‘Cultural relativism commands us to see what we call our values as simple prejudices; the beliefs of a particular tribe called the West. The religion of the prophet is thus draped in the mantle of the outcast in order to spare it the slightest attack.’ — Pascal Bruckner
This societal dichotomy is crystal clear for me, an Iranian-born Australian who treasures Australian values and cannot return to my ancestral homeland for reasons directly related to blasphemy and apostate capital punishment laws.
Growing up in Australia, I had always aligned with Australian values — without forgetting my ancestry. My beloved Iran has witnessed several millennia of profound history. Today, the Iranian diaspora speaks up against human rights abuses marked by the current occupying Islamo-fascist regime. Prior to the inception of the Islamic regime in Iran, the last global hegemonic Islamic power was the Ottoman Empire, which collapsed in the 1920s. The Islamic globalist movement, therefore, was forced to an indefinite halt until the Ayatollah established the 1979 coup in Iran.
Today, I witness this exact occupying force pose a greater threat to the entire globe, including Australia, all under the false pretext of ‘Islamophobia’. The term Islamophobia originated in Iran under the mandate of the Islamist regime. Following their erroneous coup, the regime immediately established a militia known as the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), to preserve and disseminate the Shiite Islamic revolution across the globe by means of an ‘Imamate’, according to the constitution of the regime. An Imamate is a divinely appointed Shia leader tasked with establishing the political-religious globalist hegemonic Islamic state.
The IRGC’s training regime constitutes a strict curriculum of indoctrination and propaganda, accounting for more than half of the required training for both incoming recruits and existing members. It predominantly enforces the religious ideology of Mahdism — which is predicated upon the belief that the final Shiite messianic figure is bound to return once an Imamate has been established throughout the globe, and the West, and the state of Israel, has been destroyed. In order for the Imamate to take place, the Regime understood that in the 1980s they could not spread Islam by the sword, as per the pre-Ottoman era. Instead, they opted to employ propaganda and subversion throughout the West.
In the West today, the term Islamophobia falsely connotes a form of racism and threatens secular liberal democracy — serving several functions as a tool of totalitarian propaganda. It legitimises potential violent retaliation against those who offend the ideology of Islam and positions it above critique, stripping individuals of the right to criticise or mock its ideas. Dissenters find themselves in a bind: to self-censor or to be labelled a bigot for criticising a set of ideas.
Above all, the term Islamophobia serves to silence all those Muslims living under Islamic mandate who dare question the Quran, who demand equality of the sexes, who claim the right to renounce religion, and who want to practise their faith freely without submitting to the dictates of the Mullah.
Ahmad Kasravi, an Iranian intellectual, jurist, and staunch secularist, who was assassinated in 1946 by the Islamist group ‘Fadaeeyan e Islam’ (Devotees of Islam), had declared his 13 main criticisms of Islamism, particularly against the ‘Ulama’ (clergy) in Iran. One of the core discrepancies of Islam is the process of defensive dissimulation adopted by fundamentalists, referred to as ‘Taqiyya’ — a tactic used by Islamists in the West to deflect discovery of their ultimate motives. Kasravi believed that hiding one’s religion is hypocrisy and covertly leads to danger:
‘It is most ill-fated that the Ulama, on the one hand, forces people into exaggerated and unfounded beliefs and instigates them to use abusive language against the non-believers, and, on the other hand, instructs them to hide their religion and not reveal it to anyone. It is the most ill-fated and hypocritical that they act one way and believe another. More strangely, the leaders of the Ulama have instructed Muslims to practise Taqqiya as a permanent obligation, to ensure that people do not discontinue that practise until such time as the hidden messianic Imam (Mahdi) appears. Dissimulation or hiding one’s beliefs, besides being deceptive and no different from lying, has always been coupled with other deceptive practices and lies’ — Ahmad Kasravi
Iran in 1979 is a clear example of what can happen when the practice of taqiyya is complete: violent jihad ensues. In the 1980s we observed mass executions in the thousands within the space of weeks aimed at any individual who did not subscribe to the fundamentalist ideals of the Mullahs.
