I’m glad that at an impressionable age my Dad told me of a dumb white cop with power telling a smart young black woman with promise she was “really just a Kaffir.” The settings change, the vile stupidity does not.
I wonder if there is any criticism of Islam, any valid, grounded -- constructive, even -- critique of Islam that Cohen would not consider racist? It seems to me that Cohen’s piece in its entirety is boils down to an attempt to stigmatise any criticism of Islam. If there is any “vile stupidity” at play, surely it is that of Cohen and fellow travellers, who call any and all criticism of Islam as a “racist scourge”. You are free to disagree with these characterizations, surely, but not to "ban" them outright by the tedious and tiresome slur of "racism".
Look, Mr Cohen, there are many people, even of center and left (ie not just the “far right” as you would have it), who criticise Islam because of tenets that are supremacist, misogynist, homophobic and discriminatory of minorities. By what stretch of the imagination could such grounded, factual observations be labelled “racist”??
I have, by the way, had my own “kaffir moment” in South Africa. In 1968 I was in the South African veldt, miles from nowhere, sharing a seat in a car with three or four other black guys, as both of our cars had broken down. We were all waiting for help, which my passenger had hitch-hiked off to find. After a while a police car pulled up and wanted to know what the “kaffirs” were doing. When I stepped out of the car, these “dumb white cops” wanted to know what I was doing consorting with “kaffirs”. I was on the point of being arrested, simply for sitting and chatting to these guys, when help arrived and the situation defused.
But I always remember that, as Cohen remembers his Dad telling him of “the dumb white copper”, just like the ones that nearly threw me in the slammer for simply talking to people they considered sub-human. As a btw, we towed these African guys in the car back to town. They happened to be editors of the only English language Black-African newspaper in Cape Town, the Star, I think it was, and they published a story of the incident...
I have no truck with racism, Mr Cohen. But nor do I have any truck with those who want to shut down criticism of Islam for being “racist”.
