Concerns about the term “Islamophobia”
1. Vagueness: The term “Islamophobia” is often vaguely defined, making it difficult to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Islam and actual phobic behavior.
2. Chilling effect: The label “Islamophobia” can have a chilling effect on free speech, as people may avoid criticizing Islam or discussing sensitive topics related to Islam for fear of being labeled “Islamophobic.”
3. Stifling debate: The term “Islamophobia” can be used to shut down debate and discussion about Islam, rather than engaging with critics and addressing their concerns.
Importance of legitimate criticism
1. Free speech: Legitimate criticism of Islam, like any other religion or ideology, is essential to maintaining free speech and open discussion.
2. Reform and progress: Criticism of Islam can contribute to reform and progress within Muslim communities, helping to address issues like extremism, human rights abuses, and inequality.
3. Understanding and education: Open discussion and criticism of Islam can promote greater understanding and education about the religion, its history, and its practices.
Below is a real conversation i had with Omrane which clearly illustrates the ad hominem slur “Islamophbia” being used in an attempt to shut down debate and deflect from addressing real valid issues and concerns raised regarding Islamism and the Islamic faith in general.
Kenneth Fersht: The vast majority do NOT even come close to understanding the situation in the middle east because they have not studied history or geo-politics and appear to be blissfully ignorant of the Islamist agenda. Under educated and uninformed, unaware, self-righteous nincompoops, useful idiots for Islamists abound.
The term “useful idiot” is often misunderstood so let’s clarify its meaning.
The term “useful idiot” was originally coined by Vladimir Lenin to describe Western intellectuals and politicians who supported the Soviet Union’s ideology without fully understanding its implications. These individuals were seen as naive and unwittingly promoting the Soviet agenda.
The term doesn’t necessarily imply that someone is an idiot in the classical sense. Rather, it suggests that they are being manipulated or exploited by others, often due to their own biases, ignorance, or idealism.
Intelligent people can indeed be fooled or misled, especially when it comes to complex issues or ideologies. The term “useful idiot” is more about the role someone plays in promoting a particular agenda, rather than their intelligence or cognitive abilities.
List of the 27 main countries where Islamists are on violent forms of ‘jihad’ currently
1. Afghanistan – Taliban
2. Algeria – Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)
3. Burkina Faso – Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM)
4. Cameroon – Boko Haram
5. Central African Republic – Seleka rebels
6. Chad – Boko Haram
7. Democratic Republic of Congo – Allied Democratic Forces (ADF)
8. Egypt – Sinai Province (ISIS affiliate)
9. India (Kashmir region) – Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed
10. Indonesia – Jemaah Islamiyah (JI)
11. Iraq – Islamic State (ISIS)
12. Israel/Palestine – Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad
13. Libya – Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG)
14. Mali – Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM)
15. Mozambique – Ansar al-Sunna
16. Myanmar (Rakhine state) – Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA)
17. Niger – Boko Haram
18. Nigeria – Boko Haram
19. Pakistan – Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP)
20. Philippines – Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF)
21. Somalia – Al-Shabaab
22. Syria – Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), ISIS
23. Tajikistan – Jamaat
24. Thailand (southern provinces) – Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN)
25. Tunisia – Ansar al-Sharia
26. Turkey – Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – Islamist elements
27. Yemen – Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), ISIS
Islamist refers to an individual or group who advocates for the implementation of Islamic law (Sharia) and Islamic values in all aspects of society, often through political or violent means.
Islamist groups are active in many countries around the world.
