Omar the Dancing Hypocrite

This American Life’s program this weekend was entitled “Them.” The centerpiece of the broadcast was (to quote the TAL website) as follows: “Several years ago […] Jon Ronson spent a year following around a Muslim activist named Omar Bakri, who called himself bin Laden's ‘man in London.’” [Emphasis mine.]

Bakri, who escaped from Saudi Arabia before settling in London, made it repeatedly and unblinkingly clear that he intended to overthrow the British government and set up an Islamic dictatorship (with ancillary branches in other heretical states such as America and the rest of Europe.)

At one point in Ronson’s piece, Bakri hands out flyers in the tubes warning of the disease of homosexuality: “There are homosexuals everywhere!” Now, who would have thought the message gay activists have been trying to disseminate to the heterosexual population for decades would be recognized and proclaimed by an Islamic fundamentalist extremist? Not what he intended, I’m sure.

But I digress. The risible climax of this reportorial adventure comes when, after 11 September 2001 and Bakri’s public exclamations of delight, he is finally rounded up and deported. (If there were any real justice he’d have been returned to Saudi to stand trial for the activities over which he originally feared legal reprisal, but we can’t have everything.) The punchline to this sick joke? Bakri’s pathetic whining to Ronson that he was an innocent, that he didn’t know Bin Laden, and why was he being persecuted in this manner?

A couple of personal disclaimers are in order. First, I am profoundly agnostic and, as such, am more than tired of the endless bigotry of fundamentalist Christers, Jews, Muslims and, for all I know, the Flat Earth Society. Second, and despite the foregoing, I don’t believe in persecuting or indeed prosecuting anyone for his or her religious beliefs—which is a damn site more open-minded than many of them deserve or would grant to me as a secular faggot humanist. Third, while I think that when one decides to emigrate to another nation one has to accept the mores of the culture and nation in which one lives, I do not believe one automatically gives up the right to criticize the way in which one’s new host nation governs itself. Often the finest patriot is he who objects most to the inequities of his country, adopted or native.

That having been said …

I am bloody well sick and tired of Islamists and others who don’t think twice about moving to a Western nation, then decide that nation’s society is an offense to his sensibilities but expects the people of his adoptive country to accommodate him in every particular. Not to put too fine a point on the matter:

Take your religious dogma, bigotry, intolerance and love of secular dictatorship, and go fuck yourself with it.

Thank you.