Ridley: Islamophobia in the West
Aug. 30th, 2006 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatarperegrineI was going to write about Yvonne Ridley's talk on Islamophobia, but I don't feel I have much to say. I agree with a colleague who said Ridley just didn't add much to the dialogue. Her speech consisted largely of outrageously unsubstantiated claims that most of the audience agreed with anyway, and that was about that. It didn't really fuel intellectual discussion.
There's not much to refute when everything she said was couched in vague sentiments like "we should develop a zero-tolerance approach to anyone who'd try to dilute our faith" without specifying who is diluting the faith or (more importantly) exactly what a zero-tolerance approach would mean.
Much of the talk was actually from her recent article Beware the Happy Clappies, so if you did not hear her speak, reading that will give you a gist of her rhetoric.
The only major section of her speech not appearing in the article was on the Mohammed cartoon controversy. Specifically, she lifted up the Muslim world's response to that incident as an ideal display of Muslim values and solidarity. She said that the Muslim response sent the message "We can be strong; you can only push us so far." As proof of this she said gleefully that "You'd have to have an editor with suicidal tendencies to publish a cartoon [like those] again." I found this rather stunning. I don't know any Westerners who feel they have a more positive understanding of Islam as a result of the Mohammed cartoon controversy.
Harking back to my blog entry about about pacifism in Islam, she also said, "Muslims are not pacifists. We're peace-loving people, but we're not pacifists."
There's not much to refute when everything she said was couched in vague sentiments like "we should develop a zero-tolerance approach to anyone who'd try to dilute our faith" without specifying who is diluting the faith or (more importantly) exactly what a zero-tolerance approach would mean.
Much of the talk was actually from her recent article Beware the Happy Clappies, so if you did not hear her speak, reading that will give you a gist of her rhetoric.
The only major section of her speech not appearing in the article was on the Mohammed cartoon controversy. Specifically, she lifted up the Muslim world's response to that incident as an ideal display of Muslim values and solidarity. She said that the Muslim response sent the message "We can be strong; you can only push us so far." As proof of this she said gleefully that "You'd have to have an editor with suicidal tendencies to publish a cartoon [like those] again." I found this rather stunning. I don't know any Westerners who feel they have a more positive understanding of Islam as a result of the Mohammed cartoon controversy.
Harking back to my blog entry about about pacifism in Islam, she also said, "Muslims are not pacifists. We're peace-loving people, but we're not pacifists."
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Re: the face of islam
Date: 2006-09-12 08:56 am (UTC)So what don't you believe about the "official versions" of the Holocaust and 9/11?
Re: the face of islam
Date: 2006-09-15 05:41 am (UTC)I would like to suggest you some pages where these things are described in detail - but they are always destroyed .
I also read some memoires of survivors. They tell themselves - that there was puppet show for the children - and in the hospital the German tried to cure them. Somehow such things do not fit into image of the death factory .
the history is always written by the winners . They had to create az awful image of the defeated German . they had to do so partly - to make the world forget Hiroshima ,Drezda etc .
And why do we have to remember always about the Jews mass-killings ? In my country a Jewish writer published a book - claiming- that the number of Slavs killed in WW II was much greater - than the Jews.(even if we believe the death factory ) Tiny Belgium is the responsible for the biggest massacre of the Modern history - in Belgian Congo . But we never commemorate the victims of mass-killings unless they are Jews .
WHY ?