Here is a list of countries where Islamist groups are currently or have been active recently:
1. Afghanistan
2. Algeria
3. Australia
4. Bangladesh
5. Belgium
6. Bosnia and Herzegovina
7. Burkina Faso
8. Cameroon
9. Canada
10. Central African Republic
11. Chad
12. Chechnya (Russia)
13. China (Xinjiang region)
14. Congo (DRC)
15. Denmark
16. Djibouti
17. Egypt
18. Ethiopia
19. France
20. Gambia
21. Germany
22. Ghana
23. India (Kashmir region)
24. Indonesia
25. Iran
26. Iraq
27. Israel
28. Italy
29. Jordan
30. Kazakhstan
31. Kenya
32. Kosovo
33. Kuwait
34. Lebanon
35. Libya
36. Malaysia
37. Mali
38. Mauritania
39. Morocco
40. Mozambique
41. Myanmar (Rohingya region)
42. Netherlands
43. Niger
44. Nigeria
45. Norway
46. Pakistan
47. Philippines
48. Qatar
49. Russia (North Caucasus region)
50. Saudi Arabia
51. Senegal
52. Serbia
53. Somalia
54. South Africa
55. Spain
56. Sudan
57. Sweden
58. Switzerland
59. Syria
60. Tajikistan
61. Tanzania
62. Thailand
63. Tunisia
64. Turkey
65. Uganda
66. United Kingdom
67. United States
68. Uzbekistan
69. Yemen
Omrane: Kenneth Fersht are the islamists in the room with us right now, Kenneth? (feeble attempt at gaslighting, implying that Islamists are not an actual thing, even though many many papers and even whole books have been published on the topic)
Kenneth Fersht: Omrane quite possibly Omrane. What do you think?
Omrane: Kenneth Fersht I think you’re a typical Islamophobe with a room-temperature iq and that the Gazan babies with limbs blown off I witness every day on my phone have more guts and heart than you ever have and ever will (illustrates how Islamist propagandists operate, inundating adherents with ghastly images which do not tell the whole story and tell a one sided story at that, fails to mention that these dead babies are dead because Hamas started a war with Israel and fails to mention the Jihadi ethos of intentional martyrdom for the PR strategy of their twisted political agenda)
Kenneth Fersht: Omrane, surprise surprise, an ad hominem rebuke. You did not, however, counter any points i actually made re islamist activity in the many different countries i mentioned did you. The word ‘islamophobia’ is the first recourse of a weak minded and disingenuous strategy; it is fabricated in order to chill valid critique of what Islam actually says and does in their perpetual Jihad, such as fly planes into buildings, launch rockets at civilians, indoctrinate women and children into being martyrs for ‘Allah’, a completely fabricated imaginary entity, murder cartoonists and journalists for the crime of criticizing Islamic authoritarian regimes, etc etc etc ad nauseam. Do you deny that these things are happening? Do you deny the many war crimes and many and various atrocities of Islamic forces against Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and assorted ‘infidels’ over the centuries? Go ahead and deny it; its all very well documented and absolutely undeniably factual that these things have happened and continue to happen into the 21st century. You want to challenge my intellect… ok, fair enough, i’m going to lay out for you a well reasoned, well presented, well substantiated and historically accurate argument. Would you like to go country by country, century by century or would you like to start by blaming jews for it all? After all, traditionally speaking, Jews have been the favourite scape goat of both Muslims and Christians and still are to to this day, also extremely well documented historically speaking and well demonstrated by current events also. Here is a bit more background information for you dear reader. Genocide of Jews by Islamic forces through history.
1. Conquest of Medina (627 CE): Muhammad’s forces attacked and expelled the Jewish tribes of Medina, resulting in the deaths of many Jews.
2. Massacre of the Banu Qurayza tribe (627 CE): Muhammad’s forces besieged and defeated the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza, leading to the execution of over 800 Jewish men and the enslavement of their women and children.
3. Pogroms of 1033-1034 in Fez, Morocco: Jewish communities were attacked, and many Jews were killed, forced to convert, or expelled.
4. Almohad persecution (1146-1248 CE): The Almohad Caliphate in North Africa and Spain forced Jews to convert to Islam, and many who refused were killed or expelled.
5. Ottoman massacres (14th-16th centuries CE): Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire faced periodic massacres, forced conversions, and persecutions.
6. Farhud (1941 CE) in Baghdad, Iraq: A violent pogrom against Jews resulted in over 180 deaths and widespread destruction of Jewish property.
7. 1391 pogroms in Tunisia: Jewish communities were attacked, and many Jews were killed or forced to convert.
8. 1465 persecutions in Fez, Morocco: Jewish communities faced violence, forced conversions, and expulsions.
9. 1517 expulsion from Egypt: Jews were expelled from Egypt by the Ottoman Empire.
10. 1834 pogrom in Safed, Ottoman Palestine (now Israel): Jewish communities faced violence and destruction of property.
11. 1886 pogroms in Yemen: Jewish communities faced violence, forced conversions, and expulsions.
