2025 Is Not Shaping Up To Be A Good Year For Muslims
There's a new global courage to call out bad behavior, culture and values of previously untouchable groups. Accountability is for *everyone*. Including Islam's horror-storied problems with modernity
There’s a reckoning a-coming for Muslims in 2025. The progressive freeze on free speech is lifting, here in North America and elsewhere in the Western world.
Islam has a lot of splainin’ to do.
I’m not happy about the Return of the Trumpocalypse, but one windstorm of fresh air he brings is a more open environment of free speech, however long it lasts, since Trump and his woke right friends have their own censorship wish list for his incipient term.
But now that people feel a little safer to speak the formerly forbidden, especially on X, Trump’s new BBF (Best Bro’ Forever) Elon Musk, during a moment of clarity, pulled a Hannibal Buress and outed the United Kingdom as a haven for pedophile rapists.
It’s proving embarrassing for one UK immigrant community, and is only one of multiple reasons why the world will scrutinize the religion of Islam, and its violent bastard child Islamism, in the fresher environment of freer inquiry in 2025.
Pakistani Muslim rape gangs
It’s been going on in the UK for at least thirty years, and possibly since the 1960s. Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants have targeted young poor white girls as their own swappable rape toys all over England, and the government has done damn little about it, apart from a few token trials. Musk’s recent posts have especially targeted Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who’s only the most recent PM not to do anything about the decades-long scandal of child rape gangs—one that no one wanted to touch because of the enormously uncomfortable Pakistani-Muslim connection, many of them immigrants, who regarded their thousands of victims as ‘white slags’ and subhuman ‘infidels’.
But you know, we wouldn’t want to feed anti-immigrant right-wing narratives, would we.
The details are sickening and I’ll leave you to research them on your own, but part of the reason why England failed its underage economically-challenged citizens repeatedly was because they didn’t want to appear ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic’.
While reports damn all levels of British justice and government, the decades-long elevation of racism as the most mortal of progressive human sins contributed mightily to the scandal and collaborated quite conveniently with racist rapists.
Progressive feminists and the #MeToo movement mostly ignored this. One can only imagine how they would have reacted had the rapists been affluent white prep school boys and their victims underage ‘n—ers’ and ‘filthy raghead sluts’.
The press calls them ‘grooming gangs’ but Helen Pluckrose rightly points out in her carefully worded and highly nuanced article How Not To Talk About Rape Gangs that they are, in fact, rape gangs. I highly recommend Helen’s Substack The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain for more extremely well-parsed liberal thought.
If ‘progressives’ are to be believed, it’s a worse sin to embarrass and ‘stigmatize’ a community by calling out their racist rapists than it is to rape and gang rape underage children whom they explicitly consider worthless pieces of white filth. Who swapped their sex dolls around like baseball trading cards. Sometimes in one evening.
Here’s the embarrassing part: The Muslim-y stuff.
A Rotherham ‘grooming gang’ victim wrote about the Islamist religiosity behind the rape gangs, which she says are run far more like terrorist organizations than pedophile rings. She extensively describes the way these extremist psychopaths twist the Koran to cloak gang rape and sexual torture in religion, in a manner which will be familiar to Bible readers whose own holy book is also pretty graphically horrific to women and has been used to justify horrific misogyny through the ages.
Elon Musk, with his global reach, tweeting the rape gangs out in the open (once again) has brought a predictable far-right backlash. Attacking Muslims who aren’t sexual psychopaths doesn’t help the victims and may drive more young Muslim men into the arms of these terrorism-with-benefits cells. But it will hopefully put real pressure on the UK Pakistani-Muslim community to address a long-festering problem they inarguably own—and brought from the mother country.
It’s not just a Pakistani problem, though.
Islam has a serious image problem: A clearly historically-established patriarchal obsessive desire to control women, an enduring love affair with terrorism, relentless hatred of Jews and some of the worst human rights abuses in primarily Islamic countries. Islam is accountable for their bad boys.
Islam and antisemitism
Violent attacks against Jews (dog-whistled as ‘Zionists’) have skyrocketed around the world in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel on 10/07/23. It’s awakened the genuine antisemites and Nazis in the MAGA brigade in the wake of Trump’s win. ‘Progressive’ antisemitism has crawled out from its own cesspool in North America and Europe, with many observers noticing the proliferation of the usual brown faces from their mother countries cloaked in keffiyehs, which doesn’t exactly challenge ugly stereotypes, but does effectively cloak their identities while bullying, intimidating, or outright attacking Jews.
