49The Betrayal of LiberalismNawaz Yes, we have such debates in the UK as well.
Everything I’m going to say from here on I say as a
liberal—in fact, I say while being a Liberal Demo-
crat parliamentary candidate in London. A great
liberal betrayal is afoot. Unfortunately, many
“fellow- travelers” of Islamism are on the liberal side
of this debate. I call them “regressive leftists”; they
are in fact reverse racists. They have a poverty of
expectation for minority groups, believing them to
be homogenous and inherently opposed to human
rights values. They are culturally reductive in how
they see “Eastern”— and in my case, Islamic—
culture, and they are culturally deterministic in
attempting to freeze their ideal of it in order to sat-
isfy their orientalist fetish. While they rightly ques-
tion every aspect of their “own” Western culture in
the name of progress, they censure liberal Muslims
who attempt to do so within Islam, and they
choose to side instead with every regressive reac-
tionary in the name of “cultural authenticity”
and anticolonialism.
They claim that their reason for refusing to
criticize any policy, foreign or domestic— other
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