Suspended from work...for a blog post
The purpose for this Daily Mail-esque headline can be found in Guido. A Tory blogger wrote a joking Lefty Lexicon post, which is actually pretty funny. I particularly like:
Disproportionate - foreign affairs: Describes any act by USA or Israel.
Intolerance - Intolerance can only committed against certain defined groups of people. These do not include, Americans, the middle class, white manual workers, rural people, business and Christians obviously.
Nazi - informal: describes non-Lefty views and useful to link with people Lefties don’t like. Thus Germany’s Nazi period is the only noteworthy formative experience of Pope Benedict.
Terrorist - no such thing. Only people suffering from ‘root causes’ and ‘legitimate grievances’.
His employers, Orange, received a snotty letter from some Muslim group or other. They are all indistinguishable, except they use the word "Islamaphobic" every sentence. Take this extract:
(1) "Islamophobic - anyone who objects to having their transport blown up on the way to work."
This is islamaphobic in the sense that it obfuscates the fact that Islamaphobia exists and it suggests that all victims of terrorism are islamaphobic (which is an offence to all innocent victims of 7/7 including muslim victims). Islamaphobia is the irrational fear of Islam and is a phrase which is used to describe prejudice against Islam which is especially important since such prejudice does not fall into the definition of racism. Further this comment is clearly trying to falsely polarise the problem of Islamist terrorism by saying that all muslims are terrorists - as a muslim I condemn having my transport blown up but clearly I do not consider myself islamaphobic.
This surely takes a joke far too seriously. If we can be serious for a moment (rather than take disproportionate action against someone making an obvious joke), Islamaphobia - if it actually has any meaning following it's overuse by militant lefties and paranoid Muslims - to my mind means the hating of Muslims simply because they are Muslims. Constructive criticism of Islam, however, should be allowed and encouraged. It is hardly Islamaphobic to assert that a great deal of its members seem to be against freedom of expression and freedom of speech (see the cartoon row), and a minute proportion seem to be so intolerant of people's actions they want to blow said people up. It is also surely not Islamaphobic to try and suggest ways of how this can be stopped.
-posted by Roy
