THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Baroness Warsi's speech on Islamophobia was packed with sanctimonious generalities, laments Jenny McCartney.
As Baroness Warsi, the Conservative Party chairman, discovered rather brutally last week, it's a tricky job being both an establishment politician and a member of a minority community. If you start lecturing your community too stridently, you will gradually drive away anyone you might hope to influence; if you defend it too robustly, you run the risk of infuriating the majority.
I appreciate the delicacy of the task, because I spent my youth watching politicians negotiate the explosive nuances of the overheated politics of Northern Ireland. But the chief problem with Baroness Warsi's speech on faith in Leicester last week was different: amid some thoughtful points, there were large patches that were hopelessly confusing.
Some of it struck home. She remarked that "Islamophobia has now passed the dinner-party test" in becoming socially acceptable. "Islamophobia" is a word I would rather avoid, because it is both incendiary and vague. None the less, I think she is broadly right: many people are undoubtedly less inhibited about verbally attacking Islam than they would have been 10 years ago, in part because Islamist militancy is on the rise. They are also more vocal, as it happens, in criticising Christianity.
Since religions are belief systems, I see no problem in people questioning the principles upon which they are based. What is objectionable is when critics extend their attack to the believers, and lazily assume that "Muslims" are a solid mass who all think and behave in exactly the same way. I have, over the years, had sharp run-ins with many supposedly educated non-Muslims who bandy the label with a sweeping, arrogant mixture of fear and contempt. Such sloppiness makes no distinction between Salmaan Taseer, the late governor of the Punjab whose moral courage few in the West could hope to match, and his murderer. >>> Jenny McCartney | Saturday, January 22, 2011
I wrote the following comment on this article:
…I see no problem in people questioning the principles upon which they are based. What is objectionable is when critics extend their attack to the believers, and lazily assume that "Muslims" are a solid mass who all think and behave in exactly the same way. I have, over the years, had sharp run-ins with many supposedly educated non-Muslims who bandy the label with a sweeping, arrogant mixture of fear and contempt.
This is politically correct gobbledygook! Furthermore, you cannot compare the Islamic problem with the Irish question. Islam is in so many ways unique. And uniquely problematic to boot!
People in the establishment who don’t understand keep prattling on about moderate Muslims and keep prefacing everything they utter with “the vast majority of Muslims are law-abiding citizens who want nothing to do with extremism”, or some such unproven banality. I, for one, am sick to the back teeth of all the twaddle.
The fact is that there is no such thing as Islamism, and therefore no such distinction can be made between Islam and Islamism, no more than a distinction can be truly made between moderate and radical Muslims.
Fact is, there is ONE religion: Islam. It may be broken down by sect, but not by nature. (With the possible exception of Sufis and the Ahmaddiya movement.) Truth is, Islam is an extreme religion by nature, which leaves little room for interpretation and/or evolution. The reason for this is clear: The Koran is to be taken literally, since the words contained therein are believed to be the literal words of Allah. Therefore, by definition, anyone who says anything against the Koran risks being branded a heretic. For, after all is said and done, who can question Allah’s words or judgement?
Fundamentalists, radical Muslims, Islamists, call them what you will, are simply people who wish to abide by Allah’s words. They are true to their faith. They have not gone astray, as they keep on telling us. And they have not bastardized their faith either, as so many wimps in the political class keep on telling us. They are the TRUE believers. They are doing Allah’s work! Now that sounds uncomfortable; but it is a fact. You won’t get Muslims making the distinction between Islam and Islamism. This is the distinction made by the infidel for the infidel. It serves the needs of the political class.
By extension, there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim who lives by the Koran. The “moderate Muslim” that our politicians keep going on about are the Muslims who are lukewarm about their faith. They are like the Christians who are nominal, the ones who call themselves Christian, but don’t live by Christian tenets. (All religions have such ‘adherents’.)
I have worked and lived with very many Muslims. Most of them have truly been very nice, kind people, who would go to the ends of the earth to help one. But the fact remains that there is no telling when a perfectly moderate member of that faith group will start to morph into something rather more fundamentalist. I have observed that it often happens when they already have sown their wild oats. Then they’ve had enough, and start reading the Koran. The more they read the Koran, the more fundamentalist they become. And as God is my witness, one starts to observe the transformation before one’s very eyes!
One of the probems we have in this country with all the Muslims amongst us is that there is no telling when this transformation is going to happen. It cannot easily be foretold; and when it does happen, what are we able to do about it?
Our politicians have brought upon us a very difficult problem to solve. A problem that can only truly be solved by draconian measures, which no politician has the stomach for, and probably most of the electorate couldn’t stomach the necessary measures anyway. Fact is, politicians since the Second World War have done the indigenous population of these islands down. They stand accused of short-termism. They have served the needs of big business, and they have served their own needs, and into the bargain, they have paid scant regard for the wishes of the electorate or the future of our Judeo-Christian civilisation. Fie on them all!
Regarding Baroness Warsi’s speech on Islamophobia, I have the following to say…
She has no right lecturing us on what we should talk about at dinner parties, or elsewhere. Why is she a baroness anyway? I think we all know the answer to that question. But really, what is a phobia anyway? A phobia is an irrational fear of something. Whatever can be irrational about fearing Islam? The socio-political system, clothed as it is in a deity, preaches hatred of the other, the infidel. It preaches hatred of homosexuals, and calls for them to be killed. Apostates are killed too. Women are treated as second-class citizens. They are often little more than procreation machines! Islam is supremacist at its core. Its adherents practise female genital mutilation. There are so many cases of enforced marriages that should make any young Muslimah fearful. And then there are the honour killings. Oh, dear, one could go on and on. Muslims, by the way, also take over wherever they are allowed to put down roots. They snuff out the indigenous culture – always. The process has only once ever been reversed. That was in Moorish Spain. It took 500 bloody years to reverse the process of Islamisation! Do we want this future for ourselves?
Islamophobic? By God, one would have to be Islamofoolish not to be Islamophobic! – © Mark
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