The same people who tried to have Madonna thrown out of Germany for offending their precious religion, calling her blasphemous behavior degenerate, dangerous, and offensive - well, guess whether they were more concerned with offending religion or with Freedom of Speech when the Mohammed cartoons were released - and re-released, and re-re-released . . .

It might seem odd to the student of religion that the West has taken so ferociously and suddenly to antipathy towards Islam. Sure, it is backwards; it, like every other monotheistic religion, trembles in awe before an implacable, ineffable Almighty who will strike you down and send you to Hell if you do not obey His (inevitably His) obscure, open-ended dictates. And more often than not, monotheism is used as a crutch for reactionaries, who pretend their cultural affixations are the product of religion and must be enshrined in law.

These are not features unique to Islam, nor is any of this novel; these critiques of organized religion were old news in the 19th century, and the fact that Islam behaves rather like Christianity wherever it exists is pretty much self-evident. Every Muslim country has a parallel in the Christian world; in Turkey, as in the US in the 1960s, a new wave of conservatives rally around religion, while Goldwater-style nationalists, the product of a secular tradition, try desperately to stamp them out. The Islamicization of Turkish politics parallel Eastern Europe as well - where in Poland a faction in government within the ostensibly democratic Sejm has attempted to elect Jesus King, and whose major conservative radio personality periodically rails against the world Jewish conspiracy to destroy the one true Catholic faith.

In fact, dictate to your average ‘Islamophobe’ the comings and goings of a country in eastern Europe without being specific as to where they were happening, and chances are very good that they will scream without even thinking about how savage the filthy Muslims are, and how we need to kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. (The post-Soviets would, of course, agree with them - internecine solidarity isn’t a strong suit for religious nutjobs.) Even the atheists among the ‘Islamophobes’ will make paeans to the superiority of whatever religion happens to be opposed to Islam wherever the Muslims in question are.

The only easy explanation for this is an ugly one. ‘Islamophobia’ is an inaccurate term precisely because Islam isn’t what is at issue. Atheists have no reason to love it, but the soi-disant ‘atheists’, ’skeptics’, and ‘humanists’ railing against Islam take swings at a minority religion while one endorsed by the majority of their countrymen - in some cases, an endorsement above and beyond the republic (for there is an awful, awful correlation between those with a strong belief in Lord Jesus and those who would like to see President-for-Life Bush) - gradually seizes control of the few and scattered organs of society religion does not already dominate.

In France, where that buffoonishly pretentious term dhimmitude originated, the Catholic Church is essentially the right wing of the country. In Germany, one of the staunchest bodies against Turkish accession to the EU and the country the most consistently worried about the Orwellian specter of Eurabia, the right is represented by the Christian Democrats - and the country has not only blasphemy laws but an established church. Christopher Hitchens plays tough-guy intellectual atheist by screaming at a religion brown people in his country have and occasionally says a mean thing or two about a uselessly extreme Christian Dominionist straw-man so as not to be too transparent a bigot; he casts his net far and wide and runs over all his findings with his finest-toothed comb — when it comes to Islam. When it comes time to thrash the largely white Anglican communion — which he spent his entire young life being abused by for thinking on his own — he is strangely unmoved by their history of abetting genocide and oppression — from Cork to Taiping, and with plenty of stops in Britain itself.

The Christians next door are now, and have been for centuries, stripping them of every religious and sociological liberty they can get their greasy little hands on - and yet the like of Hitchens view these people as acceptable allies against ‘Islamofascism’.

So why is it that those so worried about the future of secularism are so worried about Muslims as their Christian phalange seizes control?

As I said, the only sensible answer is the ugly one. ‘Islam’ is not what ‘Islamophobes’ presume it. It doesn’t have the internal unity of the Protestant communion, let alone the Catholics; it is split between two major branches that hate each other like poison (and a few minor communities that neither branch likes at all), and of those each branch represents a number of different traditions, faiths, and interpretations. If one takes Islam to be the belief in the prophecies of Mohammed - for requiring all of the hadiths of any given branch will rule out all of the others, and those, like saintlore, have as much to do with tradition as they do with religion - the Muslim world is spread from the Sahel to Indonesia.

