Pat Condell: "I'm offended by Islam"

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This is for the person who told me recently that Muslims have every right to be offended by western culture.

Of course they do. All I'm saying to offended Muslims is do us all a favour and keep it to yourself because nobody likes a crybaby.

But now I'm thinking that perhaps I'm wrong about this, and that maybe we should all be a lot more offended as often as possible, to fully embrace this new culture of kneejerk offence and give it every chance to work. After all, we in the West have many more reasons to be offended by the religion of peace than it has to be offended by us. I'm offended by the very term "religion of peace" which I regard as a far greater lie than any of the superstitious nonsense about flying horses or angels in caves and I think it should be prosecutable under the Trade Descriptions Act.

Also, I find the Islamic attitude to women, gays, Jews and apostates to be really quite deeply and profoundly offensive. And I would like to emphasise just how offensive I find it, if I may. I find it mind-blowingly soul-witheringly and unforgivably offensive. Where do I apply for my compensation?

Now, I want to make it clear that I'm only offended by Islam because I'm offended by cruelty, intolerance and oppression. If Islam wasn't cruel, intolerant and oppressive then I wouldn't be as offended as I am. Obviously, I would still be somewhat offended because Islam would still be pushy, confrontational, demanding and threatening. If it wasn't pushy, confrontational, demanding and threatening I wouldn't be as offended as I am.

Obviously, I would still be somewhat offended by the ridiculous hair-trigger sensitivity to criticism, and of course the cynical manipulation of language. Who could forget that?

So yes, I'm offended by Islam in so many ways you really don't want to know.

Oh, you do? OK. Well, where to begin?

Well, I'm offended by a religion that regards the female half of humanity as innately inferior and deficient and I'm offended that we all pretend that isn't the case when we all know it bloody well is, and it will remain the case until we do something about it, because nobody else is going to.

I'm offended that I live in a society where a little girl can be forced to walk around everywhere concealed inside a black sack. Is that religious freedom, or is that child abuse? And at what precise point does one become the other - without the Catholic Church being involved?

I'm offended by the dozens of Sharia courts in Britain that are allowed by law to treat women as less than fully human and by the thousands of genital mutilations, not one of which has ever been punished, despite carrying a theoretical 14 year prison sentence and I'm offended and embarrassed in equal measure by the deafening silence on these matters from "progressive" western feminists who think we shouldn't impose our values on Muslim women because that's the job of Muslim men.

I'm offended that anyone who burns a Koran in Britain will go to prison, but if they burn a Bible they won't.

I'm offended when Saudi-funded Islamic schools are found to be using books that teach violence and hatred and are not shut down and everyone connected with them run out of the country on a rail.

I'm offended that we allow extra unnecessary cruelty in slaughterhouses to accommodate Islamic superstition, and then we allow that meat to be sold unlabelled and fed to children in schools without their parents' knowledge or consent because we've learned the hard way that if we don't do things the Islamic way there'll be trouble. I'm offended by that.

I'm offended that publishers won't touch certain books and that the media won't reproduce certain images because they're afraid of Muslim violence.

And I'm doubly offended by our society's cowardly tacit acceptance of this.

I'm personally deeply offended by anyone who thinks I'm stupid enough to think I should give a damn about their carefully manufactured feelings, especially when it comes to the cultural terrorist's favourite word, Islamophobia, which is Islamic shorthand for free speech, secular democracy and common sense.

I'm offended that anyone who speaks up for these things is likely to be deemed an Islamophobe, and by extension a racist, because Islam is a race, apparently; a race of quite diverse ethnicity, it has to be said, but if you point this out you'll be called an Islamophobe and a racist. Yet we know that racism is driven by fear and insecurity which manifest themselves in things like intolerance, supremacism and separatism, precisely the qualities we've come to associate with the religion of permanent offence, the one that likes to label everybody else mentally ill.

If Islam is a race (and either it is or it isn't, let's make up our minds, shall we?) then Islamic supremacism is racism, and Islam is the most racist ideology on the planet. On the other hand, if it's not a race then criticising it is not racist. So what's it going to be, people, racist or not racist?

Answers on a postcard to the racists at the East London Mosque, an institution which, you won't be surprised to hear, offends me. Indeed, whenever I hear, as I often do, about a visiting preacher at that place calling for death to gays and not being immediately arrested and deported with a firecracker up his arse I'm offended to the point of virtual apoplexy.

And I'm incandescently offended that Islam doesn't like free speech unless you're preaching death to gays and apostates, and then you can have as much of it as you like, in the sure knowledge that no Muslim, extremist or moderate, will call you what you are, a savage and a nutcase.

But if you speak up for freedom, pluralism, equality, diversity and genuine human rights, you're guaranteed to be slandered as a racist and an Islamophobe and you're also guaranteed to be threatened with physical violence. I'm offended by that, and if you're not offended by it, or if you're pretending not to be offended because you don't want to cause offence, then you've got something seriously wrong with you. No offence.

My information is that Islam does not see women as inferior, that these are cultural norms that Jews by the way practice in the Middle East as well...

My information is that Islam does not see women as inferior, that these are cultural norms that Jews by the way practice in the Middle East as well...

There is a Rabbinical Teaching: God counts the tears of a woman.

Wife beating is very anti Jewish.

ruveyn

institutionalised religion for the most part, is deeply mysoginist.

Lets just draw a line under that.

That is strange. When I received my religious training when young I was NEVER taught that women were lesser people or women were to be abused.

ruveyn

Yet they won't allow women to serve the faith in equal capacity to men. They say one thing with their mouths and contradict in the way they proselyte.

Show me a female rabbi before you claim that Judaism has its own house in order.

to stoning and even being killed for having been raped.

And for the record, Jews don't proselytize ("proselyte" is a noun meaning a new convert, not a verb).

Wrong. Islam doesn't consider rape to be rape. It considers it zina (i.e. prohibited sex). That's how woman-hating the fiqh is.

That doesn't make it wrong.