Peter Singer: Why Vegan?

Professor Peter Singer is a prominent, academically distinguished advocate of veganism. He if anyone can write a compelling argument for veganism.

It seems there is no compelling argument for veganism.

Why Vegan? is a quick read. (Took me only 1½ years as the father of a child from newborn on! This may also explain why my previous blog post came out some two years ago.) A pocket-size paperback of 85 pages, it consists of several veganism-related articles spanning five decades. The text is easy to comprehend and suitable even for the not-so-academical reader.

All that is left

The book attempts to rationally argument for vegan ethics mainly in the first two chapters. Singer apparently believes that he’s making so strong a case that he confidently goes on to demonstrate the urgency of adopting veganism, describing the plight of factory-farmed livestock in horrific detail. An analytical reader will see through his attempt to actually promote veganism by instilling empathy towards animals, applying a narrative that emphasises their human-like qualities and leaving out the details that would make them seem less antropomorphic. (I’d like to point out at this point that vegans are typically city-dwellers with a much narrower experience of animals than the rural human.)

What striked me as surprising was the overt display of left-wing ideology in the ethical argumentation. (Singer has also authored a book titled Marx, by the way.) This is probably indicative of the well-known hegemony of leftism that has established itself in the academia over the last several decades. Singer may find it quite sufficient to only convince the leftists of veganism as those are the overwhelming majority in his world. The first two chapters of Why Vegan? pertain to Singer’s 1975 book Animal Liberation, but their message seems perfectly contemporary to someone who has followed the culture wars of the recent years. Cancel culture, for example, can be found on the book’s pages—the fear of being left on the wrong side of history may well convince a leftist to turn vegan:

If we wish to avoid being numbered among the oppressors, we must be prepared to rethink all our attitudes to other groups, including the most fundamental of them.

The very point of the 1975 book on veganism is to extend the victim hierarchy to include animals, or ”non-human animals” as Singer puts it:

This book is about the tyranny of human over non-human animals. This tyranny has caused and today is still causing an amount of pain and suffering that can only be compared with that which resulted from the centuries of tyranny by white humans over black humans.

When a majority group – women – began their campaign some thought we had come to the end of the road. Discrimination on the basis of sex, it was said, was the last form of discrimination to be universally accepted and practiced without secrecy or pretense, even in those liberal circles that have long prided themselves on their freedom from prejudice against racial minorities. ¶ We should always be wary of talking of ’the last remaining form of discrimination.’

Yeah, spoiler alert: there will always be a newly found group of victims. Forms of discrimination are the renewable fuel of leftist activism. (This is not my discovery but one that has been pointed out by many conservative political commentators over the years.)

Beyond religion?

Thanks to my scepticism about veganism, Why Vegan? is a great book for me to comprehensively question the tenets of moral philosophy. My earlier adventures on the field of philosophical literature have been limited, but I have become convinced of the necessity of the transcendent point of view for an honestly established ethical system. Peter Singer doesn’t shake that conviction. He does claim to go beyond religion:

Christians, Jews and Moslems may appeal to scripture to justify their dominion over animals. Once we move beyond a religious outlook, we have to face ’the animal question’ without any prior assumption that animals were created for our benefit or that our use of them has divine sanction. If we are just one species among others that have evolved on this planet, and if the other species include billions of nonhuman animals who can also suffer, or conversely can enjoy their lives, should our interests always count for more than theirs?

To utterly destroy Singer’s vegan ethics, I can simply replace that last clause with: ”do we have any moral responsibilities that other animals don’t?”

Singer and his fellow Oxford Vegetarians from his student years around 1970 were non-religious (with the exception of Andrew Linzey). No wonder he arrogantly sees his own discipline as reaching beyond religion. Let me just point out that utilitarianism, his tool for reaching ethical conclusions, was developed in the context of Christian culture. It couldn’t have been conceived anywhere else.

Singer has his own scripture to invoke when morally equating animal suffering with human suffering. It’s biological literature. This seems to be the culmination of his ostensible rationale for veganism:

We commonly use the word ’animal’ to mean ’animals other than human beings.’ This usage sets humans apart from other animals, implying that we are not ourselves animals – an implication that everyone who has had elementary lessons in biology knows to be false.

