Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Christianphobia

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March 23, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

14:00

Christianphobia

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	Thank you very much.
	Ah, this is working right.
	I apologise in advance for using notes quite heavily in what I'm going to say here, but I'll be following on from the Asia.
	Sorry, I don't know how to pronounce it.
	Aziya Bibi stuff, because I think a few things have happened recently that really have shaken my faith in the neutrality of our institutions.
	And one of the things that I think Britain can be most proud of is having institutions that are founded in an ideologically neutral way, as in they are designed to be fair for everyone who uses them without any kind of prejudice or favor either way.
	This also is going to somewhat amount to me making a defense of Christianity, which is a bit strange as I'm a lifelong atheist and I come from an irreligious household.
	So I have no particular care for Christianity nor any other religion.
	But it will become apparent as to why this is going to happen.
	So the way I view Christianity is in a remarkably benign light these days.
	I mean, it defines itself specifically as being apart from government.
	Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, render unto God what is God's.
	It's also necessarily pacifist.
	When you're struck, turn the other cheek.
	It's very clear.
	And in this country, obviously, Protestantism is remarkably undogmatic and requires more of a personal commitment to the religion rather than the imposition of the religion on others.
	So this brings us then to the case of Asia Bibi.
	So she was a Pakistani Christian.
	I don't know what kind of denomination she was, but Catholic.
	Oh, God, the worst kind.
	I'm sorry, I'm just teasing.
	But she was, of course, falsely accused of blasphemy against Islam.
	Now, I'm sure that people in this room are aware of just how rigidly Islamist Pakistan is.
	In fact, I believe it has some kind of religious caste system.
	And this was the core crux of the issue with Asia Bibi: she had gone and drunk from a bucket at a well, and two Muslim women approached her and said that they weren't going to drink from the same bucket as a Christian.
	They had an altercation.
	They obviously went away unsatisfied because one of these women then went to the local authorities and made up a story about Azia Bibi blaspheming against the Prophet Muhammad.
	She and her family were obviously set upon by an Islamist mob that were riled up by this until the police came and arrested them all and took them away.
	As you heard earlier, she was held for eight years in solitary confinement, sentenced to death by hanging until recently acquitted for a lack of evidence.
	If this wasn't bad enough, naturally, her acquittal caused riots, caused Islamist riots where they smashed up property, sent her credible death threats, and she lives in secrecy now.
	The UK did not offer her asylum when she applied for it.
	Why?
	Well, our glorious leader, Theresa May, personally intervened to refuse her asylum application, with the risk, the reason being, quote, the risk of inflaming community tension.
	Now, what does that mean?
	To me, that has some terrifying implications because what she's saying is, I wish to preserve the multicultural peace.
	I am afraid of the Islamist communities from Pakistan in Britain rioting, or worse, because of the decision to take in a refugee.
	This is hardline appeasement to the Islamists.
	It's absolutely disgraceful.
	But we shouldn't really expect too much different from Theresa May, because her deal with the European Union was hardline appeasement to the European Union.
	So she really has actually earned her name, Theresa the Appeaser.
	She is the Neville Chamberlain of our time.
	Oh yeah, I'm gonna the question really the question really would would this have been the same had it been in the reverse?
	Had it been a Christian country that was persecuting a Muslim for blasphemy against Jesus, would she have personally intervened to block that person being given asylum?
	The answer is obviously no and you know it Then we're given the example of an asylum bid by an Iranian national now this one I find even more ludicrous to be honest I mean at least I suppose in the case of Theresa May she at least has the the argument well I'm trying to prevent violence.
	Okay, maybe you are, maybe you are.
	I think you're a spineless coward and I think you're pandering to an agenda from people who will not show you any kind of reciprocity on that.
	But no, she doesn't.
	Don't even get me started.
	So this?
	This was an asylum bid by an Iranian national.
	That happened.
	That was published, I believe, either yesterday or today.
	I don't know his name, but presumably that's because he's an apostate from Islam and releasing his name may well get him killed because he converted to Christianity.
	The case was revealed by immigration case worker Nathan Stevens, and he described the letters that the HOME Office sent to this gentleman as unbelievably offensive.
	So the Iranian national had applied for asylum in 2016 because he had converted to Christianity claiming quote, it was a religion of peace.
	So he must have read some churchill or something.
	So what did the home office do?
	Well, the home office sent a reply letter with six cherry-picked verses from the Bible in order to prove that Christianity is not actually a religion of peace.
	Mostly this came from the Old Testament and the book of Revelations, you know, core Christian texts that really put across Jesus's message.
	And the HOME Office ended their theological attack on Christianity by saying, quote, these examples are inconsistent with your claim that you converted to Christianity after discovering it was a peaceful religion as opposed to Islam, which contains violence, rage and revenge.
	This was described by many people as wholly inappropriate, and I think that we can all agree that discussing theology is not the HOME Office's forte, nor should it be.
	Attacking anyone's religion as part of their asylum application request is, I mean, it's laughable.
	I can.
	I can barely say it without bursting into laughter.
	It's ridiculous.
	Why would that even cross the mind of whatever bureaucrat was running the show there?
	But um, the question obviously is, would this have been done in reverse?
	Can we in any way envisage a scenario where a Muslim asylum applicant would have had his religion challenged on the grounds that it's violent or anything of the sort?
