THE INTELLECTUAL HOLLOWNESS OF LEFTIST CRITICS OF HIRSI ALI


A brief reply by Con George-Kotzabasis to Mark Bahnisch on his piece, Hirsi Ali:an apostle of liberal democracy and of secularism, published on Online Opinion on June 15, 2007


Mark, you place a lot of strawmen on the dry branches of your ideological tree to make your morally and intellectually shrivelled argument against the intellectually and spiritually invigorating Hirsi Ali.

Who of her supporters who accepts the canons of reason would ever suggest that to criticize Ali is to disrespect her freedom of speech, as you clearly imply? No argument could ever have any respect that doesn't accept criticism. And Ali's supporters, unlike you, would never put her argument in this intellectually shameful category.

Further, "equality under the law" also means-which in your one-sidedness you do not state-that one accepts unreservedly all the laws of the country if one expects to be treated as a citizen equally and without discrimination. The cardinal breach in your argument is that many Muslims breach the law of this country by widely practicing female genital mutilation upon their children. In what way would they therefore be treated unfairly, as you suggest, if they were vigorously condemned for this abominable action, as anyone else likewise would have been condemned who sexually violated his children, by the citizenry?

You also ask the critics of the Left, such as Albrechtsen and Devine, to "cite" anyone from the "secular left" who actually defends "genital mutilation"when the Left as a whole defends the mores of Islam, all in the name of multiculturalism. This is like asking critics of the Catholic church for its stand against abortion to cite individual members of the church who actually are against abortion before one can condemn the church for its anti-scientific position. And when you say that the Left does not defend genital mutilation on "cultural grounds", why then does it not come out and publicly denounce it on moral grounds, instead of running away as a witness from the scene of crime?

One would expect the Left to be up in arms on this issue instead of running away from it on the silent feet of the rabbits, i.e. keeping its silence about it all in the name of not "breaching" the paper walls of multiculturalism.

You have created mythical arguments to make your case. And the fallacies of your argument issuing from the obsolete, and condemned by history, left-wing ideology are not without cost. You are paying this cost with the loss of your moral and intellectual integrity.