I think Singer is missing something while imagining that humans are categorising themselves apart from animals in order to be morally able to inflict suffering upon them. The semantics has far wider uses, in reality. There are tons of reasons to separate ”non-human animals” from humans in everyday contexts. That humans are categorised as animals in biology doesn’t mean that they should be in other respects. This reminds me of Maurice v. Judd, the trial to decide whether whales are fish.

Singer quotes Jeremy Bentham to reach the pivotal conclusion that it is a creature’s ability to suffer that defines whether it deserves moral protections. ”So the only question is: do animals other than man suffer?” This is also the book’s subtitle. Singer goes on to assert that animals suffer the same as humans. But this isn’t the only question, after all:

There will be many readers of this book who will agree that factory farming involves an unjustifiable degree of exploitation of sentient creatures, and yet will want to say that there is nothing wrong with rearing animals for food, provided it is done ’humanely.’ These people are saying, in effect, that although we should not cause animals to suffer, there is nothing wrong with killing them.

Singer ridicules this viewpoint, stating that if it were only suffering that matters, we would be obliged to exterminate all animal life—to oppose this is to place some value on animal life. But I must say, given the weight Singer has given to suffering earlier on, he is ridiculing himself.

Introducing the value of life into the equation complicates matters.

When discussing experimenting on animals, Singer draws a comparison between the animal victims of these cruel trials and human infants.

There is no characteristic that human infants possess that adult mammals do not have to the same or a higher degree.

Singer reluctantly acknowleges it can be argued that the infant has potential of developing higher cognition than animals. But he insists that holding this viewpoint would require opposing abortion for consistency. And that this would still allow for using humans with severe brain injuries for experimentation.

For a reason left untold, Singer doesn’t seem to oppose abortion for consistency with his own moral standards of avoiding causing suffering and valuing life. Vegans in general, leftists they tend to be (as demonstrated in Why Vegan? as earlier noted), usually advocate accessible abortions. Veganism makes me uneasy not because of how vegans want to treat animals but because of the implications for the value of human life (and the discrepancy between the two).

What essentially distinguishes a human infant from an adult mammal in an ethical context is simply its humanity, being human. The truth is, humans’ special position in the moral hierarchy as opposed to animals originates from their Creator, the objective Goodness, God. Defining suffering as the objective evil in atheistic philosophy is artificial and baseless.

The real case against animal cruelty

Animal Liberation will require greater altruism on the part of mankind than any other liberation movement, since animals are incapable of demanding it for themselves, or of protesting against their exploitation by votes, demonstrations, or bombs.

They are also incapable of granting humans and other species (and often even their own kind) the same courtesy. Animals are not equal moral actors to men any more than are animal rights an obvious counterpart to human rights.

Despite everything I’ve written, I do not want to approve of animal cruelty nor to contribute to excessive suffering in the exploitation of livestock. I do see moral implications there. Abusive treatment of animals is morally reprehensible. Not directly because of what happens to the animal as a victim but because of what such behaviour makes of the culpable human and his actions. There must be a reason why the Greek word for ”(morally) good” originally also meant ”beautiful.”

[This book] does not tell us that we will become healthier, or enjoy life more, if we cease exploiting animals.

I would argue that the author does enjoy life more on a diet that leaves him free from feeling guilt over every meal. As he himself writes earlier on:

If we did give the issue serious consideration, if, for instance, we looked closely at the conditions in which animals live in the modern ’factory farms’ that produce our meat, we might be made uncomfortable about ham sandwiches, roast beef, fried chicken, and all those other items in our diet that we prefer not to think of as dead animals.

The pros

Why Vegan? has obviously hit a nerve and provoked me to a ”counter-attack.” This is definitely to the book’s credit—who doesn’t appreciate facing a book with the capability of doing this?

Also, Peter Singer does make a few points that I can agree with:

• Consumers who purchase meat do have a share in the moral responsibility for the suffering of livestock. They should be aware of the practices and knowingly accept their complicity.
• Eating meat does have implications for humans’ health and the environment that should be considered.
• When basing ethics on atheistic philosophy, there’s a case to be made for extending moral principles from humans to animals. Of course, atheistic philosophy also makes all moral principles negotiable and ultimately based on absolutely nothing.

The booklet gave me a deeper understanding of the everyday realities of factory farming. It’s far from pretty.

