Richard Dawkins’ Islamophobia Just Reached Disturbing New Heights

[rug]

This is not the first time that Dawkins has made bigoted statements about Islam or weighed in on what it means to be a “good girl."

By Sarah Lazare / AlterNet
Sarah Lazare is a staff writer for AlterNet. A former staff writer for Common Dreams, Sarah co-edited the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahlazare.
January 26, 2016

Richard Dawkins took his creepy brand of Islamophobia to new heights this week when he released a tweet praising Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan as a “good Muslim” for how she speaks, dresses, and wears her hair.

Steve Rose ?@steveplrose

Richard Dawkins made creepy tweet about Queen Rania of Jordan then deleted it: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins …

1:28 PM - 25 Jan 2016

http://twitter.com/steveplrose/status/691689226535067648/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

The evolutionary biologist, writer, and champion of so-called New Atheism deleted his tweet soon after posting it on Monday, but not before a social media user preserved it for Internet posterity.

This is not the first time that Dawkins has made bigoted statements about Islam or weighed in on what it means to be a “good girl.” The prominent figure has been called an imperialist chauvinist, a neo-Orientialist, and simply vulgar for issuing declarations like the following:

Richard Dawkins
✔ ?@RichardDawkins
@ToddKincannon Haven't read Koran so couldn't quote chapter & verse like I can for Bible. But often say Islam greatest force for evil today

1:01 AM - 1 Mar 2013

Richard Dawkins
✔ ?@RichardDawkins
For me, the horror of Hitler is matched by bafflement at the ovine stupidity of his followers. Increasingly feel the same about Islamism.

2:50 AM - 20 Aug 2014

- snip -

But what makes Dawkins’ latest tweet particularly notable is his own 2013 memoir, Appetite for Wonder, The Making of a Scientist. Dawkins' musings on his colonial upbringing in then-Nyasaland, now Malawi, provide some insight into who he considers a "good" subject.

“We always had a cook, a gardener and several other servants… Tea was served on the lawn, with beautiful silver teapot and hot-water jug, and a milk jug under a dainty muslin cover weighted down with periwinkle shells sewn around the edges,” he wrote, going on to praise the head servant Ali who “loyally accompanied the family.”

“Loyal servants turn up at several points in Dawkins’s progress through life,” John Gray noted in a review published in 2014 in New Republic. “The tone of indulgent superiority is telling. Dawkins is ready to smile on those he regards as beneath him as long as it is clear who is on top.”

http://www.alternet.org/belief/richard-dawkins-islamophobia-just-reached-disturbing-new-heights

[Cartoonist]

1. Yay! More Dawkins bashing.

It's terrible that he rapes little boys and cuts off people's heads. How can he be such a bigot?

[rug]

2. Actually, more Dawkins tweeting.

Res ipsa loquitur.

[Lordquinton]

5. Yep, any excuse to bash

He deleted a tweet, this is clearly headline news.

[Goblinmonger]

6. I seem to remember that at one point

the horror was that he didn't delete one. No he has and that's bad.

Anything to distract from problems in the RCC I guess.

[cleanhippie]

9. A deleted tweet? My god! That's worse than child raping priests!

Or decades long I situational cover up of said child raping priests.


And when Catholics come out against apparent misogyny by secular individuals while ignoring the institutionalized misogyny that is part and parcel of their church's teachings and doctrines, only one word comes to mind...

Wow. just wow.

[rug]

12. Do you know what squids do when threatened?

They create a cloud of ink to cover their escape.

Now, cleanhippie, point out exactly what the RCC has to do with Dawkins.

[Leontius]

13. Do you know what dawkins worshippers do when threatened?

[rug]

15. Many will say "priest" and "pedophilia" in the same sentence as soon as possible.

[cleanhippie]

16. Is that why you squirt everywhere?

[rug]

17. Is that why you make snide attacks to third parties?

Rather brave of you to reply directly for a change, even though it's a particularly stupid remark.

