I first wrote this post back in February 2013, when Geert Wilders was in Australia, being bigoted and racist.  Given Tony Abbott’s recent comments about instituting a law to ban hate preachers (we already have such laws, but never mind), and a random Guardian commenter’s hope that this wouldn’t block Geert from coming out to Australia, I thought I’d republish this post so we can remember what Geert actually believes in, and the outcome of beliefs such as his.

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Geert Wilders, the bigoted and racist Dutch politician, is in Australia peddling Islamaphobia.  It is safe to say that I pretty much disagree with everything he has to say.  In the marketplace of ideas his viewpoints attract people who already hold the same repugnant views as himself, those that haven’t actually thought deeply about what is being said, and those who are afraid of difference.  I hope in this post to reach the last two groups, the first is welded off from hearing anything I say.

Wilders would have you believe that Europe is at risk of being overrun by Muslims and that he alone stands against the Muslim tide, which would have everyone required to submit to Sharia law, cats and dogs living together, or something.  The article in today’s Age is a bit vague about what all these threats are:

Mr Wilders – impeccably dressed and coiffured, a polished media performer who never raised his voice despite some hostile questioning – said Islam was a totalitarian system that was incompatible with freedom. Individual Muslims might integrate into Western countries, but Islam never could.

“I am here to talk about the Islamisation of Europe,” he said. “If you think what happened in Europe will not happen in Australia, you are totally wrong.”

Shorter Wilders, “The Muslims are coming, things will go badly, run for the hills/ban them from coming in the first place!”

I don’t know “what happened in Europe”, I’m guessing that the French Government banning of Face Covering is clearly the fist move by the Muslims to take Europe, closely followed by banning of Mosque Minarets. Europe must be reeling from such attacks by the Muslim community… oh no wait, I got that back to front – the bigoted and racist Governments in Europe are making the Muslim communities in their respective countries feel unwelcome and unappreciated.

I might also mention from Wikipedia:

Major lethal attacks on civilians in Europe credited to Islamist terrorism include the 1985 El Descanso bombing in Madrid, the 1995 Paris Metro bombings, 11 March 2004 bombings of commuter trains in Madrid, where 191 people were killed, and the 7 July 2005 London bombings, also of public transport, which killed 52 commuters. According to EU Terrorism Report, however, there were almost 500 acts of terrorism across the European Union in 2006, but only one, the foiled suitcase bomb plot in Germany, was related to Islamist terror.^[105] In 2009, a Europol report also showed that more than 99% of terrorist attacks in Europe over the last three years were, in fact, carried out by non-Muslims.^{[106][107][108]} In terms of arrests, out of a total of 1,009 arrested terror suspects in 2008, 187 of them were arrested in relation to Islamist terrorism. The report also showed that the majority of Islamist terror suspects were not first generation immigrants, but were rather children of immigrants who no longer identified with the culture of their parents and at the same time felt excluded from Western society, “which still perceives them as foreigners,” thus they became “more attracted to the idea of becoming ‘citizens’ of the virtual worldwide Islamic community, removed from territory and national culture.” [emphasis added]

In reality, the Islamisation of Europe is all in Wilders’s, and others who think like him, head.  Governments in Europe are nowhere near embracing Islam and instead are making life difficult for their respective Muslim communities.  It is this difficulty and entrenched racism that drives some to extremism.  Less people like Wilders would probably mean less extremists, if I am reading the bolded text above correctly.

For those who believe the Muslim Demographics urban myth, Snopes.com have a lovely debunking of that for you here.

Let’s now consider a vital point that Wilders and his ilk hope you don’t think about.  They talk constantly about the Muslim threat, the Islamisation of Europe, that Muslims are effectively plotting together to enact Sharia in a town near you.  Now just think about this for a moment.  Of all the people you know, how many of them are 100% committed to a religious or political idealology?  Of all those people, what is the percentage of them who will act on their religious or political idealology to attempt to change the status quo?  Of that percentage, how many of them are going to be ultimately successful?  It’ll be a number fairly close to zero.  Now, how many Muslims do you think are actively engaged in Islamicising the nearest town?

Now this may surprise some people but Muslims are not a monolith, they do not have an agenda to take over Europe, or Australia, or even the world.  Muslims don’t even have a central authority unlike Catholicism and the Anglican Church.  The idea of an overarching Muslim agenda smacks very much of a rewording of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A hoax which ultimately resulted in the Holocaust.

The average person has average dreams and ambitions, to be happy, to have somewhere to live, to have people to love and be loved, to enjoy their day, to have enough food to feel full, to be healthy, and to be financially comfortable.  To suggest that anyone of any religion does not have these dreams and ambitions is suggest that they are not the same as you, that they are a completely different type of person and that they have alien desires to your own.