Also, Singer’s dal recipe is quite good and easy to cook.

Why Vegan? is a good book for a devout leftist who wants a superficial idea of why he/she needs to be vegan, to have something to explain to others, although his/her real motive for adopting veganism is social pressure.

Book club: Hudson Taylor: A Retrospect

What are Christian missionaries thinking and why are they choosing to leave their homes for an ascetic life of peril and hardship? If this is what you’re pondering, a missionary’s autobiography might give you an answer. The answer—at least in Hudson Taylor’s case—seems to be that it’s not the missionary’s own choosing to begin with, but the result of divine providence. And it’s not leaving one’s home so much as finding a new home in China. Also, it isn’t all peril and hardship but also blessing and inner peace.

Hudson Taylor was a 19th-century British physician and lay missionary to China with a passion to evangelise. His autobiographical A Retrospect is a powerful testimony about the power of prayer, starting off with his own conversion to Christian faith, detailed in chapter I, ”The power of prayer.” It occurred through seemingly random events—little did young Hudson know that at the very moment, his mother received assurance from above that her prayers for his son were answered.

It was Hudson Taylor’s personal connection with God throug prayer that prepared him for the work of mission. Along his medical studies, he undertook work of charity, which developed his sense of priorities and trust in God. I would usually expect a physician to write enthusiastically about practicing medicine in his autobiography, but this Dr Taylor doesn’t do. At a later point, in China, he briefly tells about running a local hospital—managing fifty in-patients and numerous out-patients as the sole doctor—and between the lines I speculatively read that this results in a burn-out, forcing the poor man to return to England to recover his strength. It was mission that was his calling, his life.

Back in England, Taylor felt the urgent need to save all those people in China who hadn’t had the chance to hear the gospel. He writes about the developments that led to establishing China Inland Mission, vastly expanding the scope of his work. The last pages of the book are dedicated to listing all those mission stations that were consequently founded in China. The China Inland Mission was later severely struck by persecutions that the book doesn’t detail—the story, presumably written during his sick-leave in England, basically ends midway into Hudson Taylor’s life’s work.

The other book club member* informed me that the 19th century was a time of great awakenings in Great Britain. Hudson Taylor writes about a restoration of lay evangelism. A Retrospect is an inspirational book about the vocations we as Christians are called to realise. An ever-topical testimony about living in God’s care.

We were to prove, however, that no unforeseen mischance had happened, but that these circumstances which seemed so trying were necessary links in the chain of a divinely ordered providence, guiding to other and wider spheres.

*) Yes, it’s a rather exclusive club.

A Retrospect is available as an ebook for free via Project Gutenberg as well as Amazon.

Milo Yiannopoulos: Dangerous

Paedophilia is the first—and only—thing that should come to your mind from the name ”Milo Yiannopoulos”… according to the vocal opposition. Reflecting the escalated political polarisation in the United States, Milo’s political enemies machinated a public controversy by strategically releasing a year-old video recording right before the CPAC convention where Milo was to speak. While the controversy didn’t cost Milo his fan base, I believe it did further marginalise him from the mainstream.

More recently, there was an attempt to denigrate Milo with a video showing people, at a bar with Milo, making Nazi salutes. He swiftly addressed the video on social media, though, claiming it was intentionally staged.

Why these attempts to discredit Milo? Dangerous, Milo’s bestselling book on current political issues, doubling as something of an autobiography, explains Milo’s point of view. One answer lies in the book’s title: to his enemies, Milo is dangerous. I originally figured that his sharp delivery of politically conservative opinions is hard for leftists  to argue against, making him dangerous. In Dangerous, Milo points out a different danger, referring to himself belonging to a sexual minority:

I’m also particularly terrifying to the Left because they see in me a repeat of the 1980s, when workers across Britain and the United States turned to Reaganism and Thatcherism. In the age of Trump, the Left are worried I might not be the only dissident minority. They’re afraid you might agree with me.

The Alt-Right isn’t what it used to be

A brief introduction of Milo Yiannopoulos is in place. He’s a journalist and an eccentric conservative political commentator. Religion Catholic, nationality British, with Jewish, Greek and Irish ancestry. A provocative personality known for outrageous statements and escapades targeting leftism, feminism, Islam, etc. Recently gay-married to a black man.

