by Brendan O’Neill, spiked
The war in Iran has provided a violent reminder of how widespread Islamism is in the West.
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 week 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.
Read also: Labour’s Islamic blasphemy code is a sop to the sectarians by Tim Dieppe