Giles Fraser, following on from Baroness Warsi’s rather silly comments this week, indulges in the slippery slope fallacy.
No one actually comes out and directly says “I hate Muslims” – at least, not on the liberal dinner party circuit that was the target of Lady Warsi’s speech. Conversations generally begin with the sort of anxieties that many of us might reasonably share: it cannot be right for women to be denied access to education in some Islamic regimes; the use of the death penalty for apostasy is totally unacceptable; what about the treatment of homosexuals? The conversation then moves on to sharia law or jihad or the burqa, not all of it entirely well informed. Someone places their hands across their face and peers out between their fingers. Another guest giggles slightly. Someone inevitably mentions 9/11. Later, guests travel home on the tube and look nervously at the man in the beard sitting opposite.
Oh, god, here we go again…
Every one of those items is a reasonable concern. You don’t have to be fully informed to have a distaste for such things as Sharia, Jihad or the burqua. Our system of law may be flawed, but at least it is evidence based and does not result in people being condemned on the basis of some medieval ravings from a desert warlord. Nor do we execute people for adultery or prosecute rape victims. Jihad may have several interpretations, but some Moslems have used it to perpetrate terror – this much is fact – and the wearing of the burqua is not only antithetical to British society, it is indicative of a culture that is deeply misogynistic. Moslem women may say that they choose to wear it, but how much of that is peer pressure or pressure from their spouse? And if not that, how much is an overt display of their rejection of the host culture? And, frankly, the wearing of the burqua is a consequence of cultural pressures, not religious ones. Should I at this point mention female circumcision?
It’s the last , stupid sentence in that paragraph (stupidity being so typical of CiF contributors) that really rankles. I despise Islam and everything that it represents and stands for; the totalitarianism, the misogyny, the intolerance towards non-believers, the supremacism, the incompetent and corrupt legal system, the conversion by force, the persecution of other faiths; all of these things, but at no time have I ever looked nervously at the man in the beard sitting opposite me on the tube – and I have noticed no one else looking nervously either. Like Warsi, Fraser is pulling examples from his arse and presenting them as a fait accompli to justify his stupid assumptions about a host of people he doesn’t know and has never met. But, never mind, he’s going to accuse them all of bigotry anyway.
The problem Warsi identifies is the problem of slippage. What can begin as a perfectly legitimate conversation about, say, religious belief and human rights, can drift into a licence for observations that in any other circumstance would be regarded as tantamount to racism. Like the 19th-century link between anti-Catholicism and racism towards the Irish, one can easily bleed into the other.
It might, but it doesn’t. Remind me, who, exactly, was it on our streets demanding violence against non-believers? Who was it demanded that critics of Islam be beheaded? Was it those dinner party guests? I think not. And, any attempt to link a dislike – a perfectly rational dislike – of the evil cult that is Islam with racism deserves nothing less that outright derision, but I’ve come to expect risible articles form CiF contributors, they parade them as a badge of honour almost.
The worst sort of dinner party bigot may talk about Islam as a faith but – nod, nod, wink, wink – we all know what they mean.
No, you don’t know what they mean. When I talk about despising Islam, the faith, the political system and the ideology, that is exactly what I am talking about and nothing else.
One of the tests for flushing out prejudice from robust but legitimate critique is the extent to which complexity is allowed to enter into the picture. The dinner party bigot may never have been to a mosque or read the Qur’an, but he already knows what he thinks. Life is always simple for the prejudiced. Indeed, the very point about a prejudgment is that it is a conclusion reached before the complexity of the world is allowed to make any difference.
See what he did there? If you haven’t been to a mosque or read the Qur’an, you must be a prejudiced bigot. Never mind merely looking at the evidence or listening to the words of the hate mongers. I have read enough about Islam and listened to what the followers have to say to form a reasoned opinion. I don’t need to go to a mosque, and, no, I don’t need to read the Qur’an, to recognise what it is that I dislike about this creed – and not having done these things does not make me prejudiced, nor does it make me a bigot – unless a distaste for the death penalty for apostates, the persecution of other faiths, the execution of homosexuals and the suppression of women makes me a bigot; in which case, fair enough, we need to redefine what bigot means.
The other difference between robust critique and what is tantamount to bullying has to do with the power relations between those involved. The Muslim community in this country is generally more socially disadvantaged and has less access to the levers of power. British Muslims do worse at school than any other faith group, they are more likely to be unemployed and live in poorer housing. It is generally from communities such as this that the prosperous and the powerful find their scapegoats.
Nice little hand of victimhood poker there.
This is also why the growing idea that there is in this country such a thing as Christianophobia – an equivalent to Islamophobia – is such total nonsense.
Well, yes, Islamophobia is nonsense. Utter cack. Complete cockwaffle. A construct created by the dhimmis of the left as a stick to beat those who dare to dissent, a tool for the suppression of contrary voices. Criticise Islam and you are labeled immediately by these apologists with the cry of Islamophobia just as the term racist was used before – and now these terms are becoming interchangeable. There is no such thing as Islamophobia as any fear or loathing is perfectly rational.
Islamophobia is the moral blind spot of 21st-century Britain.
No, it isn’t and only a fool would come out with such garbage. But, then, this is the parallel universe that is CiF.
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Update: He’s getting a well deserved pasting in the comments.
“One of the tests for flushing out prejudice from robust but legitimate critique is the extent to which complexity is allowed to enter into the picture. The dinner party bigot may never have been to a Nazi Rally or read the Mein Kampf, but he already knows what he thinks. Life is always simple for the prejudiced. Indeed, the very point about a prejudgment is that it is a conclusion reached before the complexity of the world is allowed to make any difference.”
:0)
“British Muslims do worse at school than any other faith group, they are more likely to be unemployed and live in poorer housing.”
Ah, well obviously the many devout Muslim students from the Indian sub-continent, Malaysia and Indonesia I taught at university were a figment of my imagination, as are the many business-owning Bangladeshi Muslims I know. There is a trend within Wahabi Islam which is profoundly anti-education, and teaching girls anything is regarded as offensive, dangerous and pointless. Look there for the ill-educated, poor and unemployed (not amongst the medics of all kinds, shop and restaurant owners, teachers and every other kind of industry which is dedicated to service, as the Qu’ran requires) and then tally those people with the ones calling for sharia or death to kaffirs.
Islam is no more more stupid or silly on paper than any other religion, but its literalist form is the current most destructive force around (apart from the EU and AGW).
Excellent fisking, one small point I might disagree on. I will admit that I have on a couple of occasions looked nervously at a backpack wearing young man on the tube but of course I’m well aware that this is irrational, it doesn’t follow that I think every Muslim, still less any dark skinned bearded man, is a potential suicide bomber, I’m perfectly capable of examining my own gut responses and rejecting them. This is something that never occurs to the likes of Fraser, only they have the subtlety of mind the nuanced responses and the intellectual clout to behave rationally, the rest of us are just lumpen morons who will vote BNP at the drop of a hat, apparently.
I have tried to read the Koran, boring as hell.