Social Acceptability List 2015

As Christmas approaches, we reflect on a bumper year in the world of social discourse. Here’s a little run down of the movers and shakers in this year’s Social Acceptability List, which is compiled by the Fallen in Public and its patchy memory and is about what politicians, newspapers and netizens went on about and how. What’s in? What’s out? What’s OK? What’s not? Read on to find out...

In today's edition... IT’S IN! - Islamophobia

It’s been a good year for the adherents of Islamophobia. Islamist fascists have made great strides in convincing the west that they are the true voice of Islam, even while failing to convince ordinary Muslims, and often killing them instead. There’s been wrangling over terminology – the refugee/migrant palaver, the Daesh, Isis, Isil, IS conundrum. Anyone who seeks to remove the Islamic flavour from the word is deemed to be simply politically correct by those who’d prefer to associate Islam with violence. And the people, especially those reading the Mail, the Sun and the Express, are lapping it up.

Since 9/11 Muslims have been battered like the proverbial piñata, and yet for all the nasty rhetoric, terrorism in the name of Islam hasn’t stopped. It turns out that hurling abuse at a group doesn’t stop the violently inclined members stop being violet. The same could be said for bombs. You might say, it simply causes and entrenches division... but I’ll leave that type of conclusion to the strategists, who seem to have the situation under control.

This year in London we’ve had a black woman racially abusing a Muslim woman on the bus. I mention that the abuse hurler was black because, as a group, black people have also had a hard time of it and often still do. Irony, anyone? In other news, an old man on the platform in the Underground recently tried to push a Muslim woman under a train. Thankfully, he was as weak of body as he is of mind, and couldn’t muster up the strength. Politically-motivated, violent or abusive retaliations towards Muslims isn’t deemed to be terrorism, but rather the wanton acts of mad people. Terrorism per se is literally, glaringly, a label saved for the bearded or veiled Arab type.

Commentators have, for a number of years, taken shots at Muslims. Richard Dawkins is one of the most notorious, and readily gets a torrent of abuse redirected at him. Dawkins’ problem is with religion itself, fair enough, but the targets he chooses come across as deliberately inflammatory. Recently he compared the number of Nobel prizes which have gone to Trinity College Cambridge with that of the entire Muslim world; more recently he’s been gleefully picking apart the claims of the Muslim bomb-clock kid in the US. Dawkins is a clever man who doesn’t want to cause offence, but doesn’t care if he does. His followers, however, are not clever; they’re ordinary people who simply hear ‘Muslims are bad’.

Just in time for Christmas, the big D, Trumpman, the Donald himself, has decided that closing the border to Muslims, all of ‘em, will provide some kind of solution to the threat of - wait for it – terror. This is so barmy that few opponents even bother argue against it – they respond with platitudes about it being against American principles, or how Trump is a joke or a fascist. Cameron said it was simply quote-unquote “wrong”. But while people are always hearing about things that are simply wrong, Trump proposes a tangible thing – a wall! For those with fewer brain cells than spouses, it’s genius!

In China, where I live, islamophobia is practically built-in, partly due to the political issues in the Muslim province of Xinjiang. As with a number of political disputes around the world, some of the Uighur have responded to Beijing’s repression with violence. The result, combined with rolling world news and its obsession with Islamic terrorism, has become the mantra that ‘Muslims are violent’. Some westerners I have met here, who are not recipients of Beijing’s propaganda and should know better, are also islamophobic, claiming that “Muslims are bad” is somehow self-evident. 

There are of course the defenders. There are those who hurl abuse back at the bigots; there are those who go to help refugees in Calais or make them feel welcome in the UK; there are those that argue that alienating the group en masse will only make the situation work. We hear less about these folk, but we do hear some. And why? Because people being nice to Muslims is newsworthy. It’s the other side of the coin, the proof that Islamophibia has hit the mainstream.