"Late Late Show" calls Islam a "wilfully ignorant religion"

national | rights, freedoms and repression | news report Saturday October 04, 2003 12:41 by James McKenna jimmymac61 at hotmail dot com

Ian O'Doherty facilitated in sectarian tirade by Pat Kenny

The Late Late Show on Friday night became a spectacle of sectarianism and set-piece television. Not for the first time Pat and his "team" betrayed their middle class Cathoilc backgrounds in this Islamophobic production.

Recent census figures ahowing Ireland muslim population grown from 4000 to almost 30,000 has put Christian fundamentalist groups like the Power to Change and Opus Dei into a tizzy. It was not so bad when it was just "fereigners" but now it appears Irish people are converting to Islam at an ever increasing rate.

Planted deep in the Late Late Show audience was Evening Herald journalist Ian O'Doherty, to whom Pat returned repeatedly for such gems as....

"It's a willfully ignorant mysogynistic homophobic religion." (Islam)

This line drew applause from an audience that seemed to me to be wearing a lot of crucifixes. Handpicked from the files of Opus RTE Dei ?

"....supporters of Sharia......your dealing with a profoundly undemocratic group. Their explicit goal is to rid us of democracy and they want to bring us back to a bronze age desert superstition", Mr O'Doherty continued .

"Sharia law is something that has no place in the 21st Century......the idea that we should go back into this ante-diluvian nonsense to me is actually quite staggering."

Ian O'Dohertys ignorance of the true nature of Sharia law may be a result of his Irish Independent pedigree, his Middle-class Catholic upbringing or the anti-Islamic propagnada raging the world at the moment but it does not excuse Pat Kenny allowing such rampant sectarianism.

Ian O'Doherty used the two examples that are constantly regurgitated by the propaganda media as examples of "bad Sharia law". The shooting of "women" in Kabul and the "stoning" of rape victims in Nigeria.

I'm sure he has a good explanation for the fourteen million "witches" tortured to death by the Roman Church ? The tens of thousands tortured and raped by Cathoilc priests? Christian Law? Anyway back to his two great examples.

The woman filmed being executed in the football stadium in Kabul was in fact the only woman so executed by the Taliban. The Iranian woman who made that documentary -"Lifting the Veil"- made a follow up documentary since the bombing and mass murder by the US of thousands of Afghanis. She found the five children of that woman and the whole truth is told .

The woman had been having an affair and her husband said that becase of it he would divorce her, thus leaving her destitute, so she killed him in his sleep and threw his body down a well. She tried to get the children to back up her story that he had fallen down the well but they would not and with the brothers and sisters of the dead man they prosecuted their own mother for leaving them destitute without a father. She was not, "killed by the Taliban for adultery."

The tribe in Northern Nigeria had such a law allowing the stoning of women for adultery long before Islam came to them. They cling to it and try to justify it by the Koran, but there is no justification. Most of Nigerias Muslims are actively trying to stamp out such crime and hope to do so soon. Like female genital mutilation, Mr O'Doherty and Mr Kenny however only use it as propaganda but never actually do anything about helping end it.

For a journalist like Ian O'Doherty to come on the Late Late Show and pretend to be an "audience participant" and misrepresent Islam by picking the most extreme examples from tribal cultures, is a crime. He knows better. And Mr Kenny and his production teams part?