Today, Thursday, February 14, is Valentine’s Day, the sacred day that
intimate companions mark to celebrate their love and affection for one
another. If you’re thinking about making a study of how couples
celebrate this day, the Muslim world and the milieus of the radical Left
are not the places you should be spending most, if any, of your time.
Indeed, it’s pretty hard to outdo jihadists and “progressives” when it
comes to the hatred of Valentine’s Day. And this hatred is precisely the
territory on which the contemporary romance between the radical Left and Islamic fanaticism is formed.
The train is never late: every time Valentine’s comes around, the
Muslim world reacts with ferocious rage, with its leaders doing
everything in their power to suffocate the festivity that comes with the
celebration of private romance. Imams around the world thunder against
Valentine’s every year — and the celebration of the day itself is
literally outlawed in Islamist states.
In Pakistan just a few days ago, for instance, supporters of Jamat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s main religious party, took to the streets
in Peshawar to vehemently denounce Valentine’s Day. Demonizing it as
“un-Islamic,” the Muslim protestors shouted that the day of love has
“spread immodesty in the world.” Shahzad Ahmed, the local leader of the
student wing of Jamat-e-Islami, warned that
the organization will not “allow” any Valentine’s Day functions,
warning that if Pakistani law enforcement did not prevent Pakistanis
from holding such functions, that the Jamat-e-Islami would stop them “in
our own way.”
This Islamist outcry in Peshawar against Valentine’s Day reflects
many other protests and outcries against the day of love throughout the
Muslim War this year. It is a mirror image of what transpired in Aceh
province in Indonesia last year, when Muslim clerics issued a stern warning to Muslims, the younger generation in particular, against observing Valentine’s Day. Tgk
Feisal, general secretary of the Aceh Ulema Association (HUDA), stated
that “It is haram for Muslims to observe Valentine’s Day because it does
not accord with Islamic Sharia.” He added that the government must watch
out for youths participating in Valentine’s Day activities in Aceh. One
can just imagine what will happen to the guilty parties caught
celebrating their love for one another.
The Saudis consistently punish the slightest hint of celebrating
Valentine’s Day. The Kingdom and its religious “morality” police always
officially issue a stern warning that anyone caught even thinking
about Valentine’s Day will suffer some of the most painful penalties of
Sharia Law. This is typical of the Saudis of course. As Daniel Pipes has reported,
the Saudi regime takes a firm stand against Valentine’s every year, and
the Saudi religious police monitor stores selling roses and other
gifts. They arrest
women for wearing red on that day. Every year the Saudis announce that,
starting the week of Valentine’s and until a certain day in the future,
it is illegal for a merchant to sell any item that is red, or that in any way hints of being connected to Valentine’s Day. As Claude Cartaginese reported at Newsreal Blog
about Valentine’s Day in Saudi Arabia two years ago, any merchant found
selling such items as red roses, red clothing of any kind (especially
dresses), toys, heart-shaped products, candy, greeting cards or any
items wrapped in red, had to destroy them or face the wrath of Saudi
justice.
Christian overseas workers living in the Kingdom from the Philippines and other countries always take extra precautions,
heeding the Saudis’ warning to them specifically to avoid greeting
anyone with the words “Happy Valentine’s Day” or exchanging any gift
that reeks of romance. A spokesman for a Philippine workers group has commented:
“We are urging fellow Filipinos in the Middle East, especially lovers,
just to celebrate their Valentine’s Day secretly and with utmost care.”
The Iranian despots, meanwhile, consistently try to make sure that
the Saudis don’t outdo them in annihilating Valentine’s Day. Iran’s
“morality” police consistently order
shops to remove heart-and-flower decorations and images of couples
embracing on this day — and anytime around this day. In Pakistan, as
mentioned earlier, the student wing of the fundamentalist Islamic party
Jamaat-e-Islami has traditionally called for a complete ban on
Valentine’s Day celebrations. Khalid Waqas Chamkani, a leader in the
party, calls it a “shameful day.”
