Posted on 07/23/2012 10:43:23 AM PDT by bayouranger
In the wake of the incident of the "Allahu akbar-shouting Olympic torch-snatcher in London, the headline on a July 8 article in the Guardian by a British Muslim journalist named Mehdi Hasan may seem, shall we say, a mite ironic: "We mustnt allow Muslims in public life to be silenced. The piece was a bid for pity. "Have you ever been called an Islamist? it began. "How about a jihadist or a terrorist? Extremist, maybe? Welcome to my world .Every morning, I take a deep breath and then go online to discover what new insult or smear has been thrown in my direction .the abuse is as relentless as it is vicious. Hasans claim is that this "abuse mostly by readers commenting online on his articles is evidence of "Islamophobia and is part and parcel of a widespread, insidious attempt to suppress the voices of Muslims in the public square.
Hasan says that he has been targeted throughout his career in journalism by this repulsive effort to silence Muslim voices. "On joining the New Statesman in 2009 [as political editor], I was promptly subjected to an online smear campaign .Three years later, as I leave the New Statesman to join the Huffington Post UK [as political director], little seems to have changed. If anything emerges clearly from Hasans plaint, its that if anyones trying to silence him, it sure aint working. Au contraire this guys journalistic career is thriving. Though hes leaving the New Statesman as editor, hell remain in its pages as a weekly columnist. Hes been a welcome regular contributor to the Guardian for some time now. He appears frequently on the popular political talk shows Newsnight and Question Time. And hes just been given his own series on where else? Al Jazeera. In short, despite the supposed campaign to "silence him and other Muslims, Hasan has held top positions at some of the top media organizations in Britain few (probably none) of which would ever dream of hiring anyone remotely critical of his religion.
One reason for all the vitriol directed at him, Hasan insists, is that "Islamophobes have misrepresented his views and twisted his words. But the evidence is out there, and the facts are plain and damning. In a 2009 talk to a group of his fellow Muslims, Hasan disparaged non-Muslims as "animals, bending any rule to fulfill any desire. In another 2009 talk to a similar audience, he called atheists "cattle and "people of no intelligence. Last November, in an essay for the Guardian, he turned the truth about Irans nuclear ambitions on its head, defending that countrys desire for an H-bomb by depicting Israel as an aggressor out to destroy Iran and representing Iranians as consequently, and understandably, "fearful, nervous, defensive. As for Hasans contributions to The New Statesman, Douglas Murray summed them up in 2009 with the wry observation that "Hasan appears to be doing everything he can to chase any non-Muslim readers away from [The New Statesman] .[he] has a dim view of the worth of us non-Muslims.
None of these facts, however, kept Hasans fellow Guardianistas from taking his side against the evil Islamophobes. In a July 10 piece, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland offered as proof of the validity of Hasans lament the "vile reader comments on the lament itself. Among the comments Freedland considered "vile were those "branding Islam backward or denouncing its beliefs and practices as odious, and culminating in an ultimatum by which Islams, and therefore Muslims, place in Britain was deemed conditional on adaptation to suit the critics tastes: If Islam is to be truly accepted as part of British society it must embrace science. It must embrace rationality, sexuality and reason. Freedland lambasted all this as "racism. In Freedlands eyes, indeed, even the critics of Islam who, as he put it, "dress up in progressive, Guardian-friendly garb slamming Islam as oppressive of gay and womens rights, for example, are, deep down, nothing but racists: "the thick layer of bigotry is visible all the same.
Given how sensitive Freedland is to purported prejudice against Muslims, it is interesting to see how easily, and sneeringly, he dismissed concerns about Islamic prejudices as a question of taste and a matter of bigots cynically dress[ing] up in progressive garb, as if there were no legitimate reason whatsoever for such concerns. Freedland admitted, to be sure, that he had felt uneasy at some of the language [Hasan] used a few years back, when he appeared to describe non-Muslims as people of no intelligence and as cattle. But he went on to say that he found Hasans explanation for those incidents pretty plausible (it wasnt) and to give Hasan credit for conced[ing] that his phraseology was ill-advised and inappropriate. Mind-boggling. What to make of a man who, after seeing Hasans cattle and animal videos, can still call readers racists for taking those videos seriously, characterizing them fairly, and responding with fully appropriate moral outrage to Hasans unambiguous and explicitly faith-based contempt for his non-Muslim fellowman?
