Bill Maher, a self-proclaimed “9/11 Liberal” has a history of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, claiming falsely that Islam and Muslims are: uniquely more violent than practitioners of other faiths, the Bible is less violent than the Qur’an, there are “too many Mohammads” in the West and he is fearful they will “takeover,” Arab men (who he interchanges with Muslims) are all horrible to women, and women cannot vote in 19 out of 22 Arab states. Maher is also a staunch supporter of Obama’s drone assassination programand is on record defending Geert Wilders.
Category Archives: Liberal
Lies and hysteria over ‘gender segregation’
When Universities UK published its guidelines on External Speakers in Higher Education Institutions last month it can hardly have anticipated the outcry that would result.
The publication’s rather pedantic discussion of the possible legal implications of a hypothetical public meeting where gender separation was requested by a visiting speaker unleashed a wave of outrage, with UUK being angrily denounced for advocating a system of discrimination that was variously compared to the US South in the 50s or South Africa under apartheid (a protest last Tuesday evening outside the UUK headquarters in London “echoed much of what Nelson Mandela fought for”, wrote the Telegraph‘s Emma Pearce).
Education secretary Michael Gove (author of the Islamophobic tract Celcius 7/7) stepped in to accuse UUK of “pandering to extremism”. And by the end of last week media fury had reached such a pitch that the prime minister himself felt it necessary to intervene, with a spokesman stating that David Cameron “doesn’t believe guest speakers should be allowed to address segregated audiences”.
Student Rights director promotes ‘counterjihad’-style propaganda against Islam
Last month Observer columnist Nick Cohen posted a piece on his Spectator blog in which he attempted to distance himself from some of the more extreme elements in the Islamophobia industry.
Admitting that he had felt “irritable” when former English Defence League leader Stephen Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”) was presented as a guest of honour at an event where Cohen himself was speaking – it was to mark an award presented to the film Silent Conquest – Cohen even went so far as to state that he was “uneasy” about the message contained in the paranoid Islamophobic documentary he had been helping to publicise. He wrote: “Robinson’s appearance after a film that had made Muslims seem both an homogenous bloc and a conquering army summed up everything that was going wrong with the Right’s reaction to militant Islam.”
Nick Cohen speaks at anti-Islam festival where former EDL leader is guest of honour
Lars Hedegaard accepts award for ‘Silent Conquest’ (left) and Nick Cohen with Firoozeh Bazrafkan (right)
Nick Cohen recently treated us to yet another of his “Left capitulates to Islamism” articles, this one in the Spectator. As is often the way with Cohen, he tried to evade accusations of Islamophobia by framing his arguments as an expression of admiration for a non-white opponent of Islam, in this case the Danish-Iranian artist Firoozeh Bazrafkan. He recounted:
When I met her, she was enduring a crash course in politically correct Europe’s many hypocrisies. White Danes reported her to the police for writing that Muslim men abuse and murder their daughters, and adding for good measure that the ‘Koran is more immoral, deplorable and crazy than manuals of the two other global religions combined’.
You could say that her remarks were offensive. You could say that the inattentive reader might just take them to mean that all Muslim men abuse and murder their daughters. But if every remark that someone might find offensive or misinterpret were banned, the human race would fall silent.
Lib Dem parliamentary candidate calls for niqab ban
Fresh from assisting the former (but entirely unreformed) English Defence League leader Stephen Lennon to carry out a cynical rebranding exercise, and then joining his protégé in spreading inflammatory anti-Muslim rumours, Quilliam’s Maajid Nawaz has now taken up the battle against the niqab.
In an article for the Daily Mail‘s RightMinds blog, Nawaz declares: “It’s time we tackled head on the genuine security concerns and social consequences of face-veiling in modern Britain.” The Mail, of course, is notorious for its PC-inspired reluctance to address that issue.
French cartoonist combines anti-union propaganda with Islamophobia
The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France draws our attention to the recent controversy over a cartoon published in Le Monde last week.
Drawn by the paper’s longtime cartoonist Plantu, the illustration refers to recent court judgements – backed by the French trade union organisation, the Confédération générale du travail – that a number of retail outlets including the home improvement store Castorama were operating illegally on Sunday.
A snarling Muslim is depicted as shouting “I forbid you to go to school” at a young girl, while a CGT representative shouts at a woman employee “I forbid you to go to work on Sunday”. It is difficult to say who this is more offensive to – Muslims or trade unionists.
Yes, Muslims are denouncing the Nairobi terrorist attack
Talk show hosts at Fox News have been whipping US viewers up into a state of indignation over Muslims’ supposed failure to condemn the terrorist attack in Kenya.
Bill O’Reilly demanded: “What is the Muslim world doing about it? Nothing!” And Bob Beckel expanded on this theme:
‘Secularist’ irrationality over the veil
The level of argument from secularists denouncing the niqab has reached a new low recently. Here, for example, is Joan Smith writing in the Independent on Sunday:
I’m aghast at the prospect of being treated by a health professional in a niqab. Patients often have to discuss intimate matters with GPs and nurse-practitioners, from sexual health to domestic violence. If someone doesn’t trust me enough to let me see her face, I’m hardly going to feel comfortable about her carrying out an intimate procedure such as a cervical smear. Nor is it easy to imagine a man discussing the symptoms of prostate cancer with a health professional whose idea of “modesty” doesn’t allow her to expose her nose.
Lib Dem minister calls for debate on Islamic veil
The government should consider banning young Muslim women from wearing the veil in public places, a Liberal Democrat minister has said. The Home Office minister, Jeremy Browne, called for a national debate on whether the state should step in to prevent young women having the veil imposed upon them. His intervention came after a row erupted over the decision by Birmingham Metropolitan college to drop a ban on the wearing of full-face veils amid public protests.
‘What me, an Islamophobe?’ Stephen Fry replies to critics
Under the headline “Stephen Fry hits back at accusations of Islamophobia”, the Independent on Sunday reported yesterday on the controversy over Stephen Fry’s endorsement of Nick Cohen’s “superb” defence of their fellow atheist Richard Dawkins and his position on Islam.
In a Twitter exchange on 22 August, responding to the criticism that Dawkins has described the Islamic faith as the greatest force for evil in the world and “clearly targets Islam in particular”, Fry sneered: “Wonder why. Oh, have a look around the world and see them slaughtering each other, let alone others. So charming to women too…”
You’ll note how, in Fry’s formulation, Islam the faith becomes “them”, the Muslims. And Muslims are then equated with murder and misogyny. A clearer expression of mindless bigotry would be difficult to find.
When his critic persisted in arguing that Dawkins was “entitled to call a small religious minority evil but branding an entire religion as ‘evil’ is beyond ignorant”, Fry didn’t have an answer. Eventually he just dismissed his opponents as “dickheads” and told them to “fuck off”.