Ramadan passed and the celebration of Eid for Muslims the world throughout. Ramadan is a month of fasting, refraining from eating, drinking, and sexual relations in a bid to find patience, humility, and spirituality; a month of contemplation. I sat reading my newspaper last Wednesday and I found myself curious to how much contemplation must have gone through the mind of Pastor Terry Jones and his failed plans to burn the Quran to mark the anniversary of 9/11. I was further curious to read some Facebook statuses of people who I thought I knew supporting the act and voicing their support in the small-minded racist way that the ignorant so often do. Ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s embarrassing. Someone once said to me when watching some generic American crime drama based in the Middle East that what these extremists need is education, it’s the lack of education why people blow themselves up. This may be true, anyone who kills another person in the name of God or because of some voice in their head has had some misleading somewhere along the line. So yeah, extremists need education, but all extreme views...What got to me from this conversation, Pastor Disaster and the racist status’ was the presumption that we in the West know all. Just because we have a train of thought doesn’t make it the only train of thought, nevertheless the correct train of thought if one can truly exist?
The French writer Voltaire writes that ‘we shouldn’t judge a man about the answers that he has but by the questions he asks and intends to answer.’ What Pastor Jones did, besides take the attention off the mourning and remembrance of the 9/11 victims, was to show us that extremists live on either side of the globe, have different religions, and just as my friend said, are just as ill-educated. Those that preferred to be judge rather than jury, would prefer to assume rather than ask, those that would go along with the status quo because that was presumed to be the ‘correct’ way of thinking. But who wants to see the wood through the trees when it isn’t our forest?
Arthur Miller, one time husband of Marilyn Monroe and playwright, written The Crucible in 1950’s as an allegory of Senator McCarthy’s hunt for Communists during the cold war. The play revolves around the Salem witch trials when a young girl is accused of witchcraft and starts pointing the finger at someone else and so on and so on. Ultimately the town ends up in mass hysteria and girls are convicted and hung on the grounds that they share a gender with the person originally accused. McCarthyism in the United States was Senator McCarthy’s witch-hunt for Communists and the hunt was similarly based on grounds from the Salem witch trials. People were recklessly arrested and advised that if they did not give up a name of someone who they knew was a communist they would be charged, if they did they were set free (Guantanamo Bay Bells ringing anyone?). It had such a cascading affect that Hollywood actors found themselves on a communist blacklist, people such as Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, and Miller himself brought in for questioning. McCarthyism is now known as a term of making allegations without correct consideration of evidence, a strategy for gaining power by appealing to bias, worries and emotions. McCarthyism is used on a daily basis in our political sphere and press reports but the term is seldom mentioned. There have been wrong doings by someone of colour, creed or clothing over the past 100 years but does that make it right to bastardize the whole because of the actions of an individual because they fall under some umbrella term?
To subvert Churchill’s famous quote ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much [damage] owed by so many to so few’:
The Brixton riot of 1981 involving 5000 people both Black and White resulted in injury and arrests to both sections yet when the smoke had settled the fault (allegedly) lay in Black hands. The aftermath would result in The Scarman Report, not just the black people involved in the riot or the Black people that resided just in London, every single Black person in Great Britain could LEGALLY be stopped and searched without warrant on the grounds of their skin colour.
In 1985 Liverpool football fans incited riots at the European Cup Final causing the death of 36 people, the repercussion was so that British football clubs and subsequently their fans were banned from Europe competitions. There was 27 arrested yet millions of football fans suffered the consequence, and to this day English football and the fans still carry the repuatation of hooligans.
In the Noughties, a fraction of younger members of society that wear hooded tops commit crimes and now teenagers aren’t allowed into shopping centres due to the chance that people who wear such clothing commit crimes.
So what do we have; the clothes that someone wears are an indication of the person they are, the flag of your country is an indication of all your politics, the religion you follow is an indication of all your belief system. It sounds as ridiculous as it is and it happens every time an incident happens, we attack the collective rather than the individual.
To look at British culture today we can see that we have come a long way since the aforementioned witch hunts but English fans in Europe will always be seen as trouble causers, black people are still more likely to be pulled over by the police than any other colour. The major problem with the witch hunt on Islam is that it is on an unprecedented scale, no pursuit like this has gone before so it’s unknown how we recover. If my friend is correct and it is education that will stop extremism then why is it we don’t lead by example? Why do we adhere to Harry Redtop Sun journalist interpretation of Islam rather than read it ourselves? But we don’t need to, as my friend presumes it’s not us that are the uneducated it’s those over there. We have the answers, we don’t need to ask any questions.
Let’s Blame all of Islam for 9/11, blame all the Irish for the deaths caused due to IRA bombings, blame Black people for inciting riots and blame hood wearing youths for shoplifting. Hitler did a similar thing with Judaism and Jewish people; generalised them, alienated them, (literally) branded them and put them into neat little sections, Aushwitz anyone...oh yeah, then he murdered them...by the millions.
Not a nice man Adolf, but then again, he was German, and all Germans are the same, aren’t they?
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