Profound insights on multi-culturalism from an Islamophobe

Via Haroon Mughal, I came across an interesting post on Little Green Footballs–a pro-Israeli blog that was long the premier hangout on the Blogosphere for Islamophobes but which now seems occupy some nebulous middle space in the debate on Islam; the insane extremes of Muslim-baiting has reached truly makes for strange bedfellows–on Pamela Geller's latest racist Freudian slip. It concerns a picture of a group of attendees at a youth camp affiliated with the Norwegian Labor Party like the one that was recently attacked so horrifically recently by the Christian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik.

She reposted an article from a racist far-right blog that included photo of a mostly lilly white group of activists that bore the caption "Note the faces which are more MIddle Eastern or mixed than pure Norwegian." After sharing that bit of white supremacist commentary without objection Geller then went back and edited the caption to "The camp was run by the Youth Movement of the Labour Party and used to indoctrinate teens and young adults."

Little Green Footballs – Pamela Geller Deletes Racist Caption, Hides Comments

That Geller should approvingly cite the ravings of an obvious racist and Islamophobe probably won't surprise anybody who has followed her inane diatribes with any regularity. What is interesting, to my mind, is how comically uninformed Geller's comrade in bigotry is and how bizarrely neurotic his reaction is when you look at the demographics of the photo.

First, there's the fact that this crowd is large–at least 100 people, I'd guess–and has only 3 brown faces yet this ignoramus is sounding the alarm about a takeover by ethnics. That's not just racism, it's an obsession with "racial purity" that neo-Nazis would appreciate.

Second, these faces are by no means obviously "Middle Eastern." I don't expect bigots to be phenotypically savvy, but this is drastic cluelessness in someone who fancies himself an observer of multi-culturalism. The two in the foreground are obviously South Asian and, while it's hard to make out, the woman in the back might be of African descent (and not North African, either) or perhaps even (really) South Asian (as in Tamil), but she sure ain't Middle Eastern, either. Finally, one of the two menacing South Asian "Middle Easterners" appears to be, ahem, a Sikh (note the tell-tale joora, or top-knot).

The stupidity and ignorance of Islamophobes never ceases to amaze, but not as much as how they hold forth with unassailable confidence on Islam,  Muslims, multiculturalism and world affairs. No doubt, he's drunk deeply, like Breivik, from the insights of Islamophobic pretend-scholars such as Robert Spencer.