Islamophobia – Wis[s]e Words

Inventing problems to appease islamophobes is the VVD way to win elections

Published on March 12, 2018Leave a comment

Currently we have fortytwo mosques in Amsterdam, none of which actually issue the call for prayer because the people running it aren’t idiots, so it makes sense that for new mosques being build here the city council should put clauses in their contracts forbidding the call for prayer?

It’s all thanks to it being local elections month in the Netherlands, which means that the background noise of islamophobia that has continued unabated since 9/11, gets turned up a notch. This time it’s the notoriously criminal VVD that wants to put the boot in. Until a decade and a half or so ago this was supposed to be a serious, centre right party that could go into coalition with social democrats and left of centre liberals, though in reality it was always the tax dodgers party. But then it discovered that a more polite form of the islamophobia pioneered by Fortuyn and Wilders was a vote winner, so you now you get idiots like local Amsterdam weird^w wethouder Eric van der Burg promising hard measures to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist.

It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. Christian churches are free to ring their bells every bloody Sunday, but mosques aren’t free to do the same thing. I find it understandable that a mosque would voluntarily decide not to use their legal right to do this, for the sake of getting along with the neighbours and all that, but to not ever have this acknowledged, to always come back to this non-issue whenever a supposedly decent party wants some plausibly deniable Muslim bullying to win votes, is just sickening. It lends a veneer of respectability to islamophobia, it confirms actual racists in their beliefs and it keeps portraying the Muslim population in the Netherlands, who have been here at least fifty years and in some cases much much longer as foreign intruders who want to disturb the Dutch peace and quiet. It’s deeply cynical and disgusting.

Charlie Hebdo, Before the Massacre

Published on January 13, 2015Leave a comment

A short video of an editorial meeting at Charlie Hebdo, back in 2006, when they were first debating to run Mohammed cartoons. It shows where Charlie Hebdo was coming from quite clearly. These were not, are not, Islamophobes even if their cartoons were sometimes trading in that territory.

Charlie Hebdo

Published on January 7, 2015Leave a comment

The news of the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices has hit close to home. Cartoonists are always one of the first targets for repressive regimes and other psychopaths and Charlie Hebdo has not been shy about taunting authoritarian assholes; they already had their office firebombed by the same kind of idiot who got offended enough this time to kill. As Ted Rall put it:

Cartoons are incredibly powerful.

Not to denigrate writing (especially since I do a lot of it myself), but cartoons elicit far more response from readers, both positive and negative, than prose. Websites that run cartoons, especially political cartoons, are consistently amazed at how much more traffic they generate than words. I have twice been fired by newspapers because my cartoons were too widely read — editors worried that they were overshadowing their other content.

Scholars and analysts of the form have tried to articulate exactly what it is about comics that make them so effective at drawing an emotional response, but I think it’s the fact that such a deceptively simple art form can pack such a wallop. Particularly in the political cartoon format, nothing more than workaday artistic chops and a few snide sentences can be enough to cause a reader to question his long-held political beliefs, national loyalties, even his faith in God.

That drives some people nuts.

Twelve people killed so far, five of whom were cartoonists, some of the most famous in France and beyond: Charb, Cabu, Honoré, Tignous, and Wolinski. It’s a tragedy like no other that has happened to the comics community. Cartoonists have been threatened, assaulted and even killed for their cartoons, but on this scale?

And what may be the worst thing about this massacre (apart from, you know, the people murdered) is that the cartoons may just have been used as an excuse for some fuckwitted jihadist publicity stunt to heighten the tensions, wanting to rile up islamophobia by attacking a well known target in the worst possible way. The attackers know and count on innocent Muslims getting caught in the crossfire, but don’t care. All that matters is that they showed how big and scarey they are to be able to kill people only armed with pen and ink.

The danger is of course that the response to this attack will travel through the well worn tracks of outrage and Islamophobia, of uncritcally making Charlie Hebdo into free speech martyrs to rally people for another spot of Muslim bashing, as Geertje Wilders was already busy doing while the bodies were still warm.

For me personally, Charlie Hebdo’s satire about the Islam felt too much like punching down to be enjoyable or interesting; this tragedy doesn’t change that.

Liberal paternalism and the burqa

Published on February 22, 20126 Comments

I want to highlight part of a comment Alex made at a recent post:

Strangely, I’m strongly in favor of the burqa ban, which you referred to as foulness. My philosophical reasoning here is strongly affected by my emotions and the way I was brought up. I was brought up as a strongly conservative Christian, and sent to Christian schools my entire life, including boarding school in high school, and the dress codes were very strict. I look back on my entire childhood as abuse and torture, that affected me absolutely as much as the beatings. Given that most “women” are expected to start wearing these costumes at puberty, when they are not in control of any part of their lives, is giving too much control to parents. I know this raises issues of what an adult woman can choose for herself, but the adult women I know in any kind of conservative religion are mad and usually poor or no education which would enable them to have the economic freedom to choose, and they are kept from making real outside social connections which might offer them the support to make real choices.

