The empire of hurt feelings
Islamic countries are trying to force the West to respect Muslims’ ‘feelings’. We must resist this therapeutic imperialism.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/03/the-empire-of-hurt-feelings/Of course, Sweden helped to make this rod for its back. In fact, countries across Europe, by institutionalising the profoundly illiberal idea that criticism of Islam is a species of bigotry, left themselves open to attack by this empire of hurt feelings. Often, Muslim nations exploit the unreason and unfreedom of the West itself to drive home their insistence that ‘blasphemy’ against Islam be curtailed as a crime. From the Danish cartoons controversy of 2005 to the Charlie Hebdo bloodbath of 2015 to the various instances of Koran-burning in Sweden over the past year, it is often Western liberals who first wring their hands over ‘insults’ against Islam, before Islamist nations chime in a little later and say: ‘Yes, that is ungodly. Crush it.’ Hence why so many Muslim leaders have used the woke language of ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘hurt feelings’ to reprimand the Swedes – they’re exploiting the West’s own ideologies to try to further wound the West. Their empire of hurt feelings gains its power from our own yellow-bellied fear of hurting certain people’s feelings.
Sweden, for a while, was one of the worst offenders on this front. It was extraordinarily reluctant to discuss the social problems caused by an ideology of multiculturalism that encouraged ethnic and religious groups to do their own ‘equally valid’ thing rather than seeking to integrate them into Swedish society. The Swedish elites, and others, refused to be honest about the impact such top-down relativism was having on this once widely admired social democracy. Even as gang crime, largely Muslim riots and unheard-of forms of violence became a serious problem in Sweden – in 2020 alone there were 200 explosions and 360 shootings – European observers said: ‘Everything’s fine in Sweden.’ It was a lie. Then Swedish PM Magdalena Andersson tried to break the cowardly impasse last year when she said we now have ‘parallel societies in Sweden’ and that integration has been ‘too poor, at the same time as we have experienced very substantial levels of immigration’. Whether her intervention was too little, too late, remains to be seen.
Bugger the therapeutic caliphate that imagines it has the right to force all of us, wherever we live, to love Islam.