12. 1912-1913 pogroms in Shiraz, Iran: Jewish communities faced violence, forced conversions, and expulsions.
Omrane: Kenneth Fersht I don’t need to answer to anything you wrote. You’re okay with genocide because the victims are Muslims and you don’t like Islam. You’re fucked and are the definition of « weak minded »
Kenneth Fersht: Omrane The Mufti of Jerusalem during World War II was Haj Amin al-Husseini. He was a Palestinian Arab nationalist and Islamic leader who held the position of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948.
Haj Amin al-Husseini was a strong opponent of Jewish immigration to Palestine, which was then under British rule. He saw the Jewish presence in Palestine as a threat to Arab and Muslim interests.
During World War II, al-Husseini sought to align himself and the Palestinian Arab nationalist movement with the Axis powers, particularly Nazi Germany. He believed that an alliance with the Nazis would help him achieve his goals of preventing Jewish immigration to Palestine and establishing an independent Arab state.
In 1941, al-Husseini met with Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking Nazi officials in Berlin. During these meetings, he expressed his support for the Nazi war effort and his desire to collaborate with the Nazis in the Middle East.
Al-Husseini also helped to recruit Muslim soldiers for the German army and advocated for the extermination of Jews in the Middle East. He saw the Holocaust as an opportunity to eliminate the Jewish presence in Palestine and advance his own nationalist goals.
Al-Husseini’s collaboration with the Nazis was not representative of the views of all Palestinians or Arabs at the time. Many Arabs and Palestinians opposed Nazi ideology and collaborated with the Allies during World War II.
After the war, al-Husseini fled to Egypt, where he continued to play a role in Palestinian politics until his death in 1974.
Some background info:
Here’s a list of some significant Islamic attacks on Israel since 1948:
1948-1949:
1. 1948 Arab-Israeli War: A coalition of Arab states, including Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, launched a military campaign against the newly declared State of Israel.
1950s-1960s:
1. Palestinian Fedayeen attacks (1950s-1960s): Palestinian militants, backed by Arab states, carried out numerous cross-border attacks against Israeli civilians and military targets.
2. Sinai War (1956): Egypt, backed by Palestinian militants, launched a military campaign against Israel, which resulted in Israel’s occupation of the Sinai Peninsula.
1970s:
1. Munich Olympics massacre (1972): Palestinian militants from the Black September organization killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches during the Munich Olympics.
2. Yom Kippur War (1973): A coalition of Arab states, including Egypt and Syria, launched a surprise military attack against Israel on Yom Kippur.
1980s:
1. Lebanon War (1982-1985): Israel invaded Lebanon to drive out Palestinian militants, leading to a protracted conflict.
2. Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993): A wave of Palestinian protests, riots, and attacks against Israeli civilians and military targets.
1990s-2000s:
1. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) suicide bombings (1990s-2000s): Palestinian militant groups carried out numerous suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, resulting in significant casualties.
2. Second Intifada (2000-2005): A wave of Palestinian violence, including bombings, shootings, and stabbings, targeted Israeli civilians and military personnel.
2010s:
1. Gaza Wars (2008-2009, 2012, 2014): Israel launched military campaigns against Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups in Gaza, resulting in significant casualties and infrastructure damage.
2. Palestinian lone-wolf attacks (2015-2016): A wave of Palestinian attacks, including stabbings, shootings, and car-rammings, targeted Israeli civilians and security personnel.
2020s:
1. Gaza border protests (2018-2020): Palestinian protesters, backed by Hamas, clashed with Israeli security forces along the Gaza border, resulting in significant casualties.
2. Israel-Gaza conflicts (2021): Israel launched military campaigns against Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups in Gaza, resulting in significant casualties and infrastructure damage.
3. October 7th, 2023 attacks, also known as Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. On that day, Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups launched coordinated armed incursions from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel, marking the first invasion of Israeli territory since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
The attacks began with a barrage of over 4,300 rockets launched into Israel, killing dozens and injuring many more. Simultaneously, around 6,000 Palestinian militants and civilians infiltrated Israel from Gaza, breaching the border in 119 locations. The militants attacked military bases, settlements, and civilians, resulting in significant casualties and damage.