I’ve been thinking about the ”alt-right” recently. The mainstream media frequently discusses the movement whose mascot is Pepe the frog. The media doesn’t really get it right, though, according to Milo.

Is Milo alt-right?

He says he isn’t. But in his book, he clarifies the obscurity surrounding the concept. You see, something happened to it.

Milo credits himself for the ”most influential piece of political journalism” in 2016: ”An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” published on Breitbart, the popular conservative (alternative) news source. In this article, he described the alt-right as a movement for a wide variety of conservatives. Later, ”alt-right” was redefined as something exclusively sinister:

In effect, the extremist fringe of the alt-right and the leftist media worked together to define ”alt-right” as something narrow and ugly, and entirely different from the broad, culturally libertarian movement Bokhari [the Breitbart article’s co-author] and I sketched out. This wanton virtue signaling was wholly unjust to young members of the movement who were flirting with dangerous imagery and boundary pushing. Bokhari and I called them ”memesters,” and those are the people I will always speak up for.

Milo has something more to say about the media’s influence:

From day one, the media had an agenda with the alt-right: turn it into a synonym for ”Neo-Nazi,” and then accuse all young conservatives of being members of the movement. It’s an old game, and it’s growing exceedingly tedious. ¶ Because I was guilty of writing the only even-handed analysis of the alt-right—in other words, I gave them a fair hearing, as I thought journalists were supposed to do—the mainstream media decided to crown me the queen of the movement.

Milo uses several pieces of character evidence to disown today’s alt-right. While today’s alt-right is racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic, Milo is a Jew with a black boyfriend. In his speehes, in response to allegations of belonging to the alt-right, he always describes in obscene detail how he pleases his black partner in bed (humorous but distasteful; if there’s one thing I don’t trust about Milo it’s sexual moral, even if the paedophilia-advocacy allegations are unbased).

In addition, Milo points out that alt-rightists have repeatedly expressed their hatred towards him. This is a questionable defence, though, as recent revelations suggest Milo has been fraternizing with Richard Spencer, an alt-right icon and white supremacist, among other communications.

The culture wars

The aforementioned political polarisation in the Western world may interestingly have its roots far back in the past. Early on in his book, Milo educates his readers about Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s plan to undermine the foundations of the capitalist society—family values, nationalism, and religion—through culture in order to succeed in a proletarian revolution.

Today’s popular culture is to great extent like Gramsci envisioned, which feels like a grave concern to me as the society is falling to more and more insanity based on ”progressive” ideology rejecting the reality.

Milo writes that the left adjusted Gramsci’s ideas and practically won the culture wars in every field: media, academia, and the arts. (One artform refused to give in to ”cultural Marxism”: the gamers.) He fiercely criticises the right for failing to fight these battles and speak to the masses. Milo convincingly explains what makes left-wing cultural warfare so appalling: the left wants to eliminate all fun, strictly control artistic freedom, and make everything political. (Gaming, he claims, was the only artform ”naturally resistant” to this politisation. Milo’s insights into gaming and internet cultures are among the most informative contents of Dangerous.)

Milo believes his own approach to be winning: he constantly ridicules the left and disregards political correctness in doing so. So far, this has made him attract lots of attention among students, i.a. Students are a very important target group as universities are so thoroughly filled with left-wing hegemony. (We are reading more and more about the suppression of free speech on campuses and other such concerning developments.)

Milo’s outrageous humour is found on pretty much every page of Dangerous, making the book hilarious to read at times.

Victimisation is weaponisation

As we all have surely observed, the left is fixated with the settings of oppressors and the oppressed. A good position in the ”victim hierarchy” means prestige and benefits among the leftists. Milo explores the case of a Black Lives Matter leadership aspirant who turned out to be white according to his birth certificate. He’d also embroidered the story of how he got beaten in a racist attack. And there are other similar cases of forged victimhood accounts.

The social justice activists are distorting more than just their autobiographies, Milo claims. He points out how the BLM movement’s talking points are in conflict with factual social problems within the black community and how their actions are actually counteracting black people’s interests.

It’s sad that due to political polarisation, Milo’s suggestions for improving the conditions of people of colour are totally rejected on ad hominem bases by the left.

