Consider two stories carried by Bob Pitt on Islamophobia-Watch.
Exhibit A, published by I-W on June 25th, is the story of Sureyya Ozkaya:
These are the shocking injuries inflicted upon schoolgirl Sureyya Ozkaya during a brutal daylight assault near her Thornton Heath home.
The 14-year-old’s hair was set on fire and her hands and feet were cut with glass during the attack in Grangewood Park, before her attackers smashed her head against a tree and left her bleeding in a bush.
She was stumbled upon by a woman walking her dog and carried home to nearby Kitchener Road following the attack, at about 7.30pm on June 9.
Sureyya’s mother Pemdegul Kale, 39, said three girls taunted her daughter about her Muslim faith as they carried out the assault, before burning her hair with a lighter and stealing her trainers.
Academic Tariq Ramadan, sacked by Rotterdam city council last year, is asking for €75,000 compensation for wrongful dismissal.
Ramadan lost his job as city integration adviser after officials discovered he presented a tv show for a broadcast company financed by Iran. The city said this could not be combined with his other roles. Erasmus University also ended his contract as a visiting professor.
Court hearings over the compensation claim began on Monday. Ramadan claims the sacking damaged his reputation as an Islamic scholar.
The second is about Tariq Ramadan who has decided to take his erstwhile employers to court on grounds of wrongful dismissal. Rotterdam City Council decided that Ramadan’s links to an Iranian TV channel would conflict with his role as an academic at Erasmus University.
Question: Why is the story of Tariq Ramadan, suing Rotterdam City Council in this case, Islamophobic?
There is no commentary by Bob Pitt to tell us why. There is simply the vague suggestion from the title of the piece that implies Ramadan was dismissed on grounds that were Islamophobic. But this is not articulated in the article, which is cut and pasted verbatim from Dutch News.
When two completely divergent stories are juxtaposed in this manner, it has two effects:
1) By offering no distinction between the two cases, it seeks to conflate the fate of ordinary muslims with the travails of seasoned political Islamists. It does this by claiming that violent anti-muslim bigotry suffered by ordinary people who are targetted because they are muslim is of the same qualitative order as political action taken against right-wing Islamists.
2) There is the attempt to bolster Tariq Ramadan’s story by listing it alongside the story of real violence against a real victim. Tariq Ramadan is not a victim of any kind, but what this juxtaposition does is to objectify the pain of Sureyya in particular, and devalue and disrespect the real victims of anti-muslim bigotry in general.
Islamophobia-Watch is replete with this kind of sophistry and moral relativism. Political Islamists will be the first to claim to be victims of “Islamophobia” but will be the last to be on the receiving end of real anti-muslim bigotry.
But the take-away point to remind oneself when one reads the blog is this:
Islamophobia-Watch uses ordinary muslims to protect the interests of right-wing Islamists.
