“Islamophobia”

Is a child shot or burned alive worth less today than a copy of the Hadith burned in a square? The cowardly West seems to think so.

It’s always the same scene: a village and humble houses surrounded by open fields, Muslim terrorists appearing in the middle of the night when everyone is asleep, breaking down doors and shouting “Allahu Akbar”, killing, raping and mutilating women and children on sight, setting fire to churches and houses. Only because they are Christians.

Nigerian Archbishop Matthew Man-oso Ndagoso said that his faithful are being killed “like chickens”. In another country, a bishop reveals: “Catholics are killed in hospital beds”. Yet all these masses of persecuted are not trendy enough to merit the mobilization of the beautiful western people. Those murdered are not even worth the time of the hashtag #savechristians. They don’t move the Western cyber public as much as does a Libyan migrant, males who call themselves women or a Koran burned in a Swedish square…

If the nearly uniform narrative offered in a spate of recent books about “Islamophobia” is to be believed, Western Muslims, who enjoy freedoms denied to their brethren in most places in the world, are being tyrannized by hateful white Westerners afflicted with an irrational “phobia” of Islam and its adherents, which drives them to blithely reenact the crimes their ancestors perpetrated in previous centuries against indigenous peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Western hemisphere.

In these books, Muslims living in the West are the hapless victims of oppression, and their non-Muslim neighbors are the eternal oppressors. Accordingly, these oppressors can only offload their burden of civilizational guilt (and the punishment it invites) by confessing their sins (and those of their ancestors), engage in acts of contrition, and convert, either to Islam itself or to a political agenda that acquiesces in Islamist assaults on the rights historically accorded to citizens in Western democracies. Under this arrangement, the only rights that need to be protected are those of Muslims; non-Muslims have no rights, only rules and liabilities.

A highly-anticipated report into the Government’s Prevent strategy, which is designed to detect and prevent radicalisation, has been published this week, with scathing findings about the state of the nation’s flagship anti-extremism programme.

The report, headed by William Shawcross, who was appointed as the Independent Reviewer of Prevent in January 2021 by the Government, has made several shocking revelations.

Principally, the report laments that the approach to tackling Islamism has become ever narrower, while the approach to the far-right has become broader. This has various manifestations, including different thresholds for what constitutes Islamist extremism and far-right extremism, and an excessive focus on relatively minor threats from the far-right over more urgent and serious threats from Islamist groups. The Research Information and Communications Unit, a Home Office unit established in 2007 as part of the Prevent programme, comes in for heavy criticism in the report for focusing too much on the far-right at the expense of Islamism.