RATIONAL PHOBIAS

Am I an Islamophobe? A phobia, according to the OED, is “a fear, horror, strong dislike, or aversion; esp. an extreme or irrational fear or dread aroused by a particular object or circumstance”. Well, I certainly possess a fear, horror, strong dislike and aversion to the expressions of Islam that are routinely made in Britain and across the world and I probably experience an extreme fear and dread too. But I wouldn’t call it “irrational”. I think it is wholly deductive.

I have made it a rule in life to take people as I find them. Sometimes, I find myself disagreeing with a friend about a third party and being aware that our experiences of this third party have been our own and different. I don’t generally accept at face value someone’s assessment of someone or something else without verifying for myself and, as often as not, finding cause to dispute the offered opinion.

My aversion to Islam is pragmatic, able to be reasoned, a posteriori. It begins with Islamic homophobia. In Iran, Saudi, Somalia, Sudan and other Muslim nations, homosexuality is a capital offence. Mullahs and other influential men cite The Qur’an as justification. On the other hand, some Islamic cultures are more tolerant. The somewhat notorious practise of bache bazi – men fucking boys – is widespread in Afghanistan but will doubtless be suppressed when the Taliban return to power (or perhaps not; there are contradictions even in extremism).

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says hi to his friend; who knew?

Of course, opposition to being gay, more or less fiercely expressed, is common to all religions. The present pope believes that homosexuality is the greatest threat to the world today. He recites this belief while sitting in a dress on a throne surrounded by other old men in dresses and “protected” by a cadre of Swiss guards, also in dresses, among whom homosexuality is pretty much de rigueur. But as I say, extremism is no guarantee against contradiction.

As a consequence of homophobia routinely expressed by leaders and “teachers” of religion, I have a phobia of them all, a religiophobia. It starts with their hatred of me. But all religions embrace the irrational and I am a rationalist so I soon find myself rejecting all that religions stand for. For that reason, I prefer to use the term “supernatural superstition” rather than “religion”.

Baroness Warsi makes a characteristically subtle point

Sayeeda Warsi is the first Muslim woman to serve in a British cabinet. She is Minister Without Portfolio, a nonce term coined two hundred years ago to justify co-opting some pal of the Prime Minister who has no particular knowledge or skills. Not for the first time, MWP has been used as a device to bring a party appointee into cabinet. Lady Warsi is co-chair of the Conservative Party. I bet you don’t know the name of her fellow co-chair *.

The other day, Warsi made a speech at the University of Leicester on the subject of “casual Islamophobia”. She reckoned that this phobia has “crossed the threshold of middle-class respectability”, that “Islamophobia has now passed the dinner-table test”. I dare say that the “dinner-table test” is pretty easily surmounted. The kind of disobliging talk that has evidently cleared out a few dinosaurs from Sky Sports this week (and filled the pages of The Guardian to the extent that I thought it must be the result of a WikiLeaks revelation) is doubtless common enough at dinner tables throughout the land, once the ladies have withdrawn, the cigars are lit and the port is circulating. Islamophobia, homophobia, LibDemophobia, Milibandophobia and Beebophobia are probably just as generally aired in this unguarded, unbridled atmosphere.

Islamists enjoy free speech in London

My own lifestyle has little use for dinner-tables these days, but I often recall an Easter Sunday teatime passed around a large parlour table in north London some years ago. It was a very jolly and lively gathering, probably with a majority of women (I didn’t reckon it up), dominated by journalists and with extensive representation of Jews, non-whites and gays. What certainly united us all was that we knew ourselves to be articulate, informed and enlightened.

Quite suddenly and without warning, the general conversation took a markedly racist turn. I immediately recoiled from this, looked around the room and was astonished at the individuals who, one after another, ratcheted up this now nakedly racist chatter. Punily, I tried to raise an objection but I was quickly shouted down and slumped into appalled impotence. The rampant, excited expressions of group racism went on for some time and then segued into some other topic.

The all-knowing greybeards of Tehran; no prejudice at their dinner-tables

Does this surprise you? Perhaps not when I reveal the object of this racism. It was the Welsh. The hatred of the Welsh that has been indulged by the English for decades, even centuries, is a good deal harder to fathom than the even fiercer hatred for the English felt by the Scots, but it is palpable and there seems little prospect that it will decline soon. I find it very hard to understand. I have no Welsh connections, save that the mother of my oldest friend was Welsh and so he is half-Welsh. This fact does not impinge on our friendship or indeed make its presence felt very often. Equally, I have no unpleasantness, actual or imagined, upon which to found hatred or even disdain. But the Easter outburst was clearly a case of casual racism, indulged by people who, without exception, ought to have known better.

