The Perils of Speaking Unpopular Truth

Several months ago, I wrote a post about Virtuous Authoritarians that mentioned Islam in passing, then last December I wrote a post highlighting the overrepresentation of Islamic groups in the Global Terrorism Database and finally, about two weeks ago I wrote a longish post on the difficulty of even suggesting that there is a problem with Islam. This is the sum total of my writings on Islam but nonetheless punishment is being meted out for my recklessness.


The amusing thing to me is that my main thrust was that there needs to be a more open and honest dialogue about Islam and Islamicism. I noted the difficulty in merely suggesting that there might be a problem with the religion is that it results in being labelled an Islamophobe and shouted down by moral grandstanders rather than being engaged rationally.

I received some unfortunate correspondence through Twitter, but this can be largely ignored. One of these Twitter communications involved a long diatribe denouncing me as a nazi and a propagator of “Fake News” because I hadn’t made clear that the Quebec shooting was done by a white supremacist. I pointed out to this lady that the identity of the perpetrator was not known at the time the post was written and I had said as much in the post. She continued with several more posts along the previous vain before blocking me.

I also had one or two emails from folks I’ve never heard of suggesting that I am an unpleasant chap of questionable personal habits and that I had not thought the matter through sufficiently (I am paraphrasing and omitting expletives, but you get the thrust). I also had some correspondence with people I know personally.

One former correspondent who now refuses to engage with me, has labelled me a member of the “alt-right” for my troubles. The term “alt-right” for those not familiar, is the new-fangled way of calling someone a nazi while trying not to seem completely irrational. My erstwhile correspondent has not been able to explain why I am a member of the alt-right, just that I am.

Another former colleague highlighted to me a passage in my post that says “I have come to the conclusion that anyone that writes widely on the subject of Islam must first accept that any mainstream career will be impossible if they are to maintain any level of honesty.” This chap suggested to me that I had now given up any chance of a mainstream career due to my article. Once again, said correspondent declined to engage further, this time ending any discussing with the sarcastic reply that I should submit my material to Fairfax for publication, Fairfax of course being a notoriously left wing group.

Of course there are a few people that have congratulated me on the article “We need to talk about Islam” especially, but even in these cases the congratulations have been offline or by email. The post itself has only one comment (not unusual for my blog) and the Facebook posts about the post are largely uncommented (a little more unusual).

All of this is fairly good evidence of what is sometimes called the “chilling effect”. That affect whereby an action or type of speech is shut down not by legal sanction, but by general condemnation. Usually condemnation of the moral kind.

I’ll reiterate a key point that I made earlier. We do need to talk about Islam and we need to talk about it in a rational way. In the event that someone has something to say about Islam, they shout not be automatically shouted down as Islamophobic and nor should they be automatically applauded. There is, by any objective measure, a problem with Islam. The preponderance of terror attacks related to Islam, the stated preference for Islamic law by Muslims in Western European societies, the unspeakable treatment of women in the middle east. All of these things are connected with Islam in one way or another and they need to for part of international dialog.

I don’t plan to stop writing about Islam when the mood takes me, but I would make a special plea that when I do, those of you who respect the right to freedom of speech and the enlightenment approach of assessing arguments on their merits rather than simply measuring an argument against received doctrine, that you make a particular effort to show support for that writing. Just a small note on the blog or on Facebook (or best of all on both) would be welcome.

I suspect we’ll see whether I have forgone any chance of a mainstream career.





Image courtesy CC BY-SA 4.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50870839