Islamophobia – Page 3 – Wis[s]e Words

Geert Wilders not wanted anywhere

Published on June 16, 20101 Comment

So Geert Wilders may have won the elections last week, but it seems for now he’s getting nowhere in organising a coalition. Negotiations with the other big winner and currently biggest party in parliament, the VVD are going slow, while the CDA, the party he wants for the third partner is so far still politely but firmly declining to talk. What’s more, many of the CDA’s members are vehemently opposed to any coalition with Wilders, as they find his politics and ideology abhorrent. And without the CDA it will become very difficult to form any coalition with Wilders in it. The other big party — the PvdA — is right out, having been diametrically opposed to him before and during the elections, while all other parties are just too small.

Which puts Wilders in a difficult position. If he wants to get in government he’ll have to make big concessions to the VVD and CDA, disappointing his voters. If he decides it’s not worth it, he will again disappoint his voters. They after all were led to believe that if he won the elections, he would get down to business and not let anybody stop him. Another four years or so in opposition may find his votes drained away again. This is what happened to the SP after the 2006 elections, when it became the third largest party in parliament and the biggest winner of the elections, yet excluded from government, so it will prey on Wilders’ mind a lot. Also preying on his mind, what happened to the LPF, Pim Fortuyn’s party after they won the elections in 2002, who did get into government but squabbled so much it lasted less than a year and virtually annihilated the party….

The good election results for Wilders therefore are proving to be a double edged sword, as they have created expectations that will be difficult to fulfill. Good news for those of us who dislike him and his islamophobic ways.

Mythologising Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Published on March 30, 20101 Comment

Aaronovitch Watch reports that Paul Berman, the most tedious of the Decentists has decided one of his tedious essays wasn’t dull enough and therefore has expanded it into a book. This would be awful enough, though ignorable, had it not been for the sucking up Berman recieves from Ron Rosenbaum in Slate, which contains this collossal and quite likely deliberate error:

“Hirsi Ali, who described her decision to leave Islam in 2007’s Infidel, was subsequently driven from her refuge in Holland by death threats that followed her from Somalia. And by the murder of her friend and supporter, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose slashed and bleeding body was found with a note that called Hirsi Ali next to die. ”

No… Just no…

She left because it came out she told fibs about her real background, wasn’t actually Ayaan “Hirsi Ali” at all and the then minister for Deporting of Brown People (Rita Verdonk) still had a personal score to settle with her and attempted to take away her Dutch citizenship for it. Ayaan then left parliament in a huff and buggered off to America to her wanktank job. Nothing to do with death threats, certainly none that followed her from Somalia. In reality, nobody gave two figs about her until she jumped on the anti-Islam bandwagon.

The above quote is a typical example the mythology build up around Ayaan Hirsi Ali by writers like Rosenbaum, mostly for US and UK consumption. She’s supposed this brave fighter for the rights of women oppressed by Islam, a liberal freethinker refusing to bow down before terrorism. But again, she was silent about all of this until after “9/11” changed everything, until there was a market for this image. In the Netherlands she’s largely seen as a hinderance rather than a help in emancipating Muslim women, as her rhetoric puts the back up of those she’s supposed to help, while any real practical engagement by her remains elusive. But for those who regard The War Against Terror is the Greatest Intellectual Struggle of Our Times this is more of a feature than a bug, as witnessed by Rosenbaum’s judgment on a Decentist villain, Tariq Ramadan:

The problematic nature of Ramadan’s moderation can perhaps best be illustrated by his call for a “moratorium” on the stoning of women to death in Islamic societies for “honor” violations. The fact that he called for a “moratorium” at all has been hailed by Western, particularly European, intellectuals as a comforting sign for those concerned about women’s rights in the growing Muslim communities of the West.

The fact that he did not condemn the practice outright or call for its outlawing, and instead only called for “debate” with Islamic scholars and theologians on the matter during the “moratorium,” is not entirely reassuring to others.

Leave alone the twisting of Ramadan’s words, what comes across is that Rosenbaum rather would’ve had him make grandiose but futile pronouncements that make them feel good, than offer a practical, face saving measure that might just stop stonings because it offers conservative, suspicious theologians and the governments that employ them a way to change their religious laws while claiming to be completely orthodox and true to Islam. You don’t convince genuine believers by loudly denouncing their faith and demanding they should adjust to your moral worldview immediately. Or to put it in words even Decentists should understand: you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Antiracism is a crime in Bolton

Published on March 20, 2010

From Socialist Worker’s rolling update on the anti-EDL protests:

1.10pm: From Bolton, Victoria Square

Police have broken up an entirely peaceful UAF rally in the square and seized organiser Weyman Bennett. Trade unionists are trying to speak but have been stopped.

12.55pm: From Bolton, Victoria Square

Police are preventing hundreds of anti-fascist protesters from entering Victoria Square. Those inside are chanting “Let them in”. They have had to link arms to block the police and defend the UAF speakers. Riot police have repeatedly pushed into the crowd.

Weyman Bennett of Unite Against Fascism address the crowd, saying, “Police are rioting and are out of control.

“Anti-racism is not a crime, and it’s about time the police stopped treating it as such.

“I say to the police, if you can turn this number of officers out here today, why could you not stop the EDL running riot through Stoke last month?”

