By NICK COHEN - GUARDIAN.CO.UK
Added: Sun, 26 Jun 2011 05:31:07 UTC

Why isn't the Equality and Human Rights Commission taking action against this prejudice?

You can tell that speakers are preparing to say something scandalous when they assert that "militant atheists" are the moral equivalents of the religious militants that so afflict humanity. Trevor Phillips, whose flighty management of the Equality and Human Rights Commission is becoming a scandal, was no exception when he announced last week that British believers were "under siege" from "fashionable" atheists.

If his claim that "people who want to drive religion underground are much more active, much more vocal" contained a jot of truth, we would have read the following stories in the days after his intervention.

• Inflamed after reading an acerbic passage by Richard Dawkins, "fashionable" Belfast atheists decide to lay siege to Catholic homes in the Short Strand area of the city. They terrify its residents and attack the police with petrol bombs and fireworks. (As it was, the riots were the work of Belfast Protestants motivated by a hatred of Catholicism. They were met by Republican IRA "dissidents", filled with an equal hatred of Protestantism.)

• "Vocal" Iraqi secularists decide that they want to drive the Shia Muslims in Baghdad underground. They ignite bombs in a Shia market during its busiest time of the week and a mosque, killing 40 in all. (As it was, the murders were the work of al-Qaida in Iraq, which regards Shia Muslims as heretics and was determined to demonstrate again that no one is as murderously "Islamophobic" as Islamists are.

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TAGGED: ATHEISM, HATE, RELIGION, SECULARISM