The following excerpts of DANGEROUS by MILO Yiannopoulos come from Chapter 9: “Why Muslims Hate Me.” DANGEROUS by MILO is available for direct order or on Amazon.
9
WHY MUSLIMS HATE ME
“I studied the Quran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad.”
-Alexis de Toqueville
Islam and the Left
During my college talks, I’m often asked what arguments to use when debating with the regressive Left. I always have the same answer: Islam.
There is nothing else which better exposes the modern Left’s rank hypocrisy, their disregard for the facts, and their hatred for the West and all it stands for than their attitude to Islam. Every noble principle the Left claims to uphold, from rights for women to gay liberation, even diversity itself, dies on the altar of its sycophantic defense of Islam.
Karl Marx called religion the “opium of the masses.” If you look at the Left’s attitude to Christianity, you might think they believe in this message. The progressive Left’s comedians and columnists never miss an opportunity to belittle and denigrate conservative Christians, and yet, they defend Islam at the expense of every other minority. Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have all been frustrated by this question: Why is the Left refusing to lift a finger against the most radical, dangerous, socially conservative and oppressive religion on earth?
Author Sam Harris sums up the backwards attitude of this group with his characteristic clarity:
These people are part of what Maajid Nawaz has termed the “regressive Left”—pseudo-liberals who are so blinded by identity politics that they reliably take the side of a backward mob over one of its victims. Rather than protect individual women, apostates, intellectuals, cartoonists, novelists, and true liberals from the intolerance of religious imbeciles, they protect theocrats from criticism.
Examples of this behavior are not hard to find.
Charlie Hebdo is a rare example of a leftist newspaper that understood radical Islam to be akin to the radical religious Right. Actually, that’s too mild, it’s really closer to the radical medieval religious Right. I know members of the radical Christian Right in the United States, and they are scary. But nowhere near as scary as Islamic terrorists. They’re the Westboro Baptist Church with machetes.
Charlie Hebdo had the temerity to stand against religious bullies. They published humorous cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, which made them prime targets of al-Qaeda. Charlie Hebdo’s editors correctly understood that allowing people to intimidate artists and writers by threatening violence was the first step on the road to a terrified, censored society.
On January 7, 2015, twelve employees of the newspaper paid for it with their lives, when two armed Muslim siblings forced their way into Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris and opened fire.
Charlie Hebdo is a leftist publication. Marxist, in fact. Their opposition to Islam flows from their opposition to the Right. They are just as strident in their criticism of the National Front as they are of Islam. I may happen to think the National Front deserves a more nuanced approach, but one could never accuse Charlie Hebdo of lacking consistency. They say they oppose bigotry, and they do—whether they perceive it in the European Right or in Islam.
So what did other leftists do when 12 of their comrades were gunned down by religious thugs? Did the old ideal of socialist solidarity finally kick in?
No, of course it didn’t.
As most of the civilized world adopted the slogan “Je Suis Charlie,” The New Yorker published an essay entitled, “Unmournable Bodies,” attacking Charlie Hebdo for “racist and Islamophobic provocations.”
Before the month was out, a number of British student unions, including the University of Manchester, banned Charlie Hebdo under their “safe space” policies, arguing that it made Muslim students uncomfortable.
It made Muslim students uncomfortable? Well, I’m not sure that’s quite in the same league as making non-Muslim cartoonists dead. That, in a nutshell, is the modern Left for you.
There was no collective display of solidarity from the left-wing literary class either. To an ordinary observer, the fact that the prestigious PEN Freedom of Expression Courage Award went to Charlie Hebdo in 2015 would not be particularly surprising news, much less a moral outrage. Yet 204 members of the organization, including established authors like Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore and Junot Díaz thought so. They boycotted the awards, signing an open letter condemning Charlie Hebdo for making a “marginalized community” feel uncomfortable:
To the section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled, and victimized, a population that is shaped by the legacy of France’s various colonial enterprises, and that contains a large percentage of devout Muslims, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the Prophet must be seen as being intended to cause further humiliation and suffering.
What suffering! What horror! Cartoons, published in a newspaper with a minor circulation that Muslims don’t have to buy if they don’t want to. I’m sure the friends and families of the dead Charlie Hebdo cartoonists feel thoroughly ashamed of their loved one’s actions.
The author Salman Rushdie, who faced an Iran-backed fatwa for the crime of writing about a forbidden area of Islamic theology, summed up the stance that the boycotters had taken.
The massacre of cartoonists, wrote Rushdie, was a…
…hate crime, just as the anti-Semitic attacks sweeping Europe and almost entirely carried out by Muslims are hate crimes. This issue has nothing to do with an oppressed and disadvantaged minority. It has everything to do with the battle against fanatical Islam, which is highly organised, well-funded, and which seeks to terrify us all, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, into a cowed silence.
These… writers have made themselves the fellow travellers of that project. Now they will have the dubious satisfaction of watching PEN tear itself apart in public.
The boycott failed, and Charlie Hebdo got their award, presented to them by Neil Gaiman, who stepped in after other writers pulled out. I have to wonder how he must have felt to see so many of his peers in the left-wing literary establishment choose to attack murdered cartoonists rather than stand against the ideology that created their murderers. Embarrassed for the Left, I hope.
The reaction to the Charlie Hebdo shooting is just one example among many of the Left’s suicidal attitude towards Islam.
When Paris again fell victim to Islamic terrorism in November 2015, with over 100 slain in a series of attacks masterminded by the Islamic State, Salon.com published the extraordinary headline “We Brought This On Ourselves: After Paris, It’s Time To Square Our “Values” With Our History.”