The EDL, the socalled English Defence League is the sort of acceptable side of the BNP, supposedly non-racist but just concerned about the “loss” of Englishness. In practice of course they are a bunch of white racist thugs just using the fact that mainstream politics has made islamophobia largely acceptable. The constant stream of scaremongering news items and editorials about the danger of “Muslim terrorism”, combined with the lack of the same sort of attention for “white terrorism”, has lead to a climate where Paki-bashing has become acceptable again. Everytime the EDL gets to march through a city unopposed helps strenghtened this climate, especially when it’s the police who make it possible by attacking the antifascist, antiracist counterdemonstrations.

The police of course always present that as a neutral problem of keeping public order, with the argument that allowing counterdemonstrations would lead to violence, yet as Weyman Bennett points out, where were the police when the EDL rioted in Stoke, unopposed?

The killing of Theo van Gogh – five years on

Published on November 2, 20095 Comments

On this day five years ago Theo van Gogh was shot and killed by Mohammed B, in Holland’s first (and so far, only) Islamist terror attack. At this late date I’m not sure I still stand entirely by what I wrote at the time, as I tried to push back somewhat too hard against an unrelenting stream of Islamophobia that his murder unleashed. I tried to explain what might have driven van Gogh’s murderer at a time when his motivations were still far from clear, as well as why his murder didn’t make van Gogh into a free speech martyr. Looking back I came on too strong and my point was lost in te confusion.

But I still believe it is wrong to call van Gogh a martyr of free speech. His killing was a political deed, intended as a a warning and threat to those Mohammed B. saw as enemies of Islam, but this in itself is not enough to make him a martyr, just like John Lennon wasn’t made a martyr when he was murdered by a deranged fan. Van Gogh never had to fear state prosecution, or social ostracation for his views, no damage to his career. That one random nut decided he needed killing therefore did not turn him retrospectively into a martyr.

This myth however has served as a focal point for Dutch Islamophobia, confirming the supposed dangers Islam offers to our liberal, tolerant society. Van Gogh’s murder shows the dangers of allowing this alien philosophy to grow unchallenged, showing the need for strict measures to make sure Muslims living in the Netherlands fully share our values — or leave the country. He provided the excuse for all sorts of people to let loose their id, all in the name of freedom of speech, aimed at a part of the Dutch population increasingly seen as alien and unbelonging by a growing segment of (white) voters. It was only after van Gogh’s murder that Islamophobia found its official voice in Geerd Wilders’ PVV, which since than has grown larger and larger, while the established parties seem to have no answer to its rightwing populism, waffling between joining in and condemning it.

A recent and telling example is how the current social democratic minister for integration, Eberhard van der Laan, who today took a strong stance against Wilders by calling his party “dangerous”, while alos having been in the news last week for feeling “uncomfortable” about Turkish and Moroccan people living in council housing while saving up for a house in Turkey or Morocco to retire to — real Dutch people never buy houses in Spain to spent their winters in, apparantly. This sort of me-tooish populism helps legitimise Wilders, while the attacks on him make him look the victim of the “Den Haag establishment” as well as the only honest man there, not changing his opinion ever other day.

Van Gogh’s murder accelerated an already present tendency towards intolerance in the Netherlands, fetishised the idea of free speech as being as rude as you want to without consequences, paved the way for the PVV to quite possibly be the largest party at the next elections, while setting back any serious attempts to deal with integration problems. It may therefore have been the most important political event in the country’s recent political history.

Wilders wants to deport millions of Muslims from Europe

Published on June 16, 20092 Comments

In an interview with a Danish television station Geert Wilders dropped his mask and said that Europe should be prepared to deport millions of Muslims. He argues that any Muslim who “crossed the line” should be “taken back” to their supposed country of origin, whether or not they were an EU citizen. He said that this should not just happen to criminals, but also to any Muslim who believes in Jihad or Sharia law, in what he calls the “Islamic ideology”. All Muslims or even all non-western immigrants should sign a assimilation contract in which they pledge to obey western values and behaviour and if they fail to do so, they should be deported.

However, in interviews with Dutch papers he has already argued that you cannot trust Muslims to keep their pledges anyway, as according to him their religion gives Muslims living in a non-Muslim society the right to “just lie and cheat” — his interpretation of Taqiyya, the right within a Shia theological framework of Muslims to conceal their religious identity when treatened with physical or mental harm because of it. This is a “right” only to be used in situations where Muslims are prosecuted for their beliefs, but Wilders warps it into the right to lie to any non-believer for any reason.

What’s more, the interview makes it clear that Wilders has a problem with all Muslims, not just “radical” or criminal Muslims as he bangs on about the Islamisation of Europe, of mass immigration of Muslims into Europe and how a society will change when twenty, thirty or forty percent of the population is Muslims. He scaremongers by predicting that in 2025 one in three babies born will be of Muslim descent, which as Randy McDonald already showed for France way back in 2004 is nonsense. He constantly reiterates that, despite his protestations about having no problems with Muslim people themselves, a society changes, becomes “less pleasant” when Muslims reach a certain percentage of the population. He also repeats how Muslims are more criminal, that the majority of criminal is from Muslim countries. There is only one solution to this and that’s to sent them back.

These statements are the most clear Wilders has yet made about his intentions. If we look back at his career since 2002 we’ve seen Wilders become, if not necessarily more radical in his views, more radicial in how he expresses them. He has constantly sought out the limit of what’s permissible in a politician, constantly pushed the window so that what was taboo ten years ago is recieved wisdom now. He started as your average, slightly racist rightwing politician obsessed with immigration and integration and now he’s proposing mass expulsion of Muslims from Europe.