Sex on the Beach – is Western Decadence a Molotov Cocktail?

 by Mary Jackson (January 2009)

“etiquette guide”, warning guests to “employ discretion” in public displays of affection (“anything more than a peck on the cheek”) and warning that “drunken behaviour”, especially outside licensed premises in the hotel, is severely punished.“

 

 

Ross Clark, writing in The Times on another occasion, comes straight out with what Marrin only hints at: 

There is no better recruiting sergeant for al-Qaeda than the sight of Westerners trying to thumb their noses at the laws of Islamic countries.

romantic near-namesake, was provoked by “slags dancing around” at a nightclub. Muslim “extremism” is highly combustible: New English Review’s Hugh Fitzgerald has listed Almost One Hundred Things that Fuel Muslim Extremism. They include Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, Pim Fortuyn’s remarks about Muslim resentment of Dutch liberalism and Pope Benedict’s refusal to continue apologising for his remarks on Islamic violence. To which could be added Salman Rushdie’s knighthood, the Danish cartoons and Gibson Square’s proposed publication of The Jewel of Medina (which literally “fuelled extremism” in the form of an arson attack). Time and space are the only limitations to the length of a list of things that fuel Muslim extremism.

“the cultural left”, is to blame for Muslim hostility, and by implication Muslim violence. Robert Spencer, writing at Front Page Magazine, makes short work of this idea:

[T]he immorality of the West has been a feature of Islamic anti-Western writings since long before Britney Spears took to the stage. Jihad theorist Sayyid Qutb was scandalized by the dancing at a church social in Greeley, Colorado in 1948….[I]t should be borne in mind that from the Islamic perspective, Christians are inherently immoral simply by virtue of their – in the Muslim view – exalting Jesus to divine status.

Islam does not permit sex on the beach, but neither does Christianity, and neither do traditional Western laws and standards. Islam has nothing to teach us about morality, and we should not pander to Muslims by claiming that it does.

 

 

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