L'attrape-coeurs

thischarmingman1981:

The price that some on the Left pay for ignoring this “complication” of class struggle is, among other things, an all-too-easy and uncritical acceptance of anti-american and anti-western Muslim groups as representing “progressive” forms of struggle, as automatic allies: groups like Hamas and Hezbollah all of a sudden appear as revolutonary agents, even though their idiology is explicitly anti-modern, rejecting the entire egalitarian legacy of the French revolution. (Things have gone so far here that some of the contemporary Left consider even an emphasis on atheism as a Western colonialist plot.) Against this temptation, we should insist on the unconditional right to conduct a public critical analysis of all religions, Islam included, and the saddest thing is that one should even have to mention this. While many leftist would concede this point, he or she would be quick to add that any such critique must be carried out in a respectful way, in order to avoid a patronizing cultural imperialism, wich de facto means that every real critique is to be abandoned, since a genuine critique of religion will by definition be “disrespectful” of the latter’s sacred character and truth claims.

Zlavoj Zizek