The UK’s National Union of Students recently refused to condemn IS because to do so would be Islamophobic. Or rather, “””Islamophobic””” – one set of scare quotes isn’t sarcastic enough.
Hand-wringing delegates at the NUS blocked a vote to show solidarity with Iraqi Kurds and condemn Islamic State militants because they say it’s “Islamophobic”.
The bill called for the Union – which claims to represent UK students – to support unity between Muslims, condemn the bloody terror of ISIS (also known as the Islamic State), and support a boycott on people who fund the militants.
But the motion offended Black Students Officer Malia Bouattia, who said: “We recognise that condemnation of ISIS appears to have become a justification for war and blatant Islamaphobia.
“This rhetoric exacerbates the issue at hand and in essence is a further attack on those we aim to defend.”
Progressive Muslim friends of mine are unsurprised to learn that it’s Bouattia who said that ridiculous thing. She doesn’t like progressive Muslims, either.
Birmingham student Bouattia says she plans to put forward another motion in the next meeting to condemn ISIS that “will in no way pander to Western imperialistic intervention or the demonisation of Muslim peoples.”
ISIS has wreaked misery in Syria and Iraq, slaughtering thousands of Kurds and other Iraqis, raping and kidnapping women, beheading innocent victims including British aid workers Alan Henning and David Haines.
Baffled delegates pointed out the motion specifically expressed “no confidence or trust in the US military intervention”.
Roza Salih, a student of Kurdish descent, had worked on the resolution for the NUS to condemn the Islamic State and to campaign for democracy in Iraq.
Also significant is the fact that the vast majority of the victims of IS are Muslims.
I wonder that Bouattia doesn’t understand equating fear of savages with fear of Islam puts the religion in the same category as the savages.
What is she studying? Not logic, obviously.
The problem appears to be, it wasn’t her who wrote it.
Never mind the “pandering,” real or imagined; condemn that which is reprehensible.
Just to give him the benefit of the doubt…
Isn’t it likely that it was this type of nuttery that Sam Harris was trying to go after with his “disappointment with the Left” tweet?
Obviously expressed poorly, and using a lousy analogy. Obviously he shouldn’t have given the appearance of throwing Western feminists under the bus while he did it. And perhaps he’s personally too tied up with Islamophobia to criticize anyone for not being critical of Islam enough. But we on the Left keep on asking, “How come the mainstream figures on the right don’t do more to disavow and distance themselves from the right’s lunatic fringe?” So Harris is mainstream, and he’s distancing. It’s rather distressing that, to a lot of moderates, the kind of appeasement that Bouattia peddles comes across the The Official Position of the Radical Left. I think that all of us need to be denouncing that perception loudly and often (which, I should hasten to add, almost everyone here at FTB does).
In much the same way that condemning the Israeli government for its actions is anti-Semitic.
Islamophobia is, unfortunately, all too real. The problem is that the word has been taken up by the perpetrators of abuse, and by the supporters of those perpetrators, as a way of deflecting criticism of those abuses.
So I think that slaughtering thousands of unarmed and innocent civilians and selling women into sexual slavery is totally cool because I’d be an Islamophobe if I didn’t.
Who has the more idiotic ideology, ISIS or the UK student union?
Indeed.
Still, is it too much to ask that people find a less historically laden word than ‘savages’ as used in comment #1?
@ 4, yes, it is, and I probably mostly agree with Harris on the subject.
I wouldn’t be so obnoxious about him if his early best-sellerdom hadn’t given him such outsize prominence and confidence. It annoys the bejeezis out of me that people think he’s a philosopher, and a good one at that. I wish he were more aware of what he doesn’t know.
It has been more than 60 years since Nasser went over to the Russians for aid with his national projects. Large portions of the ‘progressive’ left still haven’t got the later memos. Islamist killers were ‘freedome fighters’ right up until the Russians invaded Afghanistan.
So from 1979 until 1989, the Taliban were capitalist-running-dogs, or US Corporate Proxys. Until September 11th of 2001, when they were magically re-transformed in to Proletarian Heroes.
The switch is every bit as dramatic as the Hitler/Stalin pact, and Barbarossa. The instant ideological reversal that Orwell satirized in ‘1984.’
Ha, yeah! The American right wing certainly was consistent on the Taliban throughout that entire time. God, lefties are such idiots.
Reminds me of my generation of students who while condemning the Vietnam War, turned a blind eye to Communist oppression and atrocities, then the blinker was “anti-imperialism”, now it’s “anti-Islamophobia.”.
‘The more things change…”
Where’s Katherine Woo when you need her? 😉
This really is an appalling example of the cynical use of concerns about anti-Muslim bigotry to shield Islam from even the most warranted condemnations.
I read in the Guardian that the same group is lobbying to change the name* of the town of Rotheram because “the name Rotheram had been ineradicably tainted with the poison of Islamaphobia”.
*Poe
#10
Are you forgetting how the Reaganites fawned over the Taliban? There was even a Rambo movie about the ‘Faith Based Freedom Fighters…’
Actions like NUS’s, and the relentless sacrifice of reality to parochial partisanship, do more to demonstrate Western Decadence than anything ISIS could say.
Also, a thinly-veiled Taliban were the “good guys” in the 1987 James Bond movie “The Living Daylights.”
Here’s what I’ve read about this elsewhere.
The motion was turned down because parts of its content were objected to, and it couldn’t be amended there and then. One of the authors was Daniel Cooper, a member of the AWL, who have been called out for islamophobia in the past (http://www.workerspower.co.uk/2013/10/denounce-the-awls-racist-article/). It was turned down so that it could be re-presented after being amended; Malia has rewritten it to unambiguously condemn IS, without the supposedly islamophobic bits: https://www.facebook.com/malia.bouattia/posts/10154739200655331?fref=nf
Well when you say “called out for islamophobia in the past” I think what you mean is “accused of ‘Islamophobia’ in the past.”
That is what I mean – I haven’t looked through everything.
The point is that the motion hasn’t been turned down out of hand, it’s been turned down for amendment, and Bouattia does condemn ISIS.
I was being sarcastic. I was wondering if you’d forgotten. But you did acknowledge that.
I don’t know that blindness via partisanship is a Western thing, but it certainly is an issue among groups that ally with other groups over subsets of ideology, motivation, or goals. Points of agreement are emphasized and differences are de-emphasized, sometimes to the level of willful blindness.
The motion was turned down because parts of its content were objected to, and it couldn’t be amended there and then. One of the authors was Daniel Cooper, a member of the AWL, who have been called out for islamophobia in the past (http://www.workerspower.co.uk/2013/10/denounce-the-awls-racist-article/). It was turned down so that it could be re-presented after being amended; Malia has rewritten it to unambiguously condemn IS, without the supposedly islamophobic bits
Malia is a true progressive!
Islam was a boon to women’s rights, you know.
As a non-Islmophobic athiest, I can only say: “May god bless her!”