Typical of this whole pathology in the Islamic world was a
development witnessed back on February 10, 2006, when activists of the
radical Kashmiri Islamic group Dukhtaran-e-Millat (Daughters of the
Community) went on a rampage
in Srinagar, the main city of the Indian portion of Kashmir. Some two
dozen black-veiled Muslim women stormed gift and stationery shops,
burning Valentine’s Day cards and posters showing couples together.
In the West, meanwhile leftist feminists are not to be outdone by
their jihadi allies in reviling — and trying to kill — Valentine’s Day.
Throughout all Women’s Studies Programs on American campuses, for
instance, you will find the demonization of Valentine’s Day, since, as
the disciples of Andrea Dworkin angrily explain, the day is a
manifestation of how capitalist and homophobic patriarchs brainwash and
oppress women and push them into spheres of powerlessness.
As a person who spent more than a decade in academia, I was
privileged to witness this grotesque attack against and “deconstruction”
of Valentine’s Day at close range. Feminist icons like Jane Fonda,
meanwhile, help lead the assault on Valentine’s Day in society at large.
As David Horowitz has documented,
Fonda has led the campaign to transform this special day into “V-Day”
(“Violence against Women Day”) — which is, when it all comes down to it,
a day of hate, featuring a mass indictment of men.
So what exactly is transpiring here? What explains this hatred of
Valentine’s Day by leftist feminists and jihadis? And how and why does
it serve as the sacred bond that brings the radical Left and Islam
together into its feast of hate?
The core issue at the foundation of this phenomenon is that Islam and
the radical Left both revile the notion of private love, a non-tangible
and divine entity that draws individuals to each other and, therefore,
distracts them from submitting themselves to a secular deity.
The highest objective of both Islam and the radical Left is clear: to
shatter the sacred intimacy that a man and a woman can share with one
another, for such a bond is inaccessible to the order. History,
therefore, demonstrates how Islam, like Communism, wages a ferocious
war on any kind of private and unregulated love. In the case of Islam,
the reality is epitomized in its monstrous structures of gender
apartheid and the terror that keeps it in place. Indeed, female sexuality and freedom are demonized and, therefore, forced veiling, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, honor killings and other misogynist monstrosities become mandatory parts of the sadistic paradigm.
The puritanical nature of totalist systems (whether Fascist,
Communist, or Islamist) is another manifestation of this phenomenon. In
Stalinist Russia, sexual pleasure was portrayed as unsocialist and
counter-revolutionary. More recent Communist societies have also waged
war on sexuality — a war that Islam, as we know, wages with similar
ferocity. These totalist structures cannot survive in environments
filled with self-interested, pleasure-seeking individuals who prioritize
devotion to other individual human beings over the collective and the state.
Because the leftist believer viscerally hates the notion and reality of
personal love and “the couple,” he champions the enforcement of
totalitarian puritanism by the despotic regimes he worships.
The famous twentieth-century novels of dystopia, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, George Orwell’s 1984, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, all
powerfully depict totalitarian society’s assault on the realm of
personal love in its violent attempt to dehumanize human beings and
completely subject them to its rule. In Zamyatin’s We, the earliest of the three novels, the despotic regime keeps human beings in line by giving them license for regulated
sexual promiscuity, while private love is illegal. The hero breaks the
rules with a woman who seduces him — not only into forbidden love but
also into a counterrevolutionary struggle. In the end, the totality
forces the hero, like the rest of the world’s population, to undergo the
Great Operation, which annihilates the part of the brain that gives
life to passion and imagination, and therefore spawns the potential for
love. In Orwell’s 1984, the main character ends up being
tortured and broken at the Ministry of Truth for having engaged in the
outlawed behavior of unregulated love. In Huxley’s Brave New World,
promiscuity is encouraged — everyone has sex with everyone else under
regime rules, but no one is allowed to make a deep and independent
private connection.