The article blamed the West “behaving horrifically in the Middle East for decades” for the deaths in Paris. In March 2016, after Muslims killed 35 in Brussels, Salon.com allowed the same writer to run virtually the same article under the headline, “We Brought This On Ourselves, And We Are The Terrorists Too.” Liberals blaming the West for the terrorist attacks has become depressingly predictable after each new atrocity.
What really cements the Left’s betrayal of its own values over Islam isn’t so much its opposition to wars in the Middle East, but its opposition to liberal Muslim reformers. Perhaps the best example of this is Maajid Nawaz, one of the few moderate Muslims making an effort to drag his religion kicking and screaming into the modern age. For his work combating extremism, supporting interfaith tolerance, and challenging bigotry in the Muslim community, he is rewarded with polite silence from the Left at best, and scornful disdain at worst.
New heights of absurdity were scaled in 2016 when the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) added Nawaz to a list of 15 “anti-Muslim extremists.” The entire list was ridiculous. It included female genital mutilation survivor and women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Islam critics Daniel Pipes, Pamela Geller, and David Horowitz. But the addition of Nawaz, precisely the sort of moderate Muslim that anti-bigotry, anti-intolerance groups like the SPLC ought to be encouraging, summed up just how morally bankrupt the Left’s attitude to Islam has become.
Is there—and perhaps this is just my gallows humor—anything more amusing than a religion so thin-skinned that cartoons designed to provoke it give rise to deadly shootings, as though precisely to prove the point of those French cartoonists?
Is there anything more preposterous than the phrase “The Religion of Peace”?
What an indictment of America’s supposedly “brave” comedians that not a single one dares to tell a decent joke about Islam on prime-time television.
How to Really Fight Bigotry
The Left claims it opposes bigotry. Yet Islam, the most bigoted ideology that exists today, is given a pass.
Here are a few things that Muslims in Britain—who are often portrayed as one of the more integrated western Muslim communities—believe.
A Gallup poll of Muslims in the UK found that not a single Muslim in the 1,001 people polled thought that homosexuality was morally acceptable.
The same poll found that 35% of French Muslims and 19% of German Muslims thought homosexuals were morally acceptable. These polls were taken before Europe’s importation of hordes of young Muslim “rapefugees.”
When it comes to Islamic immigration, assimilation doesn’t seem to be an option. “When in Rome, rape and kill everyone and then claim welfare.”
Andrew Bolt on Sky News Australia, whose show I go on regularly because they get the lighting just right, perfectly encapsulated Islam’s integration problem in the West.
He recalled the case of Dr. Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, the grand mufti of Australia, who gave a speech explaining to Australians that they are wrong to think Muslims can’t integrate into Australian culture. There’s just one problem. The Grand Mufti, one of the foremost Islamic scholars in Australia, delivered the speech in Arabic. He had lived in Australia for 19 years, and his integration speech was in Arabic.
That’s what I call chutzpah.
There were 1.6 billion Muslims in the world as of 2010—roughly 23% of the global population—according to a Pew Research Center estimate. But while Islam is currently the world’s second-largest religion after Christianity, it is the fastest growing one.
The growth of Islam ought to be concerning for liberals. Here is a religion that sanctions forcing women into submission, a religion that sanctions the execution of gays, a religion that sanctions the killing of non-believers. And they’re spreading.
Islam preys on the most vulnerable in society, offering them a sense of higher purpose. It’s no wonder gingers (ahem Lindsay Lohan) convert to Islam in such high numbers. They also have especially high conversion rates in jails, making Islam and dick the two things most likely to penetrate new inmates.
For years, the Left has been tormenting the right with tales of bigotry. We’re supposed to consider frat boys singing lewd songs about women as an example of “rape culture.”
We’re supposed to look at critics of Black Lives Matter as racists.
And we’re supposed to consider Christian bakeries uncomfortable with gay weddings as the leading example of homophobia in society today.
Well, there is a real rape culture in the West. And there is real homophobia in the West. And there is real out-group intolerance in the West. It all comes from Islam.
Never again let the Left tell you they are the ones fighting bigotry. They are, in fact, its greatest defenders. They are the ones standing in the way of Pamela Geller, Geert Wilders, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Douglas Murray, Maajid Nawaz, Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and me. All the people who are actually doing something to fight the most intolerant, bigoted ideology in the world today face a constant pushback from the very same people who, if they were true to their own principles, would be on our side.
So Why DO Muslims Hate Me?
Last summer, I annoyingly had to resign myself to the fact that I could not lead a gay pride march through the gay district of Stockholm, as I had been planning for some months. My security team informed me that the risks in Sweden were too great. By that time, I had already been subject to a deluge of Arabic death threats (and one bomb threat) on Twitter (which promptly suspended me for a day).
I have little love for western feminists and leftists, not least for their relentless denial of everyday realities. But at least their willful ignorance rarely comes with a body count, at least not directly (indirectly, in the form of their immigration policies, it certainly does). It is only Muslims who are so fanatically devoted to their 6th-century delusions that they will murder anyone who dares challenge them.
Well, there’s a little phrase I like to say that Muslims had better be prepared to hear more often: Sorry, no offense, but it’s true. With so much of the western media determined to play the ostrich on Islam, don’t be surprised when the public turn to Dangerous Faggots to give them the real story.
The gap between what Muslims believe Islam to be, and how it is actually practiced in many Islamic nations, is so wide that it’s hard to imagine any Islamic reformation taking place in the near future.
DANGEROUS by MILO is available for direct order or on Amazon.