ISLAM-O-PHOBIA IS DANGEROUS HUMBUG

It is doubtful that a single case of ‘Islamophobia’  has ever existed,

Among the most purely dishonest expressions in modern politics (eclipsing even ‘Social justice’) is ‘Islamophobia’. A phobia – the word comes from an ancient Greek term meaning more-or-less ‘panic’ – is a haunting, disabling, panic-inducing, and above all irrational, terror of something generally considered harmless. Cats, clowns, enclosed spaces and the number 13 are among a myriad of such objects.

I knew a small boy who, very suddenly, became thrown into a state of screaming terror at the mention or sight of bones. He would not eat fish or meat if there was a possibility of touching a bone in them, or enter a room containing a kid’s skull-and-cross bones flag. His mother, a nursing sister, had to cut all the pictures of skeletons out of her text-books.

Yet shortly before the onset of this phobia his mother had taken him to a nursing exhibition and he had explored a skeleton there perfectly happily. He had even shown off by lecturing on the names of the bones his mother had taught him. His condition persisted into his early teens and then died away (being bullied at school had probably shown him more rational fears). That is a phobia. It is quite irrational and is often cured by the passage of time, or even by actual contact with the object of dread. ‘Islamophobia’ is not a phobia at all, though survivors of Islamic terror may feel a fear of Muslims that is perfectly understandable, as survivors of Auschwitz fear SS uniforms.

It is not a phobia to criticise Islam’s oppression of women, the literally countless terrorist activities all over the world, or the huge, ongoing massacres of Christians in the third world. Recently a girls’ school in an Islamic country caught fire. The religious police pushed the fleeing girls back into the flames because they were improperly dressed. Is it irrational, or ‘phobic’ to criticise a religion, or a sect, that allows or encourages such things?

The practice of female genital mutilation is common not only in many Islamic countries but also in Islamic communities in many Western countries, where the crones who carry out the operation (often using razor blades or broken glass) are specially flown in. The purpose is to deprive women of any possibility of sexual pleasure – one of the most joyous and fulfilling experiences of life. One rationale is that it keeps them faithful to the husbands whose property they are.

Muslim holy writings endorse rape of captured women, and almost all Muslim countries are committed to not just the conquest but the extermination of Israel and the Jews, who they teach are descended from pigs and monkeys. Nor of course, is Australia untouched by this.

Fear of accusations of Islamophobia and associated evils played a big part in Britain’s Rothertham scandal, where girls were sexually assaulted by Muslim men while authorities did nothing. A Christian woman in present-day, nuclear-armed, Pakistan, Asia Bibi, was sentenced to death for drinking from a Muslim cup. The local governor who tried to stop this was himself murdered; his murderer hailed by vast crowds as a hero. It is hardly necessary to mention the abominations of Iran and Isis. And it is hardly ‘Islamophobic’ or irrational to criticise all this.

Islamic religious extremism is not, as many suggest, the property of a tiny minority. Surveys in Britain and elsewhere show that large numbers of young Muslims – in some cases overwhelming majorities – agree with various extremist propositions, including support for the torturing, head-chopping savagery of Isis, and the total destruction of Israel. Meanwhile in Germany, women have been issued with running shoes to help them flee from rape by immigrants.

The mass outbreaks of violence and sexual assaults by Muslim ‘asylum seekers’ and others in Germany, Sweden, Holland, France, Britain and God-only-knows what third-world hell-holes are not irrelevant. Nor is the fact that Islam since its inception has expanded almost entirely by armed conquest, making an unremitting assault on Europe from the East to Vienna and from the West to Tours in France; and which has been held in check only by Western science, technology and military valour. Of course, a quasi-exception today is Sweden, where a weird, Eloi-like establishment is not only failing to resist its new conquerors but appears to be positively accommodating them, lavishing social benefits on them and pouring money over extremist leaders as well as, presumably to appease the growing Islamic electorate, subscribing to the most noxious kind of anti-Semitism, which now seems actually official in some areas of Government. Dagens Nyheter, the most sophisticated Swedish newspaper, published a violently anti-Semitic op-ed entitled ‘It is allowed to hate the Jews’. This sums up the whole international race-relations industry, and its one-way campaign against Jews, against the West, but nobody else. In a statement of pure suicidal cultural capitulationism, such as would have shamed Marshal Pétain, Sweden’s ‘Minister for Democracy’, Jens Orback, claimed: ‘We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims so that when we become a minority they will be so towards us.’ No Islamophobia here! And this from the nation that once gave the world Eric Blood-Axe and Thorfinn Skull-Splitter. No wonder many Swedish youth are coming to look upon the Viking age with nostalgia. Sweden, and more or less the other Western countries, really are facing the renewal of an ancient existential threat. What form, if any, the reaction will take is anybody’s guess.

Very alarmingly, there is a repeat of this new Stockholm syndrome in Australia, where a significant number of Labor MPs, mostly in electorates with large Muslim populations, have turned viciously and violently against beleaguered democratic Israel. Given all this, ‘Islamophobia’ is not a phobia in the medical or psychological sense at all, nor is it remotely comparable to inherently irrational phobias. It is doubtful that a single case of ‘Islamophobia’ in the clinical sense of over-mastering, paralysing, irrational terror and panic has ever existed, though there are good grounds to rationally fear Islamic extremism, whether expressed by direct terrorism or stealth invasion.