Race is not a choice, let alone one that requires a defensible moral rationale. Religion, on the other hand, is exactly that.
The opportunity to overlook this distinction is taken up, enthusiastically, whenever a criticism of religious ideology is dubbed as racism. Further obscurantism is supplied by the prevailing confusion over what race is, or isn’t, or whether it exists, or not, or… etcetera.
Here’s an example from Islamophobia Watch – a source one would expect to show clarity the matter. The site provides (at time of writing) definitions of Islamophobia, quoting various sources. So:
“It is viewed as a new form of racism whereby Muslims, an ethno-religious group, not a race, are nevertheless constructed as a race.”
According to this, it’s the Islamophobe who fallaciously “constructs the race”. However, further on:
“A more accurate expression would be ‘anti-Islamic racism’ for it combines the elements of dislike of a religion and active discrimination against the people belonging to that religion.”
Now, it seems to be the anti-Islamophobe who’s at it.
This needs clearing up. Better still, why not just drop the race hot-potato from discussions of ideology. Even in the cases where race is itself an effect of ideology, it’s the causes that matter.
(The image is of a Polish-born German and convert to Islam, Christian Ganczarski. I saw, as a random tourist, an hour or two of the Paris trial for his role in the 2002 bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia.)
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