I have avoided commenting about the Robert Kilroy-Silk affair, which seems to be dominating the British wing of the Blogosphere.
In my option, far too many rightwing bloggers have been praising the piece of ignorant drivel from Mark Steyn, surely the Robert Fisk of the right, which reads all too much like an attempt to stir up racial hatred within Britain. I point you to the fiskings (or should that be Steynings?) of that article by Harry, and by Bobbie of PolitX.
When Eric Olsen praised the same article, and I claimed in the comments thread that many warbloggers were racist, he exploded. It looks like I hit a raw nerve….
since I have made such efforts to disentangle the threads of religion, politics, culture and, to my bafflement, race, is it possible to criticize Arabs or Muslims on political, cultural or religious grounds without being racist?
By choosing your words very carefully, and making it abundantly clear you’re not demonising all Muslims or all Arabs, and not making blanket generalisations. Just like I have to convince my left-wing brother that not all Americans are a cross between Jerry Falwell and Kenneth Lay.
Note that critics of Israel’s security policies have to take the same amount of care, to avoid accusations of Anti-Semitism.
As for ‘Racist Warblogs’, any blog that repeatedly uses deliberately insulting terms like “Religion of Peace(TM)” or “ROPMA”, and makes it clear they hold all Moslems and all Arabs in complete contempt counts as racist in my book. I suppose you could argue that hating a religion rather than a race isn’t technically racism, but to me that’s just splitting hairs; the rhetoric and the emotions are similar, and the end results are depressingly similar; exhibit A: Northern Ireland. exhibit B, the disintegration of Yugoslavia.
Oh, and Tom Paulin is an idiot. Having seen him appearing in the panel of critics on BBC2s “The Late Show”, this sneering elitist twit is the sort that gives critics a bad name; he’s capable of making Germaine Greer sound sensible by comparison. But his nasty Anti-Semitism doesn’t justify other people’s racist outbursts. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
A few words to explain where I’m coming from, and why I feel as strongly about thus subject as I do. As you know, I come from Britain, where we have about a couple of million Muslims out of a population of sixty million, most of them descendants of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent in the 1970s. I grew up in a town, Slough, where Muslims form perhaps 10% of the population (that’s a guess since I don’t have the actual figures, the actual figure may be higher or lower). In general we haven’t experienced much really large-scale racial tension (especially in Slough), but there have been isolated problems in the past couple of years in a couple of northern towns with very high levels of unemployment; in these towns the white supremacist British National Party have been deliberately stirring things. What I don’t want to see is a rising anti-muslim sentiment among the Anglo-Saxon population, because once the Muslims start to feel under siege it can only increase support for extremists within the Muslim community. I think you would agree that would be a Very Bad Thing.
When I read articles by Mark Steyn and others implying that Britain is somehow halfway to Shaira, it sets alarm bells ringing in my head; it’s the same rubbish I’ve heard from ignorant saloon-bar bigots for years. All that ridiculous scare-mongering of that kind from a mainstream newspaper achieves is to embolden the real hardcore racists. For years, every time there’s been a well-publicised racist outburst by some public figure, there’s been a sharp spike in racially motivated assaults. In these times, such rhetoric could easily get people killed.