[rug]

11. Tell me how you like the tweet he put up (before he deleted it).

[rug]

10. If you consider the article bashing, dou you also consider his tweet just fine?

I'd love to hear your defense.

[Jim__]

3. Gray's review of Dawkins' book is online.

A version of it was published in the New Republic. An excerpt:

If an autobiography can ever contain a true reflection of the author, it is nearly always found in a throwaway sentence. When the world’s most celebrated atheist writes of the discovery of evolution, Richard Dawkins unwittingly reveals his sense of his mission in the world. Toward the end of An Appetite for Wonder, the first installment in what is meant to be a two-volume memoir, Dawkins cites the opening lines of the first chapter of the book that made him famous, The Selfish Gene, published in 1976:

Intelligent life on a planet comes of an age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilisation, is: “Have they discovered evolution yet?” Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.

Several of the traits that Dawkins displays in his campaign against religion are on show here. There is his equation of superiority with cleverness: the visiting aliens are more advanced creatures than humans because they are smarter and know more than humans do. The theory of evolution by natural selection is treated not as a fallible theory—the best account we have so far of how life emerged and developed—but as an unalterable truth, which has been revealed to a single individual of transcendent genius. There cannot be much doubt that Dawkins sees himself as a Darwin-like figure, propagating the revelation that came to the Victorian naturalist.

Among these traits, it is Dawkins’s identification with Darwin that is most incongruous. No two minds could be less alike than those of the great nineteenth-century scientist and the latter-day evangelist for atheism. Hesitant, doubtful, and often painfully perplexed, Darwin understood science as an empirical investigation in which truth is never self-evident and theories are always provisional. If science, for Darwin, was a method of inquiry that enabled him to edge tentatively and humbly toward the truth, for Dawkins, science is an unquestioned view of the world. The Victorians are often mocked for their supposed certainties, when in fact many of them (Darwin not least) were beset by anxieties and uncertainties. Dawkins, by contrast, seems never to doubt for a moment the capacity of the human mind—his own, at any rate—to resolve questions that previous generations have found insoluble.

...

[rug]

4. Thanks for the link.

A devastating review.

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. Wow, Gray is a philosopher who doesn't understand the basic concepts of knowledge

"revealed to a single individual of transcendent genius"

No, the whole point is that it wasn't 'revealed'. That would have been religion, with an entity doing the revealing. That wouldn't have involved Darwin being intelligent. Such sloppiness with language might not be worth noting normally, but when this is a professional philosopher who got paid to give opinions on the worldview of Dawkins as shown by his autobiography, and he's explicitly drawing attention to Dawkins' attitude to religion, he really ought to have been able get the basic ideas right.

What a dumbass.

He then goes on to a completely unjustified "Dawkins thinks he's like Darwin" tirade. I can see that is as embarrassing for Gary as Dawkins' tweet was for him. Shame Gray hasn't tried to delete his idiocy.

[edhopper]

18. so Gray never heard of

Alfred Russel Wallace, I guess.

[MisterP]

7. he's sliding from "atheist Trump" to "atheist Jaden Smith"

"Ancestors who die old have passed on genes for dying old. Genes for dying young aren't passed on. No wonder we die of old age."

[hrmjustin]

14. K&R!

[Major Nikon]

19. Makes about as much sense as conservatophobia

Hate of an idea is not the same thing as hatred of the people who subscribe to that idea.

Certainly many religionists consider superstitious beliefs as something that transcends the abstract, but to many others they are nothing more than bad ideas and elevating them to such status makes about as much sense as corporations = people.

[rug]

20. So, I take it you do not hate Nazis but hate National Socialism.

[Major Nikon]

21. I don't hate anyone

It would needlessly take up too much time.

[rug]

22. That's a good philosophy.

[Fumesucker]

23. What is the death toll this time?

Somewhere between Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan I would guess given the breathlessness of the reporting.

[Cartoonist]

24. Disturbing New Heights

Disturbing???????

New Heights??????

No tweet has been revealed. I went to the cache but found a million tweets. I certainly am not going to look for the disturbing one. I did see some tweets by Dawkins in which he explained why he deleted it. The author of this nonsense that rug posted is BS. Instead of quoting the tweet, it was reinterpreted. Pure BS.

