What Georgetown University Professor Jonathan Brown in 2017 wrote is “so out of date” and a “pointless article to read now,” he declared in a July 6 podcast concerning possible Muslim-LGBT alliances in Western countries. Brown, the Islamist former director of Georgetown’s Saudi-established Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), has belatedly realized how opposing totalitarianisms frustrate Leftist-Islamist alliances.
Brown’s 2017 article for the Yaqeen Institute (YI), where he is director of research, had proposed an ironical tactical alliance between Muslims and, among progressives in particular, LGBT communities. “LGBTQ groups are some of the only activists in the U.S. who have consistently stood by Muslims” against “Islamophobia,” he wrote. Yet “core elements of various LGBTQ identities and lifestyles are prohibited in Islam” as “individually and socially harmful,” although historically Islamic “policy was basically ‘Don’t ask; Don’t tell’” towards private behavior. “The prohibition on homosexual acts in Islam,” he noted in the podcast, “is absolutely certain.”
Disturbingly, Brown’s article revived fears that America’s same-sex redefinition of marriage would also aid Muslims in redefining marriage to include polygamy as well. “Muslims and LGBTQ groups have the same goal, namely” marriage laws “not influenced by Western-European/Christian cultural mores,” he wrote. “Muslims and their marriages are just as repugnant to many conservative Christians in this country as LGBTQ folk are” given polygamy.
Summarizing in the podcast Brown’s 2017 writing, he envisioned a “soft liberal, pluralistic society.” Thus “different groups” would “pursue their own moral, religious vision or lifestyles under a shared protection of rights.” This would be “almost like a millet system” in Ottoman history.
Nonetheless, Brown strenuously rejected that Muslims should embrace progressive sexual and gender mores such that “Islam would just become an identity.” Elaborating upon his past writing, he marveled that some self-defined “progressive” Muslims “have jumped in the Kool-Aid completely” of LGBT agendas such as same-sex marriage. “What universe are people in that they think it is halal?” he asked and proclaimed that “Muslims shouldn’t dance in gay pride parades.” Particularly his “Muslim sister,” the pro-LGBT (and anti-Semitic) Representative Ilhan Omar, “has made it effectively impossible for me as a Muslim to support her program.”
Brown cautioned whether modern LGBT innovations including same-sex marriage would ultimately prove better than centuries of contrary experience. People such as his parents “were the hippy, the 60s and 70s generation. We don’t even have one full generation of people who have lived through the sexual revolution, let alone seen what that does to their kids,” he stated. Saying “if you don’t view the world this way…you are some kind of monster—that is the pinnacle of arrogance.”
To preserve dissent from LGBT ideology, Brown advocated individual conscience rights. Therefore a baker has a right “not to be forced to make a cake that forces the baker to engage in expression he doesn’t agree with.” Likewise, citing the experience of Birmingham, England, Muslim parents who successfully protested LGBT curriculum mandates, Brown opposed school LGBT indoctrination.
Sheikh Shadee Elmasry, Brown’s Islamist podcast interlocutor who had written a response in the original 2017 article, noted how “fascist liberals” had dashed Brown’s previous hopes of any tolerance from LGBT advocates. “Hegemonic progressivism and liberalism,” Brown agreed, are making his previous “position almost impossible.” Especially Supreme Court LGBT jurisprudence is endangering institutional “bubbles of existence” for Muslims and others in places such as religious schools.
Such disappointments validated Elmasry’s 2017 warning that “Liberals, including those who identify as LGBTQ, are using Muslims as part of their diversity hammer to crush the white conservative establishment.” Meanwhile he had correctly rejected Brown’s “Islamophobia” panic, for “[i]n general, Muslim men and women are going about their daily business.” Although Elmasry would “proudly stand fully by the Sacred Law and against attacks on polygamy,” he noted that Islamic doctrine concerning polygamy was not absolute and wondered how “is polygamy on the Muslim community’s to-do list.” Moreover, LGBT advocates had often taken pains to reject any claim that same-sex marriage justified polygamy.
By contrast, LGBT advocates and others might very well become alarmed by Brown’s podcast statement that “in a Muslim society or a Muslim country I actually think it should be illegal to insult the prophet” of Islam, Muhammad. Brown also felt this prohibition should exist as well under various hate speech and related laws around the world, as he has previously argued online. Accordingly, in France “Charlie Hebdo should not been allowed to have those cartoons” mocking Muhammad in the years before the 2015 jihadist massacre at Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices.
