bhkad

'Who Cares? It's Only Gays'

That is, apparently, the mental dialogue which prevents anyone from talking about this or doing anything about it.


'Who Cares? It's Only Gays'

IBID

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mikhail

This is a full article from Johann hari a very liberal gay man who understands the problems in islam.

Do you believe a religious leader who fights to save Section 28 and says gay people spread disease is a fulminating bigot? Do you believe a “leading cleric” who advocates stoning gay people to death should be denounced? Do you believe sharia law – which requires gay people to be lashed or stoned – is always and forever unacceptable? Then, according to an energetic and aggressive group of white straight boys who surreally consider themselves to be on the left, you are an “Islamophobe” and “objectively pro-Nazi”.

People who believe in opposing hatred of gay people everywhere – in Teheran as much as Tunbridge Wells, in Kingston, Jamaica as much as Kingston-Upon-Thames – are being subjected to a bizarre counter-campaign. As so often, Peter Tatchell is facing the most abusive backlash on our behalf. Tatchell believes all people are equal, regardless of their pigmentation. He does not see a difference between the white far-right preacher Jerry Falwell calling gay people diseased, and the Muslim leader Sir Iqbal Sacranie doing the same. He does not see the difference between gay teenagers being lynched to death in Jamaica and murderous gay-bashings on Clapham Common. He reacts to them in exactly the same way – by fighting to stop them.

For this, he is being accused of racism. Look, for example, at the popular website ‘Islamophobia Watch’, set up by a man called Bob Pitt. Unlike Tatchell, he lacks courage and, fearing reprisals, uses a fake name for his writings – Martin Sullivan. His website obsessively snipes at Tatchell, responding to every criticism he makes of the Islamic fundamentalists who incite and perform the murder of gay people by calling him a bigot and even “pro-Nazi”. How does he back up this slander against a man who has fought fascism all his life? The website complains Tatchell uses “the term ‘Islamism’… without distinguishing between its reformist and violent wings.” Yes, it’s true - Tatchell fails to draw a distinction between the people who will lash and stone gays after winning at the ballot box, and the people who will lash and stone gays after seizing power in a coup. This is bigotry?

When the Festival of Muslim Cultures promised to represent “all parts of the Muslim community” but banned gay Muslims, Tatchell supported Muslims like Aaron Saeed, who said, “Lesbians and gay men are part of Muslim faith and society. We are not going to be silenced or victimised any more. We are out and proud, as both gays and Muslims.” Islamophobia Watch accused Tatchell of a “stupid stunt.” When Adam Yosef, a leading figure in George Galloway’s RESPECT Coalition, said Tatchell “needs a good slap in the face” and should “pack up his bent bags and head back to Australia,” Islamophobia Watch accused Tatchell of leading “a witch-hunt” for answering back – without offering a single word of condemnation for Yosef’s homophic jeers. The list goes on.

The website – which has also attacked me, I should add – reminds me of the people who respond to every criticism of Israel by accusing the critic of anti-Semitism. It is a poisonous way of avoiding a serious debate about the facts.

They defend Sacranie on the grounds that his homophobia is part of his religion. But religions are just another set of ideas formulated by human beings and open to human discussion. Tatchell says, "All people are worthy of respect - but not all ideas are." Just because somebody wrote it in a book a millennia ago and called it a ‘religion’, doesn’t place it beyond discussion. If I write a book calling Sacranie a homophobe and claim it was dictated to me by the Archangel Gabriel, will Pitt defend it as my religious view, and damn everyone who disagrees as “Johann-phobic”?

Islamophobia Watch – and the dense chunk of the hard left that adopts a similar approach – is trying to redefine consistent atheism as a form of racism. I believe that the idea of God has been a disaster for humanity, and any person who bases their morality on the writings of hallucinating pre-modern nomads is going to have pretty warped values. Islam is no worse than the absurdities of Christianity and Judaism, but it is no better. Yet Islamophobia Watch call the National Secular Society – which campaigns on this basis – “bigots”. But how is criticising a set of ideas that people choose to adopt and can choose to abandon akin to attacking people on the basis of their skin colour?

The real racism comes from Islamophobia Watch itself, and the people who parrot their claims. Where Tatchell treats Muslims as the equal citizens of a democracy, people with open minds and a free intelligence, they treat Muslims as feeble children who cannot cope with the scorn we routinely (and rightly) pour on Catholics and Protestants. They argue that Muslims are so sensitive and uncurious that their ideas must be ring-fenced from criticism, with the police arresting anybody who vehemently criticises their beliefs.

Indeed, in their shrill condemnations of anybody who criticises Islam, they have actually fundamentally misunderstood Islam itself. Like all religions, it is based on a dense, contradictory and often ludicrous Holy Book that is being constantly reinterpreted. At the moment, there is a fierce battle within Islam between fundamentalists with a viciously reactionary agenda, and liberals with a more moderate agenda. If Muslim women and Muslim gays are going to have any kind of decent life, the liberals need to receive solidarity and support – but slap-dash charges of Islamophobia intimidate people who could offer it. They make people afraid to help the Muslim critics of fundamentalism, encouraging people to see Islam as a homogenous block defined by its most reactionary elements.

