Michael Gove: Birth of an Anti-Islamist Intelligentsia
The Croydonian reports from this year's major speech by a UK-based thinker and parliamentarian Michael Gove. His subject was The Birth of an Anti-Islamist Intelligentsia, organised by the New Culture Forum on 22nd January 2007:
''Christopher Hitchens has described the opportunistic alliance between ex Stalinists and Islamists. David Aaronovitch has also denounced it, as has John Lloyd who has argued that the Left needs to fight for as well as against and that Fascism, Communism and Islamism are all strands of the same totalitarianism.''
''And novelists of the Left have come out too – Ian McEwan who had denounced ‘morally selective outrage’, Salman Rushdie who has written of ‘paranoid Islam’ and Martin Amis. Amis wrote that the single most depressing event in the UK last year was the spectacle of white middle class protesters holding placards with ‘We are all Hizbollah’.''
A more detailed report on the speech is available at Conservative Home:
One of the most important contributions in the debate period of the evening came from Tory A-lister Sayeeda Varsi. She made the simple but vital point that 'Islamist' may be an intellectually accurate way of describing the ideological misinterpretation of Islam by the extremists and terrorists but on many practical levels it was a confusing term. Most people she said would not understand the difference between Islam and Islamist and assume that quite proper attacks on Islamism were attacks on Islam itself. Gove said he understood the concern, that he respected the faith of Muslims but did not have a solution to this naming issue.
