Fear, loathing and respect
Rod Liddle says that Islam appeals to liberal Western man for the very reasons it appals him
Of all the many fashionable phobias that we are meant to reach inside ourselves and disavow, Islamophobia is the most stubbornly resistant to expulsion. Islamophobia, we might argue to ourselves and to others, is an entirely rational state of mind. After all, why should we not have a ‘morbid fear [of] or aversion’ to something which, at its most extreme, at its most crass, wishes us all dead? How could we not be averse to a religion which seems to provide the ideological legitimacy for the following chilling and triumphalist statement from al-Qa’eda: ‘You want to live: we want to die’? That’s a pretty alien concept for us, wanting to die.
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