End of year dreck

The New Statesman – it’s sad. Emad Ahmed tells us about his year in Islamophobia. If his piece were all about people shouting on buses and attacking in the street and Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump, I’d agree with him, but this is the Staggers, so of course it’s not.

It’s so alarmingly difficult to identify as a Muslim today. I’m having to prove my sensible existence in a world dominated by dramatic headlines and tweets. The Charlie Hebdo attacks proved this. The whole purpose of that silly magazine (which has made international headlines in the past) is simply to offend, a degree above satire.

No.it.isn’t. It’s an anti-racist magazine, a magazine of the left. Its whole purpose is to resist the Trumps and Le Pens, as well as the Islamists. That doesn’t mean anyone has to like it, it says nothing about its quality, but it just is not true that its whole purpose is to offend.

Of course everyone has the right to be offensive and annoying (within the limits of the law), but why bother? The response to those attacks was Islamophobia, pure and simple, fuelling exactly what Islamofascists across the globe love.

Pure and simple? Hardly. Maybe that’s his problem: he thinks he sees simple (crude) facts when he doesn’t. Of course the response to the massacre at Charlie Hebdo and the streets outside and the Kosher supermarket was not Islamophobia pure and simple – what a disgusting, callous, self-involved thing to say. The response was grief and fear and anger, and even the anger was mostly at fanatical Islamist murderers, not Islam itself, let alone at all Muslims.

The New Statesman shouldn’t be publishing simple-minded shite like this. It should do better.

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