Transcript of Thought For the World's thought for the day

Maryam Namazie

19th February 2008

Label me human

There are innumerable characteristics that can define people but in this day and age we are increasingly being identified by religious labelling.

This has a lot to do with the rise of the organised religion industry, but is even more dangerous when it comes to the political Islamic movement, which has state power in many places like Iran or Iraq or is vying for power as in Britain.

Within this context, labelling people as Muslim and Muslim alone is actually part of the process of constraining them in order to feign 'representation.'

Aided and abetted by the Government's policies of appeasement and cultural relativism, innumerable people - often people like myself who have resisted and fled Islam in power - are handed over lock, stock and barrel to regressive Islamic organisations like the Muslim Council of Britain.

Rather than being non-racist as it is often touted, this is racism pure and simple because it implies that masses of people choose to live the way they are often forced to and imputes on them the most reactionary elements of culture and religion, which is that of the ruling class, parasitical imams and self-appointed leaders.

It's as if there are no classes, political, social and rights activists, socialists, atheists, progressives, humanists, rationalists or secularists among this group - all are 'Muslims' and the most reactionary of Islamists at that!

Moreover, rather than aiding social cohesion, cultural relativism is a prescription for social discord. Look around you. Huge numbers of people are being relegated to fragmented "minority" communities where they continue to face sexual apartheid, Islamic schools, Sharia courts and forced veiling. They live in Bantustans with somewhat separate legal, social, cultural, and religious systems. Their rights are not the highest standards available as one would expect but the most regressive and reactionary. They are denied access to universal standards and norms. They are denied equal rights and the secularism fought for and established by progressive movements over centuries.

The idea of difference has always been the fundamental principle of a racist agenda not the other way around. The defeat of Nazism and its biological theory of difference largely discredited racial superiority. The racism behind it, however, found another more acceptable form of expression for this era. Instead of expression in racial terms, difference is now portrayed in cultural and religious terms.

Clearly, this has to stop.

And it can begin to, if I and millions like me are labelled human.

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