The Government is planning to introduce an official definition of ‘Islamophobia’ – which could criminalise criticism of Muslim migration and even grooming gangs.
According to reports from the Telegraph, the Government is planning a new legal definition of ‘Islamophobia’.
In order to do so, it will convene a 16-year member ‘council’ on Islamophobia, which could include figures such as Leeds imam Qari Asim.
Asim was appointed to serve as an “independent adviser on Islamophobia” in July, 2019 by the Conservative Government of Theresa May.
He was also Deputy Leader of the Government’s ‘Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group’.
But in 2022, he was dismissed, after leading protests against the screening of a film about the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter.
Showings of The Lady of Heaven were pulled from cinemas in Bolton, Birmingham and Sheffield, amidst fears that Muslim protestors would attempt to intimidate cinemagoers.
Hardly a free speech champion.
The Government’s ‘Islamophobia’ council could also feature Dominic Grieve, the former Conservative MP who served as Attorney General between 2010 and 2014.
Grieve previously chaired the Citizens UK ‘Commission on Islam’, which aimed to promote dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims in the UK. Back in 2018, Grieve also authored a foreword for ‘Islamophobia Defined’, a controversial report from the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims.
This report came up with a “working definition” of ‘Islamophobia’, for eventual legal adoption. In 2019, the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee formally adopted this definition. As such, we can be reasonably confident that the Government’s review will formalise something like the APPG definition.
But what does the APPG definition of ‘Islamophobia’ actually say?
Well, the ‘Islamophobia Defined’ report is a methodological disaster. It relies heavily on anecdote and the work of activist charities such as the Runnymede Trust. It also focuses on perceived discrimination, rather than tangible examples.
Polls such as these, which presuppose anti-Muslim sentiment amongst white Britons, feature heavily.
Eventually, the APPG’s report settled on the following definition:
Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.
What does this mean in practice? Helpfully, the report provides examples.
‘Islamophobia’ could include any of the following things – a fairly extensive list.
One example includes engaging in “stereotypes about Muslims” – for example, suggesting that Muslims have a particular propensity to commit or support acts of terror, or suggesting that Muslims tend to be more politically illiberal.
It’s easy to see how this definition could also capture legitimate recognition of facts like these:
- only 24% of UK Muslims say that Hamas committed rape and murder on October 7th
- 46% of UK Muslims say that they have more sympathy with Hamas than with Israel
- just 24% of UK Muslims have a negative view of Hamas
- 52% of UK Muslims favour making it illegal to depict the Prophet Muhammad
- 57% of UK Muslims support making it mandatory to provide halal food in public buildings
- just 23% of UK Muslims oppose the implementation of Sharia law in the UK
- just 28% of UK Muslims oppose outlawing homosexuality
That’s just one example.
The APPG definition also classes the following as falling within the definition of ‘Islamophobia’:
- complaining about immigration from majority Muslim countries
- talking about Muslim overrepresentation in prisons
- suggesting that Muslims are more likely to commit certain types of crime
- suggesting that Muslims are more likely to be reliant on the state for financial support
- talking about sectarian political networks, in places like Tower Hamlets
- talking about majority Muslim grooming gangs
- criticising halal slaughter
- stereotypical jokes about Muslims
- objecting to the presence of a mosque in your area
- mentioning that somebody is Muslim when the Government deems it “irrelevant”
- suggesting that Muslims are more likely to be sexist, homophobic or antisemitic
- supporting policies which would disproportionately impact Muslims, due to national security concerns
- opposing Palestinian statehood for reasons considered ‘prejudicial’ against Muslims
- denying that Islamophobia is one of the biggest problems that we face as a nation
The list goes on and on and on.
A formalised legal definition of ‘Islamophobia’, based on the APPG’s definition, would empower police forces to clamp down on everything in the list above, and more. Expressing any of these sentiments could mean you go to prison under anti-free speech laws such as the Public Order Act 1986, Malicious Communications Act 1988 or the Communications Act 2003.