I know that new things are different, and that people asking for recognition of the articles of their faith may seem like they are attempting to force their beliefs on you, but just as religious days such as Christmas and Easter are public holidays in Australia, and that Coles promotes “Fish for Lent” (which pushes Christianity and Catholicism respectively on everyone else), surely recognising that other religions have their own special days and special dietary requirements won’t hurt.  In fact, if it weren’t for the fantastic people who have braved the institutional racism of Australia when they came here, Australia would be a far poorer country in relation to art, fashion, food, innovation, business, design and other fields of endeavour.

Eating Halal food will not make you Muslim no more than eating Kosher food would make you Jewish.  Halal and Kosher are terms that relate to religious requirements for food, they are not a gateway drug into religious experience.  Eating fish during Lent does not make one a Catholic, avoiding eating beef does not make one a Hindu, and being a vegetarian does not make one a Jain or Buddhist.  With the exception of the Mormons baptising people after they’ve died, you cannot be inducted into a religion by stealth.

No religion is superior to another, they are all flawed and I’m not a fan, but I respect people’s individual rights to believe and participate in any faith they choose.

For those people who argue Al Qaeda, I would like to remind you that they are a fringe group, and are definitely a terrorist group, a group who can only control through terror.  I would also point out that other religions have also had their own terrorist groups with Christian Militias (with Israeli help) in Lebanon massacring Muslims in Sabra and Shatila; the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Island; the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda; the Klu Klux Klan in the US, and Sikh Extremism. There is no way that terrorism is an activity only undertaken by Muslim extremists.

In summary:

• People who follow a religion are people
• No religion is superior than another
• Terrorism is a result of extremism and elements of fundamentalism which can occur in any religious group
• Recognising different religion’s special days and dietary requirements is not conversion by stealth
• You cannot be stealth inducted into a religion

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I wrote this post in August 2011, and again with the rise of bigotry towards those who are, or who are identified as, Muslim, particularly Muslim women, I thought I’d publish it again.  This one is particularly for the Jackie Lambies and Cory Bernardies who believe that women can’t be trusted to choose to select which aspects of their faith they want to engage with.

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Feminism is the radical idea that women are people.  People that can reason, think, educate themselves, and make their own decisions.  For some men at the end of the 1800s and early 1900s, this was a radical notion, and one that took a great deal of getting used to.  Society is still structured around the antiquated notion that the default human is male (I’ll blog more on that another time) and so there is still a deep societal distrust of women who do their own thing, who act differently to others, who stand up for themselves, and they get called names, and pressured to be like everyone else, because a group of women being the same is somehow more comforting.

Ok, I might have made most of that up, or it might be a long chain of thoughts from all the feminist blog posts I’ve read over the past ages, or it might be that I’ve been watching the world from the sidelines from time to time.  This post, which is white-Western feminism based, is about what we (and I’m thinking about both society and Western feminists) trust women to do and what we don’t.

This post is partly inspired by Chally’s recent post on religious faith and social justice and on thoughts I was having on the flight over to Malaysia before I fell asleep on the plane.  I’m not sure what inspired them exactly, but let me lay them out for you.

If we can trust women to make up their mind on which political candidate they are going to vote for, if we can trust women to decide on which medical procedures and treatment they wish to undertake, if we can trust women to decide on who they do and do not want to sleep with (slightly contentious in rape culture I know), and if we can trust women to make their own moral and ethical decisions, why do so many of us have trouble trusting women deciding to be religious (with all that their specific faith entails)?

Yes there will always be cases where women are pressured into things, that happens with every example I’ve listed above, and no one suggests that women shouldn’t vote because they’re being pressured into voting for a certain candidate, or that they shouldn’t be able to make their own medical decisions because they’re being pressured into it by someone.

Maybe I’m completely misunderstanding the debate about women who follow the strictures of their faith.  But from what I’ve heard about politicians and some people who identify as feminists, women are clearly being oppressed by the strictures of their faith – the faith that they have most likely chosen to have.

I am an atheist, I am against organised (generally read as Christian) religion attempting to dictate to me and anyone else who isn’t a member of that faith how to behave.  I am for the separation of religion and politics.  But most importantly I am for the right for any individual to practise the faith that they believe in if it is doing no harm to anyone else.

As a former Catholic I remember many of the times I questioned whether what I believed in was real, from when I was a child to the day I stopped believing.  Perhaps we should give religious women credit that they have also spent time questioning their faith and the strictures of that faith, and that they have made a conscious choice to continue believing and to continue practising their faith.  These women do not need to be rescued from an “oppressive religion”, a religion that they probably do not believe to be oppressive – as the nuances and the ways that it is practised will be as individual as each person in that religion.

 

Further reading:

A great discussion on the comment thread of Stargazer’s post on The Hand Mirror, “yet another burqa post”

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I wrote this post in March 2011, and with the current political climate in Australia, I think it  needs to be republished.  The situation described below is not much different in Australia currently with many of our Conservative politicians calling for bans of Sharia law, bans on burqas (which aren’t worn in Australia, and they usually  mean the niqab), and now increased threats and assaults against those who appear to be Muslim.  This typically means Muslim women are being assaulted, usually by bigoted white people.

