You may well be right, but wading through all this stuff (and the new Blog Wars thread) is not so easy.

I think I agree with him (Standing) when he criticises parts of the more shrill left.
I wouldn’t go blaming ethic minorities themselves for giving the BNP a wider profile as Sunny seems to be suggesting is being done by some people (in the links he made at the top of this thread).

From that thread titled ”The “race industry” and blaming the left for racism” on June 18th:

First, the “race industry” is a bunch of civil society organisations started by activists who were pissed off being constantly demonised and decided they had to organise themselves politically. Anyone who blames the “race industry” for the rise of racism, than actual prejudice is hilariously deluded.

… the race industry”is a bunch of civil society organisations started by activists … ”

That’s the place to start this discussion IMO.

NEVER try to win any dispute by misrepresenting what the other person said!

Please list all belief systems and their real or alleged flaws. [You might find it hard to say much bad about Seventh Day Adventists and Quakers but you CAN try!]

If a bloke detests one belief system, he is probably wary of those who embrace it [whether they were born into it or converted]

A ‘true’ Muslim believes the stuff that the Chief Preacher in Makkah believes, right? The one currently in the U.K., I mean.

Which would include all HE spouts about the beastliness of Jews, Christians, Hindus and probably Shintoists.

A non-Muslim would obviously be wary of such a person.

Cultural issues like FGM*, cow-loving, pig-hating, lobster-eating are minor trifles.

Anyway, who except anthopologists and nutters had even heard of FGM until a few years ago?

*FGM is not a Muslim monopoly. Some benighted Christians in Egypt and East Africa did it until recently and probably some are still going in for it.

The funny thing is have you actual met a Kosovan or Bosnian Muslim? They are deeply secular often Muslims in name only (you know the type of Muslims you always go on about how all Muslims should be)- you are far more likely to find a Kosovan in a nightclub or pub than a mosque. Yet you still detest them- because they are Muslims or have Muslim names!

This tells Muslims all we need to know about “if you assimilate, theyll accept you”.
They wont – so why bother?

Now substitute:

Christianity / Christians
Zoroastrianism / Parsees
Shintoism / Shintoists
and so on until you run out of -isms …

To ‘be wary of’ is not necessarily to hate.
I am wary of large dogs that growl but I do not actively hate all canines.

Someone who detests Islam is wary about all Muslims

kind of exposes the “I hate Islam not Muslims” canard

including Albanians, Bosnians, Scandinavian converts ['reverts'] to Islam and everyone else who is Muslim. S/he might attempt “to love the sinner while detesting the sin” of Islam but skin colour would hardly enter the picture.

What exactly is the “sin” of being a Muslim ?. Is it like the “sin” of being Jewish or Hindu ?.

Im positive you’ll say “believing in terrorism, forced marriages, FGM” and other such media driven lies about Islam and Muslims

“Anti-Muslim Racism” is oxymoronic.

Someone who detests Islam is wary about all Muslims, including Albanians, Bosnians, Scandinavian converts ['reverts'] to Islam and everyone else who is Muslim. S/he might attempt “to love the sinner while detesting the sin” of Islam but skin colour would hardly enter the picture.

Someone who is a genuine real racist detests people of another colour [or perhaps only blacks or only browns or only yellows or only redskins] but probably isn’t bothered about what such people do or do not believe.

Thus it can be stated that not all racists are Islamophobes and that not all Islamophobes are racist.

Of course, there are some people who really and truly have both sets of hatreds in their hearts simultaneously but they tend to be the dumbest of the dumb.

An unswerving non-racist Islamophobe would be happy to approve a one-on-one exchange of every Muslim in Britain for a Christian Tamil or Keralite, jet-black though many of them are.

An unswerving racist would be happy to exchange every person of a dusky hue – irrespective of confessional identity – for a Bosniak, Albanian or Pomak.

There! Now write it out and memorise it, Yakoub.

Well, hopefully Standing’s kind of barely disguised anti-Muslim racism, made respectable in a climate where Islamophobia is politically legitimate, won’t lead to a holocaust. But where will it lead exactly? Anywhere good? Anywhere peaceful and productive? Does he think MCB are going to disband, while all us Mussies become timorous clones declaring our unremitting adoration for Ed Hussein? Send me a list of your demands, Standing. Go on, give us a laff.

The problem is, people like Standing don’t actually understand “culture” in the anthropological sense of the term. They have no idea whatsoever about how communities exist, beyond the kind of journalistic essentialising prevelant among sensationalising Daily Mail hacks. If Standing wrote about Westminster politics with the same level of intellectual incompetence that his ilk bring to the topic of Islam and Muslims, their blogs would receive less hits than Andy’s Underpant Collection. It’s genuinely pathetic.

