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<\/a>Since my essay on the Danish cartoons<\/a> was published on 21 February 2006, I have received dozens of emails supportive of my argument that racism has no place on the left.\u00a0 Additionally, comments on the article posted on MRZine<\/em> show that there are people willing to stand up against anti-Muslim bigotry.\u00a0 However, what is deeply troubling is that the majority of comments, presumably from progressives, are hostile to Islam and to Muslims.<\/p>\nIn what follows, I respond to these comments for reasons that should be obvious to any person of conscience: the wholesale demonization of Arabs and Muslims is racist and unacceptable, it serves to bolster US foreign policy goals in the Middle East, and giving even an inch to Islamophobia divides us and weakens our ability to build an effective opposition to the war in Iraq and the potential war on Iran.<\/p>\n
Criticism #1: Islam is inherently violent.\u00a0 The history of Islam is full of barbaric acts of terror and torture.\u00a0 Furthermore, because 9\/11 was committed by Muslims, Islam is to blame. <\/em><\/p>\n We can also find passages from Christian religious texts that command the faithful to commit acts of violence: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt.\u00a0 Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey'” (1 Samuel 15: 1-3<\/a>).<\/p>\n However, to conclude from such passages that Christians today must be an inherently violent people is ludicrous.\u00a0 When Timothy McVeigh carried out the Oklahoma city bombings, we didn’t hear tirades against Christianity or arguments about how all white people are to blame for the bombings.\u00a0 We don’t remember Timothy McVeigh as “that white Christian terrorist.”\u00a0 The same, clearly, is not true for Muslims and Arabs.<\/p>\n Post-9\/11 “common sense” has it that, because the attacks were carried out by Muslims, their violence must come from the teachings of Islam and therefore all Muslims are to blame.\u00a0 Furthermore, these men were from the Middle East, they were Arabs, so all Arabs must be terrorists.\u00a0 Certainly, there is no shortage of Hollywood films that reproduce this stereotype.<\/p>\n The Danish cartoon of the prophet Mohammed with a bomb on his head is nothing if not the visual depiction of the racist diatribe that Islam is inherently violent.\u00a0 To those who can’t understand why this argument is racist, let me be clear: when you take the actions of a few people and generalize it to an entire group — all Muslims, all Arabs — that’s racism.\u00a0 When a whole group of people are discriminated against and demonized because of their religion or regional origin, that’s racism.<\/p>\n Criticism #2: Muslims today are not victims but oppressors.\u00a0 Defending Muslims and people of Middle East descent against racist attacks is equal to supporting the actions of Islamic Fundamentalists.<\/em><\/p>\n In my original article I argued that progressives have an obligation to “defend ordinary Muslims all over the world” — I did not say that we should support the actions of religious or political extremists.\u00a0 However, it is quite telling that my critics can’t seem to tell the difference between the two.<\/p>\n I was asked if I have ever heard of a country known as Indonesia and of the atrocities it has carried out against East Timor.\u00a0 I was also asked if I have heard of the murders and rapes taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan.\u00a0 These and other examples were cited as evidence that Muslims today are the oppressors not the oppressed.\u00a0 As one critic rails, the slaughter of people of East Timor “were carried out by the army of a Muslim nation against an overwhelmingly Christian population.\u00a0 Now how exactly do you explain that, Deepa??”<\/p>\n Very simply. I don’t conflate the actions of the dictator Suharto with those of the Indonesian people, who a few decades later would rise up against him and throw him out of power.\u00a0 Furthermore, it is noteworthy that this individual as well as others would not say a word about the fact that US President Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger gave the green light to the invasion of East Timor, as recently released documents from the National Security Archive<\/a> prove in no uncertain terms.\u00a0 Additionally, as East Timorese activists such as Constancio Pinto, who I was fortunate to have organized with during his time in Providence, Rhode Island, have pointed out, the guns and firepower used to carry out the massacre were supplied by the US.\u00a0 So, should we now blame Christianity, since the US is predominantly Christian?