Sheep may safely graze
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting tackles what it (inaccurately and tendentiously) calls ‘Islamophobia’.
The term “Islamophobia” refers to hostility toward Islam and Muslims that tends to dehumanize an entire faith, portraying it as fundamentally alien and attributing to it an inherent, essential set of negative traits such as irrationality, intolerance and violence.
Why should a ‘faith’ be humanized to begin with? ‘Faiths’ are not human, so why is it wrong to dehumanize them? It isn’t wrong; that’s just a rather stupid and unthinking bit of rhetoric. The rest of the sentence (and the rest of the report) simply assumes that it is wrong to portray a religion as having ‘negative’ (meaning bad) traits without first determining whether or not the religion does in fact have bad traits. Imagine talking that way about criticism of other sets of ideas and practices – for instance sets of ideas and practices that FAIR (rightly) thinks are bad. Imagine talking that way about the ideology of the KKK, or Jim Crow laws, or apartheid, or Serbian nationalism. Wouldn’t it seem rather stupid to try to rule out investigation in that way? In short, FAIR seems not to have entertained even the possibility that Islam does in fact have a set of bad traits such as irrationality, intolerance and violence.
This of course is not to mention the obvious fact that ‘Islamophobia’ in fact means hostility toward Islam and not hostility toward Muslims and that it is a bit of underhanded trickery to conflate the two.
I agree with you that there is no a priori reason to assume that a faith or philosophy or ideology doesn’t have negative traits or for that matter, positive traits. However, with reference to the definition of “Islamophobia”, words come to mean something different than what their etymology suggests. Thus, “anti-semitism” is generally used to mean a hatred of or prejudice against Jews, not semites in general. Is the meaning the common use or is there a correct meaning, independent of the use? In any case, most people use the word “Islamophobic” to mean hostility towards both Islam and Muslims.
The reason that antisemitism means prejudice against Jews is that a) there’s no such thing as a semite, and b) the terms ‘semite’ and ‘antisemitism’ were invented by Jew-haters themselves to provide a spurious racial justification for their Jew-hatred.
There is no other, ‘etymologically correct’ use of the term.
Sometimes words come to mean something different from what their etymology suggests, but sometimes words are deliberately chosen and manipulated to mean something different from what their etymology suggests. The latter is the case with ‘Islamophobia.’ It has been used incorrectly to mean hatred of Muslims and Islam from the beginning. It is a very tendentious, political, misleading, manipulative word, that should not be taken at face value merely because words in general can change their meaning according to usage.
Those last two paragraphs in the piece you linked to are fair enough though:-
“Islamic institutions and Muslims, of course, should be subject to the same kind of scrutiny and criticism as anyone else. For instance, when a Norwegian Islamic Council debates whether gay men and lesbians should be executed, one may forcefully condemn individuals or groups sharing that opinion without pulling all European Muslims into it, as did Bawer’s Pajamas Media post (8/7/08), “European Muslims Debate: Should Gays Be Executed?”
Similarly, extremists who justify their violent actions by invoking some particular interpretation of Islam can be criticized without implicating the enormously diverse population of Muslims around the world.”
That implies a narrower definition of “islamophobia” than the Islamophobe Watch garbage of Bob Pitt, which calls anyone who dislikes jihadism an Islamophobe, or anyone who criticises any Muslim whatsoever.
The term Islamophobe should not be used at all as it is unemployable except as a term of disapproval. It has even less meaning than the term Fascist, which still can be cleaned up and tidied and put to work. I use “muslim-basher” and “critic of Islam” – two totally different things of course.
Yeh, the later qualifications are something, but they come a bit late, and they don’t seem to apply to the report as a whole. There’s a hell of a lot of assuming that any claim that is critical of Islam is automatically evil. In practice their version of ‘Islamophobia’ seems to be much too like Bob Pitt’s.
Amos. Just a couple of points. First, the word ‘antisemitismus’ was coined by Wilhelm Marr to refer specifically to European, principally German, hatred of the Jews, and made it into a political ideology. So it was never intended to refer to ‘semites’ in general, and clearly Hitler and the Nazis, who had good relationships with the Arabs, for instance, because of Muslim hatred of Jews (it’s part of the history; it’s part of the Qu’ran), never intended it in any other way. So it is really misleading when people use this word with a broader meaning. Because of the Holocaust the word is a lightning rod, and it should be used with great care.