While Islamophobia Watch talk about defending Muslims, they end up defending the nastiest and most right-wing part of the Muslim community – the ones who are oppressing and killing the rest. For example, the gay rights campaigner Brett Lock wrote to one of the website’s authors, asking if he really thinks it is Islamophobic for gay people to resist sharia law, a system that demands we should be lashed or stoned. He replied, “As with adultery, I think it’s not homosexuality as such that’s an offence but the sexual act itself. And you need four independent witnesses for a conviction.” This is, of course, the distinction made by the vilest homophobes across the world – we don’t dislike gays, just the ones who actually **** each other. Lock accurately summarised Pitt’s view as, “Don’t worry, it’s okay to be gay or lesbian under sharia law – as long as you don’t have sex.”

Like all people who cry wolf, those who cry Islamophobia are aiding and abetting the real wolves out there. There is an authentic Islamophobia howling in the background. It is the notion that Islam is a uniquely evil religion, more inherently war-like and fanatical than Christianity or Judaism or the other primitive delusions. These bona fide Islamophobes do not have a principled disagreement with superstition and human rights abuses, as Tatchell does. They have a raw prejudice against Muslims, often because they see them as foreign and all secretly sympathetic to the al Quaeda psychosis. You can see this poison smeared across the pages of the right-wing press every day. Muslims face hefty discrimination in the workplace and wildly disproportionate stop-and-searches by the police. But organisations like Islamophobia Watch are making many gay people – the natural political allies of any minority facing cruel discrimination – dismiss all claims of Islamophobia as concocted nonsense. If Tatchell is an Islamophobe, they say, then so am I.

And as for me… I am not inclined to take lectures about defending Muslims from people who utter not a word in condemnation of the systematic slaughter of gay Muslims across the world, nor a splutter of condemnation about the violation and battery of Muslim women across the world. As Tatchell asks, “Since when has being oppressed given anyone the right to oppress others?”

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bhkad

The issue that he brings up is certainly one that doesn't get much attention on these pages. Sometimes his meanings are difficult to follow, but overall I think I grasp his message.

Gays are people, too. No matter what their belief system is and Gay Muslims are especially oppressed. And I agree with his position, for the most part.

I take issue, however, with his understanding of Islam.

This is my personal response to that writer:

I think he might want to look again at Islam. In particular, I'd want him to examine these two aspects of Islamic radicalism.

1) Islam's 'marching orders'

He says that Christianity and Judaism are no less war-like and fanatical than Islam and that may have been the case long ago but Jesus left a specifically non-violent message to those who would follow him up to this very day and beyond.

Not so for Muhammad.

2) Sayyed Qutb

Qutb is called the Godfather of modern Islamic terrorism because he wrote the book, Milestones, which distilled the Koranic ideas and revived the effort to achieve global mastery of mankind using violence.

There is nothing like that in Judaism or Christianity.

And finally, because there is no way to separate the good from the bad, in accepting the wonderful Muslims we must also accept those who really do wish to kill us, convert us or conquer us and overthrow our system of government. The estimate is that around 15% of all Muslims subscribe to this ideology and by warmly accepting all Muslims we are also saying we recognize and accept the other 15% who have an evil and hidden agenda.

Would you feel comfortable with a 15% chance that the people you warmly welcome will one day walk on you and your freedom or even walk on your grave after putting you in it?

That's what we face today and I would like that writer to consider these points the next time he is tempted to call all religions the same.

They aren't.

And that reminds me of one more point.

In a Western nation Gays' freedoms are protected by the law. Under Sharia the law becomes the enemy of a Gay person. No serious responsible religious or political leader in America proposes incarceration or doing harm to Gays.

OK, one LAST thing.

Won't someone please hurry up and invent a device to discern the good Muslims from the bad Muslims?

Leftist Protozoa

I'd be more interested in a device that can discern Christians who actually understand the meaning of the New Covenant, versus "Christians" who bomb abortion clinics, picket the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq with signs that say "thank God for dead soldiers," and insist that my kids should go to public school and learn that the world was created 6,000 years ago.

On a day to day basis, the vast majority of us Americans are more influenced by looney-tune Christians than Muslim extremists. You Right Wingers and your hot button topics are comical at times. Is the non sequitur that you're trying to make that Liberals like Muslim extremists, and Muslim extremists hate homosexuals, therefore Conservatives are more gay friendly? Sometimes I get lost with all the mirrors, smoke and doublespeak.

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Edify_Always_In_All_Ways

The Bad Muslims of the world are more numerous and dangerous. However, I'm sure Steve Jobs could throw your device into his iFundamentalist Detector.

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A_Wise_Fool

Okay, so when a few muslims start bashing gays the world must come to a screeching halt but when a few muslims blow themselves up all over the world every week we just sweep that under the rug?

Haha well I guess the best way to fight political correctness is with... political correctness. Nobody can say there is anything wholly wrong with a culture/idealogy until, on the whole, it starts insulting another lesser culture/idealogy(lifestyle?). Could this finally be the spark that makes the world develop enough backbone to say there is something wrong with a particular ideology?

bhkad

What too many people fail to acknowledge is that Islamists are different from Gays or Blacks or regular criminals or anyone or any group of any particular ethnicity, race, nationality or other religion.

Think about why and how that might be.

Leftist Protozoa

You lost me there. I never said Muslims (or Islamic extremists) weren't different than other groups. In fact, I would even struggle to see the similarities between Gays and Blacks... unless you're talking about people who are gay and black simultaneously.