The Welsh are not suicide bombers. There was a period a few decades ago when Welsh nationalists set fire to the odd English holiday home in the principality. That was about the extent of Welsh anger at English exploitation.

London suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer, making his witlessly brutal self-justifying video

Radical Islamists, however, are indeed suicide bombers, easily making up the majority of such kamikazes this century. They are going in for what they term istishhad, which is to say “martyrdom”. The point of this martyrdom is simultaneously to kill others at random. It is the cruellest, most brutal act of war imaginable, largely because it is utterly impossible to combat. Once the perpetrator is determined to “sacrifice” his – or, increasingly often, her – life, he becomes much more difficult to pre-empt.

The passage of the Qur’an most often used to rationalise this philosophy is this passage from the book called, in English, Repentance: “Allah has bought from the believers their selves and their possessions against the gift of Paradise; they fight in the way of Allah; they kill and are killed; that is a promise binding upon Allah in the Torah and the Gospel and the Qur’an” [from Arthur J Arberry’s translation for OUP, though I have changed his own term ‘God’ to ‘Allah’]. It is, of course, no accident that this verse is number 9:111.

In actuality, there is no Paradise and no existence after corporeal death. Islamists, like others who cleave to supernatural delusions, are determined that the utterly unverifiable notion of life after death is not only a fact but a sacred fact; Islamists further consider that those who refute eternal life or even question it are infidels who deserve to die. You might spot the odd paradox here but, as I say, extremism is no bulwark against contradiction.

Anjem Choudery, 7/7 apologist and Sharia advocate

The notion that life is readily disposable is one of the scariest aspect of Islam. Do you notice how close are the words ‘sacred’ and ‘scared’ – can it be a coincidence? Islamists happily kill their daughters if they disobey their fathers -– "honour killing" they call it, as if somehow there is some notion of morality involved in it – and they kill neighbours who have been accused – the accusation, however baseless and malicious, is sufficient – of blasphemy, adultery, sodomy and other relatively harmless and certainly not murderous activities. BBC News showed heavily edited footage on Wednesday evening of the summary justice meted out in a Taliban-controlled village in Afghanistan when a couple in their early 20s, accused of adultery, were tricked into returning to their village where they were trussed up and stoned to death. A Taliban spokesman told the BBC reporter: “There are people who say that stoning is inhuman but in doing so they insult the prophet”. Not much room for rational discussion there, I suggest.

There are Muslims in Britain – Anjem Choudery is one such – who wish to introduce Sharia Law into our system of justice. Such a nice idea, don’t you feel? We all look forward to the day when the high court rules that both the Poet Laureate and the Master of the Queen’s Musick are to be publicly beheaded for being gay and that the likes of Mrs Edwina Currie and Sir John Major are to be stoned to death for adultery.

Doku Umarov, leading advocate of terrorist attacks on Russia by Chechen Muslims

Other British Muslims, while not supporting the July 7th bomb attacks in London as Choudery does, do go in for special pleading about the imagined depth of Islamophobia. Ibrahim Mogra of the Muslim Council of Britain draws a parallel with “how the Jew was persecuted as a misfit … by the Nazis”. You don’t have to be Jewish to find that a wholly outrageous suggestion.

Britain is not a Muslim nation. It is fundamentally haram which means un-Islamic. It is, by and large and despite the existence of the BNP, a nation that tolerates all manner of in-comers. There are nearly two and a half million Muslims here and they may go about their business pretty much as they please, worshipping in mosques, observing their own dietary requirements, wearing the dress they choose, establishing their own schools and generally being thoroughly Islamic. I do not believe that the infidel – whether Christian, Hindu, Jew or rationalist – enjoys anything like such peace, freedom and security in any nation governed by Islam.

The surviving Muslim terrorist who struck at Mumbai in 2008

So, what are the arguments that should render me an Islamophile?

* You can’t name the other Tory co-chairman? I didn’t think so. His name is Andrew Feldman and he is a pal of David Cameron’s from Brasenose. Jobs for the boys, eh?