Fjordman: Irrational Fear of Islam?

Fjordman’s latest essay has been published at FrontPage Mag. He includes this note with excerpts from the article:

Note from Fjordman. I have just started sending out the first thank-you emails to those of you who have donated to the Fjordman Relocation Fund this autumn. Those who haven’t donated yet, but wish to do so, may use the Donate to Fjordman button you can see on the left sidebar at the Gates of Vienna website.

I am deeply grateful for all donations of any size.

Update: Read also Andrew Bostom’s take on the Islamophobia commanded by Allah and the Koran:

“The Koran, hadith, and sira — Islam’s most important foundational sources — thus mandate Islamophobia to be inculcated amongst non-Muslims as a ‘sacralized’ objective.”

Excerpts:

In his book How the West Was Lost, the Russian-born author Alexander Boot suggested that Westerners no longer live in a democracy but in a glossocracy, the government of the word, by the word and for the word.

One could posit that we live in a world dominated at least as much by images, especially moving images in the form of television and movies, as by words, but words clearly matter. In many cases, those who coin new words, or manage to force the public to accept their definition of old words, win the struggle. In practice, this is done by those who control the propaganda flow, in the education system and the mass media.

We now have a term for an imaginary problem: Islamophobia. It has become the subject of international conferences and is treated as a threat to world peace. In contrast, racist violence against people of European origins, a very real problem from South Africa via North America to Western European suburbs, does not exist because we have no special word for it. This is word magic. “Tolerance” and “diversity” mean dispossessing Europeans from the countries their ancestors created, whereas “intolerance,” “hate” and “racism” imply any opposition by Europeans to their own dispossession and organized national destruction.

[…]

Having rabbitophobia, a paralyzing fear of rabbits, could with considerable justification be classified as an irrational fear. Rabbits can potentially carry diseases, as can mice and many other animals, but apart from that they hardly constitute much of a threat to humans. Likewise, it is hard to find any rational justification for coulrophobia, a fear of clowns, apart from some bad childhood experience that somehow stuck to adulthood.

However, one could not sensibly be said to suffer similarly from greatwhitesharkophobia or crocodilophobia. That’s because big sharks and crocodiles are large predators that are genuinely dangerous. Having some healthy fear of them is perfectly sane and may help you stay alive. This doesn’t mean that great white sharks or big crocodiles will attack and kill humans every time they have the opportunity to do so, but they are perfectly capable of carrying out such attacks, and sometimes they do.

The same principle applies to so-called Islamophobia. An ideology that has as its stated goal to put the entire world under its eternal rule, by force if necessary, and to kill those who stand in its way, criticize it or leave it, is genuinely dangerous. Having some healthy doses of fear and skepticism of such a force is perfectly rational.

Read the rest at FrontPage Mag.

For a complete archive of Fjordman’s writings, see the multi-index listing in the Fjordman Files.