Some of the most devastating attacks occurred at the Supernova Sukkot Gathering, a music festival near kibbutz Re’im, where 364 civilians were killed and many more wounded. Other attacks took place in Kfar Aza, Be’eri, and Netiv HaAsara, resulting in hundreds of deaths and injuries.
The October 7th attacks were widely condemned by governments and organizations around the world, and are described as a terrorist attack, a war crime, an atrocity and a massacre.
Is that all a result of my ‘islamophobia’ Omrane or do we have some valid concerns there? A ‘phobia’ is an irrational fear, our concerns are extremely well justified by historical and present day reality.
Omrane: Did Islamists also cause your life’s short comings? (another ad hominem meant to distract from the debate and avoid addressing any of the actual issues being discussed)
Omrane: Kenneth Fersht I think it was actually written in my Quran growing up. “Allahu wishes that Kenneth fersht becometh a lonely racist idiot who rants about islamists” (thus proving that pretty much everything in your wholly fabricated Quran is false)
Kenneth Fersht: Omrane, once again, you did not make a single salient point Omrane. I do not condone any genocide but i did list a number of them that Islamic forces have perpetrated over the course of the centuries since the inception of Islam in the 7th century. I suggest you address the argument i make point by point, calmly and rationally rather than simply resorting to ad hominem remarks that seek to divert attention from the actual facts in this matter. Let’s see you work that ‘intellect’ of yours Omrane. By the way, Muslims themselves are the main victims of Islamic ideologies and the whole thing is intellectually stultifying. Christians were just as bad if not worse a few hundred years ago, and Jews were just as bad about 2500 years ago so don’t think i’m picking on Islam. All religions are predicated upon demonstrably false and erroneous precepts but at this time in history Islam is by far the most violent and toxic form that religion takes and the lists i provided are ample evidence of that fact.
addendum: so here we see a blatant example of the slur “Islamophobic” being used to avoid actually having a respectful and meaningful debate on the Issue of problems inherent in Islamic though, teachings and the actions and practices informed by those teachings.
Historically speaking Islamists do not only target Jews. They also have repeatedly attacked Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and they do not like secularists either. And as they go they tend destroy many ‘holy’ sites, important archeological sites as they wage ‘jihad’. This is well documented FACT. FACTS are not and cannot be erased or dismissed by the use of such slurs as “Islamophobia”.
Concerns about the term “Islamophobia”
1. Vagueness: The term “Islamophobia” is often vaguely defined, making it difficult to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Islam and actual phobic behavior.
2. Chilling effect: The label “Islamophobia” can have a chilling effect on free speech, as people may avoid criticizing Islam or discussing sensitive topics related to Islam for fear of being labeled “Islamophobic.”
3. Stifling debate: The term “Islamophobia” can be used to shut down debate and discussion about Islam, rather than engaging with critics and addressing their concerns.
Importance of legitimate criticism
1. Free speech: Legitimate criticism of Islam, like any other religion or ideology, is essential to maintaining free speech and open discussion.
2. Reform and progress: Criticism of Islam can contribute to reform and progress within Muslim communities, helping to address issues like extremism, human rights abuses, and inequality.
3. Understanding and education: Open discussion and criticism of Islam can promote greater understanding and education about the religion, its history, and its practices.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/theres-no-such-thing-as-islamophobia
There’s No Such Thing as Islamophobia
Critique of religion is a fundamental Western right, not an illness.
In 1910, a French editor in the colonial ministry, Alain Quellien, published The Muslim Policy in West Africa. This work, addressed to specialists, is one of measured praise for the religion of the Koran, a “practical and indulgent” religion, better adapted to indigenous peoples, while Christianity is “too complicated, too abstract, too austere for the rudimentary and materialist mentality of the Negro.” Seeing Islam as a civilizing force that “removes peoples from fetishism and its degrading practices” and thus facilitates European penetration, the author calls for an end to prejudices that equate this confession with barbarism and fanaticism, castigating the “Islamophobia” prevalent among colonial personnel. What is needed, on the contrary, is to tolerate Islam and to treat it impartially. Quellien was writing as an administrator, concerned with order. Why demonize a religion that keeps peace in the empire, whatever may be the abuses, which he considers minor, of which it is guilty—that is, slavery and polygamy? Since Islam is the best ally of colonialism, believers must be protected from the nefarious influence of modern ideas; their way of life must be respected.