‘Islamophobes’ gloss over this; they presume that the Arabs spread from the Middle East, murder and rapine in their wake, and converted all the populations under their heel by the sword. Hence dhimmitude — the absurd belief that wherever Islam spread, it spread uniformly by a wave of Arab conquest, placing subjects of the hated Moor under intolerable impositions and forcing them to convert or die.

In some historical regimes — the tiny minority, akin to defining Christianity as a whole exclusively by the political and theological activity of the Gnostics — this is true. But for most of history, jizyah — the poll tax on non-Muslims — was a political and economic issue, like taxation in general. In Southeast Asia, jizyah was almost unknown except for cases where the Muslim merchants sought to interfere with competing Hindu, Buddhist, and pagan businessmen — it had an almost protectionist aspect to it, and it was not in the slightest intended to convert. (In fact, it was sometimes instituted at the behest of Muslim traders who had a non-Muslim ruler in their pocket.) For religious minorities in an Islamic polity, dhimmi status and the jizyah coming with it was a blessing - it represented the opportunity to enjoy religious freedom (which the regimes Islam toppled rarely offered) and autonomy (which the regimes Islam toppled never offered) in exchange for less taxation than they had paid under their previous overlords. (And jizyah was a set amount to which Muslim rulers were bound if they intended to govern non-Muslims at all; it simply proved loyalty to the state that the minority community might go unmolested; unlike ‘protection’ in the modern sense and the innuendos the screamers at dhimmitude enjoy, protection from majority tyranny is a fairly vital functions of a just state.) That combined with acculturation offers a good explanation for most Muslim converts; the children of the dhimmis enjoyed opportunities their grandparents did not, and saw the mainstream for the first time beginning to tolerate their existence - and make a semblance of scientific or religious progress. Dhimmitude, far from a life-long nightmare of violence and persecution, represented a golden opportunity for most and an irritation for few.

And it was especially the former for the Jews - which inevitably lead to purges, disinheritance, and pogroms during conflicts between Christian states and Muslim ones. As if the Christian princes ever needed an excuse to wound the Jewish people; for a millennium the safest bet as a Jew, if one was not lucky enough to be born in Khazaria in its few centuries of Jewish rule, was to be part of a Muslim state, which would comparatively seldom steal away all that you owned and flay you alive for desecrating sacred instruments. It is an intense historical irony, considering how hard hawks in Israel have pushed for the Arab to be seen as an implacable and eternal enemy of the Jew, to realize that in pre-modern times, well into the lifetime of Mozart, what made Christian Europe angriest about Muslims was that they suffered the Christ-killers to live free.

The Ottomans, who essentially shaped the entire modern conception of Islam and the Muslim polity, rejected conversion by the sword - in fact, they usually actively discouraged conversion; the Iranians were certainly not converted by the sword (representing a population larger than the entire Arab world put together in antiquity), and neither were the Indians (the future Mughals invaded Pakistan because it represented a large Muslim territory, not the other way around). Indonesia is almost entirely Muslim (and in fact is the single most populous Muslim-majority country) without any conquest having been involved; no Arab army ever got within two thousand miles of its westernmost shores and Islam spread there by trade and cultural diffusion, like Hinduism and Buddhism. The same goes for the Muslim communities of the Sahel and Sahara. (In fact, Islam in Africa is as old as Islam itself; one of the oldest folktales in Islam involves an Ethiopian muezzin beloved by Mohammed, who dismissed xenophobes’ complaints about his accent with ‘His sin is shin to God.’)

In short, the narrative of conquest and violence on which the ‘Islamophobes’ perch their view of the present - largely intended to prove the inevitable perfidy of Muslims and the necessity of the humiliation, degradation, and destruction of Islam (and Muslims) - is wholly false, and is so obviously false (requiring rank absurdities like a 10% tax and communal autonomy being a universal act of oppression, and the Islamicization of areas of the world nearly impossible to reach in force from the Islamic heartland as ‘conquest’) that the complaints around which ‘Islamophobia’ revolves clearly have a secondary motive: to mar Islam and to tar what it represents by association.