It is not possible for me to say (to the Shiite Islamist) “Well, you pursue your Shiite dream of a hidden Imam, and I pursue my study of Thomas Paine and George Orwell, and the world is big enough for both of us”. — Christopher Hitchens
Devised by Austrian British philosopher Karl Popper, the ‘Paradox of Tolerance’ is the idea that if a society is tolerant without limits, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, society itself must exercise the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
If Islamists are allowed unchecked expression (using accusations of Islamophobia as a weapon), they can potentially exploit open societal values to erode tolerance itself, and implement authoritarian practices. Therefore, we should be intolerant to ideologies like Islamism, as we are with Nazism and Fascism.
The DNA of Islamism is not democratic, it’s authoritarian. This is the fundamental difference between peaceful secular Muslims and Islamists. The former is living as per their own spiritual individualised philosophy, while the latter is driven by ideological expansionist motives.
The idea of secularism throughout the Muslim world was first devised by Ahmad Kasravi, only two years before his assassination, as a means of reforming Islamist culture. Kasravi was inspired by the European reformist movement and constitutionalism to maintain separation between the clergy, monarchy, and the state. He was an ardent believer in the concept of ‘Pakdini’ (which translates in Persian to ‘pure spirituality, humanism, and individuality’) when it came to religion and omnipotent worshipping.
The true believer cannot rest until the whole world bows to the knee. It is not obvious to all, say the pious, that religious authority is paramount, and that those who decline to recognize it have forfeited their right to exist? — Christopher Hitchens
Subsequently, secular Muslims forced to live under Islamic mandate who have no political-religious motives and prefer to practise in their own way without subscribing to the clergy, are the first and biggest victims of Islamism.
American feminist Kate Millet was one of the earliest victims of accusations of Islamophobia. Millet travelled to Iran in 1979, shortly following the Islamic coup, to support women’s rights protests against Khomeini’s imposition of mandatory hijab. During the demonstrations on International Women’s Day 3 March 8, 1979, Millett encouraged Iranian women to reject the compulsory hijab as a symbol of oppression.
Shortly after, Millet was arrested and deported by the newly established Islamist regime. Her involvement in these protests also led to criticism from her Western colleagues, with accusations of the imposition of Western feminist perspectives on Iranian women, which later evolved into claims of Islamophobia.
The most famous Fatwa for Islamophobia was against the British author Salman Rushdie in 1989 when the supreme leader sentenced him to death and placed a bounty on his head for the crime of writing a work of blasphemous fiction, which is, alongside the apostasy of Rushdie, punishable by death, according to the Islamic Hadith. Considering the number of attempts to assassinate Rushdie and his colleagues, a naive mind might easily assume that such abhorrently motivated state-sponsored homicide attempts would have called forth a general condemnation. But this is far from the truth.
Instead, a whole host of religious figures — the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, and the Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel — all took a stand with the Ayatollah.
From this we can see how, by making a misguided effort to be culturally sensitive, Western liberals weaponise claims of racism towards critics of Islam by branding them Islamophobes. When liberals consistently entertain this fallacious semantic shield, they are inadvertently entertaining Islamism, which is precisely the fuel that Islamists feed on. In the past 46 years since the conception of the Islamic Republic, there have been many such tragic cases where a defence of Islamophobia has condoned violent attacks in the West.
In short, the moral relativism of self-proclaimed liberals has facilitated the rise of radical Islamism. Acceptance and tolerance do not mean the appropriation of terrorist riddled ideologies, especially when those ideologies seek to override and destroy Western values. When we blind ourselves and enable this moral narcissism to prevail, we feed ourselves a false notion of tolerance in order to prevent being ‘phobic’.
