It’s depressing to watch Richard Dawkins’ fanboys trying to defend his recent words about Islam on the grounds what he’s saying isn’t technically racism. Surely if the same words were to come out of the mouths of established bigots like Nick Griffin, Geert Wilders or Pamela Gellar they’d rightly be condemned as hate speech. It makes you wonder how many of them share his bigotry, or whether there’s some cognitive dissonance in play here.
When somebody singles out and demonises a religion that just happens, in the UK at least, to be practiced largely by non-white immigrant communities it’s splitting hairs to argue whether it’s racism or not. Whatever it is or isn’t, the one thing it is doing is furthering the agenda of the far right, and this is precisely the point many mainstream commentators I’ve read have been making.
It’s disappointing that so many people who are not by any stretch of the imagination fellow travellers of the far right fail to see this.