Reflecting on the Cologne attacks one month on

To watch her deliver this lecture at Goldsmiths in December (2015), only weeks before the mass assaults in Cologne, is to see precisely the abuse of power and the attack on free speech she describes. She is repeatedly interrupted and her equipment tampered with by students from the Islamic Society, almost all of whom were men. They created an atmosphere of intimidation and death threats were allegedly issued to at least one audience member, the UK-Iranian lecturer and free speech campaigner Reza Moradi.

What Hélie Lucas, Namazie and others are saying, is that they are being silenced by a new form of identity politics and multiculturalism, which ironically cannot see its own stereotyping of Muslims and which panders to one particular notion of 'Muslim' that is conspicuously consistent with Islamism.

Of course, this is part of a broader politics around free-speech and no-platforming in universities unfolding in the UK and the US at the moment, but it also speaks powerfully to the new opposition between feminism, Left politics and the secular critique of Islamism, including what these very activists see as a co-ordinated effort by far Right Muslims to assault and intimidate Western women in public space on New Year's Eve.

For Namazie, Muslims are often the first victims of Islamism and, therefore among them (like herself) you will find its staunchest critics. Like Hélie Lucas, she draws attention to a profound inability on the Left, and of feminists, to be critical of Islam because of this new illiberal fear of causing offence. It is precisely this blindness that has obstructed robust critique of the Cologne attacks - a point Namazie made in her television program with Fariborz Pooya Bread and Roses last week.

Like the Paris attacks, the Cologne attacks show that a radicalized fringe of Muslim fundamentalists are active in the West – whether they are recruited in the West or arrive from outside is less relevant than the fact that they exist. What needs to be made clear is that such fundamentalists are not representative of the great majority of Muslims either in their own countries or as migrants; indeed, it is precisely fundamentalism and war (in part caused by relentless Western bombing) that the refugees are escaping!

Importantly, the accusation of 'racism', from which feminists and others on the Left recoil, risks erroneously aligning race with culture and erroneously conflating progressive (or liberal) and conservative (or fundamentalist) Muslims. The latter conflation silences an important voice of critique that the Left would do well to listen to.

Liberalism, like it's opposite, is a cultural phenomenon not a racial one. If you're culturally Western - that is you hold a universalist and egalitarian outlook (itself on a continuum from conservative to radical) - it doesn't matter what your racial background is.

When social commentators talk about 'Western values' what they're really talking about is liberalism or the idea that all are equal, that human life is sacred, that individual rights are inviolable, that personal attributes are not relevant to one's political status, that states are politically neutral about religion (and thus separate Church from State), and neutral among the ends of social, cultural and sexual expression (within the bounds of the law, which is concerned primarily with consent and non-harm to others rather than with tradition or religious edicts).

Despite this extraordinary accomplishment, nobody wants to defend liberalism or individual rights on the Left (with the notable exception of libertarians and secularists) because there is a lot of critique about the mess liberalism has got us in whether economically or socially.

One way liberals (who don't want to call themselves liberals) have got around this in more recent years is to call individual rights 'human rights'. This way the western origin of these rights and their modern philosophical foundation in liberalism is conveniently skirted, which takes me to my next point: why can't progressive (liberal) westerners define and defend their own tradition?

In a little known but beautifully erudite book by the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial, he notes that one of the historically unprecedented ironies of western modernity is its deep critique of itself. No other culture does this, notes Kolakowski, and it is the West's greatest strength and ultimate Achilles heel.

As we critique ourselves infinitum generating civil society in our wake – lively public debate, reflexive societies and internal revision as well as division – we also generate the paradox of universalism: that it fails to define or defend itself (because there is nothing to define, nothing to defend), and in turn fails to engender affinity. As Kolakowski observes,

This culture, as a result, becomes vulnerable not merely to outside threats but, perhaps, even more dangerously, to that suicidal mentality characterized by indifference to our own distinct tradition, by doubt, indeed by an auto-destructive frenzy, all given verbal expression in the form of a generous universalism.