Johann Hari

Do you believe a religious leader who fights to save Section 28 and says gay people spread disease is a fulminating bigot? Do you believe a “leading cleric” who advocates stoning gay people to death should be denounced? Do you believe sharia law – which requires gay people to be lashed or stoned – is always and forever unacceptable? Then, according to an energetic and aggressive group of white straight boys who surreally consider themselves to be on the left, you are an “Islamophobe” and “objectively pro-Nazi”.

People who believe in opposing hatred of gay people everywhere – in Teheran as much as Tunbridge Wells, in Kingston, Jamaica as much as Kingston-Upon-Thames – are being subjected to a bizarre counter-campaign. As so often, Peter Tatchell is facing the most abusive backlash on our behalf. Tatchell believes all people are equal, regardless of their pigmentation. He does not see a difference between the white far-right preacher Jerry Falwell calling gay people diseased, and the Muslim leader Sir Iqbal Sacranie doing the same. He does not see the difference between gay teenagers being lynched to death in Jamaica and murderous gay-bashings on Clapham Common. He reacts to them in exactly the same way – by fighting to stop them.

For this, he is being accused of racism. Look, for example, at the popular website ‘Islamophobia Watch’, set up by a man called Bob Pitt. Unlike Tatchell, he lacks courage and, fearing reprisals, uses a fake name for his writings – Martin Sullivan. His website obsessively snipes at Tatchell, responding to every criticism he makes of the Islamic fundamentalists who incite and perform the murder of gay people by calling him a bigot and even “pro-Nazi”. How does he back up this slander against a man who has fought fascism all his life? The website complains Tatchell uses “the term ‘Islamism’… without distinguishing between its reformist and violent wings.” Yes, it’s true - Tatchell fails to draw a distinction between the people who will lash and stone gays after winning at the ballot box, and the people who will lash and stone gays after seizing power in a coup. This is bigotry?

When the Festival of Muslim Cultures promised to represent “all parts of the Muslim community” but banned gay Muslims, Tatchell supported Muslims like Aaron Saeed, who said, “Lesbians and gay men are part of Muslim faith and society. We are not going to be silenced or victimised any more. We are out and proud, as both gays and Muslims.” Islamophobia Watch accused Tatchell of a “stupid stunt.” When Adam Yosef, a leading figure in George Galloway’s RESPECT Coalition, said Tatchell “needs a good slap in the face” and should “pack up his bent bags and head back to Australia,” Islamophobia Watch accused Tatchell of leading “a witch-hunt” for answering back – without offering a single word of condemnation for Yosef’s homophic jeers. The list goes on.

The website – which has also attacked me, I should add – reminds me of the people who respond to every criticism of Israel by accusing the critic of anti-Semitism. It is a poisonous way of avoiding a serious debate about the facts.

They defend Sacranie on the grounds that his homophobia is part of his religion. But religions are just another set of ideas formulated by human beings and open to human discussion. Tatchell says, "All people are worthy of respect - but not all ideas are." Just because somebody wrote it in a book a millennia ago and called it a ‘religion’, doesn’t place it beyond discussion. If I write a book calling Sacranie a homophobe and claim it was dictated to me by the Archangel Gabriel, will Pitt defend it as my religious view, and damn everyone who disagrees as “Johann-phobic”?

Islamophobia Watch – and the dense chunk of the hard left that adopts a similar approach – is trying to redefine consistent atheism as a form of racism. I believe that the idea of God has been a disaster for humanity, and any person who bases their morality on the writings of hallucinating pre-modern nomads is going to have pretty warped values. Islam is no worse than the absurdities of Christianity and Judaism, but it is no better. Yet Islamophobia Watch call the National Secular Society – which campaigns on this basis – “bigots”. But how is criticising a set of ideas that people choose to adopt and can choose to abandon akin to attacking people on the basis of their skin colour?

The real racism comes from Islamophobia Watch itself, and the people who parrot their claims. Where Tatchell treats Muslims as the equal citizens of a democracy, people with open minds and a free intelligence, they treat Muslims as feeble children who cannot cope with the scorn we routinely (and rightly) pour on Catholics and Protestants. They argue that Muslims are so sensitive and uncurious that their ideas must be ring-fenced from criticism, with the police arresting anybody who vehemently criticises their beliefs.

Indeed, in their shrill condemnations of anybody who criticises Islam, they have actually fundamentally misunderstood Islam itself. Like all religions, it is based on a dense, contradictory and often ludicrous Holy Book that is being constantly reinterpreted. At the moment, there is a fierce battle within Islam between fundamentalists with a viciously reactionary agenda, and liberals with a more moderate agenda. If Muslim women and Muslim gays are going to have any kind of decent life, the liberals need to receive solidarity and support – but slap-dash charges of Islamophobia intimidate people who could offer it. They make people afraid to help the Muslim critics of fundamentalism, encouraging people to see Islam as a homogenous block defined by its most reactionary elements.

While Islamophobia Watch talk about defending Muslims, they end up defending the nastiest and most right-wing part of the Muslim community – the ones who are oppressing and killing the rest. For example, the gay rights campaigner Brett Lock wrote to one of the website’s authors, asking if he really thinks it is Islamophobic for gay people to resist sharia law, a system that demands we should be lashed or stoned. He replied, “As with adultery, I think it’s not homosexuality as such that’s an offence but the sexual act itself. And you need four independent witnesses for a conviction.” This is, of course, the distinction made by the vilest homophobes across the world – we don’t dislike gays, just the ones who actually fuck each other. Lock accurately summarised Pitt’s view as, “Don’t worry, it’s okay to be gay or lesbian under sharia law – as long as you don’t have sex.”

Like all people who cry wolf, those who cry Islamophobia are aiding and abetting the real wolves out there. There is an authentic Islamophobia howling in the background. It is the notion that Islam is a uniquely evil religion, more inherently war-like and fanatical than Christianity or Judaism or the other primitive delusions. These bona fide Islamophobes do not have a principled disagreement with superstition and human rights abuses, as Tatchell does. They have a raw prejudice against Muslims, often because they see them as foreign and all secretly sympathetic to the al Quaeda psychosis. You can see this poison smeared across the pages of the right-wing press every day. Muslims face hefty discrimination in the workplace and wildly disproportionate stop-and-searches by the police. But organisations like Islamophobia Watch are making many gay people – the natural political allies of any minority facing cruel discrimination – dismiss all claims of Islamophobia as concocted nonsense. If Tatchell is an Islamophobe, they say, then so am I.

And as for me… I am not inclined to take lectures about defending Muslims from people who utter not a word in condemnation of the systematic slaughter of gay Muslims across the world, nor a splutter of condemnation about the violation and battery of Muslim women across the world. As Tatchell asks, “Since when has being oppressed given anyone the right to oppress others?”

POSTSCRIPT: You can ask the editors of the Islamophobia Watch website why they continue to demonise gay men who resist sharia law at editorial@islamophobia-watch.com

Please be polite. You could also ask them to post a link to this article so their readers can hear an alternative view.