Why The Liberal Left Is Partly Responsible For The Murder Of Atheist H Farook – Huffington Post India

"I am an enemy of god, enemy of religion and enemy of caste. But I am not an enemy of humans who believe in humanity."

H Farook, an ex-Muslim atheist from Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, made the above mentioned Facebook post on 13 March. It was enough provocation for Islamic fundamentalists to murder him and dump his body near a sewer.

Back in October 2016 HuffPost blogger Narayani Syal Anand posed a question to Mona Eltahawy at 'The Bridge' event in New Delhi; Anand asked whether it was fair to label legit criticism of regressive Islamic edicts as "Islamophobia". While Eltahawy maintained it wasn't, she was quick to add that any critique of Islam in a Hindu majority country would be akin to "punching down", and therefore must be avoided (listen here). This dubious, morally repugnant idea spawned from post modernist moral relativism at the end of the last century, has now spread like drug-resistant gonorrhoea throughout the mainstream Left. Every illiberal dogma is now put through the prism of "power structures" to see where it fits into the Left's identity politics.

Disingenuous moral relativists the world over are using this social justice term to give a free pass to a wide range of barbaric, illiberal customs. So long as it is practiced within minority communities in secular democracies, any criticism of it has become taboo.

When Somali-born women's rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali raised awareness about female genital mutilation and "honour" killings that were rampant within Muslim immigrant enclaves in Netherlands, some of her fiercest opponents were Dutch Leftists, who claimed that calling out the proverbial elephant in the living room was tantamount to bigotry (the non-word "Islamophobia" wasn't coined back then).

With the resurgence of the far-right across the worldfrom Trumpism to Hindutva fascismcriticising Islam within liberal-Left circles has become further off-limits. At a time when gau rakshak lynch mobs, with the Hindutva government's tacit approval, are prowling the streets in India, Leftists consider any criticism of Islam to be a point in favour of majoritarianism on the political scorecard. With the result, victims of Islamic dogmatism such as Shirin Dalvi and H Farook are left to fend for themselves.

In their zeal to fight the Right, Liberals and Leftists have not only abandoned dissenters within minorities, but have started aligning with far-Right Islamists, as was the comical case when Linda Sarsour (pro-Sharia apologist of Saudi male guardianship laws) was made co-chair of a feminist march in Washington.

Muslim reformers and apostates are the worst casualties of the Left's apartheid. These folks who are at the greatest peril of being murdered for victimless "crimes" such as blasphemy, are now being abandoned at the altar of Leftist identity politics, to be slaughtered by Islamist thugs who have mysteriously become pseudo-victims of the same majoritarianism that they gleefully perpetuate on dissenters within their own communities. In many ways, a little bit of H Farook's blood is on the regressive Left's hands as well.

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Why The Liberal Left Is Partly Responsible For The Murder Of Atheist H Farook - Huffington Post India