Blogger Tipu Sultan argues that Maryam Namazie of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain is a hate preacher and should not be given airtime in the media.
The recent national discourse on the successes and failings of multiculturalism is the latest tool being used as a cover by some in the mainstream to propagate bigoted hate speech.
The hijacking of social trends to convey, under stealth, that which would otherwise be rejected by the rational mind is nothing new. The problem with the latest manifestation of this old phenomenon is that it is actually gaining some traction in mainstream media.
But we must speak out against such discrimination in order to preserve our celebrated British basic rights to freedom.
One of the main culprits conducting this campaign promoting discrimination is our very own ex-Muslim, Maryam Namazie. To her credit, she has worked tirelessly to create an artificial, and at best a thinly-veiled academic distinction between Muslims and Islam in order to not get labelled a racist bigot and fall foul of laws protecting communities from hate speech and related crimes.
She used to be careful and say that she abhorred Islamism as a whole (ie an extremist application of Islam or “political Islam”), a euphemism for hating Islam itself, and only had specific criticisms of Islam as a religion which is agreeably her right if that was indeed the case.
However, more recently she’s gotten carried away with the perceived acceptance of being an Islamophobe and stated “if Islamism is not Islam, well then people who’re telling me that Islam is something else should in fact tell the Islamists”.
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Her writings use the terms interchangeably, criticising any defence of any part of Islam and her deeply-held emotional state of utter hatred for Islam as a religion is no more being sidestepped but being openly declared.
An educated mind can engage in a critical analysis of the parts of Islam but if a complete irrational broad brush of the religion of nearly 2 billion people as being “evil” and deserving of abolition is not considered “phobic” then nothing ever will.
Namazie openly says that abolishing fundamentalism among Muslims is not enough and neither is a reinterpretation of Islam. Only an end to a 1400 year old belief system of a quarter of the human race will satisfy her irrational phobic tendencies.
Racism
But is she a racist?
According to the Oxford dictionary race is “A group of people sharing the same culture, history, language, etc”. As a classification method, it is commonly employed to categorise people into groups by anatomical, cultural, geographical, historical, religious, linguistic and social affiliations.
If this was not the case then saying “I hate Americans” wouldn’t be racist since they do not represent any single race of people (as defined in the traditional sense) but a variety of races sharing a political/geographic identity.
So to say “I hate Muslims” is hence as racist as any statement can be. The commentator Nisrene Malik rightly pointed out that “The fixation on terminology and not the reality suggests a society that does not want to come to terms with the creeping ugliness of hatred….. Racism is behaviour, not an informed academic position”.
Can an “ex-Muslim” still be a Muslim?
Maryam Namazie tried to categorise the people she hates and clarifies that it is not all Muslims but just the ones she finds to be “extreme”.
She believes that “Muslims…include secularists, ex-Muslims, atheists…” and therefore cannot be pigeonholed into a single homogeneous group. However, it is a logical fallacy to say that an ex-“something” can still be that very thing! A Muslim, by the very definition of the word cannot be an atheist.
She further states that “clearly, the ‘Muslim community’ is not synonymous with Islamism any more than English is synonymous with the English Defence League or Christian with the Christian-Right”.
That is as logically contradictory as saying that being British is not synonymous with having some sort of connection to Britain. Being English is a national/geographical/cultural identity and it is certainly not synonymous with a single political party representing just one facet (and a small one at that) of our identity just as being Christian is not synonymous with any single sect of the religion.
A correct statement to make would have been to say “being Muslim is not synonymous with being Alawi or Ahmadiyya”.
However, to detach being a Muslim from Islam itself is devoid of the most basic understanding of the meanings of the terms and is akin to saying that one can be British but detach that completely from having any link to the UK.
The Oxford dictionary itself defines a Muslim as “A follower of the religion of Islam”. How can a thing be and not be at the same time? How can one believe in Islam to qualify for being a Muslim and yet, at the same time, not believe in Islam to qualify for being a variant acceptable to Maryam Namazie?
Yet Namazie is regularly invited on to mainstream television channel to discuss on behalf of Islam and Muslims.
Unfortunately, inside her hate filled Islamophobic and bigoted world the only “Muslims” that are acceptable are the ones that do not believe in Islam. The rest need to be condemned for what they are – Muslims.
Condemned to what, one wonders? Would she like to condemn them all to death, prison or just “re-education” so that they can become acceptable Muslims who do not associate with or believe in Islam?
Despite her desperately contrived statements to the contrary when speaking on television for the masses, reeking of political correctness but no honesty, she is clearly and obviously a Muslim-hater of epic proportions revelling in spreading social unrest and antagonising relations between European Muslims and their entirely friendly co-habiting non-Muslim compatriots.
What is Maryam Namazie fighting against?
Sadly it is not extremism, multiculturalism or cultural relativism that she fights against.
Token criticism of far-right organisations and ideologies in addition to those espoused by certain fringe Muslim groups is not enough to whitewash her singular objective in life – to eliminate any traces of Islam from the face of the earth and in the process “deal” with any Muslims who believe in its virtues and philosophy.
It is all, however, a very human reaction. One can never understand the extent and intensity of the internal suffering of someone who is tortured at the hands of government entities. It is bound to produce extremists such as Maryam Namazie.
Nevertheless, it does not give her the right to target with such severe hatred an entire legitimate segment of humanity simply because luck would have it that her suffering was carried out at the hands of people who unfortunately happened to be Muslim. She has effectively become what created her, the very thing she despises; a hateful oppressor of the rights of people to make conscious decisions and not be attacked for it.
The British public has a duty to call out hate preachers and firmly establish the rule of law that grants everyone the right to practice their beliefs without persecution. As sorry as it is, regarding what happened to her at the hands of the Iranian regime, we the British public cannot stand by idly and allow her to continue spreading racism and social discord that may have contributed to so many hate crimes in our country.
