Table of Contents
As George Orwell said, too many people never bother to examine the catchwords they use so liberally. This effect becomes a cause: language is “ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts”. Too often, that’s the whole point of catchwords. They are words designed, not to make our thoughts clearer, but to cloud and muddle them.
This is why I refuse to use certain all-too-common catchwords. The silly tautology biological woman, for instance. Or the ugly, made-up nonsense of cisgender.
Two of the most egregious relate to Islam: Islamophobia and Islamist.
As I wrote recently, Islamophobia is a big, fat lie.
The dictionary defines “phobia” as an “irrational fear”. Yet it’s hardly irrational to fear a religion when numerous terrorist acts are committed in its name.
‘Numerous’? Try ‘incessant’. In just the past decade, there have been nearly 60,000 Islamic terror attacks, claiming nearly a quarter of a million lives. This is reckoning without Islam’s 1600 year history of appalling violence, beginning from the very moment a backwater illiterate Arab slave-trading paedophile starting telling his gullible friends that he was talking to angels.
And while, sure, not all terrorists are Muslims (as the white supremacist at the Christchurch mosque amply demonstrated), there are clearly a lot more radicalised Islamists screaming Allahu Akbar as they take the lives of infidel nonbelievers than there are Christians screaming support for Jesus as they detonate suicide vests or fly planes into buildings.
In fact, the Christchurch terrorist ‘amply demonstrated’ that the exception proves the rule. That they can only cite one anti-Muslim terror attack, while any of us could reel off a dozen Islamic atrocities without even scratching our heads, proves exactly the inextricable link between Islam and grotesque violence.
Yet in the aftermath of the Bondi massacre last December, the vast bulk of Australia’s Islamic leaders tried to insist that the killings had nothing to do with religion, even though there were terrorist flags on display in their car and the AFP commissioner said this was an outrage “inspired by Islamic State”.
These are the same Islamic leaders who either openly cheered or stood shamefully silent while their co-religionists spontaneously broke into rapturous celebration of the October 7 monstrosities. Islam’s glass jaw is almost as inextricable as its penchant for appalling violence.
But that hasn’t stopped the Albanese government gutlessly and shamefully pandering to that very Islamic glass-jawed hypocrisy.
Last Sunday was the International Day to Combat Islamophobia and just as he welcomed the start of Ramadan with a social media post (but not Lent, which occurred on the same day), Anthony Albanese was in full flight as he warned against “rising fear and intolerance, here and around the world”.
Remember that Albanese claims to be a Catholic.
The Australian Human Rights Commission also marked the day by slamming our country, claiming that Islamophobia was a manifestation of the racism that’s supposedly “embedded into our society”.
Yet another of the deliberately misleading catchwords so endlessly and damnably peddled by the left. Islam is a religion, not a race. Jewishness, on the other hand, is a race (as well as a religion). But, like every other institution subdued by the Long March left, the AHRC barely even deigns to notice the appalling racism against Jews, most notably prominent in the Islamic community, which is hardly surprising given that even the Islamic daily prayer openly denigrates Jews (as well as Christians).
But the other catchword, ‘Islamist’, is even worse, in that it’s been so insidiously inveigled into the public consciousness that even those who (rightly) criticise the term Islamophobia use it without thinking. From the same article:
In other words, the most significant thing about those attacks in Israel, at least to the report’s author, was not the Islamist Jew-hatred that was responsible for them, or the antisemitism that had also spiked in their wake, but the Islamophobia that they had allegedly inspired.
Ask yourself: have you ever heard anyone use the term ‘Christianist’? ‘Buddhistist’? The very fact that bad actors deliberately coined a term to try and pretend that Islamic terrorism is somehow ‘not real Islam’ merely shows that they know perfectly well that it is.
Islamist is a dodge, deliberately designed to deflect criticism of the fundamental tenets of Islam. It’s designed to deceive us that the violent hatred of jihadis and hate preachers is somehow ‘not Islamic’. In fact, as scholar and journalist Graeme Wood pointed out, the Islamic State (the quintessential ‘Islamists’) are: Very Islamic… the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam. The violence and bigotry of jihadis are all explicitly justified by Islamic scripture.
There is just one more catchword we need to do away with: the endlessly parroted calls by critics of Islam for an Islamic Reformation.
The Christian Reformation, after all, was a fundamentalist reform movement that led to unspeakable violence for centuries, including the horrific destructiveness of the Thirty Years War. Islamic Reformation? We’re already seeing one. Salafism, Wahhabism, call it what you will, is the wellspring of most modern jihadism. It is an Islamic reform movement that began, like the Protestant Reformation, as a reaction against what it perceived as a decadent and corrupt version of the faith.
That’s where the similarities begin and end, though. Anyone who deludes themselves that a ‘purer’ Islam would be somehow more peaceful, or would lead to anything like the Christian separation of church and state, doesn’t know the first thing about Islam.
Anyone who prates the Islamic Reformation catchword neither understands the terms they use nor Islam (or they’re deliberately misleading about it).
In a famous address to Al-Azhar university in Cairo in early 2015, Egyptian President Abdel el-Sisi called for a “religious revolution” to confront versions of Islam “sanctified for hundreds of years” that had become a source of “danger, killing and destruction” for the rest of the world. It is this call for reformation, from a brave Muslim leader for a better Islam, that’s the best antidote to any religious hostility.
Those “versions of Islam” that are a source of violence are not some supposed ‘perversions’ or ‘misinterpretations’, they’re the direct prescriptions of the faith, repeated in not just the Koran, but the other Islamic scriptures – the Hadith and the Sira. Further, Islam, by its own most fundamental tenets, is utterly unchangeable. Islam, as its core claim repeatedly underscores, is the last and final word and the literal word of Allah, as directly transmitted in Allah’s own words, which cannot, ever, be changed or altered.
There are no ‘Islamists’: only Islam and those who take its prescriptions more seriously than others.
