All these things took place in the UK over the past week. Four men were arrested on suspicion of spying on London’s Jews for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Supporters of that brutish regime rained blows on Iranian dissidents outside an Islamic centre in central London. A seething mob in Birmingham set fire to the Israeli flag at a vigil for the late Ayatollah Khamenei. ‘Allahu Akbar!’, chanted these Brummie lovers of Islamist tyranny. In Whitehall, more ayatollah fanboys gathered. ‘Death to Israel!’, they hollered, polluting our nation with the anti-Semtic battle cry of the death cult that rules Iran.
And what was the Labour government working on while all this was taking place? Its new definition of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’. Its appointment of what some in the media are calling an ‘Islamophobia tsar’. Its crusade to prevent any ‘prejudicial stereotyping of Muslims’. What a brilliant snapshot of our spineless, clueless, rudderless ruling class – as the scourge of Islamism continues to ail our nation, Downing Street proposes the protection of Islam’s followers from scurrilous commentary. These are Kafkaesque levels of misgovernment.
Some freedom-lovers breathed a sigh of relief this wek when the government unveiled its measures to tackle ‘anti-Muslim hostility’. It’s not as bad as it could have been, they said. Notably, the word ‘Islamophobia’ does not appear. That is a relief. ‘Islamophobia’ is one of the slipperiest terms of modern times. It’s a staggeringly dishonest neologism that repackages state clampdowns on blasphemy as a valiant effort to tackle racism. In conflating criticism of Islam with bigotry against Muslims, ‘Islamophobia’ gives polite society a blank cheque to punish any pleb who dares to diss the Koran or crack a gag about Muhammad.
And yet, while the government’s new crusade assures us it is ‘not about… protecting the religion of Islam’, there is still an awful lot to worry about here. As Andrew Gilligan says, there’s still something ‘truly sinister’ in officialdom’s hell-bent efforts to ringfence one religion’s followers from mockery. Hatred and discrimination against Muslims are already illegal, and ‘emphatically wrong’, says Gilligan. So it follows that ‘the only purpose of an additional definition [of anti-Muslim hostility] must be to create special protections for one faith which do not apply to those of other faiths’.
That is indeed what we are seeing. For example, the government document says ‘debates in the public interest’ should still be permitted. But who decides what is ‘in the public interest’? What if the new tsar on all this stuff decides it is not in the public interest for naughty secularists to march through London displaying Charlie Hebdo’s pisstaking depictions of Muhammad? Might something like that be shut down to protect the feelings of believers? We’re also told ‘intimidation’ of Muslims, including of the written and verbal variety, should not be tolerated. Might that include social-media pages devoted to mocking Muslim beliefs? After all, ‘intimidation’ has become a flabby word of late – our era is overrun with sensitive souls who feel ‘intimidated’ not only by brutish behaviour but also by sore words and hard ideas.
The new definition condemns the ‘stereotyping of Muslims’, including on the basis of ‘their appearance’. Most people agree it is not big or clever to stereotype social groups. But what about a comedian who rips the piss out of the niqab? Indeed, what about that old Boris Johnson newspaper column that said burqa-clad women look like ‘letter boxes’ and ‘bank robbers’? He was roundly damned as ‘Islamophobic’. Today, might he find himself accused of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’, given the government is expressly warning against any ‘stereotyping of Muslims’ on the basis of ‘their appearance’?
The word ‘Islamophobia’ might be gone, but the tyrannical impulse is the same: to keep a beady eye on commentary about Islam. To ensure the masses’ rude blather on that religion is not too ‘intimidating’, too ‘stereotyping’, too far beyond the government-decreed bounds of ‘the public interest’. This is a blasphemy law by the backdoor. Once more, it is the policing of irreligious speech in the drag of anti-racism. For all the lip service the new definition pays to freedom of speech, the entire point of singling out Islam as uniquely deserving of government pity and attention is to circumscribe discussion. As shadow justice minister Nick Timothy says, this latest effort to lavish special protections on Islam is yet another ‘attack [on] our freedom to criticise, satirise and scrutinise ideas’.
The announcement of a bureaucratic offensive on ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ would be worrying at the best of times. That it has come now, at the outset of the Iran War, as we are witnessing explosions of Islamist intolerance, is mindblowingly reckless. The evidence of our eyes is that Britain and the West are afflicted with Islamism. With large numbers of people who feel a greater affinity with the anti-Semitic tyrants of Tehran than they do with the nations in which they live. Where’s the tsar for that, Keir Starmer?
Forget ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ – who will protect us from the anti-Western hosility of the Islamist mob? To weep showy tears over the ‘rise of hatred’ without mentioning the hatred for our own civilisation that courses through the veins of the Islamist movement and its suicidal allies on the bourgeois left is nothing short of insane. That we only ever hear chattering-class bleating about ‘hatred’ when the targets are Muslims is so striking. It confirms how catastrophically blind these people are to the hatred for our society. The hatred for our values. The hatred for our citizens, almost a hundred of whom have been slain by Islamists these past 20 years. The hatred for our working-class girls, who were raped by gangs disproportionately made up of Pakistani men, who called them ‘white slags’, as officialdom looked the other way. And the hatred for our Jewish compatriots, who remain the key victims of religious hate crime, many carried out by Islamists.
The Iran crisis has shone a harsh light on our moral troubles on the home front. In the US, the UK, Europe and Australia, people have openly wept for the ayatollah and prayed for the defeat of America and destruction of Israel. Now that is hatred. That is hostility. This week there was an explosion outside a synagogue in Liege, Belgium. We saw the allegedly ISIS-inspired hurling of a homemade bomb in New York City. The Iranians suspected of spying on Jewish institutions in London remain in custody. And you want us to fret over some muppet on the internet making a joke about the burqa? This is something worse than fiddling while Rome burns. It’s the throwing of petrol on to Rome’s flames. For in sanctifying Islam as the most put-upon religion, the ideology most deserving of special protection, the UK government risks inflaming the very cult of grievance that powers the Islamist mindset. They think they’re tackling hatred when in truth they’re inflaming it, giving ever greater licence to the anti-civilisational self-pity of the West’s Islamists.
What a betrayal this is of the good people of Iran who thirst for freedom. There they are praying for the demise of their Islamist oppressors while we shake our heads over mockery of Islam. There they are tearing off their hijabs while we worry about ‘hijabophobia’. So long as we fear ‘offending Islam’, we will be incapable of standing up for our own values or offering solidarity to those valiant warriors for liberty in the Islamic Republic.
