Mail colmnist gets off at the wrong stop
The systematic demonisation of Muslims has become an important part of the central narrative of the British political and media class; it is so entrenched, so much part of normal discussion, that almost nobody notices. Protests go unheard and unnoticed.
No it hasn’t; no it isn’t; no they don’t.
As a community, British Muslims are relatively powerless. There are few Muslim MPs, there has never been a Muslim cabinet minister, no mainstream newspaper is owned by a Muslim and, as far as we are aware, only one national newspaper has a regular Muslim columnist on its comment pages, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown of The Independent.
What does it mean to be powerless as a community? What is a community? Who decides? What is not a community? Who decides that? How many dentist MPs are there? Has there ever been an engineer cabinet minister? Is any mainstream newspaper owned by a computer programmer? Or what about chess players? Fans of Herodotus? Bird watchers?
Why are people supposed to be powerful as a community and what does that mean and who decides and what are the criteria? Is it possible that this way of thinking is stupid and parochial and ill-advised? Swap ‘Christian’ for ‘Muslim’ and it can look downright insane. So why is it any saner when used of a different religion? Why is it considered right-on to conflate one religion with a ‘community’ when it’s not at all right-on to conflate a different religion with a ‘community’? Or, in short, why don’t people think about what they’re saying?
Islamophobia – defined in 1997 by the landmark report from the Runnymede Trust as “an outlook or world-view involving an unfounded dread and dislike of Muslims, which results in practices of exclusion and discrimination” – can be encountered in the best circles: among our most famous novelists, among newspaper columnists, and in the Church of England.
That’s the key move, of course, but it’s also the stupidest. The landmark report from the Runnymede Trust can define any old thing any old way it wants to; that doesn’t make it a valid definition; and people have been pointing out and pointing out and pointing out that that’s a bad and deceitful and misleading definition. If you want a word for ‘an unfounded dread and dislike of Muslims’ then it would have to be Muslimophobia, not Islamophobia; Islamophobia means – this is too obvious even to say, but there’s the Mail columnist (eh?) getting it wrong – dread and dislike of Islam.
Its appeal is wide-ranging. “I am an Islamophobe,” the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee wrote in The Independent nearly 10 years ago. “Islamophobia?” the Sunday Times columnist Rod Liddle asks rhetorically in the title of a recent speech, “Count me in”. Imagine Liddle declaring: “Anti-Semitism? Count me in”, or Toynbee claiming she was “an anti-Semite and proud of it”.
No, no, no, no, no, no. Bad Peter Oborne. No. It’s not the same thing, it’s not comparable, it’s not parallel. Surely you understand that. Islam is a religion, with particular ideas and rules; we are all allowed to dislike it. Semitism is not a religion. Don’t. be. silly.
Its practitioners say Islamophobia cannot be regarded as the same as anti-Semitism because the former is hatred of an ideology or a religion, not Muslims themselves. This means there is no social, political or cultural protection for Muslims: as far as the British political, media and literary establishment is concerned the normal rules of engagement are suspended.
No it doesn’t. It’s quite common to distinguish between Muslims and Islam. Go play war games with your Martin Amis and Ian McEwan dolls.
From the Indy again?
Hell, maybe my “Tony O’Reilly must have important business interests tied up in assorted ne’er-do-well middle-eastern states” suggestion might have more legs than I thought…
???
Sooo, I did a little googling…
Well, he’s definitely into oil.
“Sir Anthony O’Reilly” is chief shareholder (40%) in (possibly about to hit the jackpot thanks to a deal with ExxonMobil) Providence Resources, an oil/gas exploration company, although currently they seem to be operating only in Ireland, Nigeria & Gulf of Mexico…(according to the company website)
Interestingly, the company was founded by his son, Tony O’Reilly junior. Who’s also a non-exec director of “Independent News & Media”
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2006/05/08/cxmktrep108.xml)
Then there’s an extremely well-timed NYT detailed profile, which does mention another (unsuccessful) oil exploration company, Atlantic, but no sign of links to Arab nations…
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE1DA1638F93BA35756C0A96E948260
Mind you, according to this older article:
“In the early 1970s, Mr. O’Reilly set up in Dublin a company called Fitzwilton PLC. By the mid-1980s, with investors such as John Kluge, then the richest man in America, the oil heiress Ann Getty and Saudi businessman Suliman Olayan, Mr. O’Reilly was billing Fitzwilton as a future Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co. of Europe. Like that American pioneer in leveraged buyouts, Mr. O’Reilly said he envisioned Fitzwilton doing “billion-dollar” deals.