Which is what I’m saying. It’s just annoying to find people who are willing to indulge this tripe, is what my point is.

I would never dream of saying Standing is racist. But he has a political agenda I do not share (playing down anti-Muslim bigotry, blaming the left).

As a final point – it’s easy to point and laugh at the knuckle-draggers. They are an easy target. It’s the racists in suits who claim they are not racist while fully sprouting opinions matching those of the BNP I’m worried about.

There’s a lot of links in all these articles, and a lot of reading to be done. But as Edmund Standing praised that article, I focused on it.

Is it true that the left created a ”race industry”?

He talks of ”thought crime”. Is this rightwing nonsense?
He has a pop at Billy Bragg and that kind of ”concert in Victoria Park” anti-racism.
As someone who has fallen out with some of those (in my opinion very PC) people on another internet forum, I had some sympathy with that view. The kind of people who are quick to cry ”racist” but would refuse to even acknowledge the merit in an article like this one below:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/3002/

I ended up having feelings about those anti-racist white liberals in a similar way that the Tory mentions.
(Because, in my opinion, the Spiked article was a good one.)

There is that disdain for the working class white van man with his Saint George’s flag, as we saw from Joseph Harker in the Guardian.

And then he bangs on about Whitechapel Road (near Brick Lane). I’m driving up and down it every day at the moment, on the way to Newmarket in Suffolk where I do a delivery.
Tonight I passed the East London Mosque bang on 7pm (when you can park on a single red line) and as I knew from reading Harry’s Place that a controversial Sheikh from Saudia Arabia was speaking there tonight, I pulled over for a look at was going on.

The whole block around the Mosque was very busy with people. More like friday prayers than a tuesday evening.

I went in to the main hall and sat down for ten minutes as someone was speaking, but it wasn’t the main speaker.
Anyway, it is slightly disconcerting to be a white guy in amongst such a Bangladeshi scene.
No one paid me any heed of course, but still, for an area with such a white working class history (the war, the 50′s then the Kray twins and all that) it’s quite a transformation in 30 years or so.

The point Sunny’s making is a difficult one. Is it right to bash Standing for his wide ranging argument here? I’d say it might take more than three days and a hundred or so posts to get to the bottom of this. But by then, the focus has usually moved on.

Prrsonally I think the BNP get too much publicity, and people over analise their thinking. They’re just twats.
Maybe we should be happy with the fascists we’ve got in the UK. At least they’re pretty useless.

For whatever success they might score in elections, I think that fascism has very shallow roots in modern Britain.
The soil is not fertile for them.

Sunny (28) – I’m not blaming ‘socialists.’ I’m blaming those on all parts of the political spectrum who recklessly joined in in indulging Islamic victimhood to the extent where, apparantly, my morning train could be bombed.

Some of us briefly joined under the banner of the SWTC to protest against the war. Since then those fruitloops from the SWP have seen declining support.

Firstly, the SWTC is not the SWP. Secondly, Galloway is not of the left, and neither does he represent anyone. He used to be part of a small section of the hard left.

Lastly – blaming the socialists is a nice diversionary tactic. Still doesn’t explain racism though.

Nice comment Yahya – spot on.

Someone with photogenic appeal like the cutie who won?

These days there are herds of smart graduates who support some – at least – of the BNP message.

The Greens got much more support than the BNP, despite not having half the coverage or the sympathy from right-wing scum in the media.

When will politicians go out of their way to win Green voters back over? When will they bend over backwards to put the environment at the top of the agenda rather than talking toss?

What about all these disillusioned white middle-class people who put their cross there, are they to be ignored because their views don’t fit in with right-whingers with an axe to grind?

The leftisit idea of a ‘grievance’ that ‘legitimised’ suicide bombings was poor politics and no doubt hardened attitudes. The people who vote BNP probably had their ideas before the left/islamist alliance, but I can’t escape the feeling that they had their feelings reinforced.

What was most worrying was how the left would preference perceived Islamic victim hood. White people of all and no faiths were angry about Iraq, as were pensioners, Black people and so on – yet I would guess that a white pensioner suicide bombing campaign in protest over Iraq would not have been so readily offered support from the left.

Indeed there was an undertone of racism to the way in which some seemed to think it was ‘natural’ and ‘to be expected’ for muslims to react by killing others.

The left lost its way in the early part of this decade – I suspect it did not convert people to the BNP, but it hardened opinion.

1. Racism today is more about culture than biology: the BNP knows this and exploits it.

2. To say the BNP’s Islamophobia is only tactical is insensitive/condescending to Muslims and harder to prove than taking it at face value.

3. It marginalises Muslims in an anti-racism alliance that should be inclusive. This alliance has to deal with racism in all its modern forms, including Islamophobia.