Second, the word Islamophobia, whoever coined it, was very canny, because it borrows, in a sense, from the well-known antisemtism, but is deliberately indeterminate. It could refer equally to the religion or to devotees of the religion. It is, in other words, a nonsense word, and should be avoided.
Third, antisemitism has occasionally developed a similar indeterminacy, as, for example, when criticism of Israel has been taken (in itself) as an expression of antisemitism. Of course, we use words as we choose, especially if there is political advantage to be gained from doing so, but Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting should be much more aware of this tendency, and make its judgements accordingly.
Well…we use words as we choose but if we do it misleadingly for political reasons then we’re damn well subject to sharp criticism. (I might declare that a Law and name it after myself.)
This applies doubly or triply to FAIR because that kind of misleading use of words is very much part of their beat – at least I hope it is. It certainly is part of the subject matter of fairness and accuracy in reporting.
Ok, I stand corrected about the use of Islamophobia. Actually, what strikes me more is the idea that it is illicit to criticize a faith for its negative traits. In fact, if that were the case, Muslims could not claim, as I believe they do, that Islam is the only true religion. The idea that one cannot find negative traits in a religion or an ideology is a kind of relativism by decree. In fact, the paragraph above specifically mentions irrationality as a trait that cannot be mentioned, which leads to the conclusion that all faiths, including faith in Santa Claus or that I am God, are equally rational.
Faith cannot be humanized if you can’t give it a face.
Of course, for anyone with a sprinkling of historical memory and political sense, it is evident that ‘Islamophobia’ is formed on the example of ‘homophobia’, a word used to designate irrational fear, and thus hatred, of homosexual people and conduct. It emerges, thus, from the sort of circles on the western left who coin such phrases, and who have concerned themselves with ‘fighting oppression’ of all kinds [but principally that conducted, in their eyes, by white, rich, straight people against everyone else].
It has nothing whatsoever to do, except by subsequent analogy, with either antisemitism or Jews.
Frankly, I am terrified of Islamists, just as I would be terrified of Xianists if they did things like persuade a young man with a mental age of ten to take a nail-bomb into a family restaurant in an English provincial town [fortunately it went off in the toilets, injuring only him] – the sad stooge for this going on trial here yesterday.
Being repulsed by the kind of ideas that bring such things about makes one ‘Islamophobic’ in some eyes, no doubt, if one fails to make the delicate theological separation between a notional ‘Islam’ of peace and harmony and the bloodlust of its most ardent advocates. But this is what happens when a religion gets to claim the protective mantle [in western leftist eyes] of a ‘race’. The really sad thing is that such claims are only enabled by the actual racism ever-present in the casual kill-em-all responses of the right.
Dave: I was with most of what you wrote until I got to your last sentence. It seems to me that you are using “the right” in a not dissimilar way to the use of the term “Islamophobia”. So who is this “right” in the UK? I’m finding it difficult to remember the last time Dave Cameron, or anyone else in the Tory Party, expressed a “casual kill-em-all response” to… whom exactly? Presumably Muslims.
Cameron and the Tory front bench are about as far to the right as Gordon Brown is to the left; I should have thought that was self-evident. I was meaning, naturally, the people who come out of the woodwork any time subjects like this are raised on almost any other site than B&W.
Not to mention, for example, the substantial segment of the US commentariat and political class that still seems to believe that the Iranian ‘problem’ can be solved by … how does that tune go? “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran”…
Tuez-les tous, Dieu reconnaitra les siens, as they said in the thirteenth century…
>I was meaning, naturally, the people who come out of the woodwork any time subjects like this are raised on almost any other site than B&W.< Naturally? In what way does what you wrote in the sentence I highlighted lead one to take your clarification to follow “naturally” out of the discussion on Islamophobia that preceded it? You seem to be taking something close to a Humpty-Dumpty view of the use of the expression “the right”.
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/carroll/kern7.html
Given that virtually every viewpoint, from pro-US to anti-US, pro-Israel to anti-Israel, pro-Muslim to anti-Muslim, expressed on political (and newspaper) blogs includes some despicable suggestions, I fail to see why we should have “naturally” presumed that the catch-all expression “the right” should have actually been referring to a subset of these.