“Religious freedom is incredibly important, but it can be restricted” in places including modern Malaysia, Brown wrote for YI in 2018 with ominous implications for any liberty-minded individual, LGBT or otherwise. “In the Shari’ah, the aim of punishing apostasy from Islam is to protect the communal faith and social order of a Muslim state,” he added, while in the podcast he noted that such a “Muslim state” should punish liwat (sodomy). Such historically Muslim state coercive powers give a disturbing context to Elmasry’s 2017 writings. The Ottomans had “used the power of the state to actively promote Islam and the Sacred Law, and many peoples under the Ottomans entered into Islam as a result.”
In yet another hypocritical twist, Brown during the podcast opposed American hate speech laws. “Hate speech laws are never used to protect vulnerable minorities like Muslims,” but rather “protect the powerful when minorities get out of line.” He worried that issues such as Muslim criticism of non-Muslims meant that the “Quran itself becomes an article of hate speech.”
Among many others, Brown’s self-serving, convoluted ideas have failed to convince devout American Islamists such as Daniel Haqiqatjou. His Muslim Skeptic website has undertaken a massive, withering rebuttal to YI’s “Modernist Revisionism” and “blasphemous” publications on many matters, including LGBT agendas. While the Muslim Sceptic has recognized the politically tempting advantages of YI members “not wanting to offend all of their left wing activist ‘allies,’” devout Muslims cannot ignore or approve that the “Rainbow Gestapo Cometh.”
Along with Elmasry and many others, the Muslim Sceptic’s criticism of “confused people like Brown” (and Linda Sarsour) and their doctrinal disorientation of Muslim faithful has undoubtedly helped precipitate his reassessment. He had previously wanted to advance his agendas with the largest possible enemy-of-my-enemy coalition of the willing against traditional Western societies. Simultaneous Muslim outcry and LGBT rigidity have chastened him.
Brown is belatedly realizing that his too-clever-by-half, big tent political strategies involve perilous tactical alliances between submissive, yet fanatical, believers in Islamic politics as divine will and LGBT radical individualists. Accordingly, like many other Western Islamists, he will continue to twist in the wind for tactical advantage on LGBT issues. As both Islamists and LGBT advocates often show little concern for freedom of conscience, in the end they can only see which revolutions will eat their own.
Rob R (Brit stuck in Britainistan) says
This article gives me a headache. I can’t understand why you spend so much verbal effort trying to see it from “their point of view”. Did other Islamic “scholars” lash out against him? Because if they did I can’t see through a forest of dullness.
We all know that homosexuality and Islam aren’t compatible. Even if most gays are too dumb to realise it and hate Trump like the media tells them to…. the only thing Muslims care about with regard to gays, is how many of them they can kill.
Idol and Icon says
But we do need the details if we are to engage in such issues. Ugly facts destroy fancy theories, even if they rant and rave.
Kepha says
God forgive me, but I’m full of Schadenfreude here. Nothing like watching the feminists irked at the Transsexuals and the Islamists irked at the sexual revolution. We have a foretaste of the Pandaemonium Milton’s Satan set up.
Rufolino says
You may congratulate yourself on your moral superiority.
Mike says
useful Idiots
make sense now
Islam will use you to get what they want then in the trash you go
gravenimage says
Yep.
tedh754 says
Your body in one bin, your head in another.
curious says
+1
Vladimir says
Islamists get the better of the degenerates in the long run, because the latter are just the ”ferment of decomposition” of a morally and spiritually decaying culture.
curious says
Vladimir, Muslims have been dividing and conquering people for more than a thousand years, going back to the dead warlord Mohamad and what he did to Yathrib. It has nothing to do with “degenerates” but your use of that term is part of the divisiveness that Muslims (and others) have exploited over and over again throughout history. The moral, spiritual, and intellectual decay in your comment reflects badly on you, and suggests that any civilization trying to resist Islamic divisiveness would be better off without you.
Vladimir says
As Christ once said; ”A strong man armed, his goods are secure”. A strong civilization would not fall to Islam or any other exterior power, unless there was a moral, cultural, and spiritual rot from within,
curious says
@Vladimir, The full quotation is:
21 When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace:
22 But when a stronger than he shall come upon him, and overcome him, he taketh from him all his armour wherein he trusted, and divideth his spoils.
(Luke Ch. 11, v21-22, KJV)
If you look at the horrifying history of Islamic conquest from Yathrib to Europe and across Asia to the pacific, you can see that civilizations fell without the factors you list. The Persian Empire was among the greatest in history, but was weakened by external wars that forced high taxes; Muslims offered lower taxes. The Muslim conquest of India slaughtered >60 million Hindus, and your ignorant comment insults their memory.
gravenimage says
So homosexuals are degenerates–do you also consider those like this Muslim thug who spouts apologia for slavery and rape to be degenerate–or are you fine with this?
