A subtle niggling antisemitism

[lavendersparkle]

I have a keen interest in political stories about the wearing of hijabs. Primarily this is because, to all intents and purposes I wear a hijab when out. I cover my hair for religious reasons and whilst I don't cover my neck all of the time and some of my hair usually pokes out, some Muslim women cover their hair to the same extent I do. When there's public hostility to hijabs on the street, or policies to exclude women with uncovered hair or requirements for more revealing clothing in certain situations (there goes my beautiful career as a beach volleyball chump) it affects me. Of course I don't get it as bad as a lot of women do. I'm protected to some extent by my whiteness, my Englishness, my middle-classness, my education, my attractiveness. Most often people don't even interpret the my head scarves as religious clothing. They don't expect white, middle-class, highly educated, liberal women to cover their hair for religious reasons and the cognitive dissonance usually goes the way of assuming I'm just a hippy or having a bad hair day. I also know that the measures aren't actually targeted toward me. I'm swept up in them because the people who make these rules can't bring themselves to being honest enough to say "darkies can't wear Islamic clothing" so they make a weedly rule about religious clothing or health and safety and then begrudgingly make Catholics take off their crucifixes to prove that they're not racist really. They don't really care about women like me covering her hair. I'm white and English and already married.

Anyway, after all of that I want to talk about something which bugs me but is really difficult to call out. I suppose what it boils down to is: why in an article about white Europeans of Christian origin engaging in Islamophobic ass-hattery do you have to mention Jews or Israel?

The article which reminded me of this was this one. So the line which made me think "oh great this again" was this line:
This is an arbitrary interpretation and application of FIFA's rules against wearing uniforms with personal political or religious statements ("compulsory equipment must not have any political, religious or personal statements"). Obviously, national uniforms frequently carry both political and religious meaning (Isreal, anyone?).
Now I get what she means. National football teams have national symbols on their kit and because religion and nationality have been intertwined over the centuries, a lot of those national symbols are also religious symbols. Now I don't know anything about football, so maybe the Israeli kit has "Israel for the Jews" written across the back or a map of the Golan Heights with "ours" written across it, but I'm guessing that the Israeli kit doesn't do this more than most strips, so why single Israel out. It could have just been that she took out her big book of countries with religious national symbols, closed her eyes and stuck a pin in and when she opened her eyes there was a nice blue star of David surrounding the pin. That's why you can't call people out on this kind of stuff. I can't prove that you promoted that particular man because of sexism. I can look at and aggregate trend and say that sexism most cause men to be promoted over women, but it's difficult to identify which individual promotions were the result of sexism. Similarly, one seemingly irrelevant mention of Israel in a post about Islamophobia count be perfectly innocent, but when you read more post you notice a trend.

So where do people like irrelevantly mentioning Israel or Jews when talking abut Islamophobia? One possibility is that people who are interested in Islamophobia are also likely to be interested in the welfare of Palestinians and it's tempting to try to insert your pet cause whenever it seems tangentially relevant. If your interest are the harm caused by a particular country's policies, it's easy to see that country as entirely evil and degenerate and enjoy informing people of their other sins. As a large part of the conflict is trying to convince the countries with the money and the real power that they're nicer so they should support them, playing "let's decide who gets to keep East Jerusalem based on who has the less sexist bus system" can seem to make sense.

The other reason is more sinister. I think that people like to set up a dichotomy between islamophobia and antisemitism. I've definitely met people who seem to implicitly believe that you can't believe that both antisemitism and islamophobia exist. Some people seem to believe that someone can't be both islamophobic and antisemitic. There's also this idea that islamophobia is the preserve of Jews and antisemitism is the preserve of Muslims. This is a very attractive world view if you're neither Jewish nor Muslim because suddenly none of these problems are your fault any more. You can even view your own islamophobia or antisemitism as being "with the Jews" or "with the Muslims". It's not discrimination, it's solidarity. It's always easier to get the ear of the majority if you say that you want some of another minority's goodies rather than demanding to be treated equally.

All that from one throw away comment. See what an uppity over-sensitive Jewess I am.