[rug]

25. The tweet is right here.

:large

And the link to the screen shot of this deleted post is in the OP.

Would you like to discuss how a good Muslim woman should speak, dress, and wear her beautiful hair?

Or would you rather discuss reminisces of Muslim servants?

We can accompany that with readings from Kipling and a study of Gunga Din.

[Cartoonist]

26. Out of context

This is a continuation of a joke. You completely omit the back story. And you completely omit the reason he deleted it. You've reached a disturbing new low in BS.

[rug]

27. Oh really? Do tell the joke.

[Cartoonist]

28. Nope

Look it up yourself. Next time, do a little research before you post someone else's BS

[rug]

29. In the absence of evidence the claim remains baseless bullshit.

I'm off to the garden for a spot of tea.

[Cartoonist]

30. The absence of evidence is in the OP.

A tweet taken out of context is BS. Put that in your tea.

[rug]

31. Where's the joke, Cartoonist? You said there was one.

If you take it upon yourself to defend this elitist twerp, at least do a better job of it.

[Cartoonist]

32. No defense is necessary

Not from a manufactured hit piece by someone who leaves out all the surrounding facts. Try again.

Your first clue should have been the word disturbing. Clearly, here is someone with an agenda of hate.

[rug]

33. Supply "the surrounding facts."

I'm sure you would not say such a thing unless they existed.

In the meantime, here's a fact for you. Steve Rose is not someone with an agenda of hate.

https://twitter.com/steveplrose

But he is very, very good at spotting and calling out those who do.

[Cartoonist]

34. It's in the cache

Have fun wading through it.

[rug]

35. Ah, nothing.

Again.

[Cartoonist]

36. Rose

Thanks for the link. Now I know someone who is an Islam apologist. No wonder you think highly of him, he's of the same ilk as Catholic apologists.

[rug]

37. Lol, here you are flailing and sputtering over Dawkins, yet you accuse anyone of being an apologist.

Which explains why you see a person opposing Islamophobia and ethnic bigotry as an "Islam apologist".

No worries. You have as little evidence to back that up as you have with anything else tonight.

[Cartoonist]

40. So tell me

What is "disturbing" about Dawkins out of context tweet. I will agree that it is kind of childish, but hardly as disturbing as cutting someone's head off. Certainly not as disturbing as raping a little boy. Not even as disturbing as Pope Frank's homophobia. Come back when you got something disturbing.

[rug]

41. You are yelling at a headline, not unlike Grampa Simpson yelling at a cloud.

Dawkins's condescending, colonial remark speaks for itself. If you think there's some context to explain it, you've yet to produce it.

Disturbing is the not the word I would use, It's one in a long line of revelatory statements by him. So the word I would use is "typical". Which, in his case, is not a good thing.

[Cartoonist]

42. Ok, I won't argue that

Still seems like making a mountain out of a molehill.

So how come I never see you object to Pope Frank's "typical" homophobic remarks? That's certainly not a good thing.

I'm not trying to deflect it. Dawkins is a bad boy. But your disparaging of him is totally out of proportion to the real evil and bigotry of your pontiff. It's like asking for the death penalty for someone who stole candy from a baby, while looking away from a mass murderer. What's up with that?

[rug]

43. In this room? It's hard to find anyone here not posting that.

if someone posted a picture of a slice of cheese in here, it would turn into a homophobic/misogynist/pederast Pope thread inside of five posts.

I'm not one for seeking internet points by jumping on bandwagons.

If you want to know what I think of the Catholic Church, read the Catholic & Orthodox Group. Here's a post from this morning: http://www.democraticunderground.com/12216597

[Cartoonist]

44. Let's put that to the test

/revision/20070512212624

[rug]

45. Parameters of the experiment require that to be an OP.

[mwrguy]

38. Creepy Islamophobic shitbag

[hrmjustin]

39. +1

[goldent]

46. As my uncle used to say "He's a real piece of work!"