[Reader-list] Anti-Islam Hysteria by Pankaj Mishra

[rashneek kher]

How similar are opposites:Hirsi and Mishra
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http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/op-ed-contributor/antiislam-hysteria-290
*In the New York Times last week, writing about the eruption of hatred for
Muslims in the US, Frank Rich asked what seems an increasingly pertinent
question: “How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are
calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?”

*Americans who are shocked by what the columnist Maureen Dowd calls a “weird
mass nervous breakdown” accuse the usual suspects — right-wingers whose
“fear and disinformation” is “amplified by the poisonous echo chamber that
is the modern media environment”. But anti-Muslim toxins were injected into
the mainstream well before August 2010, and not by right-wingers alone.

Bestselling authors like Ayaan Hirsi Ali may be the “new heroes”, as the
writer Peter Beinart puts it, of the Republican party’s crusade against
Muslims. But “professional” former Muslims have long provided respectable
cover for the bigotry and, more often, plain ignorance of mainstream western
commentators on Islam. On Monday Germany’s Hirsi Ali, the Turkish writer
Necla Kelek, stood shoulder to shoulder with the German central banker and
Social Democratic party (SPD) member Thilo Sarrazin as he asserted that
Muslims are out-breeding white, presumably “Aryan” Germans and that “all
Jews share the same gene”.

Most of these ex-Muslim “dissidents” lucratively raging against Islam in the
West wouldn’t be able to flourish without the imprimatur of influential
institutions and individuals in the US and Europe.

Hirsi Ali, who wishes to be the Voltaire of Islam, commands rapturous
endorsements from not only right-wing crazies like Pamela Geller and Glenn
Beck but also Tina Brown.

Certainly, the story of Hirsi Ali’s life attests powerfully to the
degradations suffered by many women in patriarchal cultures. There is no
question that she should feel free to say that some Muslims are programmed
to kill infidels and mutilate female bodies, however much these opinions may
offend some people. There is little reason, however, for most of her
opinions to claim serious intellectual attention.

Yet the mildest criticism of Hirsi Ali’s naivety triggers a tsunami of
vitriol from her army of prominent supporters. In recent months columnists
and critics such as Clive James and Melanie Phillips have rebuked Ian Buruma
and Timothy Garton Ash for not joining the chorus of praise for Hirsi Ali, a
defender of the western Enlightenment.

As it turns out, millions of angry Americans have opened up an equally
unedifying “debate” on Islam. “You look them [Muslims] in the eye and flex
your muscles,” Hirsi Ali exhorted the West recently, “there comes a moment
when you crush your enemy.”

Well, that much-awaited moment is here. Populist sentiment, which Democrats
as well as Republicans clamour to represent, fully endorses the scapegoating
of a religious minority for America’s recent military and economic failures.

*The writer is author of Temptations of the West
—The Guardian, London*


-- 
Rashneek Kher
http://www.kashmiris-in-exile.blogspot.com
http://www.nietzschereborn.blogspot.com