In the US earlier this week a controversy broke out over the decision by the Washington Post not to publish (at least in its printed edition) Sunday’s instalment of the cartoon strip “Opus,” in which a character appears in a headscarf and explains to her boyfriend that she wants to become a radical Islamist. (Fox News report here, link to the actual cartoon here.)

Reports have pointed out that a recent episode of the same cartoon strip ridiculed the late right-wing Christian fundamentalist Jerry Falwell, yet no attempt was made to ban it. Predictably, the right-wing blogosphere has leapt on this issue, accusing the media of applying double standards and discriminating in favour of Muslims (“Christians are fair game, Muslims aren’t“).

Whether the Washington Post was correct to spike the cartoon is a matter of debate (see for example Sheila Musaji’s comments at The American Muslim). But what should be rejected outright is the stupid notion that reinforcing stereotypes about a minority ethno-religious community which is already the object of a poisonous right-wing propaganda campaign is the same as taking the piss out of a white Christian evangelist like Jerry Falwell.

Far from being a beleaguered minority, the Christian Right in the US is politically close to the Republican Party and a leading figure like Falwell was even in a position to place demands on would-be presidential candidates in exchange for electoral support (see, for example, here). If there’s one thing Jerry Falwell emphatically wasn’t, it was oppressed. In fact, he was prominent among the ranks of the oppressors – so notorious was he for his Islamophobic views that the Anti-Defamation League publicly dissociated themselves from his more egregious anti-Muslim remarks.

That right-wing US commentators should be unable to make a distinction between the position of Muslims and Christians in western society is hardly surprising, but the same sort of argument is regularly trotted out by people who in other respects hold broadly progressive views and should be expected to know better.

For example, we’ve already covered Maryam Namazie’s Islamophobic rant at the International Day Against Homophobia, as reported in the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association’s magazine Gay Humanist Quarterly, in which she accused the Muslim Council of Britain of wanting to hang gay men in Trafalgar Square. But we have not dealt with the contribution from another platform speaker at the IDAHO reception – Darren Johnson, who is one of the Green Party’s two members on the London Assembly. In the same issue of GHQ George Broadhead of GALHA reported:

“In his speech, Darren Johnson cited those on the political left who were reluctant to criticise Islamic homophobia. ‘Many on the left are perfectly comfortable denouncing homophobia if it comes from the lips of right-wing Christian fundamentalists’, he said, ‘but get strangely queasy if it is espoused by Muslim fundamentalists.”

Christianity, it seems to have escaped Johnson’s attention, is the religion of the white majority in the West, whereas Islam is the religion of non-white minorities. Attacks on the belief system of Muslims therefore can and very often do serve as a cover for racist propaganda. Why else do right-wing newspapers like the Express and the Mail, and far-right groups like the BNP, devote themselves to obsessively attacking the Muslim community?

The point is – you can’t just ignore social context. This is usually pretty obvious when it comes to the Jewish community, who are of course another minority ethno-religious group with a long history of racial and religious oppression. Denouncing Judaism and Jews is not all the same thing as denouncing Christianity and Christians. Even the most rigid of secular rationalists can usually see that.

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