Freedlands piece wasnt the end of this snow job. On July 11, the Guardian ran brief contributions by Inayat Bunglawala, Huma Qureshi, Simon Woolley, Nadiya Takolia, and Bim Adewunmi under the headline Online racist abuse: weve all suffered it too. (Theres no room here to go into all of these peoples backgrounds; suffice it to say that the first person on the list, Bunglawala, the public face of the Muslim Council of Britain, has praised Osama bin Laden as a freedom fighter, called Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman courageous, and savaged the British government in the Guardian, naturally for denying a visa to Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Apparently readers who were troubled by any of that are racists, pure and simple.) On July 12, Gary Younge, another Guardian columnist, offered a few hundred words of vapid hand-wringing about the ugliness of many reader comments online, with an emphasis again on racism.
The next day Gavan Titley and Alana Lentin served up a plateful of multicultural clichés (the colorblind ideal is flawed because [b]eing blind to race often involves being blind to racism; racism has not been overcome because a black President was elected, but the legitimacy of analysing society in terms of race has been undermined). And on July 16, Rob Berkeley lamented the vitriolic abuse Hasan allegedly receives when he seeks to address issues of anti-Muslim discrimination on the basis that he is homophobic well he must be, he is a Muslim after all and everyone knows Muslims are homophobes. Presumed guilty, he is asked to prove his liberal credentials before his reasonable arguments are even given a hearing. Disingenuous claptrap. Anyone who has watched Hasans videos knows hes not just hostile to gays he thinks all infidels are, as they say, pigs and dogs.
Yes, as we all know, there are plenty of people out there who post comments online that are nothing more than ugly personal attacks or expressions of one variety or another of repellent prejudice. Its not pleasant but its not the end of the world, either. Its simply the small price we all pay for the extraordinary freedom to exchange ideas in the (so far) uncensored international forum that is the Internet. What this flurry of Guardian pieces represents, quite plainly, is a nefarious contribution to the ongoing effort to discredit as sheer racism even the most straightforward truth-telling about Islam (which, of course, the Guardians lexicon to the contrary, is not a race) and to foster a mindset on the web that is reflexively censorious toward any expression of disquietude about the ideology of Islam. In short, if theres a campaign underway to silence anybody, its not targeted at Muslims but at those of us who dare to speak the truth about their religion and one of its headquarters, as has now yet again been amply demonstrated, is the Guardian.
He's not the only filthy koranimal who thinks like that either.
Preposterous.
My government calls me these things all the time, and has for years.
"Every morning, I take a deep breath and then go online to discover what new insult or smear has been thrown in my direction .the abuse is as relentless as it is vicious.
Cry me a river, Mustafa.
Hey Hasan,
Grow a set of balls. If you won’t denounce terrorism or radicalism then you condone it. If you can’t explain the principles of Islam in a truthful and persuasive way then study some more or STFU. Whiners and victims don’t make good spokesMEN, but little sissy men.
Also, being a victim does not make you a hero. So Buck up little cowboy. Time to become a real Man
I didn’t spend a lot of time researching Mehdi Hasan. But this egomaniac seems proud of jihad and terrorism and it’s affiliation with Islam. He seems to relish in the hatred of both his religion and the perception that he is also labelled and hated as such.
I think he is the Jessie Jackson of Muslims. He wants to be hated to further his cause.
I hope his 72 virgins are fat.
Phobia refers to fear.
What’s the correct word for “hate, revulsion, derision, and general f*rt in their face?”
Only liberals has Islamophobia.
But then again, their entire lives are centered around phobias.
An "Islamic Repushionist"?
An "Islamic Repulshionist"?
Message to Muslims: Muslims believe insane crap, and those beliefs make Muslims Islamists, jihadists, and once they practice jihad, terrorists. It isn’t complicated, and any Muslim wanting to be a good person needs to repent, renounce Islam, and never return to it. Free yourselves from Satan, and never look back. Jesus is knocking on the door. Get a life, and open it.
Or quit whining about what people think of you. It isn’t their fault.
If Hasan thinks that being a muzzie is tough, he should try being a Christian for a while. We’ve pretty much been silenced in “public life”.
NOBODY suppresses the voices of muslims in the public square more than muslims in the public square.
What???
Yep. Everything they say in the public square is suppressed -- by their own damned selves. It's called taqqiyah. It is self-suppressed because their visceral thoughts are utterly abhorrent to civilized people. And they don't want to cast themselves in such a bad light. The truth hurts, so they refuse to tell it.
How about Towel heads, sheet heads, goat humpers to name a few.
Give me a break Hasan, play the victim, your religion sews hatred throughout the world! Also, I’d like to kick yours’ and Gorge Bush Jr’s rears for even suggesting a religion that subverts women beneath a sheet and encourages terrorism is a religion of peace, no, Islame is a religion of hate!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.