Islamophobia – Page 5 – Wis[s]e Words

“I think Martin has suffered terribly at the hands of the Guardian”

Published on December 3, 2007

Martin being Martin Amis, the quote being from his writer pal Ian McEwan, refering to Mart’s growing reputation as a racist and/or Islamophobe, because of remarks like these:

“What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs – well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people. It’s a huge dereliction on their part. I suppose they justify it on the grounds that they have suffered from state terrorism in the past, but I don’t think that’s wholly irrational. It’s their own past they’re pissed off about; their great decline. It’s also masculinity, isn’t it?”

McEwan, who is slightly but not much less nuts than Amis on this subject seems to blame the Guardian for publishing articles like the age of horrorism rather than Amis for opening his gob in the first place, which seems a bit unfair. The man himself meanwhile has hit back at his critics with a spectacularly incoherent piece in, you guessed it, the despised Guardian itself:

I want to talk about the discourse, and about the kind of public conversation we should be hoping to have. But before I do that, I will pay my Islamic readers – and I know I have a few – the elementary courtesy of saying that I DO NOT “ADVOCATE” ANY DISCRIMINATORY TREATMENT OF MUSLIMS. AND I NEVER HAVE. And no one with the slightest respect for truth can claim otherwise.

Has he read his earlier remarks quoted above, or does he think that if he denies them hard enough they will go away? Because, you know, that blaming of an entire population for the acts of a few seems awfully close to racism to me, especially considering the context. Ever since the September 11 attacks Amis has left no opportunity unused to discuss his disgust at the ideology behind it and over time he has done so in increasingly general terms, culminating in that awful “Age of horrorism” article which came very close indeed in blaming all of Islam for the misdeeds of September 11.

So is Amis a racist? Not in the sense that he’ll be sticking burning crescents on the council estates of Birmingham perhaps, but at the very least he’s an arrogant, self-absorbed ignorant blowhard who mistakes his regurgitation of whichever book he last read for insight. Very telling indeed in this context is the second paragraph of his “I’m no racist, honest” piece, which begins with “When I was five or six years old, my father took me to meet a black man.” That’s the level of self-absorption we’re dealing with here.

The killing of Theo van Gogh

Published on November 4, 2004

It may just be for the best that Dutch filmaker and writer Theo van Gogh was killed on the day of the US elections, as that way we may possibly be spared the mock outrage and parading of hobby horses by rightwing know-nothings we got when Pim Fortuyn was murdered. Certainly the media here in the Netherlands were filled to the brim with the sort of comments we saw two years ago, full of jeremiahads and dire warnings about the state of free speech and democracy in the Netherlands.

All bullshit.

Theo van Gogh was a provocateur, a shock jock, somebody who sought controverse as much because he relished it as out of genuine conviction. He was an arrogant crude bastard, one of those people, of whom we have had far too many these last two years, who thought freedom of speech meant being able to say anything he wanted, any way he wanted, without regard to the consequences. If you call an entire religion backward, call its adherents goatfuckers and make a movie about domestic violence in Islamic families which is deliberately provocking, by putting half nude women in see through burkas, their bodies painted with verses from the Koran, should you be surprised that somebody wants to kill you for this?

And of course what he wrote, said and filmed does not excuse his murder, no matter how provoking or insulting. However, his murder is not an attack on democracy or freedom of speech; it was far more personal than that. It looks more like a revenge killing, a honour killing.

Let’s not forget the context in which his murder took place. In the last three years or so years, especially after the murder of Pim Fortuyn, the political and cultural climate in the Netherlands has been one in which the right had appropriate to itself the right to talk as loudly and freely as it wanted to, without regards to consequences. Van Gogh was not hounded for his opinions; he was lauded for it. And his grandstanding did not do the cuase he was allegedly championing, domestic violence against Muslim women any good, when you realise his movie, if it had been made about domestic violence amongst Hassidic Jews, would’ve branded him an anti-semite. But because it is anti-Islam, anti-Muslim, it is all right.

If a genuine criticism could be made that until recently, too many existing problems had been taboos, could not be discussed, that there was too much tolerance in the Netherlands for things that should not be tolerated: crime, antisocial behaviour and the like, the last two years the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. We have become too tolerant in the other direction when we have people saying things that are borderline or wholly racist and getting awy with it, with whole population groups –Muslims, immigrants, Moroccans– being demonised, blamed for the failure of the Dutch society to adjust them to it and it to them.

It is therefore not surprising that someone who by all accounts was already radicalised, somewhat of a nutter and who took his religion very serious, would be so insulted by van Gogh’s movie that he was wanted to kill van Gogh for this insult.

Condemn his murder, but do not make Theo van Gogh into a martyr of free speech. He wasn’t. He was killed because he insulted people, not because he told them the truth.

“Openly gay”

Published on May 8, 2002Leave a comment

There is one thing about Pim Fortuyn that it seems foreigners, especially USAnians just cannot get their heads around: him being openly gay. And even more, his being gay and nobody caring about it. How could this be?

The fact is, the personal life of politicians is just not an issue. You may know the domestic arrangements of the various ministers, or you may not. If you know them, it’s usually because it came up in a sidebar to an interview, or because their family was also invited to some gala dinner or such. Unlike the US, we just don’t base our assesments of a politician’s suitability on their private life.

Apart from that, there’s also that homosexuality is an entirely normal and accepted fact of life here. Sure, there are people hostile to homosexuality or uncomfortable with it but on average people don’t care about it. Gay people are treated no different from others, the same legal rights as couples, including the right to marry. Being gay doesn’t mean anything here, isn’t a stigmata, doesn’t condemn you to a live of nightclubs, casual sex and having to hide from “normal” people. Few people are homophobic here.

And those who are, usually keep their hostility to themselves as it’s just not tolerated, as it isn’t for any minority. Fortuyn profited from this attitude in his private life, letting him live an “openly gay” lifestyle without reprecussions. In politics this attitude worked against him since for many people, including myself he crossed a line between legitamite criticism of certain opinions of (some) Muslims and condemning all Muslims for the sins of a few.

It’s true that there is a danger that our society will lose its tolerance towards homosexuals under the influence of immigrants and asylum seekers from less open backgrounds. It’s also true that the Morrocan community in the Netherlands is at the moment the least integrated of the big immigrant groups (others being Turks and Surinamers) as well as originally coming from very conservative areas in Morroco (theRif mountains). That does not mean all Muslims are raging homophobes wanting to burn all faggots in one big auto-da-fe, that they are all automatically suspect. Talking about all Muslims as being homophobes, as being backward and an automatic danger to tolerant Dutch society is what made Fortuyn borderline racists, is what made him controversial.