I was working on a piece about feminism and Palestine when the story about women and the Olympics took over everyone’s passions. I did get one blog out about that…

…when the race riots in the UK took over everyone’s passions.

 Oppression Olympics

There is no question in my mind, from what I’ve seen, that our establishment and our media far prefer talking about antisemitism to talking about Islamophobia. It was painful watching MP Zara Sultana struggling to get her point across on TV (that trying to set fire to Mosques is Islamophobic) but perhaps from the mayhem those show-hosts created, it was difficult to work out what was going wrong until Jonathan Cook, a journalist observing from Nazareth stepped in, and asked if we could imagine Margaret Hodge MP having a battle with TV reporters over whether one should say ‘antisemitism’ if it were Synagogues being attacked.

Lexophobia

Personally, I wish we could scrap both words – ‘antisemitism’ is, etymologically, a word about racism but we on the left have for years been accused of antisemitism when trying to blow the whistle on the Israeli government and military’s mind-blowingly criminal behaviour in Palestine, a stance which is unquestionably political and moral rather than religious. Meanwhile, Islamophobia is a word about religion, but is used to describe the unquestionable racism of those angry and frightened Brits who think immigrants are the cause of all our troubles.

Wouldn’t it be easier to drop both words, so we can just say illegal occupation is bad, we want our politicians to stand against it and victim-blaming is bad, we want our politicians to stand against that, too?

But while I was trying to figure that out, the rioters in Liverpool set fire to a community library (see header pic) that also housed a foodbank and other valuable local services. No! That’s BIBLIOPHOBIA! I kid you not, I have met some kids in recent years who are terrified of books. I swear all this would not be happening if we’d been able to teach our kids their history and their politics over the last 20 years, but here we are with schools that shunt them through what the government claims is education without ever challenging them with a face-to-face encounter with a book.

Pick your phobia….

So here it is – I reckon the gender ideology stuff is based on gynophobia (fear of women) especially lesbophobia (fear of women who don’t need men), the Olympic stuff is too. The Israel/Palestine stuff is just plain old colonialist racism and what’s happening in the UK right now is racism, but it’s much more a desperate population, desperately trying to work out who’s to blame and, some of them, coming to wrong conclusions because they keep seeing TV presenters and politicians giving people like Zara Sultana a hard time, so they assume it’s ‘their’ fault – brown people? Muslim people? Female politicians? Who knows!

A phobia is an irrational fear. I think it would be very rational and sensible if we all developed a passionate aversion to listening to mainstream reporters and politicians, and paid attention instead to the good people of this country who, no matter what their own background is, have been seen coming out again and again to defend those who are wrongly attacked, clear up after the riots and get their communities working again.

Tell you what – here are some of my favourite people – I’m going to listen to them….

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Kay

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