5th Annual Crybaby Conference at Berkeley ("Islamophobia")

                                                               "Step right up, Folks"

It's coming, Folks. UC Berkeley's Hatem Bazian's 5th annual Islamophobia conference will take place for 5 days in April at UC Berkeley (Where else?)

http://www.islamophobiacon.com/

"The focus of the conference will be Islamophobia: a contrived fear or prejudice fomented by the existing Eurocentric and Orientalist global power structure which rationalizes the necessity to deploy violence as a tool to achieve "civilizational rehab" of the target communities (Muslim or otherwise). The concept of Islamophobia reintroduces and reaffirms a global racial structure through which resource distribution disparities are maintained and extended."

This is a classic exercise in victimhood, complete with "call for papers" and all that scholarly rot. Last year, I submitted a few suggestions for topics, but they were ignored.

"The conference will also highlight genres of scholarly and artistic production over the period of a week that explore the maintenance and extension of existing power paradigms by bringing together academics, thinkers, practitioners, researchers and artists from around the globe who engage, question and challenge the existing disparities in economic, political, social and cultural relations." 

Hopefully, one of these years, these scholars will figure out that a phobia is an irrational fear of something. Then they can sit around and discuss all those irrational fears of terrorism; persecution of non-Muslim minorities in Muslim majority countries (e.g. Copts in Egypt), Nigerian massacres, beheadings, sexual grooming in the UK, hateful texts, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian hate speech, boasts of taking over the West and the world, mass public prayers on public streets, the killing of Lee Rigby, Boston Marathon bombing, honor killings, Sharia laws that mandate death for gays, adulterers, blasphemers, and apostates, human rights violations galore, and finally, general all-around murder and mayhem all over the Muslim world. Have I left anything out?

All those irrational fears that so preoccupy Islamophobes.

If they really wanted a serious conference, they might invite some real moderate Muslims like Zuhdi Jasser or Stephen Schwartz. They could invite some of their imagined "Islamophobes" like Robert Spencer to speak truth to them and engage in debate. Those voices will not be heard, however. The result will be propaganda and lies that do nothing to bring about peaceful relations between Muslims and non-Muslims. They will simply deny the problem and blame it all on the "Islamophobes"-the people who report inconvenient facts that are staring us in the face. The result will be further marginalization of America's Muslim community. It would be akin to Germans holding a Germanophobia conference in occupied Paris during World War II.

This is what passes for scholarship at Berkeley.