I mean “naturally” in the sense that it is natural [or at least it ought to be] for an intelligent person not to presume a self-evidently absurd conclusion without supporting evidence. It would be self-evidently absurd to assume that I meant someone as moderate as David Cameron when I invoked the kill-em-all right, unless I had specifically said that “and by ‘right’ I mean everyone who is not as left-wing as [e.g.] Noam Chomsky, because, being soft in the head, I actually do believe that, unless you are very left-wing indeed, you really do want to slaughter everyone who disagrees with you and possibly also bathe in their blood”. Which I didn’t. There is of course a kill-em-all left, too [albeit, frankly, a much, much quieter voice in the western sphere than their rightist brethren] but then I did not refer to them, did I?
I think it is no more “natural” to suppose that when you refer to “the right” that you are actually referring to the far or loony right, than when Ophelia says she regards herself as of the “left” that she means the far or loony left.
I get into a lot of arguments with Nottingham student activists about this issue (such as the people campaigning to free Hicham Yezza, the guy who was arrested for possessing an al qaeda training manual).
They seem to think it’s racist to be strongly opposed to Islam. I tell them that I can hate Islam without hating Muslims, just as I can (and do) hate Christianity and yet love my Christian parents.
I then tell them that, even if I did hate Muslims rather than Islam, it still wouldn’t be racism because Muslims are not a race or a nationality. They’re a bunch of people from different ethnic backgrounds who subscribe to an ideology called Islam.
But none of these arguments get me anywhere. They still call me a racist. What am I doing wrong?
“Faith cannot be humanized if you can’t give it a face.”
Agreed. but it can be de-humanised if you give it a veil.
Oh, wait, if it has no face you cannot put veil on it – so it cannot be de-humanised. Oops, I do not think that makes sense!?
Dear Allen, if you will persist in finding offence where none is warranted, how much more help can I give you? When I write a sentence that ends “the actual racism ever-present in the casual kill-em-all responses of the right”, I should have thought it self-evident that I was referring to a group of people who actually do make “casual kill-em-all responses”. If you or anyone else you care to name are not party to such remarks, then clearly you are not in the group that I was referring to. Nonetheless, that group exists, and is on the right. But not, alas no doubt for some, in the right.
Shut up, Tingey. Like so many things, this isn’t about you.
Sheep may safely graze… but in the interim the shepherd has no fixed abode – as “Man tries to sue God” and a judge has thrown out a case against God – because the Almighty doesn’t have an official address and legal papers can’t be served. ยป More
I just spotted this on the web-site…and was wondering if any of you out there would be able to supply God’s address.
I know the barmaid is a good friend of Jesus’ so she might have inside knowledge. :-)!
I have criticised Islam on the Guardian website and I didn’t get banned. Perhaps you really were being racist, Tingey.
Aren’t we indulging in a little reification here? There is no such thing as ‘Islam’. There is only a collection of people that may conveniently be described as Muslims, who indulge in behaviour that is conventionally described as ‘Islamic’. This behavious appears to include suicide bombings, murdering of homosexuals and female genital mutilation and abhorring it can hardly be described as a phobia.
I agree with Brian. Would people talk about Nazi-phobia or child-abuser-phobia? There is no phobia involved in this case, since a phobia is an irrational fear. It’s not irrational to fear suicide bombers. Homophobia is an irrational fear of homosexuals, based, according to psychoanalysts, on the homophobe’s fear of his own homosexual tendencies.
Dave I am having a bit of trouble getting my head around this who on the right are you talking about? I have racked my brain about this and the only example of that kind I could think of was Michael savage. He makes those sort of statments but he is just a shock radio host,you are not judging a whole political movement by what you hear on talk radio are you?
Ann Coulter as well but she is just an entertainer and bad author.
Ben, on your earlier question: maybe, I don’t guarantee success here, you could point out that you have hard facts that Mr. Mo was mentally ill?
How would that help me convince religious apologists that I am not being racist when I criticise Islam?
Perhaps you misunderstood my problem.
It was an (attempt) at a joke.
Oops, sorry Ben, I mistyped the name – not intended.
‘This of course is not to mention the obvious fact that ‘Islamophobia’ in fact means hostility toward Islam and not hostility toward Muslims and that it is a bit of underhanded trickery to conflate the two.’
Precisely the loophole that the BNP use to excuse their racism.
Which is precisely why I said ‘Racists and reactionaries and missionary Christians do confuse the issue, of course.’
Even nuts can be correct on same things (cough cough, Patrick Buchanan)