Moreover there is a mighty hint of Orientalism kicking about. This is not new. If you read John Buchan’s “Greenmantle” you will see it from nearly 100 years ago. Some lefty academics in the USA have started defending FGM. The same lefty academics who would howl if I came at their vulva with a rusty tin lid. That is Orientalism and it is fundamentally not enlightenment thinking.

Furthermore, I think the conflation of “phobias” is… not academically helpful. Sexuality is not religion for example. Religion is not race. back to the sexuality. The way we view homosexual sex is not the way the ancient Greeks did and it is not the way many extant cultures do. But religion is – almost by definition – cast in stone.

I guess what I’m saying is it’s too cutsey to lump all our hang-ups or distastes into the same pot. It is extremely lazy thinking.

And there is another thing… Islam is fundamentally (I use that term word deliberately) a supremacist view. Very few examples of homosexuality I have come across are. Very few claim the moral high-ground. It’s a different thing. Cute and neat to conflate but not intellectually helpful.

I mentioned old Siggy Fraud. He was big on “penis envy”. I think he just made that up. From my experience girls have some mighty fine orgasms so why envy? Because Fraud really meant “physics envy”. His own envy. You read his stuff about cathexis and whatnot and it’s screaming to be written in differential equations. He didn’t manage it for it is all best bollocks but that was his aim – to understand human nature in terms analogous to physics. A complete failure to comprehend culture and perhaps perversity. The same tinker-toy mentality to culture, religion, sex, life, death, tomatoes pervades the arts and humanities and social sciences to this day. Marx did the same with the idea of “scientific” history. The most corrosive thing that has happened is the idea, inspired by the enormous successes of science over the last few hundred years is that the arts have to emulate them in a real half-assed manner.

Now lets look at somethings I do know about. Beethoven and compressible flow. Einstein himself (both a musician and a scientist) stated that there is no point in analysing a piece of Beethoven in terms of air-pressure waves. No, there isn’t. I can’t play the triangle but I do know about fluid dynamics. The later doesn’t help. I indeed know people who struggle with the Pythagorean Theorem but can bang-out a tune. Culture, society and all that are done a disservice when people attempt to understand them in what are frankly pseudo-scientific terms and make up big and “clever” words to that end.

The attempt to scientificate every goddamn thing is (including God) is an appalling intellectual failure. And that applies to the “phobias”. Attempting to use the tools of science here is banging screws in with a hammer.

One day there was a joke in the c.s. which used the word “Muhammed” – he was not shown, and the joke did not attack Muhammed.

But the MSM newspapers pulled the thing – at once, and they did not even have the courage to admit that they did it out of fear.

They were so fearful they could not even admit their own fear.

These are the same newspapers who run editorials every other day (and whose every news story is slanted) with the Muslims-are-fluffy-anyone-who-implies-different-is-stupid-evil-and-mad line.

All these punctilius distinctions are really rather irrelevant. I always understood xenophobia to mean a fear of strangers, and, as Yoda said, fear can turn to hate, or in those not really inclined to the emotional investment of hating, to revulsion.

I treat islamophobia, haplophobia and homophobia the same way, as well as lycopersicophobia (fear of tomatos).

This is akin to the old saying that it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you. And the global Ummah is indeed out to Borgianly assimilate everyone on the planet, while relentlessly maintaining that resistance to the will of Allah as they interpret it (while simultaneously denying that they are interpreting at all) is futile, and deeming every refusal to embrace their faith to be an attack upon it deserving of a brutal ‘defensive’ response. And those infected with the jihadi mind virus fervently believe that they earn Paradise points by killing those who refuse to be converted or to become dhimmis and serfically submit to Caliphate hegemony, and murderously act on those beliefs.

Needless to say, most Muslims are quite aware that they are Muslims. And most people who fear and/or criticize Islam are pretty sure that they are not Muslims. So the metaphor is completely miscarried, except as a verbal association to suggest that fear of Muslims is just as neurotic, despicable, and misplaced as fear of gays in Freud’s theory.

(B) “Nobody has any idea how to fight this ideological battle” — I think we’ve been fighting it for about 1400 years. So there are some pretty good lessons available as to how to do so, but they are best sought in the period before political correctness. Try 1800 or earlier.