The blogger Longrider is a purveyor of often short pithy and hard hitting comments about life and politics and this one of his about an ‘Islamophobia’ whiner writing in the Guardian (where else) is excellent. Longrider cuts to the chase quickly and busts any idea that the whiner may have had in equating racism with ‘Islamophobia’.
Longrider said:
Let’s be clear: Muslims are neither good nor bad. We’re just human
Here we go again… There is no such thing as Islamophobia. It is an artificial construct designed specifically to silence dissenting voices. It does not exist and a dislike of Islam – even an extreme one – is based on the evidence Islam presents us. And, that dislike is not racism because a religious belief and a totalitarian ideology is not a race.
The main difficulty is that Islamophobia is so poorly understood. Instead of focusing on the harm experienced by British Muslims, Islamophobia is commonly dismissed by arguing that you can’t be racist against a set of ideas.
Ah, the old don’t understand fuckwittery. You cannot be racist against a set of ideas. Islam is a medieval ideology that is rooted in the principle of conquest. It is an ideology that governs the lives of its followers to such an extent that they ask advice from imams on the kind of everyday stuff that the rest of us take for granted. This is an ideology that treats those women that Farah Elahi is so concerned about as second class citizens. It is not a phobia to express disgust at such an ideology.
Read the rest of Longrider’s post via the link below:
http://www.longrider.co.uk/blog/2017/11/14/no-it-isnt-6/
It’s difficult to disagree with Longrider on this one. He’s correct that the word ‘Islamophobia’ was designed to shut down debate about Islam and that Islam is not a race in any sense of the word but a religious ideology. In free societies with a culture of freedom of religion we should be free to debate any religious path, including Islam, even if the adherents of that particular religion consider it to be ‘offensive’ to do so.
‘Islamophobia’ is no more real than ‘Naziphobia’ or ‘socialistophobia’, all relate to ideologies which people are not inherently part of a person from birth, which race is. As an ideology an individual can choose to accept or reject or change from this ideology to another one and it is not an immutable part of the individual.
You can’t be ‘racist’ against an ideology and the more people who say that, as Longrider has done, the the better it will be for our society in the long run.