<\/p>\n Thus, for instance, one of my critics writes: “Kumar raises the absurd notion that Islam as a belief system should be exempt from criticism. . . . I wonder how the black Muslim victims of Arab Muslim terror in the Darfur region of the Sudan, or Christians in countries such as Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan might view her arguments.\u00a0 I think that they would laugh at her.”<\/p>\n This critic, like many others, equates the actions of dictators, war lords, and reactionary politicians (who often were\/are supported and backed by the US) with their religion: Islam is to blame.\u00a0 If today Islam has been singled out for criticism, it is because politicians in the US have repeatedly demonized Islam and skillfully employed Islamophobic rhetoric to justify their aggression in the Middle East.\u00a0 Ordinary people in the Middle East or Indonesia, Nigeria or Pakistan have nothing to gain from US imperialism.\u00a0 And when people on the left uncritically peddle the same Islamophobic logic as the Bush regime, one has to ask: who is laughing at whom?<\/p>\n Criticism # 3: The left should not be in the business of defending religion.\u00a0 All religions, including Islam, should be subject to thoroughgoing critique.<\/em><\/p>\n As I have stated above, if Islam has come under fire in European nations and the United States, it is because the political elite in these countries have found it useful to whip up anti-Muslim hysteria.\u00a0 There can be no healthy dialogue in this context<\/em> about the role of Islam in the Middle East.\u00a0 What my critics need to recognize is that there are times when debate about religion is both healthy and vital to the wellbeing of society and other times when this debate is politically motivated to serve larger agendas.\u00a0 For instance, it would have been quite foolish for the left to engage in a discussion of the flaws of Judaism in the midst of the holocaust, as this would only have strengthened the Nazi regime.<\/p>\n Furthermore, there is a difference between progressive criticisms of Islam from left-liberal forces within predominantly Muslim nations and reactionary criticisms initiated in the West by the political elite to justify their wars and occupations.\u00a0 For those of us who are non-Muslims located in the United States, the choice is quite clear — you are either on the side of the oppressed or of the oppressor.<\/p>\n One of the consequences of the relentless attacks on Islam and Muslims by politicians and the media is that Islamophobic sentiment is on the rise.\u00a0 A recent Washington Post<\/em>\/ABC News poll<\/a> found that 46 percent of Americans think poorly of Islam today — a figure higher than that immediately following the September 11 attacks.\u00a0 Additionally, the proportion of Americans who believe Islam helps to cause violence against non-Muslims has more than doubled, from 14 percent in January 2002 to 33 percent today.<\/p>\n One in four Americans admit to being prejudiced against Muslims and Arabs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The role of progressives in this context isn’t to debate the merits and demerits of Islam in the abstract, but to speak out against this wholesale demonization of Muslims.\u00a0 To put it bluntly: if you don’t think that religious and racial discrimination and persecution is a problem, then you are not part of the left.<\/p>\n There are some who have defended their anti-Muslim arguments by quoting collaborators of US empire in the Middle East, such as Dr. Wafa Sultan<\/a>.\u00a0 Dr. Sultan, quoted approvingly by free-market guru Thomas Friedman<\/a> in a recent New York Times<\/em> editorial, has argued that the clash between the West and Islam is that between “the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality.” \u00a0People like Sultan shouldn’t be confused with progressive forces such as the women in the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan<\/a> (RAWA) who criticize Sharia Law, the Taliban, and US imperialism.\u00a0 Like the Ahmed Chalabis and the Suhartos, there have always been indigenous collaborators with empire, and the left has known not to take them seriously.<\/p>\n Criticism #4: The West is superior to the East because it went through the Enlightenment.\u00a0 Thus, when all is said and done, the US can be a force for good in the world.<\/em><\/p>\n A critic on MRZine<\/em> states: “Bored with it, Deepa, we are so-o-o-o bored. \u00a0I happen to represent all three major movements against patriarchal and authoritarian religion: my family is three generations in the Marxist tradition, I was a little Taoist-y flower child in the early Seventies when I was reading French at the University of London and my special subject was Voltaire. \u00a0If Muslims in the West cannot get the hang of the derision of religion, it’s your problem. \u00a0By the way, the emancipation of women is a legacy of the Enlightenment: it is the inevitable consequence of the principle of individual sovereignty.”