	Would anyone from the HOME Office have gone through the Quran and cherry-picked the verses in there that are significantly more violent than the ones in the Bible and sent them back saying, no, Islam is not a religion of peace?
	Obviously not.
	This is, in my opinion, just I mean, I don't even know how to describe how disappointing I find this.
	Because what they're doing is for bending the knee in the face of Islamist aggression or potential aggression, they're in fact allowing the bigotry of the Islamists to control our actions and to control our policy.
	I do not believe we should be controlled by these people.
	And if they cannot live tolerantly and peacefully with the result of a refugee application, then the law can deal with them, can't it?
	If they go out of their way to cause violence and property damage and whatnot, we have laws in place to deal with these problems.
	Theresa May should not have said anything about it.
	Sorry, the Home Office should not have had any sort of commentary on this at all and should have just accepted it on the grounds that he was in danger because he was an apostate in an Islamist country.
	And then finally, the thing I'd like to talk about is the new, there's been a lot of talk about proposing laws against the concept of Islamophobia.
	That's all of you, by the way.
	Labour and the Liberal Democrats have finally adopted a definition of the word Islamophobia because this has been a really real problem.
	So the only definition of Islamophobia that we've been using since about, I think it was 1993, when one was whipped up by the Running Meat Trust, was included eight points, one of which was not liking Islam as a civilization or an idea.
	So simply not even just having your own personal opinion on Islam could make you an Islamophobe.
	But obviously that was far too broad.
	And thankfully they've acted, well not thankfully, but I mean I guess we should say thankfully we've got a solid definition that they're prepared to use.
	Because Labour and the Liberal Democrats have both adopted this definition of Islamophobia, quote, for the purposes of fighting the far right.
	Now, I don't trust the communists in Labour to be able to identify what I mean, I assume when they say far right, they mean a fascist, but I don't trust them to be able to identify one in the slightest.
	Wow.
	I don't want to go off track on what I'm saying, but I don't disagree.
	But anyway, the definition is Islamophobia is rooted in a racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.
	Yes, I don't know what that means either.
	This philosophically actually comes from a postmodern philosopher called Falghuni Sheff, who in her 2009 book, Towards a Political Philosophy of Race, why would you need such a thing?
	She argues that the liberal state creates racial groups.
	And what it does is effectively normalizes what she calls racial groups.
	Now, these are not actually races.
	What they are are just identifiable groups in society.
	And effectively, what they want to do, I mean, the description of it is that the liberal state, I suppose you would say, otherizes these other groups, new immigrants into the society, until they can be normalized to the set of values upon which the liberal society is based.
	And this is why the postmodernists, the post-modernist left, want to criticize any, criminalize any criticism of Muslims and, by extension, Islam.
	They say that you are only criticizing Muslims because they follow Islam.
	Yes.
	The thing I want to criticize is Islam, and I can only do that through the mouths, through the dialogue with its adherents.
	And so in this mind, this creates a distinct group which they falsely identify as a race.
	Therefore, opposition to whatever constitutes Muslimness is in their minds a form of racism.
	So in essence, it is opposition to Islam as a worldview and civilization that Labour is trying to describe as racism.
	This is the product of a mindset called insectionality, which is the current theory that is in vogue in the radical left.
	Trevor Phillips is against it, against defining Muslim as a race, because frankly it's not.
	It's a belief.
	It also condemns the Muslim community to be defined by its most extreme elements, because what you're doing is taking an identitarian interpretation of this religion.
	And obviously, the people who end up defining what being a Muslim is, are those people who are most obsessed with being a Muslim, and those people are the Islamists.
	This also socially segregates them from wider society.
	It allows sort of cultural colonies that can't be criticized or critiqued or changed in any way by any outside forces.
	And this is something that Falghuni Sheth was talking about, how the liberal society itself normalizes the new entries into the society through a process of cultural exchange.
	Well, this is what hate speech laws are designed to prevent.
	They do not want Muslims knowing that they do not want you telling your opinion of Islam and the culture that comes from it to Muslims, because Muslims will naturally change.
	Everyone changes when you move into any new society.
	When in Rome, you end up doing as the Romans do in order to just simply get along in that society.
	Instead, we have the opposite, where the society itself, and the state in particular, is actually criminalizing those people who would wish to speak in critique of the new arrivals.
	That's not acceptable.
	That's obviously a violation of your free speech.
	You should be free to critique them, and they should be free to critique us.
	They should be saying, well, we don't agree with individual rights or personal liberty or free speech, any of the voting we've got a problem.
	I don't know, whatever their critiques are, and I'll happily debate those things with them.
	But instead, we are being prevented by law from doing this.
	Well, that is the intent anyway.
	What I believe that we should do is display a closer commitment to our institutions as impartial arbiters and show no religious group favor over another in our considerations, regardless of how those groups feel about it.
	And I include myself as an atheist.
	Atheists should not be given increased consideration from the state.
	We are not an oppressed class.
	We are just individuals operating society as the rest of people are.
	I believe that this is a strong moral claim to fairness and cannot be persuasively argued against by the religious extremists themselves.
	And I think it will help prevent further intolerance by the state against legitimate asylum seekers.
	And it will also reduce the bias demonstrated by politicians and institutions in favour of the religious extremists.

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