By Judi McLeod —— Bio and Archives January 20, 2015
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“Part of the problem, researchers say, is that right-wing groups can post anti-Islamic comments online without fear of legal prosecution. “If they were to say, ‘Black people are evil, Jamaicans are evil,’ they could be prosecuted,” says Fiyaz Mughal, founder of Islamophobia reporting web site TellMamaUK.org. “But because religious hatred isn't covered legally in the same way that racism is, Mughal says "the extreme right are frankly getting away with really toxic stuff.”So now we have a pre-packaged definition of Islamophobia, and it arrives airtight. Islamophobia hates all Muslims and comes directly from the right. The safe state of In-Between, it seems, always applies only to the left. Lost in the mounting rhetoric is that Islamic terrorism is on a rampage forging a world-wide Caliphate, while most world leaders have their heads in the sand. You don’t have to be right wing to be against the rape, enslavement, stoning, throwing gays from rooftops, crucifying, burying alive, and beheadings by radical Islamic terrorists. You just have to be human and want to hang onto your life.
"Imran Awan, deputy director of the Centre for Applied Criminology at Birmingham City University noticed the trend when he was working on a paper regarding Islamophobia and Twitter following Lee Rigby's death. “Of the 500 tweets from 100 Twitter users Awan examined, 75 per cent were Islamophobic in nature. He cites posts such as "'Let's go out and blow up a mosque' and 'Let’s get together and kill the Muslims," and says most of these were linked to far-right groups. “Awan says the anonymity of social media platforms makes them a popular venue for hate speech, and that the results of his report were “shocking, to say the least.”‘Shocking’ is an adjective that better describes the ongoing wanton slaughter of innocents by al Qaeda, ISIS and Boko Haram. Easy for the mainstream media to target resistance to Islamic terrorism as purely right wing in nature when the government leaders to whom they cater smear all who dare take a stand against Islamic terrorism as racists and bigots. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who refuses to use the term Islamophobia, is a voice crying in the wind. “Manuel Valls argues that the charge of 'Islamophobia' is often used to silence critics of Islamism. (The Atlantic, Jan. 16, 2015)
“The prime minister of France, Manuel Valls, has emerged over the past tumultuous week as one of the West’s most vocal foes of Islamism, though he’s actually been talking about the threat it poses for a long while. During the course of an interview conducted before the Charlie Hebdo attacks, he told me—he went out of his way to tell me, in fact—that he refuses to use the term 'Islamophobia' to describe the phenomenon of anti-Muslim prejudice, because, he says, the accusation of Islamophobia is often used as a weapon by Islamism's apologists to silence their critics.”Insisting that their governments take a strong stand against Islamic terrorism should be humanity’s loudest demand.
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Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years’ experience in the print media. A former Toronto Sun columnist, she also worked for the Kingston Whig Standard. Her work has appeared on Rush Limbaugh, Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com.