What does Islam represent? It’s not theocracy — for theocracy one needs look no further than ‘your Church is wounded if it does not obey my every whim’ XVI. (Previously known as ‘An Eastern Orthodox contemporary of the Crusades would be a great source for wisdom relevant to the contemporary Catholic Church’ XVI.) That’s a case of fishing after a speck in your neighbor’s eye while you have a 2 by 4 digging into your brain. (And that horrifying image, when one thinks of whether it is a Christian/’western’ country leading the world in cloning and stem-cell research, is all the more apt.)

It’s not terrorism; saying that is as silly and ultimately stereotype-driven as saying the IRA is what happens when you let Catholics into your country. It is not bomb-making directions converts to Islam are required to recite in Arabic.

Unfortunately, and here is where I must call the name ‘Islamophobia’ inaccurate and the aims of the self-aware, conscious, educated ‘Islamophobes’ (as opposed to the dupes who follow them out of intellectual peer pressure and paranoia) ugly bigots — Islam does not represent a what — but a who.

* * *

Islam has no racial identity per se. This is part of why every ‘Islamophobe’, when called on their knee-jerk bigotry, immediately shouts about how they’re not racists because there isn’t a Muslim race. . . But as for Arabs, Iranians, Turcomen and Xinjiangese, Indonesians, Chechens, Bedouins, Albanians, Bosniaks, Swahilophones, Turks, Kurds, and African-American converts - well, don’t even get them started. Long story short, their culturally inherited genetics cause them to hunger insatiably for Christian-infant falafel and if that isn’t enough to make them racially inferior that’s clearly a sign of political correctness gone mad.

But in every country where ‘Islamophobia’ is a political and social force, the religion of the largest immigrant groups — immigrant groups on whose backs the new global economy has largely been built and whose hard toil sees less reward than any of their fellow workers granted citizenship — is — surprise surprise — Islam.

That, Islam, is all those immigrants have in common — and it isn’t something that unites them. Algerians, Turks, Indians/Pakistanis, and Tunisians — the kind of Muslims who do the dirty work, are paid nothing for it, and denied citizenship even if they were born in respectively France, the D-A-CH countries, England, and Italy — would barely be able to comprehend one another’s Arabic, let alone their mother tongues, and the traditions, beliefs, and theological background of each group vary wildly. But the increasing political unity of Europe, along with an increasingly ruthless investor class eager to game the statistics to get taxation for welfare and schools off of their back, requires some category into which to lump Europe’s invisibles - those who toil beneath the system to allow for the illusion of prosperity, those whose menial existences aren’t counted when politicians and demographers tout the growing wealth, health, and happiness of the (white) citizenry.

The entire point of ‘Islamophobia’ is the same as any other kind of bigotry. It is not ‘racial’ per se, because unless they are very drunk modern bigots avoid at all costs conceding they think their mud people are born that way (viewing it as a sort of conscious, evil choice), but it represents exactly the same thing as ‘race’ — outsider status, conferred by appearance, habits, and social place. (The headscarf bans in Europe, for instance, affect practicing and lapsed Muslims, secularists, and non-Muslims from the immigrant countries the same. Middle Eastern women are encouraged to wear headscarves just like European women were once encouraged to wear skirts, and they are so accustomed to them that many feel slothenly/unwomanly/generally strange without them. While this is initially a point used in favor of the ban — after all, it doesn’t target just Muslims! — the justifications always veer towards the intolerable misogynist cruelty of Sharia and its despicable dhimmitude.) Racism is possible without the actual presence of a race, precisely because race is just an artifice. You can draw boundaries around whoever you like and call them a race, and that is exactly what ‘critique’ of ‘Islamic culture’ seeks to accomplish.

Don’t believe me? Anti-Latino sentiment in the US is an excellent example. Mexico is a country of immigrants as much as the US; while, like the US, there is a core population that represents the ‘majority’, Mexico is a republic and derives citizenship not from the content of blood but from birthplace and allegiance to national ideals. Vicente Fox was half-Irish. This is true of every Latin American country (although some more than others). One of the national heroes of Chile was named Bernardo O’Higgins — born, raised, and died there, and never viewed as foreign by his countrymen, not then and not now. There is no such thing as ‘a Mexican’, divorced from citizenship of the Republic of Mexico (or for that matter a Guatemalan or a Nicaraguan or an Argentine), any more than there is such a thing as ‘an American’ divorced from American citizenship. Yet a drive to exclude has created ‘Latino’ as a category; there is probably more Irish blood among the ‘Mexican’ population in Texas than in the ‘white’ population thereof, and yet you can bet that doesn’t bother any racist there too much, or even occur to them.