This is particularly worrying given that, in many cases, the police are already cracking down on speech perceived as anti-Muslim.
On Sunday, a man in Manchester was arrested for burning a copy of the Qur’an in public. He was charged with a racially aggravated public order offence. This is not a standalone case. In February 2023, four pupils in Wakefield were suspended from school and investigated by police after scuffing a copy of the Qur’an. The mother of one of these boys was encouraged by police to apologise publicly at a local mosque.
And even when police don’t enforce these de facto blasphemy laws, local Muslim communities often do. In 2021, a teacher at Batley Grammar School was suspended, and forced into hiding, after showing pictures of the Prophet Muhammad to students. A formal Government definition will empower vigilantism like this.
But that may be the point. This is the logical next step in the British state’s approach to managing multiculturalism. Minority groups are afforded special legal protection, political representation and parallel institutions, such as courts and schools. Relations between groups are mediated by the state, with “alleviating community tensions” as the main guiding principle. The state seems particularly concerned with policing the law-abiding majority, and affords this group no special representation.
This approach, in turn, invites more special pleading from minority groups – and thus more rights and protections for those groups. The APPG definition of ‘Islamophobia’ is a case-in-point. It mimics the expansive IHRA definition of antisemitism, which critics say restricts criticism of Israel. In recent years, calls have also grown for a specific legal definition of ‘Hinduphobia’ and ‘anti-Sikh hate’.
This all points in one direction:
1. Fewer rights to free expression for the majority
2. More legal protections for minority groups
3. Further restrictions on freedom of speech, driven by a desire to protect and uphold the project of multiculturalism
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t need to build special protections into law for any group – and we could repeal the dangerous anti-free speech laws which enable these crackdowns on inconvenient speech.
The whole rotten structure needs to be dismantled. We deserve the right to free expression, whether or not it causes offence. We deserve to live in a country where our freedoms are protected, regardless of who it upsets.
Sam Bidwell is Director of the Next Generation Centre at the Adam Smith Institute.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Special rules for them but not for White British and Christian people.
But “multiculturalism” has been a roaring success and anyone that complains is Literally Hitler.
If “multiculturalism” was so great for this country, you wouldn’t need the persistent propaganda and legislation campaign that has been running since the Race Relations Act 1965.
Perhaps there is “systemic racism” within White British Culture (I don’t think there is, but bear with me) – in which case perhaps importing a load of aliens is simply a bad idea and not what we want. A country should be run for the benefit of its citizens, and it’s not for the government to reform their citizens’ erroneous ideas but rather to follow them.
A country should be run for the benefit of its citizens
Precisely so.
I still don’t understand why one man’s fairy tales need more protection than another’s. If there is to be this, why not Sikhophobia, taophobia, Christianophobia? If these religions are supported by strong beliefs and individuals, why do any of them need protection from mockery or any challenge.
Before we know it, they’ll be calling climate change a religion and protecting that from scepticism – oh hold on, the LimpDim lord is already proposing that. 🤣🤣
It’s simply part of an anti-white project.
Considering that the majority of the people engaged in this are white themselves, calling it an anti-white project IMHO makes little sense. I’d very much prefer to call this a Marxist project as it’s still based on the assumption that people either belong to the class of the oppressors or the class of the oppressed and that so-called socially progressive¹ political forces are duty-bound to revolutionize society to eliminated oppression for the greater good of all. Just the methods have mellowed somewhat since the days of Stalin.
¹ Marxist historic theory states that history progresses from worse social states to better social states, ultimately culminating in oppression-free socialism. This is regarded as a law of nature. A political forces is referred to as socially progressive when it seeks to align itself with this “natural” social progression towards socialism in order to further it. Anything else is regressive because it seeks to delay or event prevent this natural transition.
[Coming to think of it, this is really all highly self-referential weirdo stuff — If there’s really a law of nature behind this, how can people supporting it (or not) make any difference to the outcome and if there’s no such law of nature, how can supporting some perfectly arbitrary political goal be progressive (or not).]