Milo proceeds to thoroughly and successfully criticise left-wing activists’ narrative. This is one of several chapters of his book that explores the disproportionate classification of people into oppressors and victims. It’s no news that the left evaluates whites on whole different standards than people of other ethnicities. Frustratingly, they are blind to their own racism when, say, redefining the term ”racism” in a racist way. Milo exposes blatant racism in speeches and actions of left-wing/”progressive” activists, ignored or downplayed by their co-leftists.

In separate chapters, Milo explores the wide-spreadedness of left-wing bias in the media and warns about the same biased censorship being implemented in social media. (The social media part is most unnerving.) He also addresses his own permanent ban from Twitter, which he says was the best thing that has happened to him publicity-wise.

Islam gets its own chapter in Dangerous, too. Muslims are a most challenging group when it comes to left-wing oppressor/victim classification.

A few quick points to cover the rest

1. The most difficult thing to understand in Dangerous is the conflict between Milo’s religious identity and sexual orientation. His absurd synthesis between the two seems to be working for him, though.
2. Milo is optimistic about the future of conservatism. His explicit optimism may also be a trick to motivate his followers. The book’s last chapter is advice for young minds about how to take on the cultural battle.
3. ”Fake news” has become a politically biased characterisation of certain news sources. By the way, I also remember Milo stating earlier in a lecture of his that ”fact-checking” is a form of biased journalism (I don’t think he mentions it in Dangerous). This was sort of a revelation to me, because now I don’t have to wonder why the woman who has been labelled the fact-checking journalist of Finland is also one of the journalists with the most politically coloured updates on social media.
4. There’s so much more than what I’ve managed to summarise. Dangerous spans numerous subject matters and even broadens the reader’s general knowledge.

Was my book review boring? I’m sorry, I don’t have Milo’s sense of humour. Entertainment-wise, I can promise you that Dangerous is far more interesting to read.

Knowing the media’s left-wing bias, the recent exposé by BuzzFeed must be taken with a grain of salt. Milo had this to say about it:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BZ4ahsPgSm1/?taken-by=milo.yiannopoulos

It’s only fair that Milo gets to share his side of the story. Dangerous might work as quite an eye-opener. Even for those who mostly disagree, the book should bring about some healthy criticism when it comes to the mainstream media and political hegemony. That said, Milo certainly isn’t right about everything and does deserve his fair share of criticism. In general, you can’t leave your political convictions hanging from some ”hero”, for sic transit gloria mundi.

Robert Spencer: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)

Published in 2005, The Politically Incorrect guide to Islam is still amazingly current in 2017. If one were to judge the book by its cover, one would presume it to be sensationalist and provocative. The contents are, however, more civilised than the tabloid-like cover. The author, Robert Spencer, has done a good job referencing relevant source material. The book is probably not very balanced, but the author does make some concessions to Islam’s side of the story, even when he would get away with presenting Islam in a more negative light. It’s important to point out that writings more amenable to Islam are surely also biased (reversely), but this bias isn’t routinely called out because it conforms to political correctness.

Islamic terrorism was a grave concern to many in 2005 already. The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam made many important points and taught me several new things. Where to start?

Not only alt-right slogan: Deus vult can be found in many places, including this book’s dedication page.

What is Islam?

In the Finnish education system, different religions are studied in both junior and senior secondary school. They are all shown in a politically correct, positive light to promote tolerance. This is where my first knowledge of Islam comes from.

Islam was founded some 1,400 years ago by Muhammad, considered a prophet in the religion. What’s new to me is the detailed biography of the prophet himself. ”Prophet of War,” as the first chapter’s provocative title says. Interestingly, Muhammad fought in tribal wars before his religious revelations in A.D. 610. Later, he turned against his own tribe (the Quraysh) for not accepting his new religion. The Qur’an, Islam’s holy book, gives justification for waging religious war. Spencer writes that the Qur’an verses that justified the early Muslims’ attacks against the Quraysh led to the general Islamic principle that defending the religion overrides different moral standards. Later, the Qur’an permitted the Muslims to breach a treaty with the Quraysh in Islam’s interest, for example.

Muhammad went on to share his faith to other tribes. This sharing was eventually violent in nature. With the rejection of Islam by Jewish tribes, Muhammad eventually commanded, ”Kill any Jew that falls into your power.” He had a Jewish civilian assassinated for mocking Muslims. And there’s much more. None of this was told in school.

