What makes someone a “hateful Islamophobe”?
In a new article over at the Unz Review, John Derbyshire asserts that I “hate” Islam, and calls me an “Islamophobe.” His article is entitled “I Don’t HATE Muslims—I’m PRUDENT About Them. There’s A Difference.”
So apparently one can be prudent, like Derbyshire, or “hateful,” like me. What’s the difference? Aside from the name-calling, Derbyshire isn’t entirely clear on that. He says that the promiscuous throwing-around of the “hate” charge to tar legitimate analysis is “childish” and “infantile,” but then he indulges in it himself. He says of me: “He strikes me as a decent sort of chap, but with a bee in his bonnet.” Yes, I have a “bee in my bonnet” about bike riders getting mown down by trucks, and revelers at a Christmas party getting gunned down in cold blood, and a family celebrating a Shabbat dinner being brutally murdered. How “hateful”! How silly!
I’ve never met John Derbyshire in person, and in reality he has no idea what I hate or what I don’t, but it just gets stranger from there: Derbyshire says that he favors “the suggestion that we should stop permitting Muslims to settle in the U.S.A., and ask foreign Muslims resident here to leave,” which are proposals I have never supported, and go much farther than any proposal that I ever have suggested, and which I doubt would be Constitutional. But, he maintains, he is not hateful, I am.
Interestingly enough, Derbyshire follows up his modest proposal with this: “If you say that in the public square you are denounced for bigotry and hate.”
Well, yes. In fact, if you make the slightest suggestion that anything should be done to oppose or resist jihad terror and Sharia oppression, you’ll be denounced for bigotry and hate. If Derbyshire thinks he will escape this by comparing himself favorably to me, he is in for an unpleasant surprise. Many others have criticized jihad terror and compared themselves favorably to me, and found themselves smeared and defamed and vilified by Leftists and Islamic supremacists. If Derbyshire doubts this, he can ring up Maajid Nawaz.
In reality, the only reason why I am so many people’s touchstone for hatred and bigotry is because I have been at this so long, and so the charges have been repeated against me thousands of times, such that even a reasonably sensible individual such as John Derbyshire is calling me an “Islamophobe” as if it were a legitimate word and not a propaganda term designed to intimidate people into being afraid to oppose jihad terror, which is what it really is.
This is what my book Confessions of an Islamophobe is about: what standing for the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the equality of rights of all people before the law will get you these days. What makes someone a hateful Islamophobe? Just say you don’t think women should be beaten, or gays thrown off tall buildings. Say you think cartoonists of Muhammad should not be murdered or shunned in polite society. Think I’m exaggerating? Find out in Confessions of an Islamophobe. Preorder your copy here now.
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