So many things are Islamophobic now that for Islamophobic people (which has the potential to be all non-Muslims) it is hard to speak or move — let alone leave the house — without committing a whole slew of Islamophobic hate-crimes.
You can be an Islamophobe if you attend the wrong opera (a production of Idomeneo in Germany), watch the wrong play (Voltaire’s Mahomet) or read the wrong book (such as The Satanic Verses or the gag-inducing Jewel of Medina). You might feel tempted — as a British schoolteacher, Gillian Gibbons, did in the Sudan in 2007 — to cuddle up to an Islamophobic teddy bear. When Mrs. Gibbons asked her pupils to name her teddy bear, one of them sweetly thought of ‘Mohammed’. The Sudanese authorities didn’t find it so sweet, imprisoned her and threatened her with forty lashes.
There is also the fact if you try to get out of the problem by, say, reading the Koran or any histories of the life of Mohammed and talking about them you will enter a whole new realm of hate-crime. A non-Muslim talking about Islam in any way other than complete adoration is a non-Muslim on a hate-crime-wave.
There is absolutely nothing you can do to avoid the charge. A few years back, Burger King was accused of Islamophobia because one of the swirls on its ice cream packaging was alleged by one Muslim to look like the Arabic for ‘Allah’. Burger King promptly apologised and withdrew the packaging. But perhaps we should just sit back, relax, eat our Islamophobic ice-cream while watching an Islamophobic film and put up with it? Those of us who cannot draw might at least feel relief that we will never create an Islamophobic cartoon. Except what will happen if we one day draw a stick man and someone calls him ‘Mohammed’, like Mrs. Gibbons’s teddybear? Of course, you don’t have to be able to draw to commit an Islamophobic crime. You just have to be able to write. Or think.
And God help you if you have a sense of humour. The atheist society of British university freshers’ fair recently pinned the name ‘Mohammed’ to a pineapple on their stall. It is worth stating at this juncture that Mohammed — whatever else he looked like, if he existed — almost certainly looked nothing like a pineapple. Nevertheless, the incident led the local Muslim student society to brand not just the atheist society but the pineapple itself ‘Islamophobic’. The atheists were issued with the unimprovable line, ‘Either the pineapple goes, or you do.’ But the pineapple could not go, so the atheists did. This may have been the world’s first fruit-based accusation of Islamophobia, but it will not be the last.
From cradle to grave we can now spend a lifetime unwittingly committing Islamophobic crimes. Children can do it, without any knowledge of religion at all. Take the case in Austria recently which shows that one of the greatest threats of all is the possibility of unwittingly playing with Islamophobic Lego. Who knew that when Lego introduced their new Star Wars Lego collection in 2012, they were treading into this terrain? The problem was that their play-set included a ‘Jabba’s Palace’ portion. Here — as fans of the movie franchise will know — is where the plot gets murky. Little knowing that they were committing an Islamophobic crime, Austria’s youngsters were for some months able to play with Jabba’s Palace. But then in January 2013 one of Austria’s Islamic ‘community leaders’ found that his sister had given one of these toys to his own son.
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The above excerpts are taken from Douglas Murray’s book Islamophilia: A Very Metropolitan Malady.
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