Defining ‘badness’
Robert Lambert and Jonathan Githens-Mazer tell worried Guardian readers about “Islamophobia and anti-Muslim violence” as if they’re roughly the same thing rather than being very different things. Dislike of a belief-system is a very different thing from violence against people.
[M]embers of the EDL are echoing sentiments about Muslims they have adopted from sections of the mainstream media and the BNP. It is no coincidence that Nick Griffin has been peddling exactly the same hatred towards Muslims for the last decade. Similarly, a cursory examination of the records of Islamophobia Watch over the last five years provides a sense of the extent of Islamophobia in the mainstream media.
Islamophobia Watch! As if that were a respectable and reliable source! Bob Pitt notoriously sees any kind of disagreement with or criticism of Islam or Islamism as hatred of Muslims, which he labels “Islamophobia” as if that word meant hatred of Muslims, thus helping the MCB and the other “leaders of the Muslim community” to treat Islam and Muslims as interchangeable – yet here are two academics citing Pitt’s vicious blog as if it were an impartial record.
[W]e find a long list of politicians who have sought to define and embrace “good Muslims” while attacking “bad Muslims”. If these “bad Muslims” were limited to the al-Qaida inspired terrorists who bombed London on 7/7 and the extremist members of al-Muhajiroun it might at least be an accurate categorisation. Instead, the concept of “bad Muslim” has come to demonise thousands of ordinary Muslims who do not wish to compromise their religious or political principles.
In other words, the only “badness” is bombing; anything short of bombing is not badness, it is “ordinary Muslims” (which should be understood to mean Muslim men, but of course they don’t say that) not wanting to compromise their religious or political principles. Not wanting to compromise their religious or political principles, of course, means not wanting to stop taking their daughters out of school and forcing them to marry older cousins; it means wanting to go on forcing women to wear hijab, to kill them if they go out with the “wrong” man or get a job or go to university or otherwise act like independent human beings. That kind of thing, because it is not bombing, must not be called badness, and Muslims (Muslim men) who go in for it must not be considered “bad.”
In other words Lambert and Githens-Mazer are perfectly happy for Muslim women to have no rights, and they dress this up as generous protectiveness toward “Muslims.”
We’ve encountered them before. Lambert is a former cop; he headed the Muslim Contact Unit in the Metropolitan Police; he did lots of reaching out to “the leaders” of “the Muslim community” via the MCB and similar all-male Islamist organizations. Then he went off to get a PhD.
I did a comment on their post:
It sounds grand and brave to talk of not wishing “to compromise their religious or political principles,” but in reality not all religious or political principles are good or desirable or fair to others. Some religious or political principles stink. Fascist principles stink, and so do Islamist principles.
This sly evasive paltering with words is contemptible. Lambert and Githens-Mazer should at least have the decency to spell out what it is they’re defending. They cite, of all things, IslamophobiaWatch as evidence of hatred of Muslims; IslamophobiaWatch notoriously treats all criticism of Islam as “Islamophobia” as if there simply cannot be such a thing as reasoned criticism of Islam.
Bad Guardian. Bad newspaper. No cookie.
Breath of fresh air, is nobody else seeing the elephant in the room, Nakir Zaik (the preacher who blames rape on the shortness of a womens dress) has sold out two of the UKs biggest arenas in less than a week, yet we are told its only a minority of muslims who follow extreme islam.How can the UK move forward with such a backward religion gaining influence year by year.
“How can the UK move forward…” -Biatzsche
Its easy- you just re-define backwards as forwards and voila! instant progress!
That pretty much describes it.
“Dislike of a belief-system is a very different thing from violence against people.”
Dislike of a belief-system is also a very different thing from a phobia about its followers..
Interestingly, both Lambert (briefly) and Githens-Mazer appeared on that thread, and I had some discussion with the latter. His reference to ‘rabid secularists’ was not encouraging, and he really seemed to find difficulty in grasping that it was possible to oppose political Islam without hating individual Muslims for their beliefs alone.
Did they? I missed that. Just in the last hour or two was it?
Rabid secularists. Yeah rabid feminists, too, rabid fans of human rights, rabid liberals who think people should be free to leave any religion. Mutter mutter mutter.
