 Tolerance towards that?
Asking to show tolerance vis-à-vis
Islamic laws and customs is hypocritical
Azar Majedi
December 8, 2004
iranian.com
Political Islam has recently resorted to a new tactic: it speaks
of tolerance.
It asks Western society to show tolerance vis-à-vis Islamic laws, customs
and discriminations. Their recent demonstration in Germany was an attempt to
silence the rightly angry voice of decent and freedom-loving human beings who
cannot tolerate the abuses, violence and intimidation carried out by this movement.
This movement crushes any resistance, protest and disobedience
in countries where it has the upper hand. And in the West where
it is under attack by secularists,
freethinkers and organisations fighting for equality and freedom, it has changed
tactics and resorts to speaking about civil rights and more sophisticated socio-political
concepts as freedom of religion, tolerance and Islamophobia. It has become
savvy!
Asking society to show tolerance vis-à-vis Islamic
laws and customs is hypocritical, to say the least. The most intolerant
movement is asking society to show tolerance for an ideology and
set of principles, which are most restrictive, harsh, cruel, misogynist
and reactionary.
They are taking hostage the consciousness of those
who respect freedom of thought, belief and expression, and who
despise racism. They are playing a political game. They want
libertarians to be silent in the face of abuse, discrimination,
and violence.
Because this is what Islamic laws and customs mean in the real
life of millions of people.
How can one be silent and show tolerance
in the face of stoning, flogging, reducing women to third class
citizens, sexual apartheid, the execution of human beings for
being non-believers or homosexuals, and the veiling of girls?
 The fact of the matter is that the same movement that throws
acid at the faces of non-veiled women, knives them, and slashes
their bodies with razors for not observing the veil in Iran and
the Middle East, that flogs women for not being "good Moslems",
flogs a 14-year-old to death for not fasting in Ramadan, is talking
about tolerance.
They have definitely become sophisticated! They
are not merely thugs who incite hatred; provoke prejudice, superstition,
and terrorize all those who dare to question the law of Islam.
They now enter socio-political discourse about civil and individual
rights.
This is the same movement, which stones women in Iran,
murders non-veiled, or "westernized" women and secular
journalists in Algeria, executes women in football stadiums in
Afghanistan. The same movement is defending the freedom of clothing,
so it would be able to veil girls. It talks about showing tolerance
vis-à-vis Islam, so it can establish Sharia courts in Canada.
We know this movement and we will expose it.
Showing tolerance vis-à-vis Islamic rule and laws is ridiculous.
It is absurd. They are trying to establish their small Islamic
republics here in the West, to turn Islamic communities into mini-Islamic
states. We will not let this happen. We will stop this reactionary
movement from making inroads in the west. We would push them back
in the Middle East as well.
The growing protest movement, the women's liberation movement
and secular movement in Iran will push them back.
 As a matter of fact, as freethinkers, as people who fight inequality,
we should not have any tolerance for Islamic rule, laws and customs.
We should criticize it radically. We should expose its inherent
reactionary and misogynist nature. We should expose the hypocrisy
behind the cry for tolerance coming from Islamists. We know this
movement.
About
Azar Majedi is the head of the Organisation
for Women's Liberation.
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Tolerance towards that?