<\/p>\n For the record, I am an atheist and have been one for over 25 years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Nevertheless, I am deeply offended when a self-proclaimed Marxist chooses to blame the victims of Islamophobia rather than the elites responsible for spreading such hateful messages. \u00a0Muslims should, I suppose, not complain or fight back but quietly accept their demonization and the destruction of their lives and homes? \u00a0As I argued in the previous section, abstractly calling for debate on religion, without attention to context, leads to these absurd positions.<\/p>\n But the core of many critics’ arguments, including the one above, is that the West went through the Enlightenment and is therefore inherently superior to other cultures that did not. \u00a0The Enlightenment is the body of ideas that emerged in the West in the 17th and 18th centuries during the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. \u00a0Enlightenment thinkers championed science and rationality as a way to combat the power of religious dogma and the Catholic Church in particular. \u00a0They spoke of popular sovereignty and the right of people to vote for their representatives against the notion of the divine right of kings and queens to rule, as a way to combat feudal monarchy.<\/p>\n It is noteworthy that while my critics speak of the Enlightenment in glowing terms, they are silent on how the Enlightenment laid the basis for racism. \u00a0They want us to forget that slavery, colonialism, and racism are just as fully the legacies of the Enlightenment. \u00a0The ideology of race divided up human beings into separate categories based on arbitrary markers of difference, typically skin color, and then drew up a hierarchy which placed white Europeans at the top. \u00a0Thus, slavery was explicitly justified by deeming Africans as less than human or implicitly supported in an ostensibly race-neutral language (the notorious three-fifth compromise in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3<\/a> of the U.S. Constitution<\/a>, one of the best known documents of the Enlightenment, augmented the power of Southern slavocracy, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 15<\/a> provided for the federal power to suppress insurrections of slaves as well as others, and Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1<\/a> forbade Congress to prohibit the slave trade for twenty years). \u00a0Similarly, when native peoples in Africa and Asia could be viewed as being “half devil, half child” (in Rudyard Kipling<\/a>‘s words), then the white man’s burden to “tame” and “civilize” them becomes perfectly acceptable. \u00a0Someone who claims to have read Voltaire must surely have come across all of his racist comments about Jews and Africans.<\/p>\n The Enlightenment and the various revolutions of the time, such as the English, French, and American revolutions, were no doubt progressive. \u00a0By bringing to the fore and fighting for the concepts of equality, justice, and liberty, they dealt a deathblow to the rigidly hierarchical and nakedly oppressive structures of feudal society. \u00a0However, the class that led these revolutions was unable to deliver on its promises because capitalism is not a system based on equality, justice, or liberty. \u00a0This is why the right to vote in the US was limited for the most part to white, property-owning men. \u00a0Women did not win the right to vote until a century later, through long-fought struggles for suffrage. \u00a0It took a civil war, and then a civil rights movement, before African Americans could gain similar rights.<\/p>\n Recently, South Dakota effectively banned the right to an abortion<\/a>. \u00a0Now, one way to approach this is to say let’s wait for the “principle of individual sovereignty” to “inevitably” overturns this decision. \u00a0Unfortunately, for working-class women who can’t afford to go to other states to seek out abortions (or spend time in London reading Voltaire for that matter), this is not an option. \u00a0They have to, like their sisters before them, stand up and fight for their right to control their bodies.<\/p>\n In short, the idea that the Enlightenment magically emancipated women in the West is nonsense, and when progressives buy into it, they go along with the war makers who claim, for instance, to be liberating Afghan women or Iraqi women from Islam. \u00a0The rulers of our society have never cared about the rights of women right here in the US; they are not going to suddenly start caring about women’s rights elsewhere.