The racism of never criticising Muslims
by Brendan O’Neill, spiked:
The identitarian left treats Muslims as children. Progressives should be outraged.
There has been a surge in the racism of low expectations in recent days. It has centred on the Muslim community. It is wrong – ‘phobic’, no less – to criticise the regressive social views held by some Muslims, left-wing campaigners claim. Any pondering of the possibility that sections of the Muslim community hold less than enlightened views on homosexuality or the rights of Jews to live as free, equal citizens is itself racist, they cry. It’s horrible and unfair. They doll up this desire to protect Muslim attitudes from scrutiny in the language of anti-racism, but it is the opposite. It is time we talked about the racism of not criticising the Muslim community, of refusing to subject Muslims to the same kind of social discussion that every other community in an open, democratic society might expect.
[…] The truth is that surveys suggests that the Muslim community is more likely than other sections of British society to hold regressive views on gay rights and on the scourge of anti-Semitism. A few years ago a survey found that more than half of British Muslims thought homosexuality should be illegal. Fifty-two per cent of Muslim respondents said the legalisation of homosexuality was wrong, compared with just five per cent of non-Muslim respondents. That’s a very big difference. Has the woke left forgotten this, and the media discussion it gave rise to? Trevor Phillips expressed his concern that Muslims were becoming a ‘nation within a nation’. More recently, a survey overseen by spiked’s Rakib Ehsan for the Henry Jackson Society found that 44 per cent of British Muslims buy into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of one kind or another (compared with 24 per cent of the general population – also depressingly high).
So the Labour officials suggesting that some Muslims are a tad backward on gay rights and the rights of Jews to equal treatment are not wrong. Does this mean Muslims are a problematic community? Absolutely not. First, because the survey findings of recent years are far from uniformly negative. For example, the survey that found that half of Britain’s Muslims think homosexuality should be illegal also found that 86 per cent of Britain’s Muslims felt a strong sense of belonging in the UK (compared with 83 per cent for the general population), and 88 per cent believed that Britain is a good place for Muslims to live. And secondly because the issue here is not our Muslim citizens. It is not any innate moral failing on the part of Muslims in the UK. No, the problem is the crisis of integration, and the woke elites’ active hostility towards the idea of integration, which has the effect of creating cut-off communities with little incentive to join in the more positive, solidarity-based aspects of the British way of life.
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