Yet as these novels demonstrate, no tyranny’s attempt to turn human
beings into obedient robots can fully succeed. There is always someone
who has doubts, who is uncomfortable, and who questions the secular
deity — even though it would be safer for him to conform like everyone
else. The desire that thus overcomes the instinct for self-preservation
is erotic passion. And that is why love presents such a threat to the
totalitarian order: it dares to serve itself. It is a force more
powerful than the all-pervading fear that a totalitarian order needs to
impose in order to survive. Leftist and Muslim social engineers,
therefore, in their twisted and human-hating imaginations, believe that
the road toward earthly redemption (under a classless society or Sharia)
stands a chance only if private love and affection is purged from the human condition.
This is exactly why, forty years ago, as Peter Collier and David Horowitz document in Destructive Generation, the Weather Underground not only waged war against American society through violence and mayhem, but also waged war on private love within its own ranks.
Bill Ayers, one of the leading terrorists in the group, argued in a
speech defending the campaign: “Any notion that people can have
responsibility for one person, that they can have that ‘out’ — we have
to destroy that notion in order to build a collective; we have to
destroy all ‘outs,’ to destroy the notion that people can lean on one
person and not be responsible to the entire collective.”
Thus, the Weather Underground destroyed any signs of monogamy within
its ranks and forced couples, some of whom had been together for years,
to admit their “political error” and split apart. Like their icon
Margaret Mead, they fought the notions of romantic love, jealousy, and
other “oppressive” manifestations of one-on-one intimacy and commitment.
This was followed by forced group sex and “national orgies,” whose main
objective was to crush the spirit of individualism. This constituted an
eerie replay of the sexual promiscuity that was encouraged (while
private love was forbidden) in We, 1984, and Brave New World.
Thus, it becomes completely understandable why leftist believers were
so inspired by the tyrannies in the Soviet Union, Communist China,
Communist North Vietnam and many other countries. As sociologist Paul
Hollander has documented in his classic Political Pilgrims,
fellow travelers were especially enthralled with the desexualized dress
that the Maoist regime imposed on its citizens. This at once satisfied
the leftist’s desire for enforced sameness and the imperative of erasing
attractions between private citizens. The Maoists’ unisex clothing
finds its parallel in fundamentalist Islam’s mandate for shapeless
coverings to be worn by both males and females. The collective “uniform”
symbolizes submission to a higher entity and frustrates individual
expression, mutual physical attraction, and private connection and
affection. And so, once again, the Western leftist remains not only
uncritical, but completely supportive of — and enthralled in — this form
of totalitarian puritanism.
This is precisely why leftist feminists today do not condemn the forced veiling of women in the Islamic world; because they support all that forced veiling engenders. It should be no surprise, therefore, that Naomi Wolf finds the burqa “sexy.”
And it should be no surprise that Oslo Professor of Anthropology, Dr.
Unni Wikan, found a solution for the high incidence of Muslims raping
Norwegian women: the rapists must not be punished, but Norwegian women must be veiling themselves.
Valentine’s Day is a “shameful day” for the Muslim world and for the
radical Left. It is shameful because private love is considered obscene,
since it threatens the highest of values: the need for a totalitarian
order to attract the complete and undivided attention, allegiance and
veneration of every citizen. Love serves as the most lethal threat to
the tyrants seeking to build Sharia and a classless utopia on earth, and
so these tyrants yearn for the annihilation of every ingredient in man
that smacks of anything that it means to be human.
And so perhaps it is precisely on this Valentine’s Day that we are
reminded of the hope that we can realistically have in our battle with
the ugly and pernicious unholy alliance
that seeks to destroy our civilization. On this day, we are reminded
that we have a weapon, the most powerful arsenal on the face of the
earth, in front of which despots and terrorists quiver and shake, and
sprint from in horror into the shadows of darkness, desperately avoiding
its piercing light. That arsenal is love. And no Maoist Red Guard or
Saudi fascist cop ever stamped it out — no matter how much they beat and
tortured their victims. And no al-Qaeda jihadist in Pakistan or
Feminazi on any American campus will ever succeed in suffocating it, no
matter how ferociously they lust to disinfect man of who and what he is.
Love will prevail.
Happy Valentine’s Day to all of our Frontpage readers.
*
Editor’s note: To get the whole story on Islam’s and the radical Left’s war on private love, read Jamie Glazov’s United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/hating-valentines-2/
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