In general, there is an iron law of tolerance that I think should be applied to people who are social media users: If you use social media long enough, no matter who you are, you will eventually say something unspeakably stupid and offensive. God knows, I’ve done it myself.
Not, however, quite at the level of Dr. Umar Al-Qadri, commenting on the sexually motivated murder of a 17 year old girl in the Netherlands, carried out by a recently arrived immigrant:
The funny thing here is that if you look really hard and extend the good doctor every last benefit of every last doubt, you can sort of make out what he might have been trying to say. In one light, it’s the kind of thing an old-style immigration-skeptic right winger might say: We need to make people who migrate to our country adopt our values and our way of life and show proper respect for our culture!
But of course, he also sort of accidentally intimates what even the most hard-line of old-school right winger might have stopped short of saying: That many of these migrant men who commit sexually motivated attacks on western women come from cultures where women who dress in ways that Islam in particular would decry as “immodest” are regarded as little better than – sorry now – common whores.
He is, in other words, expressing (I think entirely accidentally) an unfortunate truth: That there’s a fundamental compatibility issue between, on the one hand, a society that has state-funded lobby groups who say “sex work is work”; and on the other hand migrant males from conservative muslim countries where marital rape is entirely legal and the punishment for extra-marital rape is that you have to marry your victim to restore her father’s honour.
Why has he gotten into trouble and had to delete the tweet? Because he seems to genuinely think that the cultural conversion of men from such societies can be accomplished by a few seminars hosted by the national women’s council. Repeat after me: before fondling somebody’s bottom, you must ask their consent.
It doesn’t help either that Al Qadri is who he is. For many years now in Ireland, he has been the media-friendly face of tolerant Islam – the Muslim cleric who professes the peaceful and respectful practice of his religion, the integration of its faithful into Irish society, and so on. It doesn’t help either that he has been platformed in this cause by every major media outlet. And here he is, essentially saying that when men from barbaric cultures attack, murder, or molest women in their new host countries, the blame falls on the host country for not teaching those people that sexual barbarism is wrong.
To be honest, I remain inclined to give Al Qadri some benefit of the doubt, mainly because I think his villainy is incidental and minor compared to the inherent foolishness of western culture itself. It is not Al Qadri, after all, who is setting policy: it is the people running western nations, both at a political and cultural level, who are doing two entirely contradictory things.
On the one hand, our society apparently wishes to be the most sexually libertine place since Caligula’s Rome, going so far to make sure that adolescents are taught about how to conduct fisting or anilingus safely in the schools, while reminding every young person that the sexual laws of the jungle barely exist once the magic of consent has been bestowed. On the other hand, it insists that people who have never had the benefit of cultural education about the magic of consent should be permitted to enter the most porn-addled society in human history and feast their eyes on the garden of eden of earthly delights that an average night out in Dublin must appear to be to a young fella from Karachi or Islamabad. The inherent contradiction there is one that Al Qadri is pointing out, but it is not one that he has created.
One of the things that strikes me about this is the way, when migration to the west is discussed, sex is barely ever mentioned. We will talk a lot about how people come here for economic opportunity. Or to escape persecution.
We barely talk at all about how attractive it must be for young men in repressive societies who learn about the west via some toxic combination of CNN and Pornhub to learn that over yonder in the west, the girls are up for anything and will let you put it anywhere.
We know that sex is and can be a major factor in migratory decisions – there’s a reason you find so many paedophiles in Thailand, for example.
I’m not actually sure, in that context, that “cultural education” would even work. After all, the whole point of western culture when it comes to sex is to make it more available and less restrictive and more casual. Young men who grow up in this culture might at least have had the benefit of years of failed attempts to seduce the fairer sex, and be fluent in the language of rejection or the body language of invitation. A young man foreign to this culture, coming from a place where marriages are arranged and the flash of an ankle constitutes seduction, might almost be forgiven for not understanding that no probably means no. If you build the whole edifice around consent, then you’re just inviting cultural misunderstandings which result in awful experiences for women. And that’s just by extending the benefit of the doubt. Some men will just take what they want because they come from cultures where women don’t have any right to say no.
So ultimately I think the anger at Al Qadri is misplaced. He didn’t create this situation. His explanation for it is not a million miles off base. The problem is not with him specifically. The problem is that he’s trying to explain, albeit in a tin-eared way, what is and has been for many years now, essentially the dogma of the western governing elite.
Direct your anger at them, I say, and leave this poor eejit to figure it out for himself.