THE GUARDIAN: The dinner party bigot's attack on Islam as a creed can all too easily become an excuse for an attack upon an ethnic group
No one actually comes out and directly says "I hate Muslims" – at least, not on the liberal dinner party circuit that was the target of Lady Warsi's speech. Conversations generally begin with the sort of anxieties that many of us might reasonably share: it cannot be right for women to be denied access to education in some Islamic regimes; the use of the death penalty for apostasy is totally unacceptable; what about the treatment of homosexuals? The conversation then moves on to sharia law or jihad or the burqa, not all of it entirely well informed. Someone places their hands across their face and peers out between their fingers. Another guest giggles slightly. Someone inevitably mentions 9/11. Later, guests travel home on the tube and look nervously at the man in the beard sitting opposite.
The problem Warsi identifies is the problem of slippage. What can begin as a perfectly legitimate conversation about, say, religious belief and human rights, can drift into a licence for observations that in any other circumstance would be regarded as tantamount to racism. Like the 19th-century link between anti-Catholicism and racism towards the Irish, one can easily bleed into the other.
"I treat the Islamic religion with the same respect as the bubble-gum I scrape off my shoe," suggested one contributor to the website of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, in response to Warsi's speech. Another offered the following charming observation: "I don't care what the good or bad Baroness has to say about anything at all. I give her no credence nor voice. She is a person of faith so in my book a skinwaste." I cannot think of a single other group in our society about whom such vile remarks would be in any way socially acceptable. And OK, these are comments whose surface grammar is about Islam and religion. Nonetheless, the level of invective is very obviously personal. Read on and comment >>> Giles Fraser | Saturday, January 22, 2011
Baroness Warsi spoke twaddle in Leicester; Giles Fraser has written twaddle here!
This article confuses the issue. Islam is a socio-political ideology clothed in a deity; and a very dangerous ideology at that! Wherever it has been allowed to take root, it has eventually snuffed out the host culture. And only in Moorish Spain has the process ever been reversed, and that reversal took 500 years of bloody conflict. Now the Spaniards, under the misguided leadership of Zapatero, is busy Islamising the country again. People seem to be incapable of learning from history!
As for the phenomenon of "Islamophobia", I can say only this: a phobia is an irrational fear or aversion to something. What on earth can be irrational about fearing Islam? It preaches hatred of the other. It kills apostates. It kills homosexuals. It treats women as second-class citizens. It is supremacist. Its adherents practise female genital mutilation. They also engage in honour killings. Must I go on?
Get with the story, Mr. Fraser. You must be living on another planet to hold such a viewpoint so reminiscent of Pollyanna's! – © Mark
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