free speech, Rod Fleming's World

Originally posted 2016-11-23 14:47:57.

‘Phobia’ just means ‘fear of’. ‘Islamophobia’ therefore, is the fear of Islam. But Islam is not a group of people, a race or an ethnicity. It is just a religion. A religion is a set of ideas, so Islam is an ideology.

It is reasonable to fear an ideology that calls on its followers to kill you and destroy your culture; so why does ‘Islamophobia’ have special status? Why are people deliberately shamed into not stating that they are afraid of Islam and what it instructs its benighted followers to do to them?

Why should Islamophobia be reviled, when it is actually the only intelligent position to take? Is self-preservation a bad thing? Is it wicked to want to protect a culture that you are justly proud of? Is it wrong to want to protect yourself and your children from a 9th-century travesty of lies and delusions fabricated by an evil warlord whose closest modern equivalent is Adolf Hitler?

Islamophobia is not only a reasonable fear, it is also the only intelligent and rational position to take.

Continue reading “Islamophobia: a reasonable fear”

Originally posted 2022-11-06 22:55:27.

A less than entirely pleasant exchange on Twitter made me consider the issue of self identification. I don’t mean identity, which has been hijacked by the left. I mean self identification. Who you are, not what you are.

Self identification matters because without it, there can be no free speech and therefore, no free society. It is impossible to debate when one party is hiding his identity and the other is not. Without free society, we live in a dictatorship.

This has become hugely important, since large numbers of people use anonymity to harm others with no fear of being exposed. The cult of anonymity has become pernicious today and nobody seems to realise how dangerous it is.

Anonymity is the enabler of totalitarianism. It effects this in two ways. Firstly, it allows people to spread toxic ideologies without fear of reprisal. They can say what they want, be as vile as they can be, and mummy will never find out how reprehensible has been their behaviour. Secondly, as we have seen all too often, anonymity protects the very people who do the most to shut down free speech.