting way of looking at it, and very true. Islam constantly morphs between these states, deflecting or avoiding criticism from our lacking-in-confidence western culture.

    The left have created the fertile ground where Islam can grow, almost immune from criticism. Their self-worth is enhanced as they congratulate themselves as they bring about the death of our culture through their smug stupidity. They literally haven't a clue.

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  4. Anonymous10/6/15

    Islam got its privileges through the civil rights movement. Take heed though we may very well have our Tower of Babel Multicultural moment when the whole thing comes undone.

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  5. Common 'tater11/6/15

    Another great analysis, and all too accurate in how Islam is using our own laws and freedoms against us. However, I think there is still another ingredient to this mess.

    In order to have fire, you need fuel, oxygen, and heat. In this case, I think the fuel has been courtesy of OPEC oil money, especially from a certain country that is always presented as an ally but is really financing the islamization of many hoity-toity upper crust private universities as well as some state sponsored ones. Also financed have been presidential libraries. Large amounts of money have been invested in various media and given directly for the building of indoctrination centers, AKA mosques.

    I hate to say it, but I think the last person to stand up to that crowd was Harry Truman. Every, and I mean every president since then has rolled over and played dead to make sure the money rolls in for "a library" or "center for study." I am sure that both elephants and donkeys do the same thing in Congress.

    How else can we explain the vacillation between support for Israel and then suddenly we drop the support? The big push to get Israel to talk and to concede something yet get nothing in return, just like us. Obama seems to be the big exception. He seems to favor Shia and the MB over Sunni and the KSA.

    The main problem I see with the far left and Islam is that each of them feels the other is a useful fool to be used to achieve their ultimate goal. Unfortunately for the left, Islam has been practicing this for over a millennium, not just a few decades. If we are lucky, each side will get tired of being played with by the other and they will turn on each other.

    Unfortunately, the idiots that are in DC will figure that somehow one side deserves to have us defend them, kind of like we did in WW 2 with Stalin.

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  6. Anonymous11/6/15

    Dear Mr Greenfield,
    We read your brilliant analysis already in Frontpage Mag. The ways Islam is using to get his privileges are multiform and subtile, on both sides of the ocean. Some honest Muslims told us years ago the truth nobody believed at that time and everybody who wants to open his eyes can see unfolding nowadays: " We will conquer you with the womb of our women and with the benefits of your laws ". Meanwhile the invasion of Italy and Europe continues, facilitated by the great " humanitarian effort " Italian government is providing to save lifes of those who are escaping " starvation and war ". The curious fact is that overwhelming majority of migrants are not Iraqis or Syrians, but Chadis, Nigeris, Nigerians, Burkina asians, Malians e.g.. All young men in good shape, with smartphones, coming from countries actually NOT at war.
    The Italians are made to believe exactly the opposite. Moreover, all those above mentioned migrants are eventually gathering, having crossed the desert, on Libyan shore, the sole country in that region actually involved in an infinite intestine war. Resuming: we have to deal with migrants leaving countries at peace in order to reach a country at war.
    It's bizar to notice that in Libya, after the disruptions caused by Ghaddafi's fall, there is apparently great abundance of well payed jobs for the migrants, and ships. The migrants are staying there for months and months.
    And at the end, arrived in Italy, they find a countrywithout war and without work, just assistance, with the blessing of Francis I and the lies of the Left.

    Clelia&Eric, Eurabia, Italian province.

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  7. Anonymous11/6/15

    Great essay, Daniel, thank you.

    You did miss a few, tho

    Not only is 'culture' used to support instruction about islam in schools that are otherwise 'legally hostile to religion', 'culture' is used to excuse diddling your 5-yo daughter and other forms of paedophilia, FGM (cutting little girls' clits off), and 'honor' killings.

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  8. Anonymous11/6/15

    Islam also demands and enjoys both minority and majority rights. E.g. the phrase "Muslims are the new Jews" and variants thereof, are used to protect western Muslims from supposed hatred due to attacks by radical Muslims on the west. At the same time though, the west has to avoid mocking Islam because it offends a billion Muslims. (Continuing to mock other religions is OK for the west and Muslim countries.)

    Ingenious!

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  9. Anonymous11/6/15

    Daniel: Stephen Coughlin's book may interest you:,

    Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad May 4, 2015

    ReplyDelete
  10. The same has happened in the UK. Your article is a very lucid exposition of what is happening with the West and Islam. There will be blood.

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  11. And as for culture - where is Islam's "Matthew Passion"? Who is Islam's Rembrandt? Where do we find Islam's Shakespeare. Culturally, Islam has been a null for centuries.

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  12. Anonymous12/6/15

    Q: What do the modern state of Israel and modern state of India have in common?

    A: 67 years of unending islamic terrorism

    ReplyDelete
  13. The Muslim apologists will waffle on sanctimoniously about tolerance and understanding. Will point out the rich Islamic tradition will speak of spiritual transcendence etc but it wont be long before they are nudging you in the ribs and making "Vot those oven dodgers?" jokes. They think to scratch a Christian and you have a Nazi ...sadly they are not always wrong.

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  14. Anonymous14/6/15

    There is only one group the Islamists seem to fear and accommodate and that is the Socialists. You are safer in the Marxist Institute than in a mosque. Ask an Islamist internet troll why this is so and they shut up and leave. I have never heard an Islamist speak of the Left at all when challenged. They disappear.

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  15. Anonymous14/6/15

    Simple, yet insightful, explanation there. This really helps me square some confusing cultural messes; "why do they embrace them, when ...?"

    Seems, at the root - for the left, there's a rejection (or inability) of identifying anything.

    - djr

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  16. We brought this on ourselves with "anti-discrimination" laws which of course have nothing in common with genuine civil rights that were already guaranteed by the Constitution. The only ones who should be forbidden to discriminate are the agencies of the government; private citizens and corporations have the right of freedom of association, and once that was ceded, the rest of the ride downhill was a forgone conclusion.

    ReplyDelete
  17. aggiemom16/6/15

    Thank you for this excellent article, which is the answer that I couldn't provide the other day to a Christian couple from Malaysia who asked about this very thing-- they've left a predominantly Muslim country in order to live in religious freedom here in the U.S., but they're completely mystified at seeing Muslims dictate demands and get their way in this country, just like they do in Malaysia at the expense of people of other faiths.

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  18. Anonymous26/7/15

    Thank you for this factual article. Here in Indonesia, the same for minority.There are a lot of mosque built and come in a big shape because they demand for praying at the same time. Because they said Allah told them so(With the bank they need to form bank shariah (their allah told them so)and eat halal(prepare by moslem in certain ways and need to give money to halal institution (cause their Allah told them so,why Allah so diligent to appear in front their prophet to convey the message, are their prophet just dreaming Him or what??Because God didn't appear a little bit to me sadly wheneever i Pray a lot , it just didn't appear at all. It's very hard to meet Him eventhough we pray a lot and have difficult situation and desperately need his advice? . meanwhile other religion is very difficult to build their worship place. Some church built at the mall aka shopping place because they didn't get privilige to build it.Beware if you continue to accommodate their privilige religion someday you gonna end up like india torn to 2 state, islamic state and india.Same race but take India land, because they are moslem.Check out http://www.inquiryintoislam.com/2010/07/why-is-islam-so-successful.html.I think that's a factual fact too. Nowadays there should be separation from country to religion. Religion is not restricted to practice but don't give privilege to them.And it so wrong to do even slightest agression to people just because they're Kafir(they have term for that).My advice is just continue the separation of country and religion and keep democarcy.
    May The Goodness win over the Evil

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