"Please Link from your site"

Oh honey, I sure will!!

As frequent readers will notice, The Proud Islamist is marking a milestone this week: our first comment from Anti-Islam posters. Not one, but two, following the last post about "Naming the Enemy." We had a messianic Jewish zionist, AND an chauvinistic evangelical Christian. Not only that, but TheProudIslamist also has a thread devoted to it on a new Anti-Islam American web forum.

This is part of the reason this blog was set up - aside from reclaiming the muddied terminology of our current political and moral debate on issues of international relations and Canadian social justice. The goal was also to see who would take notice, and to attract the most vile elements of chauvinism and anti-Islam in the West, so that they could vent their fury at a real live Islamist, and demonstrate the ultimately hateful and self-serving nature of their world view. Welcome, welcome!

They are not like other racists, in that they are, prima facie, opposed to a set of ideas that people believe, and not an unchangeable fact of their existence. To say that you want to exterminate, conquer, expel, or discriminate against Muslims is NOT the same as saying that you want to do the same thing to blacks or hispanics. It is, however, equally evil and far more counterproductive.

This is because their view of Islam does not stem from a careful and complex contemplation of Islamic beliefs, values, and practices, but from a parochial worldview that IS inherently racist, in that it emphasizes the suffering of the West over the suffering inflicted by it, informed, amongst its most sophisticated proponents, by a selective, decontextualized, literalist reading of Sira and Hadith. Worse still, by assuming that the Islam of Mullah Omar is the "True Islam," they willingly cede the argument to anyone wishing to follow in such barbaric footsteps.

This is a nice, comforting, way to look at the world, because it allows people to cleanly draw a line with "bad guys" on that side, and "good guys" on this one. And then the aim is simple, if terrible - wipe out the bad guys, bad gals, and bad kids. "Return each blow with a hundred," as one of my new-found playmates said.