The location of the London Borough of Newham – the sweaty armpit of East London

One of the commentators on the twitter-feed of the Tell Mama organisation, one Steve Rose from the Huffington Post, has inadvertently alerted me to one of these much trumpeted ‘anti-Islamic attacks’ that Tell Mama keep telling me exist.

I had a look at the video and all it consists of is a drunken man telling someone off camera his opinions about Islam and that he himself is a Christian. He told some home truths about the Islamic association with terror, and the problems with Islamic cousin marriage.  We may be able to argue about the language used by him, or the appropriateness of a bus for the discussion, but many of the things he was saying were correct.

Here’s the video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAINLwa7dwI&feature=youtu.be

The local newspaper for the area, the Newham Recorder, is carrying a  police appeal for information about this ‘racist’ man. It is to be hoped that people ignore it and not let this man become another victim of those who wish to shut down criticism of or debate about Islam.  This is a situation where ‘don’t grass, don’t tell’ most surely applies.

Don’t do the Islam-appeasing Metropolitan Police’s dirty work for them by joining in with the witch-hunt against this person.  I’m as much an opponent of true racism as the next reasonable person, but attacking the ideology of Islam, as this man has done, is not racism, it’s ‘Islamo-scepticism’, but it is not racism.

Islam should no more be protected from criticism as any other ideology would be.