Deborah Orr: Against Orientalism

Many of the Islamic values the west finds so reprehensible were our own settled values too, until embarrassingly recently. Islamic homophobia? Not acceptable.
Yet gay people in Britain only achieved the same rights to legal sex as heterosexuals in 2001. Islamic inequality in its treatment of men and women? Don't start me. Yet I remember a time when two women walking into a pub together was like two pheasants wandering on to a shooting range.
Barbarous Islamic punishment? We hanged our last murderers in 1964. Some Islamist groups' yearnings for world domination? Britain parcelled out the land of another people like it was the family allotment, as recently as 1948...

A brilliant piece by Deborah Orr in The Guardian. 
Thank you - shame it's so rare to read such sense.