As he himself acknowledges, this is a fine example of paternalism in action, where you’re so convinced these women wearing burqas need to be delivered from their oppression that you’re willing to send them to jail for it. This sort of attitude has a not very proud history on the left (*cough*eugenics*cough* and we should be very careful with it. For a start, just because your reason for wanting to ban the burqa is all meant in the best interests of its wearers, it doesn’t mean that the people actively trying to do this are motivated by anything more noble than a spot of Muslim bullying. Modern bigotry often hides behind a phony concern for “western” values and liberties.

Furthermore and quite obviously, a burqa ban denies agency to the very women who we are supposedly trying to liberate from their oppression, by making it clear that they cannot be trusted to make the right choice on their own. A burqa ban also supposed that the view of the burqa as a symbol of male oppression of women is the only correct one and that women cannot choose to wear it for any reason other than that somebody is forcing them. It therefore denies the existence of any woman who has made that choice for religious or other reasons. Finally, it also supposes that “we” know what’s best for “them”, when it may very well be that the burqa is just a minor issue or no issue at all in the lives of most Muslim women living in the Netherlands.

A burqa ban also means that those women who wear them for religious reasons are forced to choose between the law and their religion, never a happy occurrence, while those who are forced into it through social pressure or their evil husbands will have other tensions to worry about…

Let’s not forget also that the number of women who wear the full burqa, rather than just a headscarf, is very low: probably less than twohundred in the entire country. Not really a “problem” we need a law for, in other words.

French burqa ban leads to more racism

Published on September 20, 20112 Comments

Is this what the current Dutch government wants for our country too?

In April, France introduced a law against covering your face in public. Muslim women in full-face veils, or niqab, are now banned from any public activity including walking down the street, taking a bus, going to the shops or collecting their children from school. French politicians in favour of the ban said they were acting to protect the “gender equality” and “dignity” of women. But five months after the law was introduced, the result is a mixture of confusion and apathy. Muslim groups report a worrying increase in discrimination and verbal and physical violence against women in veils. There have been instances of people in the street taking the law into their hands and trying to rip off full-face veils, of bus drivers refusing to carry women in niqab or of shop-owners trying to bar entry. A few women have taken to wearing bird-flu-style medical masks to keep their face covered; some describe a climate of divisiveness, mistrust and fear. One politician who backed the law said that women still going out in niqab were simply being “provocative”.

Ahmas, 32, French, a divorced single mother of a three-year-old daughter, puts her handbag on the table and takes out a pepper spray and attack alarm. She doesn’t live on the high-rise estates but on a quiet street of semi-detached houses. The last time she was attacked in the street a man and woman punched her in front of her daughter, called her a whore and told her to go back to Afghanistan. “My quality of life has seriously deteriorated since the ban. In my head, I have to prepare for war every time I step outside, prepare to come up against people who want to put a bullet in my head. The politicians claimed they were liberating us; what they’ve done is to exclude us from the social sphere. Before this law, I never asked myself whether I’d be able to make it to a cafe or collect documents from a town hall. One politician in favour of the ban said niqabs were ‘walking prisons’. Well, that’s exactly where we’ve been stuck by this law.”

Very roughly estimated, there are probably some 100 to 200 women in the whole of the Netherlands who wear the full on face covering veil. In my own Amsterdam neighbourhood, which does have a high percentage of people with a Muslim background, with a mosque only a few blocks away, there are one or two, perhaps three women I’ve seen wearing this. Even if we accept the prejudices of those arguing for a ban, this is not a real problem. But then of course it’s meant as a distraction from the very real problems our country is facing,what with the economy and having a rightwing government with no ideas how to handle these problems other than by keep on cutting spending even when it’s clear this is counterproductive.

For the politicians pushing this, not just Geert Wilders, but supposedly respectable politicians like our prime minister Mark Rutte, this may not be an issue they take seriously other than to pull the whool over the electorate eyes, but for the women who’ll be caught in the backlash this will only make worse the racism and bigotry they’re already facing. After all, once the law has singled out a certain group of people as beyond the pale for how they look or act, it does encourage people to take justice in their own hands, as the French example shows, but we also know from closer to home. We have seen an increase in accepted casual racism and islamophobia once the politicians and opinion makers decided it was alright to break these taboos — and it’s not all stuff that has been bubbling under the surface before that. Having these sorts of negative examples and stereotypes of a certain population group fired at you day in day out matter. Having the law say that certain religious attributes are wrong matters even more.