UK: MP’s murder sparks debate on political culture, but fails to address why the far right is growing
from Barnabas Fund:
[…] Just before her murder Jo Cox had contributed to a report on anti-Muslim hate crime by the charity Tel Mama, which showed an 80% increase in such attacks and warned that parts of Yorkshire such as Batley were a hotbed of far right extremist activity. Mrs Cox had commented that anti-Muslim attitudes were so bad in her constituency that “many of our young women don’t feel safe when they are out on the streets.”
So why has this been happening? There have been two opposite forces in this and similar areas that have essentially played a divisive game of identity politics.
The first of these forces is that, since the late 1990s constituencies such as Batley that have large Muslim populations have been targeted by a number of Islamic organisations effectively promising to galvanise the Muslim vote for whichever party promises to deliver most of the Islamic agenda they are asking for. These organisations which often have Islamist leanings ask candidates of each party to sign up to a specific set of issues, such as support for Palestine and state funding for Muslim schools.
In fact, immediately after the 1997 general election an editorial in the Muslim News claimed that Elizabeth Peacock, the former Conservative MP for Batley, had lost her seat because she had failed to support a local Muslim school. This deliberate playing of identity politics has continued with the Muslim Council of Britain in 2011 listing Batley and Spen as one of 33 marginal constituencies (Labour majority 4,406) where the claimed size of the Muslim vote (20,257) could significantly influence who was elected. In the 2015 general election all candidates in the constituency were asked to publicly sign up to support a range of “Muslim” issues, including “Actively supporting the boycott of the local traders selling the goods from the illegally occupied territories in West Bank and Gaza.” Quite how incendiary that was can be seen when one considers that such shops would almost certainly have been owned by non-Muslims – yet candidates signed up to this pledge.
Alongside this has been an embrace of political correctness by many politicians, particularly on the Left, which has refused to accept any link at all between Islam and recent acts of terrorism and has effectively sought to ban any criticism of Islam. The latter has been exemplified by the use of the term “Islamophobia” to condemn not only the stirring up anti-Muslim hatred, but also to prohibit any criticism of Islam, however legitimate.
The second of these forces, is a reaction to this effective alliance of Muslim identity politics and political correctness. This alliance has created a fertile ground of resentment and mistrust of politicians that has allowed racist political parties to sow their twisted half-truths, claiming not that certain strands of Islam support violent jihad, but that all Muslims are suspect as potential terrorists.
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