Vladimir says
I do believe those who spout apologia for slavery and rape to be also degenerates.
gravenimage says
Well, that’s nice. Still a lot of false moral equivalence here, though…
Rufolino says
I may be gay but I’m not a “degenerate”, thank you very much.
If you think like that, you should watch your own degeneracy.
James Lincoln says
Rufolino,
I am a devout Christian and I have adult friends who are gay. They all practice the “Golden Rule”.
I recently wrote a letter of recommendation and spent 45 minutes on the phone with HR for a gay nurse practitioner who had worked for me.
The nurse practitioner landed a nice six-figure job.
Suffice it to say, I do not consider gays to be degenerates.
All that I do, in my own Christian way, is to privately pray for them.
curious says
Both Brown and this article about him suffer from an ignorance of history. The article refers to “modern LGBT innovations including same-sex marriage,” but same-sex couples have been getting married for thousands of years, e.g. Ancient Rome and pre-modern Europe. Recent legal developments are not a “redefinition of marriage” but rather a restoration of marriage.
Aside from that, the article illustrates how Saudi Petrodollars have enabled Wahabi Muslims to capture and subdue NATO governments including especially the USA:
https://www.vox.com/2016/3/21/11275354/saudi-arabia-gulf-washington
All of this goes back to Nixon’s formerly secret deals with KSA, shifting the USD from the gold standard to the Petrodollar standard.
Andrew Harrod says
Homosexual relationships in the Roman Empire were not considered marriages.
curious says
Cicero and Nero, among others, would both disagree with you.
curious says
P.S. if you want to read more about this topic, I recommend Yale History Department Chair John Boswell’s “Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality” and “Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe”. If you want a quick online citation, you might start here:
https://www.livescience.com/50725-same-sex-marriage-history.html
I love Iblis says
You’re right, Curious. That’s because Paganism never promotes hatred towards people for their sexual orientations unlike Islam. About Judaism and Christianity I don’t blame them. Because many Jews and Christians today support gay rights and even those who oppose gay marriage still support the right to live of gay people. But Islam brutally kills gay people. I think this is why they build minarets.
Rufolino says
You should speak to the Catholic Church about its attitudes.
While professing tolerance, in reality it is ruthless in condemning and excluding gay people, whoever they are.
(And please don’t mention “hypocrisy”, it would be just too embarrassing.)
I love Iblis says
Sorry but I am not a fan of gay people. I don’t care how Catholic Church or any authority treats gay people. And if you talking about gay people are being prevented to become priests you can join a protestant church which accepts gay people as pastors. Catholic Church does not have to accept homosexuals as priests nor they have to accept homosexuality. You have no right to shout your gay ideology everywhere.
Martelson says
And just think – the modern college is populated with things like this…
RichardL says
my enemy’s enemy is my friend is a perfect recipe to lose everything. Georgetown is just another totally communist Jesuit institution.
gravenimage says
Muslim Prof Abandons LGBT Alliance
……………
So now Jonathan Brown–I wonder what his Muslim name is? Is so emboldened he won’t even pretend anymore…
And note that this Muslim thug has condoned slavery and sex slavery:
Brown asserted that it isn’t “morally evil to own somebody,” and that “I don’t think you can talk about slavery in Islam until you realize that there is no such thing as slavery.” Challenged by a member of the audience, Brown replied that, “if you’re a Muslim, the prophet of God… had slaves. He had slaves. There’s no denying that. Are you more morally mature than the prophet of God? No, you’re not.” Brown continued on to assert that “consent isn’t necessary for lawful sex,” and that “slave women do not have agency over their sexual access, so their owner can have sex with them.”
https://ratemyracistprofessor.com/professors/georgetown-university/jonathan-brown/
Of course, slavery and rape *really are* orthodox Islam. But consensual same sex relationships are beyond the pale, and in fact call for throwing off tall buildings…
curious says
+1
JihadWatch has a fascinating article describing Islamic hatred of Valentine’s Day:
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2020/02/hating-valentines-day-2
Like other totalitarian doctrines, Islam hates love. Two people who love each other have a higher priority than the doctrine, and totalitarian doctrines tend not to allow that. It reminds me of George Orwell’s 1984.
Islam allows rape, which is about power and violence, which Islam celebrates.
Saudis used Petrodollars to hire this white Muslim Quisling named Brown. He is doing his job, advocating and defending their totalitarian doctrine. The doctrine itself is horrible, and he makes a fool of himself by converting to it and speaking on behalf of it, but he gets paid a lot of money. In a materialist world, money confers power and respect, even though he does not deserve either.
gravenimage says
Agree, curious–Islam *hates* love. It is notable that homosexual pedophilia and same sex rape are seldom punished in Islam, but that any such loving relationship is considered anathema.