Muhammad’s aspirations to spread Islam and collect war booty are supported by the Qur’an every step of the way. The Qur’an promises great things to every faithful Muslim. The ones that fall in jihad are taken to Paradise to be served by beautiful ”voluptuous women”—and even ”young male servants handsome as pearls well-guarded,” to please men of different proclivities. Tendentious Islamic teachings bring about a most interesting perspective: that Islam isn’t a mere religion, but a self-empowering ideology built to subordinate the entire world under its power. Islam, ”submission.”

Islam’s nature as more than a religion is obviously not a novel thought. Some commentators speak about ”political Islam” in contrast to religion-only Islam, but there isn’t really any ”non-political Islam” to begin with. As Spencer illustrates in his Politically Incorrect Guide, the religion orders shari’a system to be established in all societies. There’s no separation of religion and state, on the contrary.

The Crusades as defensive wars

Apologists of Islam constantly refer to the Crusades to demonstrate that Islam isn’t any worse than Christianity. They may even claim that the entire conflict between Islam and Christianity started from the Crusades. Spencer argues that this is all just a PC myth.

Spencer recounts the historical background of the Crusades up to the detail and attempts to make a case against Islam-victimizing historical interpretations.

Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade in 1095 appealing to the fact that without defensive action ”the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked” by Muslim forces. Read the book for a detailed account of centuries of persecution by Muslim tyrants in Jerusalem and elsewhere.

Some of the more ignorant Islam-friendly political commentators have dismissed news about modern-day persecutions of Christians in the Middle East by claiming that Muslims were there first. This obviously contradicts clear historical facts. As Spencer explains, before the Crusades, Muslims had already conquered over two thirds (!) of the Christian world (including parts of Europe). We think about the Middle East and Northern Africa as Islamic areas, but they were originally Christian. And while Christianity was in its early days spread by word of mouth by persecuted believers, later Islam would be spread by sword, and the believers were themselves the persecutors.

The Christians’ three options under Islamic rule

This is what an unbeliever can traditionally choose from under Islamic rule:

1. Convert to Islam.
2. Pay the jizya, a tax for non-Muslims.
3. Die.

The Christians or Jews deciding to keep their faith and pay the tax would be treated as second-class citizens. They would be forbidden from telling Muslims about their faith. They would also be forbidden from constructing churches. They might even be forbidden from wearing certain kinds of clothing reserved for Muslims. The collecting of the jizya tax used to be a humiliation in itself: the unbeliever may be hit on the head or neck, and up to the 20th century, he would be held by the beard and struck on cheeks.

The aforementioned three choices are today presented to Christians in ISIS-controlled areas, according to a news article. In mainstream Islamic countries, several aforementioned restrictions for unbelievers are in place, such as the prohibition to proselytise. In Saudi Arabia, religions other than Islam are completely forbidden. Recently in Indonesia, a Christian politician was imprisoned because he said that Muslims are allowed to vote for him.

Historically, the poor treatment of non-Muslims in Muslim-conquered lands combined with the jizya contributed to the majority of people converting to Islam.

Were the Crusades worth it?

Spencer admits that looking at the Crusades’ objectives, they failed miserably. Yet he points out that the Crusades managed to slow down the Muslim forces’ attempts to conquer Europe, and this may have been decisive for Europe remaining Christian.

Would Muslim conquest of Europe have been so bad? Another PC myth states that diverse religions have peacefully coexisted under Islamic rule. Spencer claims that history testifies how Islamic rule has decayed other religions, such as Zoroastrianism and Nestorian Christianity. The decay of Christianity in Europe would have been a great loss for humanity. Spencer believes that Christianity was essential to the birth of not just modern-day Western values such as human rights but also modern-day science, whose development has made people’s lives better worldwide. Spencer writes about the philosophy of science in much the same way as Tapio Puolimatka, the Finnish professor who has written books and given lectures on the very subject of how Christianity’s understanding of God enables empirical natural science.

Spencer believes that today’s (post-)Christian society also deserves to be preserved against the spread of Islam. He points out that Islam doesn’t acknowledge universal human rights as declared by the United Nations. Some Islamic countries have formulated their own human rights declarations instead of adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. From the reality of life in several Islamic countries, we can all understand why that is.