It didn’t work out that way. “The company lost its way,” said Kyran McLaughlin, a director at Fitzwilton’s Dublin-based brokerage unit, Davies Stockbrokers. In the late 1980s, with huge debts and no profit, Fitzwilton was forced to sell many of its assets.”
(http://www.iht.com/articles/1994/02/18/tony.php)
So who is this Suliman Olayan, and how else might he be linked to Mr. O’Reilly (apparently he was also involved in the “Atlantic” failure)
Well finally!!! some research on the late Mr. Olayan yields something small-but-interesting.
Back in 1980 he became a director of..Mobil. The same company who are currently throwing cash at Providence Resources…
(http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,952860-1,00.html)
Ach.
Ultimately it’s but small fare.
There are confessions from O’Reilly that he phones his editor-in-chief every day to ensure control, debts to an extremely wealthy (but apparently very pro-western) Arab businessman, the murky (sorry, couldn’t resist) world of oil wheeling and dealing, but nothing substantive.
Still, it was fun!
:-)
Interesting.
It doesn’t seem (off the top of my head) as if unctuous coverage of putative Islamophobia in the Indy would have any effect on anyone’s oil dealings. But on the other hand it does seem as if oily networking (so to speak) might shape overall views of the world – might create a desire to please. Get me, get how sympathetic I am.
Islamaphobia is the same as anti semetism what a crock! tell that to the victims of the shoa.
Antisemitism an analogy for Islamophobia? I just love the formula where I say “X is bad”, you say “Replace X with Y and see what you get!”, and somehow, magically, now I’m the bad person, even though I didn’t even mention Y. (Notice how Y tends to stand for “Jews” all too often.)
Rarely such attempts at analogies make sense (as in “replace one race with another” or “replace one religion with another”). More often, they’re completely retarded. It shouldn’t be long before we read such gems:
“Murderers should be punished.”
“Replace ‘murderers’ with ‘Jews’, you dirty antisemite!”
“Chocolate is good.”
“Replace ‘chocolate’ with ‘antisemitism’, you Nazi pig!”
This one from an actual Slovenian columnist, who got a little carried away when defending pedophiles’ right to not have their balls cut off in the middle of town square: “Replace ‘pedophiles’ with ‘Jews’ or ‘blacks’, and see just how bigoted your proposition is!”
Well exactly – you have to replace like with like, that’s all; if you mix then you make nonsense. Ridiculous Oborne mixed and made nonsense.
Although…it has to be said that the Jewish religion often gets something of a free pass in the media precisely because of the conflation of ethnicity and religion.
So, for instance, I doubt very much you’d get Rod Liddle declaring himself opposed to the Jewish religion.
Well ramble more often then G. that hit the nail on the head, I would only add that the awfull shadow of the holocaust still makes people wary of critisising judaism and jews in general.
“This is historically a Christian country. I’m a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims.” Richard Dawkins
“Actually, part of the reason that no one much publicly declares themselves “opposed to the Jewish religion” may be that Judaism is the least objectionable of the “big three” monotheisms.”
I doubt it. I think Judaism being the smallest of the big three is rather more likely (along with the problems of conflation of ethnicicty and religion and the issue of the holocaust). We don’t see much Judaism because there aren’t many Jews. Yet there are still issues with segregated schooling and patriarchal and discriminatory religious structures and laws in the UK, and the conflation of religion and politics in Israel – I think it would be a mistake to assume that religious judaism has nothing to do with the Israel/Palestine question – just look at the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi’s comments earlier this year.
‘I bring Jell-o with canned fruit in it to potlucks.’
Ha!
Islamismophobia?
G. Tingey:
How about Jahiliyyaphilia?
PM
Wouldn’t that still be an irrational pathological aversion? That has always been the main and bothersome problem with these compounds.
_
Well personally I’d always use the suffix -phobia to mean an irrational or excessive fear, rather than a fear in general, but then we don’t have a problem with ‘islamophobia’ because it doesn’t serve to pejoratively label reasoned reservations about Islam while still being consistent with the Runnymede Trust definition.
How about anti-Islamismism? I like the sound of that.
Well, there is not and has never been any widespread bigotry against chess players or engineers or dentists in Britain, to my knowledge, whereas there has certainly been such bigotry against Muslims.
Also, “Semitism” isn’t a religion, sure, but “anti-Semitism” is used to describe bigotry against Jewish people as a religious group as well as a “racial” group.
But other than that, great points. I have no idea what “cultural protection” for Muslims is supposed to mean anyway. In fact, I’m afraid to ask.
“It’s quite *common* to distinguish between Muslims and Islam.”
Refreshingly, B&W is one of the few places in which that distinction in made. It certainly is not common in most of the media I peruse.