Pissing into the wind

The complex nature of Islam, at once both a religious and a political system (and in the UK at least, also a marker for a minority cultural identity) presents some serious challenges to its would-be critics.

Here in the West we have lately tendered a respect for other people's nutty religious opinions significantly in excess of that on offer for wayward political doctrines − especially those that appear to violate the tolerant, pluralistic principles at the heart of our democracy.

Unlike Islam, Christianity was far from fully theocratic at birth. It might have possessed a certain puffed-up righteousness, but it took the merger with the failing Roman state facilitated by Emperor Constantine to give it the monopoly of lethal power that Mohammed always intended for his seventh century upgrade.

Consequently Islamism, the world-view that most fully embraces this vision, has accelerated the flourishing of a newly self-assertive kind of atheism in the West, which clearly feels more comfortable about using Muslim fundamentalists as a punching bag than home-grown nutjobs like the Mormons (see below). In effect, the apparent obnxiousness of Islam's political and social pretensions to the liberal-minded, has driven them to overcome the taboo that has discouraged obnoxiousness on matters of private conviction.

And once they start having a go at Islam's obvious lack of consideration for Man's lawmaking capabilities, it has been deeply tempting for western infidels to widen their critique into the overall silliness of Islamic dogma, even that part of it with no obvious political ramifications. Like the hair-trigger defenders of the Prophet, they also often give the impression of being uncertain whether they are comfortable with the creeping racial overtones within this debate.

Islamophobia isn't racism per se, but there can be no argument that it is often fed by an underlying racist sensibility. I'm personally acquainted with a couple of quite virulent Islamophobes, who I'd have to say show all the signs of this. (I know another who is perhaps more like Christopher Hitchens, the discriminatory type.)

However, it remains my view that it should be permissable to stand up and criticise Islam − in effect to express a reasoned hostility to a particular flavour of otherness − without running the risk of being silenced as a bigot and a racist, simply because, as Ronan Bennet insists, Islam is not "only about faith but also about identity, background and culture, and Muslims are overwhelmingly non-white."

Racism as I understand it, and as it was understood by the architects of the Holocaust for sure, means despising someone for their biological nature, and thereby desiring their extermination (or at least removal from anywhere near your job, home etc.). There is a qualitative difference between having your identity dissed and being pushed into a gas chamber, and the recent readiness of some Muslims to draw facile comparisons between their current situation and that of Jews in Hitler's Germany is to be deplored.

You could argue that the majority of the Spaniards that turned up in Central America at the start of the sixteenth century were racists in the sense I have suggested (in spite of the fact that a good number immediately jumped into the sack with the natives). Importantly however, regardless of their views about the innate fitness of the indigenous people to participate in civilisation, their criticisms of the local religious practices − which involved ripping people's hearts out, eating their limbs and wearing their skins − remain valid on an ethical scale that we can and should keep up today.

So, it should also be permissable to draw distinctions based on cultural value-judgments. And we shouldn't forget that while some aliens come in peace, others want to tickle our earlobes with their forked tongues before biting our heads off. Respect for otherness should always be tempered with caution.

And so to the thought that originally prompted this post.

The God of most educated monotheistic believers is a combination of the deity described by their co-religionists across history and the personal one that they have, in a sense, discovered on their own. Religious texts and nutty dogmas are really not much more than the ultimately discardable scaffolding they have used to construct their own private set of consolations. So the ever proselytising Mssrs Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens are never likely to win a substantial number of educated converts to their brand of unbelief, whilst the uneducated are unlikely to even be aware of their polemics. They are, I'm afraid, pissing into the wind.

Anyway, for your viewing entertainment, a fine example of internecine, inter-nutjob in-fighting from the American presidential campaign: