| Anti-Muslim "Racism"? |  |
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 22, 2005
Posted on 11/22/2005 6:41:50 AM PST by SJackson
My talks at university campuses sometimes occasion protests featuring Leftists and Islamists who call me names. A favorite of theirs is “racist.” This year, for example, a “Stand up to Racism Rally” anticipated my talk at the Rochester Institute of Technology, I was accused of racism against Muslim immigrants at Dartmouth College, and pamphlets at the University of Toronto charged me with “anti-Muslim racism.”
Anti-Muslim racism? That oxymoron puzzled me. Islam being a religion with followers of every race and pigmentation, where might race enter the picture? Dictionaries agree that racism concerns race, not religion:
Even the notorious United Nations anti-racism conference at Durban in 2001 implicitly used this same definition when it rejected “any doctrine of racial superiority, along with theories which attempt to determine the existence of so-called distinct human races.”
Thus understood, the term racist cannot be ascribed to me, as I neither believe that race defines capabilities nor that certain races have greater capabilities than others. Also, my writings and talks never touch on issues of race.
Does that mean the word racist merely serves leftists and Islamists as an all-purpose pejorative, a magical insult that discredits without regard to accuracy? No, the evolution of this word is more complex than that.
Racism is now increasingly used to mean something far beyond its dictionary definition. The director of the influential London-based Institute of Race Relations (IRR), A. Sivanandan, has been pushing the concept of a “new racism” which concerns immigration, not race:
It is a racism that is not just directed at those with darker skins, from the former colonial territories, but at the newer categories of the displaced, the dispossessed and the uprooted, who are beating at western Europe’s doors, the Europe that helped to displace them in the first place. It is a racism, that is, that cannot be colour-coded, directed as it is at poor whites as well, and is therefore passed off as xenophobia, a “natural” fear of strangers.
An official paper from Australia goes in a different direction, that of “cultural racism”:
In the modern era the underlying assumption of “racism” is a belief that differences in the culture, values, and/or practices of some ethnic/religious groups are “too different” and are likely to threaten “community values” and social cohesion.
Once racism is un-moored from racial characteristics, it is a small step to apply it to Muslims. Indeed, Liz Fekete of IRR discovers “anti-Muslim racism” in the legislation, policing, and counter-terrorist measures deriving from the “war on terror” (her quote marks). She also sees the French banning of the hijab in public schools, for example, as a case of “anti-Muslim racism.” Others at IRR allege that “Muslims and those who look like Muslims are the principal targets of a new racism.”
Likewise, the Reverend Calvin Butts, III, of the Abyssinian Baptist Church of New York, opined recently at a United Nations conference on Islamophobia: “whether Muslims like it or not, Muslims are labeled people of color in the racist U.S…they won’t label you by calling you a nigger but they’ll call you a terrorist.” For Butts, counterterrorism amounts to racism.
When U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo raised the idea of bombing Islamic holy sites as a form of deterrence, a Nation of Islam leader in Denver, Gerald Muhammad, deemed his comments racist.
Note the evolution: as belief in racial differences and racial superiority wanes in polite society, some parties expand the meaning of racism to condemn political decisions such as worrying about too much immigration (even of poor whites), preferring one’s own culture, fearing radical Islam, and implementing effective counterterrorist measures.
This attempt to delegitimize political differences must be rejected. Racism refers only to racial issues, not to views on immigration, culture, religion, ideology, law enforcement, or military strategy.
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Pause a moment and take the following test:
In 1979, the U.S. embassy in Iran was taken over by:
(a) Norwegians from Ballard;
(b) Elvis;
(c) A tour bus full of 80-year-old women
(d) Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40.
In 1983, the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up by:
(a) A pizza delivery boy;
(b) Crazed feminists screeching that being able to throw a grenade
beyond its own burst radius was an unfair and sexist requirement
in basic training;
(c) Geraldo Rivera making up for a slow news day
(d) Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40.
In 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed by:
(a) Luca Brazzi, for not being given a part in "Godfather 2;"
(b) The Tooth Fairy;
(c) Butch and Sundance who had a few sticks of dynamite left over
from the train thing
(d) Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40.
In 1998, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by:
(a) Mr. Rogers;
(b) Hillary, to distract attention from Wee Willie's women problems;
(c) the WWF, to promote its next villain: "Mustapha the Merciless;"
(d) Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40.
October 12, 2000, 17 US sailors lost their lives on the USS Cole and this was done by:
a) That Purple Teletubbie
b) Gary Condit
c) LA Crips street gang
d) Muslim extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
December 2000 a person tries to light a shoe bomb on a commercial jetliner and this was done by:
a) Mother Theresa
b) an Italian guy from New York City named "Giacomo"
c) hard working Hispanic farm workers
d) Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
On 9/11/01, four airliners were hijacked and destroyed by:
(a) Bugs Bunny,
(b) the Supreme Court of Florida trying to outdo their attempted
hijacking of the 2000 Presidential election;
(c) Mr. Bean
(d) Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40.
I'm a realist, not a racist.
"A couple years back I was labelled a 'racist' because I put forth my idea that any new immigrants that came to Canada should learn to speak English and stop speaking their native tongue everywhere they go."
I guess the left has installed the same hot button in Canada. As we both know, language and race are not the same thing.
I think you'd agree that seeking a common language is a good thing, and about as far from racism as you can get.
But the left keeps beating the same drum, and amazingly, they still get people to listen.
"I'm a realist, not a racist.
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I think the author was implying just that: The new meaning for racism is based in revisionist (false) history, and is therefore unconcerned with truth when it renders its meaning. In fact, since truth is so often in opposition to the "new racism," a realist, at best, is a distraction, and at worst, a super-racist.
Like you, my friend, I would be considered the Lex Luthor of racists. Booh! hehehe... (evil tone).
You said it. I was shunned by a whole group of people for this, even though I myself offered up the example of my own Grandparents who came from Eatern Europe in the 30s, and learned to speak their new country's language. While they still spoke in the Slavic tongue at home, they spoke English when out in public and when doing business.
But this didn't fly with the lefties I was around at the time, most probably because I'm white and the immigrants whom I was complaining about were a group of Mexicans who had come up to Canada, had been here a couple of years and still could not speak the language.
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