And every decent person should be disgusted with Brown–interesting that he does not use his Muslim name. I think he is still largely trying to pass as a rational actor.
david M says
Muslims embrace homosexuals in Muslim countries like Iran. They embrace them around the waist, then throw them off a building or hang them.
curious says
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ-iq_dpi9A
gravenimage says
Yes–this animation is grimly hilarious, and entirely spot on. Sye Ten is brilliant.
curious says
@Vladimir, The full quotation is:
21 When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace:
22 But when a stronger than he shall come upon him, and overcome him, he taketh from him all his armour wherein he trusted, and divideth his spoils.
(Luke Ch. 11, v21-22, KJV)
If you look at the horrifying history of Islamic conquest from Yathrib to Europe and across Asia to the pacific, you can see that civilizations fell without the factors you list. The Persian Empire was among the greatest in history, but was weakened by external wars that forced high taxes; Muslims offered lower taxes. The Muslim conquest of India slaughtered >60 million Hindus, and your ignorant comment insults their memory.
gravenimage says
Yes–we can’t assume that everyone who fell to Islam somehow deserved it.
Vladimir says
Strawman. Nonetheless, moral rot and failure of leadership is endemic to any historical nation that has fallen to almost any invader, not just Muslims.
andrew mckendrick says
Wonder what age an Afghan Dancing Boy morphs into a homosexual ready for execution?
LB says
Wait.. Are you saying… No… It can’t be true! You can’t possibly be alluding to the fact that… *GASP!* the LGBTQWERTY+++ movement actually has ulterior political motives???!!! PREPOSTEROUS! I demand that you delete these hate-facts right this instant, because we all know that LGBTQWERTY+++ movement is a loving and inclusive community that only has only the best interests of all non-straights across the world at heart! [obligatory sarcasm indicator]
Seriously, you’d have to be willingly blind and deaf in order to actually think that way. Sadly, common sense is a rare commodity these days and not even JW is lacking in those people. You can’t hope to defeat an external enemy without rooting out the internal ones first.
Vladimir says
Based on my recent experience posting in the comments section of JW, there seems to be a segment of people who are against Islam because it appears to them to be a perfect representation of why they hate all Monotheistic religion to begin with; Islam, but also Judaism and Christianity.
I am a traditional Orthodox Christian, and a sin is a sin, whether it’s the sin of Islam or the sin of Theft or the sin of Homosexual acts. It’s not ”equivalence” to point that out to people, but a balanced reminder that if all we’re united by is a fear and hatred of Islam and nothing else, we are going to lose to Islam, and indeed really are. I come at this problem with an awareness that the Western world is spiritual sick, and if it wasn’t so spiritually sick inside it would have easily avoided much of the problems it has with a resurgent militant Islam that it does.
Calling things as one sees them may seem harsh and all that, but I’m not changing my belief that some things are morally wrong in the eyes of God and righteous men, just because Muslims take dealing with that moral wrong in a horrible and sinful way themselves.
curious says
@Vladimir, you are again mistaken in every way. The warlord Mohamad exploited internal divisions within Yathrib to kill, enslave, or exile all of the original inhabitants within five years of his arrival. By stoking divisions within the areas that are currently at risk of losing to Islam, you increase the risk rather than decreasing it. If you count on your sky daddy ego extension to save you, then you should simply pray, and expect that your prayers will be answered. If you recognize that your prayers will fail, then you should recognize also that people need to cooperate to defend against a common threat.
The Muslim conquest of India slaughtered >60 million Hindus. You insult their memory by calling them “spirtually sick”. Muslims have slaughtered monotheists, polytheists, atheists, and even other Muslims in addition to Christians.
Vladimir says
I know that you have this narrative in which you apply a metaphor of division in the face of Islamic invasion and conquest. My narrative metaphor isn’t much different, except that each fighter opposing the onrushing horde is chained to a corpse. That is, modern man is chained by ideological constructs that produce spiritual and moral decay. The Moslem knows what he is about, believes that he has a soul to save and paradise to gain, however in error he is he’s in better shape as far as morale is concerned than Westerners, who seem to wonder if they even have a soul, much less one that needs saving. Living for today and it’s brief pleasures because it’ll be gone tomorrow. Godless and gutless. And yes by definition under the rubrics of my traditional faith, we are all spiritually sick, including myself, while some outside that faith will have a harder time of it because of the errors they’ve absorbed from their culture and religions. In fighting the false religion of Islam, i’m not going to promote anything I see as also false, or even an ”alliance” with falsehood because that never works. Look at the Fall of Constantinople to the Muslim Turks in 1453 AD. The resistance was undermined years before by a Papacy determined to absorb Orthodox Christianity at the Council of Ferrara/Florence as the price for Western crusader support to save the City. All those doomed efforts at false ”unity” only pissed off the truly Orthodox defenders and the West alike as well when it failed, and the city was lost.