Maurice Delafosse, a colonial administrator living in Dakar, writes at about the same time: “Whatever may say those for whom Islamophobia is a principle of indigenous administration, France has nothing more to fear from Muslims in West Africa than from non-Muslims.” He adds: “Islamophobia therefore serves no purpose in West Africa.”
The term “Islamophobia” probably existed before these bureaucrats of the empire used it. Still, this language remained rare until the late 1980s, when the word was transformed little by little into a political tool, under the pressure of British Muslims reacting to the fatwa that the Ayatollah Khomeini had pronounced against novelist Salman Rushdie, following his publication of The Satanic Verses. With its fluid meaning, the word “Islamophobia” amalgamates two very different concepts: the persecution of believers, which is a crime; and the critique of religion, which is a right. A newcomer in the semantic field of antiracism, this term has the ambition of making Islam untouchable by placing it on the same level as anti-Semitism.
In Istanbul, in October 2013, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, financed by dozens of Muslim countries that themselves shamelessly persecute Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus, demanded that Western countries put an end to freedom of expression where Islam was concerned, charging that the religion had been represented too negatively as a faith that oppresses women and that proselytizes aggressively. The signatories’ intention was to make criticism of the religion of the Koran an international crime.
This demand arose at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban as early as 2001 and would be reaffirmed almost every year. UN special rapporteur for racism Doudou Diene, in a 2007 report to the organization’s Human Rights Council, decries Islamophobia as one of the “most serious forms of the defamation of religions.” In March of that year, the Human Rights Council had equated this type of defamation to racism, pure and simple, and demanded that all mockery of Islam and its religious symbols be banned. This was a double ultimatum. The first goal was to impose silence on Westerners, who were guilty of colonialism, secularism, and seeking equality between men and women. The second, even more important, aim was to forge a weapon of enforcement against liberal Muslims, who dared to criticize their faith and who called for reform of family laws and for equality between the sexes, for a right to apostatize and to convert, and for a right no longer to believe in God and not to observe Ramadan and other rites. Such renegades must face public condemnation, in this imperative, so as to block all hope of change.
The new thought crime seeks to stigmatize young women who wish to be free of the veil and to walk without shame, bareheaded in the street, and to marry whom they love and not who is imposed on them, as well as to strike down those citizens of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom of Turkish, Pakistani, or African origin who dare claim the right to religious indifference. Questions about Islam move from the intellectual, individual, or theological sphere to the penal, making any objection or reticence about the faith liable to sanction. The concept of Islamophobia masks the reality of the offensive, led by the Salafists, Wahhabis, and Muslim Brotherhood in Europe and North America, to re-Islamize Muslim communities—a prelude, they hope, to Islamizing the entire Western world. Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, a refugee in Qatar sought by Interpol for inciting murder and promoting terrorism, often deplored the fact that Islam failed twice in its conquest of Europe: in 732, when Charles Martel stopped the Saracens at Poitiers; and in 1689, with the aborted attempt of the Ottomans to take Vienna. Now the idea is to convert Europe to the true faith in part by transforming the law and the culture.
There remains the mystery of the transubstantiation of religion into race. The racialization of the world has to be the most unexpected result of the antidiscrimination battle of the last half-century; it has ensured that the battle continuously re-creates the curse from which it is trying to break free. A great universal religion like Islam includes a vast number of peoples and cannot be assimilated to a particular ethnic group. The term “Islamophobia,” however, invites confusion between a system of specific beliefs and the faithful who adhere to those beliefs. To contest a form of obedience, to reject dogmas that one considers absurd or false is the very basis of intellectual life, but belief in the existence of Islamophobia renders such contestation impossible. Should we speak, then, of anticapitalist, antiliberal, or anti-Marxist “racism” or phobia?
“A universal religion like Islam includes a vast number of peoples and cannot be assimilated to a particular ethnic group.”