They want an Islamic state

One major thing that was new to me has to do with ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, also ISIL, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant). This organisation (or state) appeared into my consciousness out of the blue a couple of years ago. Suddenly, it occupied areas in the Middle East and spread terror also in Europe. The Politically Incorrect Guide doesn’t address ISIS, of course, as it was written a decade earlier. But it does contain some interesting information as to the group’s ideology.

As you may know, ISIS has established a state, not acknowledged by the international community, ruled by caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. They believe that Islam commands them to build this caliphate. I’ve read that they also believe in some sort of apocalypse in our days and a final battle to be fought between the forces of Allah and the forces of evil.

Now, to what the Politically Incorrect Guide has to say. Even before ISIS, several Islamist groups and religious commentators were calling for a caliphate to be founded. You see, Turkey used to be the successor of the old Sunni Islamic empire, until President Kemal Atatürk abolished the caliphate in the 1920s and made Turkey secular. (As we know, Turkey has recently been moving towards Islamism, again.) Ever since, jihadists have been calling for the reëstablishment of the caliphate and the renaissance of the umma (worldwide Islamic community). They believe that the secularisation of Turkey was a Western conspiracy. Restoring the caliphate was also Osama bin Laden’s goal.

Spencer writes that terrorism expert Daniel Pipes estimates 10–15 % of Muslims worldwide to support the jihadist agenda. Even far higher estimates are referred to in the book.

Left-wing double standards

When debunking PC myths about Islam, Robert Spencer recurrently points at the moral double standard of the PC establishment.

Bill Clinton suggested that the sack of Jerusalem in 1099 was the ultimate cause of the September 11 attacks. Yet the Muslims’ sack of Constantinople in 1453 does not burn in anyone’s memory. No president has pointed to it as the root cause of any modern-day terrorist acts. Indeed, it is less well known today than another sack of Constantinople: the one perpetrated by misguided Crusaders in 1204.

This is one illustration of the strange, unacknowledged moral double standard that PC types use when evaluating behavior by Westerners and non-Westerners: Any number of massacres and atrocities can be forgiven non-Western, non-white, non-Christian people, but misdeeds by Christian (or even post-Christian) Westerners remain seared in the world’s collective memory. […] It’s a tacit admission of a fact that the PC establishment stoutly denies in every other case: Christianity does teach a higher moral standard than Islam, and more is expected not only for observant Christians, but of those who have imbibed these high principles by living in the societies molded by them.

Today, this double standard culminates in claims that only whites are capable of racism and that discrimination of whites cannot be racism, if they can be discriminated against in the first place.

The point

Am I calling for a war between Christianity and Islam? Certainly not. What I am calling for is a general recognition that we are already in a war between two vastly different ideas of how to govern states and order societies, and that in this struggle the West has nothing to apologize for and a great deal to defend.

While The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam is somewhat biased, I think it underlines certain facts that are relevant to the modern Westerner but are constantly left unsaid or even denied by the mainstream media and political commentators. ”Islam has nothing to do with Islam” is a caricature of the liberal/progressive statements made in the aftermath of more and more frequent terrorist attacks and religiously motivated acts of violence. A Westerner easily forgets what a central role religion has in the world-view and values of other peoples in the world.

It’s not that these different values are wrong from an ”objective” perspective, it’s that the collision between Western liberalism and Islamic culture produces severe conflicts. A liberal, modernised interpretation of Islam might nicely integrate into European societies, but as Robert Spencer points out, so far there’s no sign of such a reformation within Islam. Liberal attempts to conceal the conflict between Islam and Western values, while well intended, actually constitutes a disservice to reform-minded Muslims:

Why liberals in Muslim-majority countries feel betrayed by (often well-intentioned) liberals in the West:https://t.co/sPyLVZa7EA #Excerpt pic.twitter.com/cuOGldYlmf

— Ali A. Rizvi (@aliamjadrizvi) March 28, 2017

Some countries in Europe are currently going through major demographic shifts. Now is the time to acknowledge the facts and become familiar with those sides of Islam they don’t yet tell about in schools. I recommend reading The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades); if you worry about the book’s unbalanced tone, read a book with the same subject matter but liberal undertone, in parallel.