curious says
@Vladimir, as you admit, you are “spiritually sick,” in fact that is obvious. The only thing that surprised me was you accused your fellow Orthodox Christians of being also “spiritually sick”. That prompted me to read more, and indeed, it is true, Orthodox Christians are part of the problem of spreading Islam:
“Orthodox Patriarch Urges Europe to Open Doors to [Muslim] Refugees…Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians, is urging Europe to stop trying to divide what he calls economic migrants from asylum seekers”
https://www.voanews.com/europe/orthodox-patriarch-urges-europe-open-doors-refugees
Evidently, you and Bartholemew are degenerates and part of the rot inviting Islamic invaders into western civilization.
LB says
My commenting experience in JW as of late is the same as yours. As long as you even dare to imply that there’s something wrong with the LGBTQWERTY+++ movement or that you simply disagree with the gay lifestyle in general, you get attacked by rabid gays and their “allies” like this “curious” person who equates you with the genocidal muslims for wanting to preserve Western civilization and its Christian culture. No wonder the West is losing to islam…
Vladimir says
Agreed. There’s an agenda to undermine the traditional family and monotheist conception of personal morality, under the Trojan horse of attacking Islam (which is easy to do because of their errors, hypocrisy, and aggressive expansionist nature). But i’m not going to be made to feel guilty because I oppose this agenda as I do the Muslim one, or any other agenda ultimately operated by the enemy of the human race for the ruin of souls.
curious says
@LB, I do not have rabies, but I disagree with you. I do not equate you with genocidal Muslims, but I dislike you. The Pope and the Orthodox Patriarch are advocating the spread of Islam into the west, and are therefore part of the problem. You are also part of the problem.
@Vladimir, same as above, plus you are a spiritually sick degenerate. The traditional human family was polygamous, as you can observe in other primates and among Muslims and Mormons among others. Monogomy was a “redefinition” of marriage compared to e.g. Judaism where David had 800 wives. I am not part of any agenda to undermine any family, but you are part of a spiritually sick agenda to divide people against each other.
curious says
P.S. both @LB and @Vladimir, you refer to Christianity, but you seem not to believe in it.
“Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”
(Matthew 7, v1-5, KJV)
LB says
There you go again, curious, with your assumptions, proving my point yet again. You just can’t help it can you? First you assumed that I hate all gay people (which I don’t, I only think they are heavily misguided) because I oppose gayness, and you therefore decide to hate me. Now you assume I’m a Christian even though I’m an atheist. But I’m not the fedora-tipping “intellectual” kind because I’m actually able to recognize the massive role Christianity played in forming the current Western world and its ideals, and will be the first in its line of defense.
You also assume that the pope and various bishops are the representatives and mouthpieces of all Christians (Orthodox and Catholic) who are 100% supported by their flocks. I dare you to go to any pope Francis article here on JW and find one person that agrees with anything he says. Same thing with an occasional marxist Orthodox bishop (a rare case but it happens) spewing leftist pro-muslim propaganda. By assuming so, this enables you to vilify all of Christianity and have therefore made not just me, but the entirety of JW readerbase an enemy. Every true Christian knows that real Christianity has long stopped being represented by their corrupted clerical figureheads.
In the future, I suggest taking a step back and have a long hard think about whether what you’re about to say is a fact or just a baseless assumption on your part to further your own agenda.
curious says
@LB, Now you are simply lying, as anyone who reads the words on the screen can see. I did not make any of the assumptions you list.
To the contrary, I wrote that ” you refer to Christianity, but you seem not to believe in it.” That is consistent with your now proclaimed atheism.
You have also declared previously your “anti-gay attitude,” and now you “oppose gayness”. I had not previously accused you of hating anyone, and had not expressed hatred towards you, but you’re getting there. Certainly I oppose LB.
The Pope and Patriarch speak for many Christians, but I have never assumed they speak for all Christians. Yet it is Catholics and Orthodox Christians who enable the Pope and Patriarch, and fund them (except whatever bribes they get from Muslims and maybe CCP). The Pope and Patriarch are indeed part of the problem, and their enablers are also part of the problem.
In the future, I suggest you refrain from such blatant lying that destroys your own credibility. I think “LB” stands for “Lying Bitch.”