GLAZOV: Why Islamists and the Radical Left Loathe Valentine’s Day

Today, February 14, is Valentine’s Day, the sacred day that intimate companions mark to celebrate their love and affection for one another.

If you’re thinking about making a study of how couples celebrate this day, the Muslim world and the milieus of the radical Left are not the places you should be spending your time. Indeed, it’s pretty hard to outdo Islamists and “progressives” when it comes to the hatred of Valentine’s Day. And this hatred is precisely the territory on which the contemporary romance between the Left and Islamic Supremacism is formed.

The train is never late: every year that Valentine’s comes around, the Muslim world erupts with ferocious rage, with its leaders doing everything in their power to suffocate the festivity that comes with the celebration of private romance. Imams around the world thunder against Valentine’s every year — and the celebration of the day itself is literally outlawed in Islamist states.

This year, for example, the Islamabad High Court in Pakistan banned the celebration of Valentine’s Day in public places, and at an official level, and prohibited all electronic and print media from covering any festivities or mentioning of the occasion. Several cities across Muslim-majority Indonesia, meanwhile, banned people from celebrating the day. In the city of Surabaya, a group of school students, which included many girls wearing the hijab, denounced Valentine’s Day. In Muslim-dominant Malaysia, the group The National Muslim Youth Association directed females not to use emoticons and perfume in a pre-Valentine’s Day message.

Last year, Pakistan also banned Valentine’s Day, calling it an “insult” to Islam and warning that “strict” action against anyone daring to celebrate the day in any part of Islamabad. In the past, Valentine’s Day activities were disrupted by Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s main religious party, but in the last two years the state and court now get involved to ban celebration of the day. Back on Valentine’s Day in Pakistan in 2013, supporters of Jamat-e-Islami took to the streets in Peshawar to vehemently denounce the Day of Love. Demonizing it as “un-Islamic,” the Muslim protestors shouted that the day had “spread immodesty in the world.” Shahzad Ahmed, the local leader of the student wing of Jamat-e-Islami, declared that the organization will not “allow” any Valentine’s Day functions, warning that if Pakistani law enforcement did not prevent Pakistanis from holding such functions, that the Jamat-e-Islami would stop them “in our own way.” Khalid Waqas Chamkani, a leader in Jamat-e-Islami, calls Valentine’s a “shameful day.”

Read the full story at FrontPage Magazine.