From the announcement of this Contest by the “Islamic Human Rights Commission”:
What is Islamophobia?
A contemporary and emerging form of prejudice Islamophobia can be described as stereotypes, bias or acts of hostility towards individual Muslims or followers of Islam in general. In addition to individual acts of intolerance and racial profiling, Islamophobia leads to viewing Muslims as a greater security threat on an institutional, systemic and societal level and perceiving their views to be intrinsically problematic, violent or unethical.
And the Awards:
Islamophobia Awards:
The Islamophobia Awards is an annual event to acknowledge – through satire, revue and comedy – the worst Islamophobes of that year. Centred around a gala dinner, the ‘awards’ themsleves are both entertaining and raise awarness of a serious and growing prejudice. Real awards are given to those who have battled against Islamophobia – often against enormous odds.
Note the last sentence in the definition of “Islamophobia”:
Islamophobia leads to viewing Muslims as a greater security threat on an institutional, systemic and societal level and perceiving their views to be intrinsically problematic, violent or unethical.
A security threat “greater” than what? Greater than that posed to non-Muslims, by other non-Muslims, in non-Muslims societies? But surely we don’t need to know much of anything to know that that is true. After familiarizing yourself with Qur’an, Hadith, and the biography of Muhammad, do you perceive that those who claim to believe that the Qur’an is the uncreated and immutable word of God, and who take Muhammad to be the Perfect Man, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil, to hold views that might be described by you as “intrinsically problematic, violent, or unethical”?
Of course you do. Every single person who actually reads the texts, even without waking up to the day’s Jihad News from around the world, must if not crazy regard the views that those who call themselves Muslims must be assumed to hold (unless they signal to the outside world that they are not real Believers but merely “cultural Muslims” — i.e., Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only Muslims) as “intrinsically problematic, violent, or unethical.”
And what exactly is “Islamophobia” that it should be discouraged? It is a dislike, or fear, or even hatred, of a belief-system that uncompromisingly divides the world between Believer and Infidel, dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, and demands that the Believers owe their sole loyalty to the umma al-islamiyya, and must work to convert, to kill, or to permanently subjugate all Infidels, reducing them to a state of humiliation and degradation. Is that something of which Infidels are supposed to remain unaware? Or if they do manage to become aware, despite the best efforts of Western governments and media and in academic centers taken over by those dancing to the tune of Arab paymasters and, in many cases, staffed by Muslims and non-Muslims eager to accommodate their Muslim colleagues’ every wish, should they not react in some way?
Is not what we mean by “Islamophobia” a completely rational response to the situation? Is it not the fear and dislike of Islam as a belief-system? Given what that belief-system is all about, and given the 1350-year unbroken record of aggression and suppression or murder of non-Muslims and their civilizations, is not such a response rational? The indigenous non-Muslims were almost entirely wiped out from the Middle East, North Africa, from Sassanian (i.e. Zoroastrian) Persia, from Christian Byzantium, from parts of formerly Orthodox areas of the Balkans, from much of Hindu (and Buddhist) India — in short, everywhere that Islam went, it damaged, and most often thoroughly managed to wipe out, all pre-Islamic and non-Islamic peoples and histoires. In a few places — in Egypt with the Copts, in Lebanon with the Maronites who retreated to the northern mountains — non-Muslims held on. Jews came back to Israel to resettle their ancient homeland, often forced to buy land at exorbitant prices from absentee Arab landlords, and after 1948, inheriting the nearly 90% of the land that had passed to the Mandatory authorities from its previous owner, the Ottoman State.
Given what is known of that history, given the cultural and mental impoverishment that Islam brings with it everywhere, why should not Infidels, becoming aware of those tenets and that history, not react with views which others may call “Islamophobia,” but which are based on a rational and clear-sighted view of reality?
The word “Islamophobia” is a scare-word like “racism.” It by now should scare, or distract, or fool none but those who want to be scared or fooled into silence.