Antisemitism is both prohibited and promoted in the Koran, along with a posthumous rebranding of Abraham as a Muslim, its explicit genocidal intent against Jews, and a long, bloody history. Like the Bible, it often can’t make up its mind who to hate or when to hate them. Or not. Or something.
Islam and all-purpose anti-infidel terrorism
Meanwhile, in Magdeburg Germany, a far-right anti-Islam Saudi Arabian (!) barrelled his car through a Christmas market in December, killing six. He may no longer be a fanboy of his former religion but he sure terrorizes like it. And just to get the new year started off right in the United States, ISIS fanboy Shamsud Din-Jabbar likewise barreled through celebrations in New Orleans’s French Quarter early New Year’s Day, killing fourteen and injuring dozens of others. In Canada, an Islamist group is calling for a return to Islamic caliphate and Shariah law, after quickly cancelling their conference last year when their British compatriots were added to a terrorist list.
All in all, it’s not looking very rosy this year for a world religion with an estimated two billion adherents, not all of whom necessarily want to eliminate Israel, prohibit women from speaking, ever, kill infidels, or rape children, infidel or not. Many of them are friends with infidels. Many of them, frankly, are closet infidels. I used to be good friends with one before porn drove him off his rocker. I’ve known others who professed atheism safely to us infidels in Canada, but would never mention it at the Eid family dinner.
The violence problem is Islamist, those anal-retentive fundamentalists who think the world should be ruled by Islam and Shariah law. So is horrible treatment of women, encompassing many evils we recoil at in the modern day like wife-beating (sanctioned in the Koran, but debated in modern Islam), FGM, child marriage, and the clear regard of women as men’s property, which directly leads to how they’re treated today. Regardless of what the Koran says, it’s always easy to make holy books justify what you want.
If you’re familiar with Christianity—and I am, raised Lutheran, now apostate, and Christian fundamentalism’s severe critic when I lived in the U.S., you recognize exactly what Islamist fundies are doing.
I mean, unlike Christianity, whose founder was kind of a hippie guru, the Prophet spread Islam by proselytizing and conquest. Peace and war! Like any other religion, it went through waves of freedom and oppression. Islam was a beacon of light and tolerance during the Dark Ages, for example, a time when art, science, philosophy, and lively debate flourished anywhere but Europe.
Now, it’s in its own Dark Age.
Islam and collective self-analysis
When critics today argue Islam’s beliefs and values are ‘fundamentally incompatible with modern democracy and pluralism,’ they’re entirely correct. So, too, are the those similarly laid out in the Bible. The three world religions possess holy books full of contradictions, claim to be religions of peace (and are, sometimes), and justify practices we have largely banned today. It’s unfair to hold any ancient religion’s origins to our modern yardsticks, since democracy was only revived 249 years ago in the American colonies and our current understanding of human rights in the 20th century.
However, it’s fair to ask how much each religion has, in the immortal words of Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant, ‘rehabilitated themselves.’
Islam is running like a lame horse behind its brothers.
Islam is the baby brother to Christianity (600 years younger), with Judaism over twice its age at 3,500 years. Both latter religions have had more time to mature. But all co-exist today in a modern age of mass media and the Internet, with channels and windows to the world we didn’t have until radio entered homes in the 1920s. Our direct exposure to others far away awakened and revived attention and promotion of human rights that Islam has been much slower to integrate. In addition to its deficient human rights for women, Islam’s anti-LGBTQ violence persists in many places, and in most parts of northern and western Africa and the Middle East, it’s a crime to be homosexual.
A willingness to examine its own religion, and to challenge human rights abuses, practices, and bigotries we frown upon today, or render illegal, isn’t as pervasive in Islam as it should be, perhaps because challenging Islam in many parts of the Islamic world can get you tortured, imprisoned, or executed.
That said, there are progressive Muslims and groups in the world. More on that in a future article.
Like it or not, immigrants bring their values and culture with them, sometimes including oppressive practices and a greater willingness for violence. Too many ‘progressives’ and liberals have been reluctant to challenge it. The Day of Reckoning is nigh for them, too, in 2025. Scream about Christian nationalism, but ignore violent, misogynist, homophobic Islamism. Or sometimes, just plain Islam.