<\/p>\n If the left has any responsibility today, it is to use our long historical memory to expose the ways in which consent is obtained for imperialist wars.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Today, we face a situation where the left has been weakened by (a willed?) historical amnesia. \u00a0Meanwhile, Arabs and Muslims are being scapegoated and demonized to justify a war that is ruining the lives of millions. \u00a0At times like this, people of conscience need to organize and speak out against Islamophobia. \u00a0Ignorance, particularly among progressives, is no excuse for apathy and racism.<\/p>\n *Deepa Kumar<\/a> is author of Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization, and the UPS Strike<\/em>, (University of Illinois Press, 2006, forthcoming). \u00a0She is active in the antiwar movement and has spoken at several community-based and university forums on the topic of fighting Islamophobia. \u00a0On March 27, 2006<\/a>, she spoke at Columbia University, at a meeting sponsored by the Columbia Antiwar Coalition<\/a> and the International Socialist Organization<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"libro-de-las-cruzadas\"](\"http:\/\/twistislamophobia.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/libro-de-las-cruzadas-300x246.jpg\")
<\/a>The history of Islam is no more violent than the history of any of the other major religions of the world.\u00a0 Perhaps my critics haven’t heard of the Crusades — the religious wars fought by European Christians from the 11th to the 13th centuries.\u00a0 During the first crusade<\/a>, after taking control of Jerusalem, the crusaders went on a killing spree, murdering almost the entire population of Muslim men, women, and children.\u00a0 The Jews, who fought side by side with the Muslims to defend the city, were not spared either.\u00a0 The Crusaders set fire to a synagogue where the Jews were hiding and made sure that every single Jew burned to death.\u00a0 The same levels of brutality were seen again during the third crusade when King Richard of England (Richard the Lionheart), after one battle, beheaded thousands of men in cold blood<\/a>.\u00a0 In contrast, the Sultan of Egypt Saladin, after he successfully retook Jerusalem from the Crusaders, forbade acts of vengeance and violence.\u00a0 Jews were given state money to rebuild synagogues and churches were left untouched.<\/p>\nHollywood films<\/h3>\n
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<\/a><\/p>\nAtrocities into the mix<\/h3>\n
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<\/a>Let me throw a few more atrocities into the mix: Islamic fundamentalists have murdered and tortured religious minorities just as they have traumatized Muslim men and women with their ultra-orthodox practices; Hindu fundamentalist killed thousands of Muslims in a vicious pogroms against Muslims in the state of Gujarat; the Nazis killed six million Jews, and today Neo-Nazis<\/a> in Europe have threatened to massacre Muslims at the upcoming World Cup in Germany.\u00a0 What conclusions do we draw from this?\u00a0 That fundamentalists and fascists have often relied on particular interpretations of the world’s major religions to justify their actions.\u00a0 Yet, it is only Islam that apparently needs to be scrutinized.<\/p>\nMarxist tradition<\/h3>\n
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<\/a><\/p>\nImperial conquest<\/h3>\n
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<\/a>The history of colonial plunder is replete with examples of how racism is used to justify imperial conquest. \u00a0Even if we don’t remember the history of imperialism from centuries past, have we forgotten the shameful chapter from the Second World War? \u00a0Have we learnt nothing from the mass internment of Japanese Americans? \u00a0Almost immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, politicians and the media whipped up the most horrific anti-Japanese racism, constructing Japanese people as sub-human. \u00a0This was done with the intention of winning public support for US intervention into the war and for the curtailment of union rights and civil rights domestically. \u00a0What followed was that anywhere from 112,000 to 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were rounded up and placed in concentration<\/a> camps<\/a> for several years. \u00a0The logic behind this mass internment was that, if you were of Japanese origin, then you bore responsibility and guilt for Pearl Harbor. \u00a0Sound familiar?<\/p>\n