But Islam benefits from a special protection. At the very time when Christian minorities in Islamic lands are persecuted, killed, and forced into exile—they are now threatened with extinction by the middle of this century—the word “Christianophobia,” despite UN officials proposing it, has not caught on, and it never will. We have difficulty seeing Christianity otherwise than as a religion of conquest and intolerance, even though today, at least from the Near East to Pakistan, it is a religion of martyrdom. In France, with its anticlerical tradition, we can make fun of Moses, Jesus, and the pope, and picture them in every posture, even the most obscene. But we must never laugh at Islam; if we do, we invite the wrath of the courts. Why this double standard? The Parisian daily Le Monde notes that the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo had devoted only 4 percent of its covers to representations of the Prophet Mohammed, whereas it has been mocking Jesus, Moses, the Dalai Lama, and the pope for 40 years—but this 4 percent earned it a collective assassination by Islamist killers on January 7, 2015. And for criticizing two French Islamist groups with ideological complicity with the Charlie Hebdo murderers, I found myself dragged before a tribunal and charged with defamation. I won the trial—fortunately, since what I was saying was the simple truth.
And here is where the strangest factor in the whole Islamophobia controversy emerges: the enlistment of a part of the American and European Left in the defense of the most radical form of Islam—what one might call the neo-Bolshevik bigotry of the lost believers of Marxism. Having lost everything—the working class, the Third World—the Left clings to this illusion: Islam, rebaptized as the religion of the poor, becomes the last utopia, replacing those of Communism and decolonization for disenchanted militants. The Muslim takes the place of the proletarian.
The baton seems to have been passed at about the time of the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, with the resulting rise to power of Islamist revolutionaries, which was the occasion for enthusiastic commentary by Michel Foucault, among others on the left. God’s return on history’s stage had finally rendered Marxist and anticolonialist programs obsolete. The faith moved the masses better than the socialist hope. Now, it was the believer in the Koran who embodied the global hope for justice, who refused to conform to the order of things, who transcended borders and created a new international order, under the aegis of the Prophet: a green Comintern. Too bad for feminism, women’s equality, salvific doubt, the critical spirit; in short, too bad for everything traditionally associated with a progressive position.
This political attitude is manifest in progressives’ scrupulous idolatry of Muslim practices and rites, especially the Islamic veil: “modest fashion” is praised to the skies, so much so that, for certain leftist commentators, an unveiled Muslim woman who claims this right can only be a traitor, a turncoat, a woman for sale. The irony of this neocolonial solicitude for bearded men and veiled women—and for everything that suggests an oriental bazaar—is that Morocco itself, whose king is the “Commander of the Faithful,” recently forbade the wearing, sale, and manufacture of the burka in his country. Shall we call the Cherifian monarchy “Islamophobic”? Shall we be more royalist than the king?
It’s worth considering this Islamo-leftism more closely, this hope nourished by a revolutionary fringe that Islam might spearhead a new uprising, a “holy war” against global capitalism, exactly as in Baku in 1920, when Bolshevik leaders, including Zinoviev, published a joint appeal with the pan-Islamists to unleash jihad against Western imperialism. It was an English Trotskyite, Chris Harman, leader of the Socialist Workers Party, who, in 1994, provided a theory for this alliance between militant revolutionaries and radical Muslim associations, arguing for their unity, in certain circumstances, against the common enemy of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they transferred their hopes to the Islamists.
In his 1978 book Orientalism, Edward Said observed that, after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, cartoons in the Western press sometimes depicted Arabs with hook noses and standing next to gas pumps—clearly Semites, he observed. Thus, Said maintained, the target of anti-Semitism passed from the Jew to the Arab. Did not Said call himself, in an interview in Haaretz in 2000, the last “Jew of the Middle East, a Palestinian Jew”? In short, for him, the Western Christian world’s hostility toward Islam represented the equivalent of anti-Semitism and flowed from the same source. The philosopher Enzo Traverso similarly contends that “Islamophobia plays the role for the new racism that was once played by anti-Semitism”: the rejection of the immigrant, perceived, since the colonial era, as the Other, the invader, the unassimilable foreign body in the national community; thus the specter of terrorism replaces that of Judeo-Bolshevism.
