The withdrawal of the German journalist Constantin Schreiber from all issues relating to Islam is mainly due to hostility from left-wing groups at public events against the book author. MENA Research Center reported the case in the last Europe Monitor. In his publications, he always advocated for coexistence thanks to his intensive knowledge of Islamic culture and religion. At the same time, he also made it clear what dangers certain Islamist groups can pose in our European societies. By these risks he not only meant religiously motivated terrorism, he also spoke clearly about the ever-increasing influence of legalistic Islam on Muslim communities. How Turkish religious associations under Erdogan’s control influence the lives of Turkish young people in Europe, what strategies the Muslim Brotherhood is pursuing here, what politicians and those responsible for them should do about it.
Now Constantin Schreiber has felt compelled not to say anything more about Islam in the future, let alone publish it. He, in his main job the anchor for the most famous news program on German television, can no longer stand the pressure and the attacks on his person. So someone is being silenced here, even if the decision comes from himself. One would at least have expected that he would have received vocal support after he was even physically attacked, either from an enlightened public or from politicians who always support freedom of expression and tolerance.
The attacks against the journalist do not come from Islamist groups, but from the faction of the so-called “Identity Left”, which labels any critical discussion of radical tendencies in our society as “racism” or “Islamophobia”. The Islamists from AKP and Muslim Brotherhood can sit back and watch the spectacle with pleasure. For a long time now, they have found their unofficial mouthpiece on the left, which defends them and protects them from critics of a fundamentalist interpretation of religion. The question now arises as to why the progressive activists of an idea that has made secularism, gender equality, tolerance and enlightenment its basic principles since its inception, have become the handmaidens of a backward-looking religion.
The left and green spectrum in Germany in particular has been silent after the attacks on Schreiber, after his interview with the German weekly newspaper “Die Zeit”, in which he explained the reasons for his withdrawal. Everything that is problematic about Muslim associations in Germany, but also in Europe, about political Islam, is dismissed, ignored and misunderstood by this powerful political direction. Their representatives actually want to prevent a critical debate on fundamental and human rights from taking place.
Islamism is a threat to freedom and to ethnic and religious minorities who have already had to flee Islamism in their countries of origin. And the Left here has nothing better to do than to put this threat to our societies in Europe into perspective. It completely fails to recognize that such criticism is not directed against Muslims per se, but against those who want a different society, a community that is based on values that our enlightenment actually wanted to consign to the trash heap of history for all time. Would the reader like to get an example of this particular variety of cultural relativism? In a major German newspaper that belongs to the left-alternative camp, a journalist who researched women’s rights in the mullahs’ regime in Iran wrote that the “idea of the headscarf as an indicator of freedom” was “damn dangerous,” and the Western calls for emancipation in Iran are “dangerous Eurocentrism.” Shortly after the article was published, the young Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini was murdered, the headscarf became a measure of freedom and the regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran was shaken to its foundations.
As a result, this means that it is sheer Eurocentrism to complain about human rights violations abroad, while at home only the “attacked” are allowed to speak out, i.e. the bearded gentlemen of political Islam or the Erdogan spies who are working for their master in the communities and are responsible for arrests and convictions when these critical voices travel to Turkey.
We really have to ask who is affected here in Europe! Kurds, Yazidis, secular Muslims who perceive their religion as something individual that should not and must not become a reason of state. Homosexual Muslim men and women who live dangerously here in Europe when they come out. Young girls who defend themselves against forced marriage and often have to fear for their lives. Here the left or green “cultural relativist” remains silent or it attacks someone like Constantin Schreiber, who openly states where something needs to be done.
The progressives in our democracies must finally find answers to the dangers of Islamism! There must be answers that do not leave the interpretation sovereignty to the extremist right. These responses must express support for those Muslims who live our values. Cultural relativism doesn’t help, but standing up for universal values does!
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