Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the University College London (UCL) event that featured Lawrence Krauss (or Lawrence the Bauss) and Hazma Tzortzis- it was a saga I sorely missed. The organisation hosting the event, iERA (little "i"!) was apparently banned from hosting future events at the campus (clicky: UCL's response). I can't comment much on the issue as I was not there. iERA video uploaded onto YouTube that was merely time lapse photography and it's not easy to discern if there's any gender segregation going on. What's interesting to note is when "voluntary" gender segregation was called for, the women had to sit at the BACK of the room as opposed to the adacent end of the room (i.e. men on the left, women on the right).
So what was the response to this ban? Whining from iERA's Yusuf Chambers, the claim that the ban is "Islamophobic" and that Muslims if they wish to practise their religion must either move out or they must ditch Islam.
Clicky: http://www.studentrights.org.uk/article/2060/iera_s_yusuf_chambers_claims_ucl_ban_is_islamophobic
People are able to practise their religion as long as they do not promote hate speech or discrimination. But what really irritates me, is his rhetoric. He has the audacity to claim IslamoPHOBIA. This is a commonly thrown around word against those who critical of Islam, even if their criticisms are perfectly valid.
Here's the general definition of "phobia":
"An extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something"
Do black Americans have a "phobia" that racial discrimination still takes place or is their concern actually warranted? When you consider the history of black oppression across the globe, it's perfectly rational, understandable, the concerns that black people have regarding racial discrimination.
Similarly, considering the historic treatment of homosexuals, apostates and non-theists by the hands of Christians and Muslims, it's perfectly reasonable to understand why there's a concern about allowing the promotion of ideologies that forstered such hostile environments. Hence, not Islamophobic.
Also, Islam wasn't banned from UCL, iERA was...
No one is saying that we should throw Muslims off hills or murder those who convert to Islam, no one... Well, actually, we DO have Muslims who'd say those very things about homosexuals, atheists, apostates, etc, and they would even quote religious scripture that advocates such behaviour. If you have a strong stomach for this nonsense, you'll find that Yusuf Chambers and "Dr" Zakir Naik had a discussion that's available online (click mee!) condoning the murder of homosexuals. If you want examples of "phobia", you'll find that Yusuf Chambers and Zakir Naik are perfect examples of such:
-phobia of homosexuals
-phobia of those who deconvert from Islam
-phobia of those atheists/skeptics who criticise their cherished beliefs.
Realising that a religion is a threat to human rights and criticising it for this, is not by any means "phobic". I find it strange how being critical of Christianity hasn't earned skeptics the title of "Christianity-phobic", yet you already have a word "Islamophobic" regarding Islam. I see it merely as a strategy to try to discredit critics of Islam.
Unfortunately, Islamophobia isn't the only word thrown around at those critical of the religion. Occassionally we even see accusations of racism, even when racism is not present or not even hinted at the slightest by the critics. I have also been accused of being "racist" when I was openly critical of Islam in an online argument (I promised myself to disengage from online discourse when I couldn't distinguish trolls from the genuinely stupid, but I miserably failed)- the problem being that this was coming from a white individual. Despite my several attempts to point out that being critical of an ideology doesn't make one racist even if proponents of such ideologies predominantly belong to a particular ethnicity, he failed to grasp this even when I used my perfectly constructed analogy (how dare he!):
Being critical of communism (which he certainly was), even though many of its proponents/followers are non-white, doesn't make you a racist. If I had attacked the ethnicity and not the IDEAS, you'd be perfectly justified to accuse me of racism. We weren't born with these ideologies like we are born with our physical form- skin colour and all, we are indoctrinated into them.
I find the way of thinking of those who throw around the word "racist" so cheaply, to be extremely offensive. I find it devalues the word, makes it have less impact for when REAL racism occurs. I've been attacked (physically) for looking different (if you haven't guessed from the name of the blog and where I'm going with this, I'm not white...) and would even hear jives regarding my ethnicity thrown at me. Yet this pudgy white American felt he could tell me what racism is! I stopped responding to him altogether as I certainly wasn't willing to have my face uploaded on the interwebs for him.
I feel like I have rambled, but I do find this rather therapeutic, even if no one reads the blog.
I do have one last thing to point out about the iERA event at UCL, the first video clip released in the debate was an interesting choice:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-m2efCzeMA
It's about incest... The response was also quite amusing, it's as if the debate wasn't meant for an academic audience, but for a teenage one. I remember hearing that kind of cheering when we got into "cussing matches" at highschool: yo mamma this (oooooooh!), but yo mamma that (ooooaaah!). It's interesting to hear the audience react in such a way considering the incest between Adam and Eve which is justified by Islamic "scholars" (scholars in inverted brackets: you really can't call yourself a scholar if all you do is study one book) and maybe even in the koran/hadiths(?), and the common occurences of incest in some Muslim families...
You'll find a review of the debate by StopSpamming1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsJXFtoE8RU
Unphobically yours,
Mr Phobia.
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