I hope my comment pissed them off. They may have seen it, because I get the blue Contributor button that makes it conspicuous.
@Ophelia
No, it was early on. You could do a search for LambertEMRC and Gayleandlilly, which are the IDs they were using; I was using my own name as usual, only with the space missing.
Ah, thanks Peter.
Well, fundamentalist Christians also “do not wish to compromise their religious or political principles”: does that mean that they, too should be respected and even admired for the strength of their beliefs? I imagine Nazis and the Taliban also felt the same way…
Honestly, it’s got to the point that whenever I hear or read warm fuzzy phrases like “social justice” and “uncompromising principles” and “guiding to truth” and “peace” from a religious person (and not just them, I must add!), I immediately have a visceral negative reaction. I want concrete, specific details about what this “justice” and “peace” consists of! Too often it’s a cover for some rather ugly stuff.
I cringe whenever I read about Catholic “social justice” teaching, for reasons that can be guessed. Liberal Jews and Christians sometimes point to the Old Testament prophets as an example of religion calling for “peace” and “justice,” but typically fail to note that this included things like no intermarriage with non-Jews, exclusive worship of Yahweh, and driving pagan practices and “abnormal” sexual practices out of the land (after all, Yahweh had the Children of Israel slaughter the Canaanites en masse because of their tolerance of such behaviors!). Muslims sometimes refer to the Qur’anic injunction to “enjoin good and forbid evil” — but in Saudi Arabia that means forbidding the evil of women walking around uncovered and unaccompanied, possession of alcohol, failure to pray, stoning adulteresses, and so on. The full name of the “Morality Police” there is the “Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” which in Arabic uses the same words as the Qur’anic injunction. The Taliban and the mullahs in Iran think they’re doing the same. People like Tariq Ramadan and even the Pope know to keep their speeches vague to “outsiders,” because a lot of people won’t like the details, even as the “insiders” know what is meant by “justice” and “peace.”
So I want some details before I’ll even think of approving of this kind of language!
Robert Lambert and Jonathan Githens-Mazer tell those worried Guardian readers that Islamophobia is bad, but without ever defining the term. It can mean simply ‘aversion to Islam’ ( a crime to which I plead guilty Your Honour) or it can be taken to mean ‘aversion to Muslims’, or it can be generalised to mean both. It appears that Lambert and Githens-Mazer are not in a hurry to clear up any confusion on this matter.
The comments indicate to me that even most Guardian readers have not swallowed it, let alone the rest of Anglophonia. Which is cheery news.
All “-phobia” words, deployed politically, are basically stupid. Having a ‘phobia’ is having an irrational fear – it’s not something you can just stop having. Is that what they mean? Does the EDL need therapy?
Meanwhile, ‘paltering’. Good word!
There is a basic thing I have noticed online – if a website has the word “Watch” at the end of it, it can be safely considered to be run by complete whackjobs.
Red Watch anyone?
WatchWatch sites tend to be fun, though.
I think most people understand the distinction between criticizing Islam and propagating bizarre conspiracy theories about Muslims…the problem in life is that there are many stupid people out there who don’t…like bob Lambert
Saeed, quite so. By the same token, energetic loathing of the doings of the Vatican does not require loathing of Catholics – especially since many or perhaps most Catholics are the victims of those doings!
Lambert and his pal are buying into a rather patronizing assumption that Muslims are (all) peculiarly loyal to their religion in a way that other believers are not loyal to theirs. They obviously think they’re being Ultra-sympathetic or something, but really they’re being almost contemptuous.
WatchWatch sites are great, especially of course MediaWatchWatch.
I’m not an Islamophobe any more than I’m an arachnophobe. I don’t fear Muslims and I don’t fear spiders; I just don’t want to unexpectedly find either in my bath.
Not necessarily. Remember that many women, in patriarchal societies, actually help enforce the rules against other women. Especially mothers, grandmothers and mothers-in-law who keep younger women under their thumb. It’s the classic “it’s been done to me so I don’t see why my daughter/granddaughter, etc., shouldn’t suffer too”.
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[…] things to say about Lambert and his colleague Jonathan Githens-Mazer in the past – in June 2010 and April 2009. They talked evasive deceptive nonsense about the wonderfulness of Islamism and the […]