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I’ve read with… well not exactly dismay because it is part of the whole USA falling into a chasm… more resignation, the stories recently of the US Congress setting up a body to probe US Muslims, of US taxes going towards law enforcement bodies to “educate” them about Islam and instead failing to do so, and about Tennessee wanting to ban Sharia.

[ok I now have a fever and am sick, so if this post doesn’t make all the sense that I intend, apologies]

The stories above are just the Government actions taken against US Muslims.  They do not detail in any way the daily prejudice, discrimination and bigotry faced by Muslims in the US.  Islamaphobia is in full swing.

From where I’m sitting (sick and fuzzy headed), the Islamaphobia in the US (yes, I know it exists in Australia too, and is equally problematic) can lead to some very bad outcomes.  The estimated number of Muslims in the US is around 2.3% of the US population (Australia’s Muslim population is 1.71% of the overall population).  There just are not enough Muslims in the US (or Australia) to rise up and protest against the oppression they’re suffering (unlike the peoples in many Middle Eastern nations currently – which has nothing to do with Islam and all to do with oppression, lack of opportunities, etc).  The research on stereotype threat also suggests that Muslims may feel that they have to conform to the predominant sterotype held of them, which doesn’t do anyone any favours.

If we look back at history, we can see many many examples of groups that have been vilified and terrible results (clearly we are very bad at learning from history and are doomed to repeat it).  The news media played a large part in the Rwandan Genocide.

According to recent commentators, the news media played a crucial role in the genocide; local print and radio media fueled the killings while the international media either ignored or seriously misconstrued events on the ground.[14] The print media in Rwanda is believed to have started hate speech against Tutsis, which was later continued by radio stations. According to commentators, anti-Tutsi hate speech “…became so systemic as to seem the norm.”

…

From late October 1993, the RTLM repeatedly broadcast themes developed by the extremist written press, underlining the inherent differences between Hutu and Tutsi, the foreign origin of Tutsi, the disproportionate share of Tutsi wealth and power, and the horrors of past Tutsi rule. The RTLM also repeatedly stressed the need to be alert to Tutsi plots and possible attacks. It warned Hutu to prepare to “defend” themselves against the Tutsi. (Source: Wikipedia – link above)

Sound familiar?

We can also look at the internment of Japanese people (definitions on who was Japanese or not was interestingly broad) in the US during World War 2.

Many concerns over the loyalty of ethnic Japanese seemed to stem from racial prejudice rather than evidence of actual malfeasance. Major Karl Bendetsen and Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Command, each questioned Japanese American loyalty. DeWitt, who administered the internment program, repeatedly told newspapers that “A Jap’s a Jap” and testified to Congress,

I don’t want any of them [persons of Japanese ancestry] here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty… It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. American citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty… But we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.

…

Internment was popular among many white farmers who resented the Japanese-American farmers. “White American farmers admitted that their self-interest required removal of the Japanese.” These individuals saw internment as a convenient means of uprooting their Japanese American competitors. Austin E. Anson, managing secretary of the Salinas Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association, told the Saturday Evening Post in 1942:

“We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We do. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came into this valley to work, and they stayed to take over… If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we’d never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we do not want them back when the war ends, either.”

The Roberts Commission Report, prepared at President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s request, has been cited as an example of the fear and prejudice informing the thinking behind the internment program. The Report sought to link Japanese Americans with espionage activity, and to associate them with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Columnist Henry McLemore reflected growing public sentiment fueled by this report:

“I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don’t mean a nice part of the interior either. Herd ‘em up, pack ‘em off and give ‘em the inside room in the badlands… Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.”

Other California newspapers also embraced this view. According to a Los Angeles Times editorial,

“A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched… So, a Japanese American born of Japanese parents, nurtured upon Japanese traditions, living in a transplanted Japanese atmosphere… notwithstanding his nominal brand of accidental citizenship almost inevitably and with the rarest exceptions grows up to be a Japanese, and not an American… Thus, while it might cause injustice to a few to treat them all as potential enemies, I cannot escape the conclusion… that such treatment… should be accorded to each and all of them while we are at war with their race.” (Source: Wikipedia article linked above)

Again, the same sort of language is used to vilify a group, which then results in investigation and restriction of that group’s ability to participate in society.  I worry that the Muslims in the West (particularly in the US and Australia) are going to be increasingly targeted and that is going to end up being really bad.  I don’t really have a solution, just fears that the situation is going to get worse, but I hope I can stand up against Islamaphobia whenever I encounter it.

Propagating this fear runs the risk of radicalising the general population against those who follow Islam, and that crimes against Muslims may not be reported or may not be fully investigated by the authorities.  Discrimination and prejudice will continue to rise, people may feel obliged to recant their faith in order to face less bigotry, to hide their culture and act white, to remove their sense of self to find some safety.  This sucks.

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