Islam versus Europe

"White people love playing 'divide & rule' We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism".

In rushing to defend Diane Abbott against accusations of anti-white racism, the Guardian proffers a definition of racism that is itself racist.

Beyond the opportunistic timing, this discourse of victimisation demonstrates why racism does not work both ways. Bias, stereotyping and violence are human actions, but racism is not a synonym for individual prejudice. Instead, racism is the systemic discrimination of whole groups of people cast as outsiders, deemed incapable of full incorporation into society, and treated with suspicion on this basis. It has a deep and lasting effect on individuals' life chances and consequent wellbeing, and is damaging to the social fabric as a whole. For all the equivalences drawn between clumsy and prejudicial references to skin colour, racism is inherently political; it requires the power to contribute to racial oppression.

...Rewriting racism as a human impulse elides it as a process born of a set of specific historical contexts, such as the conquering of the Americas, the birth of slavery, and modern colonialism.

Source: The Guardian

So racism is defined in such a way that only Europeans can be guilty of it. This view of racism is both morally and factually indefensible. In his book "Race and Slavery in the Middle East", Bernard Lewis quotes examples of negroes who were discriminated against in the early Islamic empires. Some of them even wrote poems complaining about it!

Note the remark about "the birth of slavery" too. Of course the implication is that the transatlantic slave trade represented the birth of slavery. That is utterly false and itself indicative of the anti-European mindset these people have. Slavery was practised in virtually all societies in pre-modern times. The African slave trade, specifically, had been operated both by Africans themselves and by Muslims for centuries before the Europeans arrived. If the Guardian writers think they know when the "birth of slavery" was, I'd love to know the date. The true "birth of slavery" is lost in pre-history, before the invention of writing. Indeed, the Hammurabi Code, from 1772 BC, among the oldest texts in existence, contained legal provisions related to slavery.

As usual, the Guardian ignores Islamic and non-European wrong-doing and presents racism as a uniquely European evil.

But let's consider the point that racism is fundamentally about power relations. Compare Emma West and Diane Abbott. One is a poor, uneducated single mother with a history of mental health problems; the other is an Oxbridge graduate, an MP and a shadow government minister. One, spontaneously and thoughtlessly, articulated her distress at what high levels of immigration had done to her country; the other articulated an essentialising ideology of race. The former has been prosecuted and had her children taken away from her; the latter has left-wing establishment newspapers and journalists rushing to her defence.

Who is in the position of power here?