In order to combat this, it is imperative to make the clear moral distinction between reasonable tolerance and the actual appropriation of categorically existential threats, as per the paradox of tolerance. I am no longer naive to this phenomenon, nor willing to stay silent to please others’ feelings; my ancestral homeland has already borne the brunt of being held hostage by middle-aged mullahs from the seventh century as the result of an ‘Islamist tolerance experiment’.
History now shows how, leading up to the Islamist coup in Iran in 1979, many self-identified liberals and leftists formed an erroneous alliance with the fundamental Islamists to help overthrow the Shah and successfully install the Ayatollah. Following this, leftists became some of the most persecuted individuals under the rule of the new Regime. Executions and massacres took place en masse in the past four decades and continue today, with Iran perpetrating the highest number of executions in the world per capita against those accused of ‘moharebe’ (corruption against God).
Sadly, Iran has been the experimental laboratory rat for the world to witness the result of tolerating Islamism in the twenty-first century. This is precisely why growing up in the West with an Iranian heritage, as a conventionally left-leaning atheist, who under a fundamental non-secular Islamic mandate would be labelled a ‘blaspheming apostate infidel’, has been so eye-opening. To then speak out and be met with stringent chastisement from leftists who have no grasp of Islamism and blindly feed into it to please their cultural relativist egos, is beyond frustrating. In reality, they would be lined up against the wall and shot if they were living under the Regime whose ideology they ‘tolerate’.
The ‘Karpman Drama Triangle’, developed by psychologist Stephen Karpman in 1968, is a model representing dysfunctional social interactions in three recurring roles people unconsciously adopt: The Victim, The Persecutor, and The Saviour. Observing the spread of Islamism in the West, we can concisely infer how this social dysfunction manifests. In Iran, it is represented by the despotism of the Ayatollah, who is the main ‘persecutor’ of violence and suffering in the name of Twelver Shi’ism. The primary ‘victims’ are the people of Iran — particularly women and ethnic or religious minorities — and, ultimately, the broader region and the global community. The so-called ‘saviours’ in this dynamic are Western liberals who, in an effort to uphold cultural relativist ideals, succumb to moral narcissism. In doing so, they label victims as ‘Islamophobes’ to avoid political incorrectness, thereby silencing those who are enduring real suffering.
Whilst the white supremacy we are all familiar with vilifies non-white individuals for their immutable melanin characteristic, another subtle manifestation of it is this fallacious liberal orientalism that dictates how non-white people should remain under oppression because it is somehow part of their ‘culture’ or ‘indigenous identity’ to do so. This supremacist notion is used to justify the victim’s oppression under the guise of ‘progressivism’. Consequently, the Western liberal knows what’s best for the victim, not the victim. God forbid women who live under Islamic mandate choose to speak on behalf of their own bodily autonomy — they will then be labelled as ‘Islamophobes’ and/or ‘puppets of the West’.
Whilst criticism of Islam is apparently ‘phobic’, the hangings, rape, clitorectomies, and forced child marriages perpetrated in the ideology’s name are somehow justified as being the ‘culture’ of the oppressed.
Western secular democracies often pride themselves on the right to freedom of expression, believing it to be the cornerstone of a prosperous and healthy nation. There is a conundrum in the West today, where the false pretence of multiculturalism is now faced with a juxtaposition in values between Western societies, which uphold free speech as a paramount right, and Islamic societies, where blasphemy laws impose strict limits on what can be said and done. In resolving this contradiction, we must do away with the false concept of ‘Islamophobia’, which is used to sanction ideas and actions that fundamentally undermine our hard-won liberal freedoms.
‘Islamophobia: a word created by fascists, used by cowards, to manipulate morons’ — Christopher Hitchens
Ali Beikzadeh is an Australian-Iranian who is passionate about human rights advocacy. He works closely alongside the Iranian diaspora community to spread awareness about the global-scale threat of radical Islamism, particularly the Islamic regime in Iran.