Already in 1994, in Grenoble, young Muslims, marching to protest the government ban of the Islamic headscarf, wore armbands featuring a yellow Islamic crescent—an allusion to the yellow star that French Jews were made to wear during the Occupation—against a black background and the line: “When will it be our turn?” And when Islamist militants, suspected of sympathy for the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, were held in barracks in northern France that same year, they immediately displayed a banner: “Concentration Camp.” In Switzerland in 2011, the Islamic Central Council printed yellow stickers that associated Islamophobia with the Holocaust—a yellow star bearing the inscription “Muslim.” And it was the fundamentalist preacher Tarik Ramadan, for a time an advisor to British prime minister Tony Blair, who explained that the situation of Muslims in Europe was like that of Jews in the 1930s. The implication is clear: to criticize Islam is to prepare nothing less than a new Holocaust.
Why this Islamic desire to be considered Jewish? The answer is clear: to achieve pariah status. But the analogy is doubly false. First, anti-Semitism was never about the Jewish religion as such but rather the existence of Jews as a people. Even an unbelieving Jew was detested by anti-Semites, due to his family name and his group identity. And second, at the end of the 1940s, there were no groups of extremist Jews slitting the throats of priests in churches, as happened at Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in France in July 2016, the deed of two young jihadists; there were no Jews throwing bombs in train stations, shopping malls, or airports, or driving trucks into crowds. There is thus a third anti-Semitism that, since 1945, must be added to the classic forms, Christian and nationalist: the envy of the Jew as victim, the paragon of the disaster of the Shoah. This Jew thus becomes both model and obstacle for the Islamist; he is seen as usurping a position that by right belongs to Africans, Palestinians, and Muslims. To make oneself the object of a new Holocaust, however imaginary, is to grab hold of the maximal misfortune and to put oneself in the most desirable place—that of the victim who escapes all criticism.
It is well known how much of the Nazi legacy has passed, since the creation of Israel, to the Arab Middle East, where a classic of anti-Jewish propaganda like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, forged by the czarist regime at the end of the nineteenth century, has been a best-seller for years. Was it not the late king of Morocco, Hassan II, who said: “Hatred of Israel is the most powerful aphrodisiac of the Arab world”?
For further evidence of this corrosive envy, consider the Muslim committees in Great Britain that, in 2005, urged then–prime minister Tony Blair to replace Holocaust Memorial Day (dedicated to the Shoah) with Genocide Day. “The very name Holocaust Memorial Day sounds too exclusive to many young Muslims,” one committee member argued. “It sends out the wrong signals: that the lives of [some] people are to be remembered more than others. It is a grievance that extremists are able to exploit.” Sir Iqbal Sacranie, general secretary of the Muslim Council of Great Britain until 2006, added: “The message of the Holocaust was ‘never again’ and for that message to have practical effect on the world community it has to be inclusive. We can never have double standards in terms of human life. Muslims feel hurt and excluded that their lives are not equally valuable to those lives lost in the Holocaust time.”
On the view of Islamic fundamentalists and many progressives, the Muslim should replace the Jew for another reason: the Jew has dishonored his status and become in turn a colonizer, with the creation of the State of Israel. The idealization of the Jew after the war prepared the subsequent smear campaign; in other words, the Judaizing of the Muslims entailed the Nazification of the Israelis. There is the good Jew of yesterday, eternally persecuted, and the bad Israeli who has taken hold in the Middle East, imperious and racist. Traverso makes the formulation candidly: in the past, he argues, Jews and blacks fought together as antifascists and anticolonialists; then the Jews broke through the color line and became “white”—that is, oppressors. Today’s true Jew wears the headdress and speaks Arabic; the other is an imposter and usurper. To quote one statement among thousands, here’s former French diplomat Stéphane Hessel, speaking to the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper in 2011: “If we compare the German occupation with the present occupation of Palestine by the Israelis, then it was relatively inoffensive, apart from exceptional elements such as incarcerations, executions, internments, and the theft of works of art.”
Once the equivalence between Judeophobia and Islamophobia is established, the next step is to put in place the principle of elimination—a subtle but effective process of symbolic expropriation. It is our turn, say the Islamic fundamentalists. In this way, Islam is able to present itself as the creditor of humanity as a whole: we are in its debt because of the wrongs inflicted since the Crusades, the wound of colonization, and the occupation of Palestine by the Zionists—and finally because of the bad image from which the religion of the Prophet suffers.
