This is the first occasion that I have found myself on the road for an extended period of time. Today I am in Chichester and today I auditioned for their university. My scepticism of this place seems to have been completely removed by Ben Hill the music lecturer. It’s a practical based course but completely ‘up there’ with the other universities. I recommend anyone to check it out. But enough about me.

Islamophobe is a word that should not be used lightly. Let the word go over your lips once again…slowly, Islam-O-phobe. Arachnophobes (there isn’t such a word but I’m nounifying it :p ) are afraid of spiders, logically Islamophobe would imply fear of Islam. The word however has become associated with a racist anti-Semitic sentiment and generally applied to all those who express anti-Islamic views. Pat Condell is not an Islamophobe. He expresses no irrational fear of Islam. He is merely anti-Islam in his views. Recently a video was posted by him entitled ‘Shame on you Netherlands’, in which he spoke about the arrest and prosecution of a Dutch minister for criticising Islam.

If you haven’t seen it watch it here:

He also has many other videos which I found very interesting.

Without a doubt that was completely shameful, critical thinking of any religion should be encouraged, the same goes for Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism’s, Judaism, the flying spaghetti monster etc. No one should be able to claim asylum under the guise of ‘that’s racist!’ critical thinking is one of the key skills any mind can posses. Under that logic I should be locked up. Christianity in particular takes a lot of flak in Britain and Europe, however I think we are now passed the stage of locking people for criticising Jesus. The same should be true of all religions. So why should Islam be given special status in western culture? For god’s sake if you can’t take a joke you need to get a life (I’m being facetious). Pat also goes on to say that Islam is whinging about its unfair treatment. And Okay I’ll go as far as to agree with him on that, not wanting to forget that I live in a country which grinds to a halt every year for Christmas (we also have word processors that automatically capitalise the ‘c’ in Christmas) and pretty much stops every Sunday. Whilst Muslim holidays remain largely unobserved, fair? Methinks not. When was that last time we had Britain stop for Id-Ul-Fitar? (spelling?) Should we really be observing any religious holidays as part of our working week anyway?

Whilst I can understand Pat’s thoughts, Islam doesn’t appear to be the enemy that recent political affairs (or Pat) have made out to be. In Britain how many sucessful terrorist plots have we actually had? Hundreds… These range from the supposed guilt of Guido Fawkes; to the IRA to the current state of affairs. I count one successful plot carried out by a radical Muslim cell in Britain. The London bombings…all the others (so far) have been foiled. Is this a good enough reason for the zeitgeist of our times to be of a divide between Muslim (and pretty much) Christian? There were far more bombings carried out by the IRA but we didn’t go in there and level their houses. As for British troops being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re the terrorists there. What realistic threat did Saddam pose to Britain or the US? None. No he wasn’t a humane leader but let’s not forget who put him there. *CoughsUSACoughs* Essentially Saddam was a fall guy for Bush who had to be seen to be doing something in reaction to the world trade centre attacks. Afghanistan looks to be a similar thing with Al-Qaeda, despite a lack of proof that they committed the attacks. Put simply the vast majority of Muslims in Britain are as peace loving as you and me.
Lastly, we need to look at sources for this anti-Islam sentiment and primarily it appears to be right wing newspapers and we all know some of the filth which comes from their print….

I’d also like to stress that I don’t entirely agree with Pat on some of his views, I’d like to defend his freedom to express them.

How do you feel about Islam’s position in the west?