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On 20/01/2011 23:20, Dan wrote: > Those Marxists who oppose antisemitism ALSO oppose the barbaric and idiotic > laws > found in Judaism. Yet, Dan, you were the one who complained that one could not oppose Islamophobia without also curtailing your right to criticise religion. Now that you recognise how absurd the corollary of your argument is, perhaps you might take the step of reconising how absurd your original complaint was. > How is it a "corollary of my argument" that the term "antisemitism" is just a > "cover for letting Jews have the run of things" ? Do you even understand my > argument ? Better than you do, evidently. You may recall that your argument was that criticism of Islamophobia, even the use of the term, was a means of preventing criticism of Islam and allowing "faith-based organizations to regulate the way people live" and stone "adulteresses" to death. Or, to put it another way, criticism of Islamophobia is a way of letting Muslims have the run of things. The logical corollary would be that criticism of antisemitism is, similarly, a way of letting Jews have the run of things. Since you don't like that corollary, since you reject it (as I knew you would), perhaps you would be good enough not to be a hypocrite and reject your own absurd argument. > Again, some Muslims will use the term "Islamophobic" to shame those who are > against a certain conception of > Islamic interference in secular matters. This is only tangentially relevant to the discussion. Your objection was not to the *misuse* of the term 'Islamophobia', but to the *use* of the term as such. That, by accepting that the term can be misused, you now at least tacitly accept that there can be correct uses of the term, is a step forward. But you will never stop being confused by this issue so long as you continue to be stuck in a colonial way of seeing things, in which your problems (in this case, your right to criticise Islam as a religion) come before the problems of the oppressed, now matter how much more grave theirs are than yours. I'm afraid that this spurious victimology of yours adverts the French Left's longstanding failure to engage appropriately with the legacy of the French empire and its legitimising ideologies - viz. 'republicanism' for the Left, Catholic crusades for the Right. The empire in North Africa consistently denigrated Islam in terms of much the same dehumanising tropes that are common currency today, and the Left at the time collaborated not only in that denigration but also in the massacres that such denigration existed to justify. Notwithstanding a brief period of tiers-mondisme among a minority on the far left, there has been next to no effort to come to terms with this and overcome its legacy. This failure has been responsible lately for allowing the French state pass laws that target and vilify Muslim women in a way that is both racist and deeply misogynistic, without any serious opposition from within white society. It has also, incidentally, weakened the French Left by allowing Sarkozy to bail himself out of political crises by directing the fire toward Islam. That white leftists can complain that anti-racism in some sense oppresses them, while also evincing total ignorance of the wider phenomenon to which anti-racism objects, shows how deep those traditions of colonial supremacism still run. -- *Richard Seymour* Writer, blogger and PhD candidate Email: leninstombb...@googlemail.com Website: http://www.leninology.blogspot.com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/leninology Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Seymour_(writer) Book 1: http://www.versobooks.com/books/307-the-liberal-defence-of-murder Book 2: http://www.zero-books.net/obookssite/book/detail/1107/The-Meaning-of-David-Cameron ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
