"The liberal roots of Islamophobia"

[TV-verslaafde]

They dare to talk about the "battle of ideas" without a single citation of any living or dead Muslim theologian, philosopher, mystic, poet, artist, or public intellectual evident in their vertiginously vacuous prose.

The monumentality of their ignorance is only sanctioned by their self-entitled white privileges. They are white they can say whatever they want.

At the height of the Enlightenment modernity, Europe ended up in German concentration camps. At the height of American democracy, they are ruled by Trump. And they dare to talk about "battle of ideas!" What ideas?

The history of their own country began with the genocidal destruction of Native Americans, continued with the despicable history of African slavery, and at the heights of their technological achievements with dropping an atom bomb on Japan. Battle of what ideas against what ideas?

Such highfalutin nonsense about "battle of ideas", however, is a subterfuge for a much simpler banality of ignorance. It is no longer a matter of accusing Maher of being the bigot that he is, for his open espousing of wanton racism is now a matter of public knowledge after his recent bromance with the notorious neo-Fascist poster boy Milo Yiannopoulos.

None of this is to say Muslims en masse are God's gift to humanity. Islamophilia is as deranged as Islamophobia. There are an estimated 1.5 billion Muslims around the globe. They have their share of criminal thugs, homicidal sociopaths, psychotic gangs, etc.

But to address such pathologies you will need a minimum of sympathy for the common humanity of millions of other Muslims who have nothing to do with these criminals.

OPINION: Go ahead, blame Islam

Today there are two complementary threats to that necessary internal reform definitive to Muslim intellectual history since its fateful encounter with European colonialism: Baghdadi and his gang of cutthroat criminals on one side and Maher and his fraternity club of liberal and right-wing Islamophobes on the other.

This historic rise of Islamophobia will have a transformative impact on Muslims and the current turn in their critical thinking. The most serious among Muslim intellectuals are today undergoing the pains of moral and imaginative rebirth.

Their enemies like Maher and Bannon are the enemies of humanity, for Islamophobia is a thin subterfuge for a much more malignant xenophobia, fear of anyone and anything that does not look or sound like them.

We Muslims are privileged, perhaps we are even destined, to fight for our civil liberties in renewed universal terms - not just for ourselves but for all the other subaltern components of humanity fighting against white supremacy in the US and Europe.

We will emerge from this fight having morally universalised our political particulars. We will face Maher and Bannon face to face, eyeball to eyeball, with our learned humanity against their illiterate barbarity.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opi...152226572.html

Hehe. Soms zijn ze toch wel grappig, de moslims. Ze weten niet meer op wie ze hun bazooka's moeten richten. De "progressieven" of "alt-right". Ze zijn een beetje verward.