There are some pieces that really do need to be described as ‘must read’ and this article from the Guardian by Nick Cohen is definitely one of those bits of writing that deserve to be called important.
Detailing the case of the Bangladeshi secularist writer Avijit Roy, who was murdered with meat cleavers by Islamofash back in February 2015, and of his widows journey to London to speak at the National Secular Society, Mr Cohen said:
“No one could have predicted that the Bangladeshi writer Rafida Bonya Ahmed would make it to London last week. That she is alive at all is a miracle – to use a word of which she would thoroughly disapprove. As I watched her deliver the British Humanist Association’s annual Voltaire lecture , I saw a dignified and principled intellectual it was our duty to emulate and defend. I could not understand why anyone would want to harm, let alone kill, her
But many do. In February, Islamist fanatics hacked her husband, Avijit Roy, to death with meat cleavers as the couple left a book fair in Dhaka. They nearly killed Ahmed too: slicing off her thumb and covering her body with wounds. To hear her talk about her murdered husband made me long to have met him. He was a typical intellectual – hopeless with anything practical but in love with literature, science and free debate.
Together, Ahmed and Roy ran a secular blog that promoted the writings of young liberal Bangladeshi’s They wrote on evolution and humanism; they condemned extremism fearlessly, as the title of Roy’s 2014 book The Virus of Faith makes clear. Seeing and fearing a courageous opponent, the enemies of free thought killed him for his ideas.
Ahmed talked about how compromised the Bangladeshi state had become, and you could easily make the mistake of thinking her story had nothing to do with us. Yet there were guards at the doors of her lecture room, searching bags for bombs and guns. A widow, still recovering from the slash of meat cleavers, with no weapon to threaten anyone beyond the power of her thought, is as much a target in London as Dhaka.
The comparisons don’t stop there. Immigration has meant that Bangladeshi politics are British politics too. You will never understand why London’s East End returns politicians as grotesque as George Galloway or mayors as bent as Lutfur Rahman unless you know that Tower Hamlets is Jamaat-e-Islami’s British stronghold. Grasp that the party of Bangladesh’s religious right is always willing to lend its vote bank to politicians who bow before its prejudices and you will gaze on the East End’s foetid politics with less bewilderment.
Above all else, the fear that religious terror brings, the lies it makes people tell and concessions it forces them to make are as familiar here as on the subcontinent. “
It’s plain to see from Mr Cohen’s article that when we imported Islam to the United Kingdom we also imported dangerous and destructive Islamofascism. However, getting the ordinary person to see and understand the threat of Islamo-fascism is difficult. The constant refrain of ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ uttered by our politicians and the dishonesty on the part of the BBC about the more troublesome bits of Islam, keep too many people in the dark.
Islamo-fascism and religious violence doesn’t only affect intellectuals in far away countries which most Britons know little about. It affects ordinary people who find that their area has become Islamised and religious violence means that they can no longer leave their homes in safety, it is behind the burning down of public houses and their replacement by mosques and it’s partially why politicians pander to Islam out of fear of Islamic religious violence. It even affects me.
Because I write pieces that are highly critical of Islam, and I have relatives and friends who have foolishly stayed in areas of the country where Muslim politics is also the politics of the ruling local Labour party, I feel that my life is in danger if I visit and stay too long in those areas. They ask me ‘why don’t you come down more often?’ To which my reply is: ‘It’s dangerous for me to be here’. One wrong word from me or others, one Muslim CCTV operator/bent copper, who spots me or my vehicle on camera and makes the connection between my writing and me as an individual, and I’m in deep doo-doo. I find the incredulous response I get from those who ask ‘why are you not here more often frustrating: ‘Nobody is going to kill you’ they say, sometimes questioning my loyalty to friends and family, or the worst, most crass comment: ‘You’ve brought this all on yourself by speaking up’. As if staying silent, or cowering or keeping your head down, is any defence or protection from Islamo-fascists. The only difference between the Islamic victimisation of those who speak out, and those who do not is merely a matter of time. Today they are going after people who speak up but tomorrow they will be going after the silent ones, including the appeasers. It’s frustrating in the extreme that friends and relatives do not understand or refuse to understand.
The followers of Islam may not be hacking of the heads of writers in Britain today, but tomorrow, I wouldn’t want to bet against it happening, I really would not.
To return to the subject of Nick Cohen’s article on free speech in the face of Islamic violence he quite rightly criticises the cowardice of Western intellectuals. The heirs of those who, back in the 1930’s spoke up against the rise of Nazism, seem to cower when it comes to criticising Nazism modern equivalent, Islam.
Mr Cohen added:
“Compare the bravery of Bangladeshi intellectuals with the attitude of the bulk of the western intelligentsia. Whole books could be written on why it failed to argue against the fascism of our age – indeed I’ve written a couple myself – but the decisive reason is a fear that dare not speak its name. They are frightened of accusations of racism, frightened of breaking with the consensus, frightened most of all of violence. They dare not admit they are afraid. So they struggle to produce justifications to excuse their dereliction of duty. They turn militant religion into a rational reaction to poverty or western foreign policy. They maintain there is a moral equivalence between militant religion and militant atheism.
On occasion, they drop even that spurious attempt at evenhandedness and seem to suggest, as Professor Craig Calhoun, director of the London School of Economics, did recently, that the real menace facing universities is not students heading to Syria to rape and behead but secularists whose calls for free speech “challenge the faith and beliefs of religious students” and disrupt “campus harmony”. David Cameron will clearly have trouble taking his mission to “root out” extremism to the LSE.
For all the similarities, there is no moral equivalence between Britain and Bangladesh. They have thinkers of the calibre of Rafida Bonya Ahmed and Avijit Roy, while we have liberals whom Karl Marx might have looked at and said: “Religion is the opium of the intellectuals.”
This article by Nick Cohen really is one that deserves a much wider audience than just those who would normally read the Guardian. The threat from Islam and Islamo- fascism is not confined to people on the Right or the Left or to intellectuals or non-intellectuals or those who speak up, it’s a threat to everybody and we should never forget that.
Link
Original article in the Guardian by Nick Cohen.
It is heartening that most of the comments on Cohen’s article on the Guardian site are supportive of Cohen.
I hadn’t expected that. Is it an indication that an understanding of Islam’s real nature is spreading?
There has been a heartening shift in the tone of below-the-line comments in The Guardian, particularly over the last few months. Once most readers would have been cowed by the old “criticizing Islam = racism” orthodoxy but increasingly people aren’t buying it and don’t care what they are called.
There will always be panderers screaming “Islamophobia” and “get back to the Daily Mail” (at lifelong Guardian readers) but they sound increasingly desperate and isolated with few “recommends”.
It’s also surprising that robust comments are increasingly being allowed to stand (and are popular) when even mild criticism of Islam would once have been “disappeared” by the moderators.
I know it seems like a small step, but if even The Guardian – appeasement central – knows that it can’t keep its readers anger entirely bottled up then something significant is happening.