Irrational Fear of Islam?
Editor’s note: To read and order David Horowitz’ and Robert Spencer’s pamphlet, Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future, click here.
One could posit that we live in a world dominated at least as much by images, especially moving images in the form of television and movies, as by words, but words clearly matter. In many cases, those who coin new words, or manage to force the public to accept their definition of old words, win the struggle. In practice, this is done by those who control the propaganda flow, in the education system and the mass media.
We now have a term for an imaginary problem: Islamophobia. It has become the subject of international conferences and is treated as a threat to world peace. In contrast, racist violence against people of European origins, a very real problem from South Africa via North America to Western European suburbs, does not exist because we have no special word for it. This is word magic.
“Tolerance” and “diversity” mean dispossessing Europeans from the countries their ancestors created, whereas “intolerance,” “hate” and “racism” imply any opposition by Europeans to their own dispossession and organized national destruction.
On Aug. 25 2012, the columnist Doug Saunders published an essay in The Globe and Mail, the largest-circulation national newspaper in Canada, entitled “The unfounded fear of Muslim immigration.” He there engaged in the (by now mandatory) exercise of mentioning Islam-critical individuals such as Bruce Bawer, Thilo Sarrazin, Geert Wilders, Gisele Littman (Bat Ye’or) and Mark Steyn alongside the confessed mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik. Although the author added that these writers have never “explicitly advocated violence,” he seemed to suggest that they implicitly contributed to Breivik’s massacre by writing truthfully about how Muslim immigration is affecting Western countries.
Doug Saunders is the London-based European bureau chief for The Globe and Mail who “writes a weekly column devoted to the larger themes and intellectual concepts behind international news, and has won the National Newspaper Award, Canada’s counterpart to the Pulitzer Prize, on four occasions.” He is completing a book about the alleged myth that a tidal wave of Muslim immigration is threatening the Western world. He admits that in London he can witness a rapidly growing Islamic presence first-hand and that large sections of that and other European cities are now dominated by non-Europeans, but he claims this isn’t a problem:
What unites the ideologies of al-Qaeda and of the “Eurabia” and “Muslim tide” writers is a common belief that there is one creature called “the Muslim” and another called “the Westerner.” Yet there is no such distinction. Muslims are adopting the universal values of our society in the same way (not always easy [sic]) as other religious minorities. The shisha bar and the kebab shop are becoming part of Western culture, much like espresso and Yiddish expressions – but there is no threat to our core values.Less than a month after these words were written, violent anti-Western protests and riots swept across the Islamic world, targeting Western embassies while using an obscure movie as a pretext for this Jihad.
On August 26 2012, writer Nathan Lean published an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times using the Breivik trial as a verbal stick to beat those writing about Islamization into submission, claiming that “heightened anxiety over the presence of Muslims in Europe and the United States has ignited a string of attacks on the faith community.” That’s nonsense. On the contrary, nearly every week we see stories about Muslim immigrant gangs harassing the natives in European cities, sometimes even attacking the police armed with guns.
Lean specifically singled out such writers as Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller for allegedly agitating a “climate of hate” in North America and beyond. He concluded his essay by stating that “The discourse of hate must be stopped before it affects other extremists.” As Spencer — who lives with death threats from Muslims due to his writings — commented at Jihad Watch, this is a barely concealed call for restricting freedom of speech.
Lean writes about the existence of what he terms an “Islamophobia industry” of evil right-wingers in the Western world who are nasty and spread prejudice against tolerant Muslims for no particular reason other than being mean. He has contributed to The Huffington Post, a very large and usually left-leaning news website and Internet newspaper, where he has stated that “Islamophobia is undeniably a form of racism.” Not surprisingly, his writings are being praised by the notoriously pro-Islamic author Karen Armstrong, who claims that virulent Islamophobia is now “endangering world peace.”
Nathan Lean soon after followed up with yet another article in the Los Angeles Times arguing that the general public led by enlightened activists must from now on “publicly shame” and “marginalize” Islam-critical writers, who, according to him, breed terrorism by warning against groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.
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