That’s why Western countries are more closely scrutinizing Islamic country immigration applicants. Is it fair? Well, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Ba’hais, Shintoists and Rastaferians aren’t committing global acts of terror in the name of their god(s) or prophet(s). So now we’re debating whether countries should expatriate those who enter their country and commit horrific crimes contrary to Western democratic, egalitarian, and multicultural values, although that solution doesn’t address the radicalization of native citizens. It’s another reason to scrutinize Islamic-origin immigrants, since that’s exactly what some are doing.
It’s not Islamophobic, especially every time an Islamist intentionally creates bloodshed, chaos and suffering, to criticize the religion it’s rooted in. Religions, cultures, and groups own their wrongdoers.
We need to differentiate between legitimate criticism and debate about a frankly problematic religion versus fear-based bigotry. It does us no good to kick out law-abiding Muslim citizens, especially if it’s based on panic attacks of what they ‘might’ be plotting behind our backs. We might well raise the spectre of what any of us is doing behind closed doors. How many non-Muslims are running their own rape gangs, or ‘sex traffickers’ as we call them here? How many people are planning non-Muslim terrorist attacks? Who’s planning the next mass shooting?
One group uses bullets, the other bombs.
Who should we let into our countries?
Europe finds itself targeted once again by the ‘Islamic State’ after a knife attack in Solingen, Germany, and two car bomb explosions in France, and a thwarted attempt to target a Taylor Swift concert in Austria. Authorities say seven attacks and twenty-one attempted or planned attacks have been documented since Oct. 7th. France especially has long been the target of Islamist hate, sustaining eight attacks in 18 months for 2015-2016. French think tank Fondapol recorded over 56,000 Islamist terrorist attacks globally from 2013-2014, compared to 10,459 from 1979-2012.
Islam’s Islamists are a problem. Not all Muslims share our values or commitment to freedom or are willing to play by our rules. Just like every other human who wants to move here too. But some of them do, and I don’t want to toss out ‘the good ones’.
Islam owns its terrorists
It’s time for these uncomfortable debates. We can’t fix problems without them, and that means a lot of different groups and ‘identities’ are going to squirm, not just Muslims in 2025. We need to do a better job of protecting those who speak out against Islam’s challenges in democratic countries, or who feign concern for certain cultures while using it as an excuse to bully, intimidate, oppress, and outright attack, as we see with increasingly Islamofascist campus protesters. Free speech isn’t truly free if you have to censor yourself to protect your life, your livelihood, or your family. Progressives and liberals have proven themselves useless here.
It means defeating Islamofascism won’t be as simple as rounding up all Muslims and shipping them home, or just the terrorists. Not all Islamofascists are brown anymore. The new face is quickly becoming young, white, and privileged.
What, exactly, are we to do with the radicalized native North Americans who aren’t Muslim? Who we can’t send back anywhere? What will we do with them, once we theoretically eliminate all the ‘bad Muslims’?
Let the debates begin.
What Do Jews And All Women Have In Common?
If You’re ‘Marginalized’, Make Sure It’s Not Because You’re An Asshole
If Someone Held A Real Trans Genocide, Would Transfolk Even Notice? (about Gazan and Hamas’s attitude toward LGBTQ rights)
When I’m not holding feminists’ feet to the fire for becoming far more squoodgy-woodgy in recent years, I help women and others reclaim their power here at Grow Some Labia. I strongly encourage rape-friendly feminists to check it out.
This was well done. I was once an adherent for cultural relativism, but I've come to see it as a weapon to attack the classically liberal principles on which western societies are built. There is something to the adage that liberalism carries within it the seeds of its own demise. There will be a segment of the population that is more concerned with feelings and perceptions of their morality (moral capital) than the actual plight of the oppressed. White feminists, I realized, aren't actually our audience. Our audience is people who can't stand their illogic. The same logic I learned in graduate school to spin women's religiosity and conservatism in Muslim countries as an act of agency and empowerment fuels the government's reactions to abuses like the child rape scandal. I didn't even know it was happening until this week! There is a debate Sam Harris had with Rorty Stewart you will enjoy; can't remember if we discussed it.
In the US it’s difficult to point out that based on FBI statistics while young black men (15 - 34) comprise just 2% of the population, they commit about half of the nation’s homicides. A rate fifty times that of the average American. No one in power wants to hear those facts. Just like the Pakistani rapists in the UK.