And anti-religious biases can be transparently racist, strident insistences to the contrary aside. A good example is, again, Anti-Catholicism - it was ostensibly worried about the perfidious popery of the whore of Rome but in practice was more angry about the Oirish and their clown-car cunts, their violence and of course their drinking. (Prohibition was openly an effort to bring the country in tune with ‘Protestant morality’.) And we are seeing a slight revival of it now, with Mexicans playing the role (cheap, disposable, invisible labor) the Irish played in the 19th century. No reputable historian would completely divorce anti-Catholicism and anti-immigrant racism — and the scholarly consensus considers the two largely identical for the groups it affected.In short: the point of ‘Islamophobia’ is to demonize and exclude immigrants who just happen to be from Muslim countries. It does not represent a critique of what Islam actually is or does; it represents an attempt to frame the debate such that the groups we profit from thinking of as savage are all together, one big nasty amalgam of every Western stereotype of the Old World tropics.

* * *

While I have been congratulatory to Islam in history, the shrewd will note that my laudatory language is comparative - that is, the historical Muslim states of the Middle East, and the Ottoman hegemony in the religious powderkeg of the Balkans, were actually amazingly progressive — compared to their contemporaries. I am not here to argue and could never in good conscience argue that Islam is perfect, or that Islam is even desirable. Whatever Islam had wrong with it, Christianity (and Hinduism, where that was the main competitor) had the same, and often more still in the wings.

There is genuine critique of Islam to be written, honestly-intended higher textual criticism on the Koran and the hadiths. But we live in a day and age where an atheist firebrand like Dawkins is reduced to petulant whining about instead of triumphant intellectual scorn against theism, where the piss-poor moral sorcery of the self-obsessed dominionists sneaks its way into the law of even secular countries, and where the most common reading of the Bible has become a binary choice between ‘true’ or ‘false’. In the last century the Christian world, especially the Anglosphere, enlightenment has lunged backwards to a degree that would draw pity from the intelligentsia of the 16th century.

People now wear their crosses outside their clothes at work; instead of keeping it close as a reminder of their faith, it has become neo-Calvinist bling: they flash it out as a visual identifier that they are among the elect. Pat Robertson squints hard enough for even the smallest TVs to catch it when he ‘prays’. Bestselling books based on a book proclaiming the end of the world to be 1980 get adapted into movies, first-person shooters. Paranoid Dominionist fanatics — with no backing from any respectable theologian — find bits of science to assault for no better reason than an earnest effort to get the eggheads before the eggheads get them. One might be forgiven for saying that to the freethinker, be he Christian or Muslim or Jew or Atheist or anything else under the sun, the Cross no longer says ‘It could have been me if someone hadn’t stood up and spoken for themselves’. It says ‘It’s going to be you if you don’t sit down and shut up.‘

It is the scariest thing in the world to a humanist, and anyone who looks at that and concludes the reasonable thing to do is to join forces with the oppressors to keep the Muslims down is either a false-flagger or certifiably insane.

But all of this could be true of the Muslims, to every last man, woman, and child, they could be a million times worse — and they could be and do all the ‘Islamophobes’ put onto them — and yet that would remain the case.

Because ‘Islamophobia’ isn’t about Islam - and it’s not about fear.

