Which hateful bigots?
Owen Jones is not what you’d call a sharp thinker.
“Muslim” is not a race.
It’s not legit to pretend it’s a race and just go on from there. It’s not legit and it’s a very bad idea. Why? Because Muslims are not a race but adherents of a religion, and religions have content, and religions tell believers what to do. That matters.
Why does it matter? The quickest explanation might be just the single word “Afghanistan.”
1. If that chap wants to throw Owen Jones off a rooftop, he can take a number and wait his turn.
2. Hold up, Hypnotits is gay?
And not just a religion, but a religion with multiple schisms, who don’t agree with each other, and are at least as likely to kill each other as anyone else. Like Christianity, every believer thinks they have the one true® religion, and every other person in the world, except those who agree with them in every particular, is not only misguided, but evil.
This is a religion that formed a jihad group known as Al-Qaeda because one man who believed in the Muslim god saw women dressed in poodle skirts and pony tails at a sock hop in the United States.
Which one is Hypnotits?
Zack Polanski https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/zack-polanski-deputy-green-party-hypnotherapy-womens-breasts-5HjcmXc_2/
And Zack Polanski isn’t the first name he’s used https://x.com/BLAIMGame/status/1974739056853766263
I thought we all knew OJ is gay. Mothin Ali is not gay, but Zack Polanski is.
Probably in reference to this.
David Pauldin? Thanks for the additional link, Another guest.
Ohhh right, that kind of hypno tits. I’d forgotten.
Hmm this one does make me a bit uncomfortable. Maybe I need more context. Has Mothin Ali said anything explicitly homophobic? I did a quick google of him and all I could find was a lot of campaigning for Gaza. I remember seeing a lot of GC Twitter make the argument that lefties who defend Gazans’ human rights are hypocrites because Gazans are Muslim and many Muslims don’t support gay rights. I never liked that argument; it had a whiff of taking one’s resentment of the far left and its internal contradictions too far, to the point of forgetting that people’s fundamental human rights aren’t contingent on their personal views. (People raised in a deeply conservative culture are still entitled to live; gay rights should be won via persusasion, and never used to justify violence. Also: I’ve been friends with liberal, secular, gay-positive Muslim Palestinians. The idea that “they’re all” this or that rubs me the wrong way.)
This tweet doesn’t explicitly make the fuck-the-Palestinians-because-gay-rights connection, but there also doesn’t seem to be much of a connection between Ali and support for murdering gays, other than that he’s a Muslim, and Islam is institutionally anti-gay. So I guess the tweet lands in a gray area: I find it rather crude, and vaguely off, though not quite explicitly out of bounds. For me, it’s a bit too close to the ugly stuff I saw on GC Twitter that led me to leave the place.
I’d have to agree: these “All Muslims think gay people should be killed” statesments are too sweeping, and treat a complex religion as a homogenous bloc.
There *are* Muslims who support gay rights (I’m not a fan, but Ash Sarkar is one).
This “all Muslims have the exact same beliefs” reminds me of the “Clash of Civilizations” rhetoric around 2001-2. That same rhetoric that ultimately led some some Western secularists (hi, Christopher Hitchens) to back the Bush/Blair disaster in Iraq, because they believed the Gruesome Twosome would bring secular liberalism to the Muslim world.
Gosh, ya think?
But I didn’t say that.
What I said is that Islam has content. I said that because it’s what I meant. Yes of course there are liberal Muslims, but that doesn’t change the fact that Islam has content. Liberal Muslims are dissenting from much of Islam – and more power to them, but meanwhile the Taliban remains the Taliban.
I don’t think I disagree with you, Arty. I disagree with Owen Jones. Islam is a particularly harsh religion, so it’s particularly necessary to find out which parts of it a political candidate embraces. Jones thinks that’s racism; I think it’s urgently necessary.
I agree with you, Ophelia. And even though I’m still iffy on Malcolm’s tweet I agree that it’s reasonable to emphasize that it’s not the same as racism. It’s ultimately just a jab at Islam, and Islam is purely fair game. (Even though, in the broader context, this particular tweet *might* carry some extra baggage that I disagree with.)
Oh Malcolm’s tweet is the issue – yes, I flinched at that a little.
(I confess, I’m prickly about Malcolm’s tweet because I’m also just generally wary of LGB Alliance affiliates now, because so many of them turned out to be secretly far more right-wing than they had let on. I learned that the hard way after associating with them for years. There are some lovely LGB Alliance poeple, but it’s also a kind of secret Log Cabin Republican franchise where the game is to pretend you’re an ally of liberal gays even though you’re a closet entitled Rayndian Libertarian douchebag who couldn’t care less about gay rights, but can’t say so out loud. It’s a big ol’ closet for some. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case with Malcolm Clark — I barely know the man, and he’s always been friendly — but boy am I hella disillusioned with that org.)
We can hold two positions without contradiction:
1) Ophelia and Artymorty are correct in that Islam is not a “race”. Islam is a a religion, and comments criticising Islam shouldn’t be censured in the same way that comments expressing hated towards ethnic groups like, say, South Asians, are. The same goes for comments criticising Christianity, Hinduism, etc.
2) Malcolm’s Clark’s tweet, stating that Mothin Ali was thinking about killing Owen Jones because the latter person is gay, was unfair to Ali. Ali has gone on record in the past as being someone who supports gay rights, plus he has no issue with working with gay people like Jones and Zack Polanski:
https://x.com/MothinAli/status/1949613284857946390#m
Ali is right to find Clark’s tweet objectionable. No decent person wants to be accused of homophobia, especially the murderous kind.
I have expressed respect for Malcolm Clark’s work in the past, but I found this particular tweet of his to be distasteful. The fact that I don’t agree with Owen Jones’ political views does not make Clark’s tweet about Mothin Ali any less so.
Mostly Cloudy, you’ve summed up my feelings very well. I suspect Clark is rage-baiting.
@ Mostly Cloudy #9
And Bush/Blair did it by waging war against secular Iraq.