PrintDecember 10, 2007
Islamophobia Legislation: Who'll protect us from the protected?
The International Islamophobia Conference of Muslim "thinkers and scientists," meeting in Istanbul to fight misperceptions about and injustices against their benevolent "religion of peace," ended Sunday. Declaring Islamophobia a "crime, just like anti-semitism," their closing statement called for immediate national and international legislation to protect its victims.
Hours later, one of those requiring protection from such misplaced bias must have been mimicking persecuted Jews when he rammed his explosives-filled car into a school bus filled with innocent Pakistani kids. The blast killed the misunderstood Muslim instantly, and injured eight, including five school children -- all under 12 years old.
Indeed, since that infamous September morning when 19 harmless Islamists slaughtered 3000 innocents, we've grown nearly inured to the sight of similarly loving Muslims slowly beheading a man held to his knees, screaming in agony while begging deaf ears for the life flowing red from his throat. Or pulverizing with stones the head of a woman buried to her neck until it no longer resembles anything remotely human. Or walking gang-style down the streets of Khartoum, swinging machetes and demanding the head of a 54 year spinster whose only crime was trying to bring culture to their primitive children.
But the more familiar detonation of shrapnel-wrapped explosives in high-traffic public areas in an effort to convert a maximum number of victims into chopped viscera and bone fragments is bound to have an indelible effect.
The National Institute of Mental Health defines a phobia as: [my emphasis]
"an intense irrational fear of something that poses little or no actual danger."
Perhaps the Conference's first order of business should have been to agree upon a better word beneath which to cloak the horror its barbaric fringe invokes.