* * *

As I pointed out earlier, the word ‘Islamophobia’ is flawed down to its damned morphemes. It breaks down into ‘fear of Islam’, which it isn’t - it isn’t concerned with anything anyone could reasonably identify as ‘Islam’ per se, and it is most certainly not a product of fear — more like contempt. And racialized contempt is the great precursor to genocide; no one speaks of that other great hatred for minorities, long held dear by the West’s worst monsters, as a ‘phobia’, or blames it on the flaws of the religion it pretends to care about. They come out and call it what it is — anti-Semitism, hatred and disdain for the perceived ‘Jewish race’, in willful ignorance of how actual Jews might self-identify. A couple of quick examples of this are ‘antiummahism’ or ‘antimummahism‘, adjective ‘antimummite’ etc. — formed by anti … ism/ite and mummah, which refers to the Muslim community of the faithful — but that still involves an unacceptable concealment of the racializing element. Other alternatives, formed by ‘Middle East’ — antimoyenestite, antikhavar[miyaneh]ite, antimidestite, or perhaps relation to Arabic — anti[occo/centro]semitism (from West Semitic and Central Semitic, each a branch to which Arabic belongs — although it shares the former with Hebrew) — they are all unsatisfying, and unwieldy.

The best I can come up with: antigastarbism. This refers to the gastarbeitere - literally guest workers, a clean, stand-offish term for dealing with immigrants and making sure they would build the economy and go away. It was increasingly, as the program became a permanent source of labor, used against the Turkish laborers who built the Federal German economy from the ruins - and this proceeded to allow the malignant racist vigor that fueled the Holocaust to quietly shift targets instead of dying in shame.

The guest workers, of course, became permanent residents — with children and grandchildren and deepening roots in Europe’s fertile soil — and gastarbeiter took on an exclusionary, bigoted connotation, referring to people who had as much to do with the European economy as any one of their haranguers as foreigners and transients and demanding their removal. The identification with ‘Islam’ is exactly what the antigastarbites wish to achieve; the connection is largely meaningless, because what unifies the subjects of the antigastarbites’ hate is economic status, and where the immigrants are anything besides Muslim — the large and aggressively persecuted Lebanese community in Australia, for instance — the same rhetoric is broken out and attributed to ‘culture’ instead of ‘religion’. The lovely thing about antigastarbism is that it allows this otherwise difficult and tenuous connection to be made crystal clear.

And on that note, so will the historical parallels. It truly surprises me that the democratically-sanctioned fury directed at the Chinese in California for not learning the language, for congregating with one another, for refusing to ‘acculturate’, for having strange gods and traditions, and for having savage headwear (in this case, the queues - de rigeur for Imperial citizenship, leading to a vicious 1870 law mandating all Chinese have cut off lest they face deportment) has not been explored as a parallel to the Islamic experience in the EU.

And the sad thing is that I just pulled that one example out of thin air, as it was the closest to my memory; a researcher could spend an entire career writing about hate towards immigrants dressed up as pious concern for the spiritual well-being of the community, and yet every time one of those waves of hate strikes, we spend all too long taking what that hate claims to be at face value.

Antigastarbism has other things going for it: it’s a decent word; ugly, as a word for a bigotry must be, tough and unpleasant, and speaking to the lies inherent in the view. Just as the ‘guest workers’ in Germany remained ‘guests’ in the eyes of their would-be countrymen after remaining in the country for decades, so the immigrants into Europe remain foreigners no matter how far they go to acculturate. No matter how diverse the Asian immigrants are from each other they become a unified people; no matter how hard they work and how much they contribute to the economy and government they become a drain on the welfare state; no matter how much they might want to be a part of the country they become refuseniks stubbornly unwilling to accept the language and culture; and no matter how assimilationist they get (and studies typically indicate, rhetoric aside, that even immigrants from a different ‘culture’ or religious background do assimilate readily) — they (and their children, often better speakers of the antigastarbites’ languages than themselves) remain outsiders to the priggish racists who scream at their neighbors about the horrors of their Allah and their Mahomet, and who insist to all that can hear that they will never be a part of the precious homeland.

And it hardly seems fair, when those priggish racists have done this shouting at their share of Sikhs and Hindus, to let them get away with calling it Islam’s fault.

* * *

‘Islamophobe’, with its lily-white fear and studied concern and ostensible focus on religion - rather than poor brown people - can remain the antigastarbites’ word to accept, refute, or qualify. The word is all wrong to describe what they are, what they do, and what they want. Hitler was not a Judaeophobe; it’s hard to pretend to be afraid of someone when all you want out of them is segregation, depredation, humiliation, and death.