Paris 2015 & Islamophobia – II

By Izeth Hussain –November 28, 2015

Izeth Hussain

I have already established the point that irrationality, fanaticism, intolerance, violence, murderousness are not integral to Islam. I can provide more details of course but that is not going to convince the Islamophobe. A further point to be made is that violent Muslim reactions to the Danish cartoons or theCharles Hebdo material should not be regarded as peculiar to Muslims. His Holiness the Pope made the point during his visit to Sri Lanka that if you insult someone you have to expect reactions from him. One can add of course that if the insult is to something held sacred by a human group the negative reactions will be all the more intense. We can be certain that if there are insults to a Buddha statue or a Krishna statue there will be angry reactions, probably violent, in Sri Lanka or India. It will not be so in the West if there are insults to Christ and Christianity. That is because there has been a long tradition of secularism and anti-religion in the West dating from the eighteenth century and even earlier. That is not something that we need to emulate. Most Muslims, including myself, would hold that disrespect for the sacred betrays a degree of spiritual impoverishment. We must absorb the best in the West, not the worst.

A further point to be made against Islamophobes is their propensity to double standards. They will react with much intensity to the Paris outrages but not to the drone attacks on Muslims. The Americans are well aware that in drone attacks non-combatant innocents are almost invariably killed, and certainly far more innocents are killed in drone attacks than in the Paris bombings, but all that is dismissed as incidental collateral damage. We can also be certain that in the French revenge bombings on the IS far more innocents have been killed than in the Paris bombings. I would agree that the Paris bombings can be regarded as savage and betrays something sub-human in the perpetrators. But what words are left to describe the savaging of Iraq in 2003 in which around a million innocent Iraqis were killed? Bush and Blair lied about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They lied in order to wreak racist revenge on an Arab country for 9/11. The point I am making is that Muslims can sink into savagery but so can the West. The Islamophobes can’t recognize that fact.

Islamophobia is a form of racism. As in the case of other convinced racists it will not be possible to make the Islamophobe change his views, and the best that can be done would be to bring about an enlightened understanding of what Islamic fundamentalism and the IS are all about, so that the potential harm to this society can be contained. The best article I know for this purpose is entitled Don’t give ISIS what it wants, by Stephen M. Walt, Professor of International Relations at Harvard University, which appeared about three days after the Paris bombings. He wrote that the emergence of the IS “ is symptomatic of the broader legitimacy and governance crisis in the Arab and Islamic world. It is also, however, an unfortunate response to decades(or even centuries) of Western interference in the Middle East, and especially to the policies that have taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the region.Read More