I’ve started two threads on this topic and both have brought the regressive liberal response you say you don’t see. I got it from you with comparisons of my human rights stand to racism and jingoism; from Bowser calling me a hypocrite for denouncing human rights violations when our own culture is so imperfect; and from Robert indicating non violent muslims are all “just fine” despite human rights atrocities. All standard regressive liberal responses to criticism of certain islamic customs.

In a way, its very much like the way Liberals and Conservatives feel about crime, especially in the black community. Liberals try to see both sides, and sometimes they carry it a bit too far, or miss the obvious. That’s not quite the same as “giving a pass”. Conservatives try to find a villain, a scapegoat, so they can channel the anger and rage to support their agenda. They are trying to blame Liberals for the problem because they obviously aren’t militant enough about stopping it. In Conservative eyes, Liberals seem to have an outrage deficit, a severe lack of self-righteous indignation.

Conservatives seem incapable of seeing what is perfectly obvious to Liberals. Islamic terrorists want to piss us off, that’s their plan. They need us to react hyper-violently, they want us to hate. It feeds right into their whole program, their entire excuse for the atrocities they perform. “See, its a clash of civilizations. The Crusaders are out to destroy us. They despise our culture and religion. They persecute us in their countries and oppress us in ours. They want to wage war on us and exterminate us. And every Muslim who works with them is a traitor to his people and his god and must be eliminated.” Its ironic, but they sound a lot like Conservatives, don’t they?

But I just don’t see there is a big Liberal conspiracy to roll over and bare our throats and present our rumps to Jihadist terror (or ghetto crime, for that matter). What I do see is a big Conservative conspiracy determined to accuse Liberals of thinking that way. You’ve heard the rap: Liberals are weak, indecisive, they’re cowards, they hate their country, they don’t want to protect their families, they’re soft on crime. It reminds me too much of how Democrats are supposed to be “soft on Communism”, because, of course, its only Conservatives who are real patriots. And do you remember Willie Horton?

Sometimes Liberals may be mistaken, or go too far in trying to be fair in the public debate. But I rarely see it affecting policy, as our agreement on the Democratic response to ISIS seems to indicate. And remember, it was Clinton who went after Bin Ladin and Al-Quaeda with military action, long before 9/11–long before Bush II even recognized there was a problem.

I don’t really see Liberals as being engaged in a big program to support the contradictions and barbarities they see in other cultures. What I do see is that they seem to be reluctant to impose our values on them. Some practices, like FGM, are so disgusting it makes us want to go over there and punish the medieval bastards. But where do we draw the line? Who makes that decision? And why?

Again (sigh) my point is illiberal values in Islam: mysogeny, intolerance, lack of basic freedoms. We are not going to bomb that out of Islam.

Liberals need to stop giving Islam a pass on these human rights violations and speak up against them.

Islam’s illberal values need the overt scorn of the world if they are going to change. Bombing will never get that done, but the collective contempt from the rest of the world will nudge it along. Ignoring horrible social injustice won’t help.

I conceded that the standard liberal comments on this issue are often overcompensation and indecisive hand-wringing. I remarked that there were valid points to your position, but that it was just carried too far. I tried to caution that the points you brought up could be used unfairly by unscrupulous demagogues to further other agendas and to pursue policies that were actually counter-productive to solving the problem. I tried to explore the issue from a historical and cultural perspective. And I pointed out that the “standard liberal position”, when expressed as government policy by the present administration, was actually resulting in severe harm to radical Islamists and terror groups, without bogging us down in another endless conflict with no clear goals and an undefined enemy. And I have attempted to shed light on the subject by drawing on my own personal history as the bicultural grandson of immigrants. And I fail to see exactly where I have attempted to “defend illiberal values.”

I recognize that all my positions are debatable, that they are all judgement calls. But I don’t feel I’ve insulted you personally and I don’t feel I’ve treated you unfairly. I really don’t see how else I could have responded to your points except perhaps by unconditionally accepting every one of them and endorsing them without reservation.

No tan calvo que se le vean los sesos.

Surveys have shown a widespread belief, particularly in Mali, Mauritania, Guinea and Egypt, that FGM is a religious requirement. Gruenbaum has argued that practitioners may not distinguish between religion, tradition and chastity, making it difficult to interpret the data.

FGM’s origins in northeastern Africa are pre-Islamic, but the practice became associated with Islam because of that religion’s focus on female chastity and seclusion. There is no mention of it in the Quran. It is praised in several hadith (sayings attributed to Muhammad) as noble but not required. In 2007 the Al-Azhar Supreme Council of Islamic Research in Cairo ruled that FGM had “no basis in core Islamic law or any of its partial provisions.

There is no mention of FGM in the Bible. Christian missionaries in Africa were among the first to object to FGM, but Christian communities in Africa do practise it. UNICEF reported in 2013 that, for example, 55 percent of Christian women and girls in Niger had experienced FGM, compared with two percent of their Muslim counterparts. The only Jewish group known to have practised it are the Beta Israel of Ethiopia. Judaism requires male circumcision, but does not allow FGM. FGM is also practised by animist groups, particularly in Guinea and Mali.

History
Antiquity
Spell 1117
But if a man wants to know how to live, he should recite it [a magical spell] every day, after his flesh has been rubbed with the b3d [unknown substance] of an uncircumcised girl ['m't] and the flakes of skin [šnft] of an uncircumcised bald man.
— Inscription on Egyptian sarcophagus, c. 1991–1786 BCE

The origins of the practice are unknown. Its east-west, north-south distribution in Africa meets in Sudan. Gerry Mackie has suggested that infibulation originated there with the Meroite civilization (c. 800 BCE — c. 350 CE) and imperial polygyny, before the rise of Islam, to increase confidence in paternity.

I’m not saying we should turn a blind eye to this barbaric practice, just that we can’t use it as a wholesale condemnation of an entire civilization. This is how carefully selected anecdotal information can be manipulated and exaggerated to further unconnected political agendas by demonizing the targeted group or community.

That’s all I ask, Buck. You have to keep an eye open for this sort of thing. Its become part of the contemporary political and propaganda landscape.

90% of women in modern day Egypt have been victims of FGM. The numbers vary for the rest of the middle east and africa, but it is not a tribal only problem by any stretch.