Islamophobia

Sadiq Khan is an Islamophobe. Not just any old Islamophobe, and not just in the woollier parts of the web. According to a group part-funded by the EU called the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), the mayor of London, a practising Muslim, is one of the four ‘politicians and figures of note in the UK who [have] flagrantly displayed the most Islamophobia’ in 2018. Barack Obama is an Islamophobe. Cathy Newman, the Channel 4 News presenter, is an Islamophobe. So are Louise Casey, who led an inquiry into the Rotherham grooming scandal, Michael Wilshaw, the ex-head of Ofsted, and Maajid Nawaz, the Muslim counter-extremism activist.

This is a good time to bury bad news. And sure enough it turns out that a cross-party group of MPs and peers that includes the failed MP Baroness Warsi has chosen this moment to try to persuade the government to adopt their own definition of ‘Islamophobia’. Long-time readers will know that I have no sympathy for this term. The most succinct summary of the problem is often erroneously attributed to the late Christopher Hitchens. It is that, Islamophobia is ‘a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.’ That ‘Islamophobia’ was created by fascists is provable: the term was conjured up and pumped into the international debate around politics and religion decades ago by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Were you aware that men who transition into women can suffer period pains, despite not having a uterus? Oh, they can, apparently. There is of course no scientific explanation for this phenomenon, nor could there be, other than perhaps that the transitionee is mentally ill. But it is no longer enough simply to accept that a bloke who has had his scrotum turned inside out is as authentically female as a, um, female — you have to accept his right to a whole plethora of imagined victimhoods which are real enough in proper females but couldn’t possibly pertain to him (and which may, further down the line, include this new thing ‘period poverty’).

I’ve always been somewhat bemused by the concept of ‘hate crime’ - a phrase which first came into use in the US in the 1980s and into practice in the UK in 1998. I must say that the idea that it is somehow worse to beat up or kill someone because you object to their race or religion, than because you’re a nasty piece of work who felt like beating up or killing someone, strikes me as quite extraordinary - hateful, even, implying that some lives are worth more than others. Are we not all human, do we not all bleed? If we’re murdered, do not those who love us grieve for us equally? Why, then, are attacks on some thought to be worse than attacks on others?

On 15 September 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station owner, was arranging flowers outside his family business in Arizona. He had just returned from Costco, where he purchased some American flags and donated money to a fund for victims of 9/11. Moments later, he was shot dead. Sodhi, a turbaned Sikh, goes down in history as the first person killed in retribution for the Al Qaeda terror attacks. On his arrest, his murderer Frank Roque told police, 'I’m a patriot and American.' Fifteen years on, Sikhs, both in the US and Britain, are acutely aware that hate does not discriminate. And Sikhs, like Muslims, continue to face the backlash to the Islamist war on the West.

So now we know: the right and the respectable left are just as good at PC purges as potty, radical students are. In fact they’re better. The effective exiling of Ken Livingstone from polite society; yesterday’s almost hourly toppling of Labour councillors who once tweeted or Facebooked something ugly about Israel; the scouring of social media in search of Zionist-haters we might expose and shame and crush… all this zealous speech-policing, this crusading against people who said the unsayable, has made the intolerant, No Platforming student left look like amateurs in comparison. The right is out-PCing the left.