It’s quite common these days for people now to use the expression – for example – “anti-Islamic racism”, as if an attack on a religion was an attack on an ethnic group. The word Islamophobia in fact is beginning to acquire the opprobrium that was once reserved for racial prejudice. This is a subtle and very nasty insinuation that needs to be met head on.
Who said “what if Falwell says he hates fags? What if people act upon that?” The Bible says you have to hate fags. If Falwell says he is saying it because the Bible says so, he’s right. Yes, it might make people go out and use violence. What are you going to do about that? You’re up against a group of people who will say “you put your hands on our Bible and we’ll call the hate speech police”. Now what are you going to do when you’ve dug that trap for yourself?
Now let’s not dance around, not all monotheisms are exactly the same – at the moment. They’re all based on the same illusion, they’re all plagiarisms of each other, but there is one in particular that at the moment is proposing a serious menace not just to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but to quite a lot of other freedoms too. And this is the religion that exhibits the horrible trio of self-hatred, self-righteousness and self-pity. I am talking about militant Islam.
Christopher Hitchens gives a talk in Canada on Free Speech in November 2006. This is the end of the twenty minute speech originally from One Good Move: http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2007/03/free_speech_6.html Hitchens is right that religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred, and contempt.
Well I tell you what, I don’t think Mohammad ever heard those voices. I don’t believe it. And the likelihood that I’m right, as opposed to the likelihood that a businessman who couldn’t read, had bits of the Old and New Testament re-dictated to him by an archangel, I think puts me much more near the position of being objectively correct.
But who is the one under threat? The person who propagates this and says “I’d better listen because if I don’t I’m in danger”, or me who says “No, I think this is so silly you could even publish a cartoon about it”?
And up go the placards and up go the yells and the howls and the screams, “Behead those…” – this is in London, this is in Toronto and this is in New York, it is right in our midst now – “Behead those…” “Behead those who cartoon Islam”.
Look anywhere you like in the world for slavery, for the subjection of women as chattel, for the burning and flogging of homosexuals, for ethnic cleansing, for anti-Semitism, for all of this, you look no further than a famous book that’s on every pulpit in this city, and in every synagogue and in every mosque.
And then just see whether you can square the fact that the force of the main source of hatred is also the main caller for censorship.
Partial transcript