How should we react to this semantic racket? By affirming that we must not misunderstand our debts. Europe has an obligation where Judaism is concerned, since it has been part of Europe’s history from its origins. Islam is part of the contemporary French and European landscape, yes, and thus has the right to our sympathy, to freedom of worship, to police protection, to appropriate places for prayer, and to respect. But it must in turn respect republican and secular rules, not claim an extraterritorial status with special rights, such as exemption from swimming and gymnastics for girls, prayer places within businesses, separate instruction, and various favors and privileges in hospitals. Believers must be protected, but so must unbelievers, apostates, and skeptics. I proposed as early as 2006 the creation of a vast support system for dissidents from Islam, just as we helped Soviet dissidents. We must advocate freedom of doctrinal criticism, too, just as we do for Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism. The point is not to make Europe Islamic but to make Islam European, so that it is one religion among others and might, someday, help spread tolerance and a renewal of critical thought to the rest of the umma.
This conception of a secular society that encompasses a large Muslim community—5 to 6 million individuals—distinguishes France from the Anglo-Saxon world, which tends to believe that it can protect itself from Islamist terrorist attacks through respect for cultural differences and noninterference in the internal affairs of communities. Yet this principle of noninterference didn’t prevent the terror attack in London that killed five in March 2017 or the Manchester massacre of May 2017 that killed 22. And British cities such as Bradford (where hundreds of copies of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses were burned in 1989, just as the Nazis burned “degenerate” books in Nuremberg in 1933) and Birmingham, ever more dominated by Muslim fundamentalists, have transformed into little emirates, stifling to friends of freedom. As for the United States, despite President Obama’s outreach to Islam in Cairo in 2009, the Muslim world still detests it, whatever it does, owing to the simple fact of its existence.
France is attacked not because it oppresses Muslims but because it liberates them from the hold of religion. It offers them a perspective that terrifies the devout—that of spiritual indifference, the right to believe or not to believe, as Jews and Christians are able to do. If France were this prison that some describe, how can one explain the fact that so many people from North Africa and the Middle East come to live there, day after day, as much for economic opportunities as for the freedoms they can enjoy, including the freedom finally to leave behind bigotry, rites, and the power of mosques and of imams? Let’s not forget that, for two centuries, since Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt in 1798, France has maintained close ties with the Arab-Muslim world and has at least the potential to become the leader of an Islamic Enlightenment, as the great orientalist Jacques Berque has suggested.
The notion of Islamophobia is meant to give the religion of the Prophet a status of exemption denied to other spiritual systems. Thus, we have the reprehensible law enacted by the Canadian Parliament this March that prohibits criticism of Islam, while other confessions still can be denigrated without any problem. Such a law is a poisoned gift that risks producing the opposite of what it intends, since it can incite anger and resentment against the believers of the crescent. To regularize the presence of Islam in free societies means giving the faith exactly the same status as other confessions: neither moronic demonizing nor blind idealizing. Muslims in free societies must accept what Jews and Christians have accepted: that it is not a superior religion that should benefit from advantages refused to other confessions. We must beware when fanaticism borrows the language of human rights and dresses up as a victim in order better to impose its grip on power. There is an old saying: the devil also likes to quote scripture.
Walk through the streets of any big European or American city, and you will pass innumerable Baptist, Catholic, Lutheran, and evangelical churches, Hindu temples, synagogues, mosques, pagodas, and on and on. This peaceful cohabitation of diverse expressions of the divine is a wonder of the West. “When there is only one religion, tyranny rules; when there are two, religious war reigns; when there are many, liberty comes,” Voltaire observed. The best that we can wish for Islam is not “phobia” or “philia” but a benevolent indifference in a spiritual marketplace, open to all beliefs. But it is precisely this indifference that the fundamentalists want to eradicate. It cannot be the equal of other faiths, since it believes itself superior to them all. This is the core of the problem.
— The UN makes lists of the worst offenders against religious freedom. Year after year after year, the worst offenders are China, North Korea and 18 Muslim majority countries. In a rational world, we’d be forming commissions to fight against Communist faith-phobia and to fight against Islamic Infidel-phobia. In a rational wold, freedom-loving Western countries would be forming commissions to ensure that migration from the Muslim world does not impair our freedom of speech (without which freedom, democracy becomes a farce), or our women’s rights or any of our other freedoms which contradict shariah law. But our current Globalist Elites are anything but rational and not the least interested in preserving the West’s freedoms or preserving democracy.