Some white people hate themselves, some of them hate (or don’t care about) other white people. Combination of self loathing and cynical divide and conquer tactics. The self loathing baffles me. The cynical ones are possibly Marxists or maybe they just see this as a good way to lord it over people.
As I’ve already written a couple of times in the past: White people is a category which really doesn’t make much sense outside of the USA, historically known for eliminating ethnic and cultural differences of members of different European peoples by putting them all into a big so-called melting-pot.
In the former German colony Deutsch-Ostafrika (German East Africa), a relatively small number of white soldiers and a much larger number of black soldiers fought jointly against British rule under command of general v. Lettow-Vorbeck until 1918. The former black soldiers than received pensions from Germany until their deaths in exchange for their services.
In the UK, Swedes are regarded much differently than equally white people from Romania or Poland or – heaven forbid – Germany, an infamous category of its own. There’s an imported black/ white discussion but this is solely reserved for British subjects (including citiziens of Commonwealth countries), ie, it’s between the oppressors with full voting rights and the oppressed with full voting rights. So-called other whites with no voting rights beyond local elections also exist in millions. But these simply don’t count, neither for black nor for white Britishers.
This neurotic self-view you mention was originally invented and tested on Germans only. Extending it to “other evil groups of oppressors” is a much more recent invention.
I think it makes a lot of sense to talk about white people, for many reasons. We share a great deal – religion, culture, civilisation, being invaded by non-whites (with the collusion of our governments and many of our fellow citizens).
Of course we are still English, German etc but we are cousins.
All Pakistanis and Jamaicans in the UK get to vote how income tax I have to pay will be spent. Nevertheless, for this weird white/ not-white disctinction I belong to the group ‘naturally’ oppressing them. This makes no sense whatsoever or rather, it only makes sense if the existence of white people with less political rights than any ‘oppressed’ Jamaican who’s legally in the UK is simply ignored, something the people seeking to import US-nonsense like CRT are wont to do because they’re all British and this is certainly not their problem.
The solution to this is reject the square peg of American race-relation problems being forced into the round hole that is Europe. Things aren’t so simple over here (possibly also not in the USA, but I have no first-hand knowledge of that).
You can vote if you become a citizen.
I think it was a mistake to bring millions of people from alien cultures here. Other White Europeans are much less alien. I don’t want millions more White Europeans to come here but the presence of those who are already here does not unduly worry me.
Race matters. But I’m a Horrible Racist.
I tend to agree with that. But what I was trying to get at was that there’s a hierarchy of groups with different political privileges/ rights in the UK and this hierarchy doesn’t mirror the black/ white split which existed in the USA until the 1960 and never did.
CRT grew out of segregationist America and trying to force-fit it onto the rest of the world is just good old US cultural imperialism.
I fear it’s too late to salvage much.
Considering that the majority of the people engaged in this are white themselves, calling it an anti-white project IMHO makes little sense.
Years ago, in a different life, I used to know a number of Anti-white Party (Labour Party) members. The interesting thing is that their greeting to each other when we met in the pub was “May all your descendents be brown”. Given that the contemporary madleft has adopted the view that whites taken as a whole constitute “the world poisoners”, the anti-white project makes complete sense (although it is mad).
In a sense, this is correct. But white here means white American and is transposed into white British while the existence of white people who are neither American nor British is essentially denied as matter of no consequence. Crudely worded, all whites are slavers because they’re all American or British¹ who were and the fact that black slavery never existed in Germany or any German-controlled territory is simply ignored.
I think that’s a (post-)Marxist project which sort-of accidentally picked up a racial angle in the USA.
¹ Sometimes, they’re’ also Spanish but not in the USA where Hispanos count as non-white group.
Don’t forget Scientology, they have been known for going after their members if they don’t toe the line.
I suppose it makes a bit of a difference if your religion’s followers don’t engage in mass child rape, stabbings and murders of those who don’t share your views.
”Appeasement is feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last” W. Churchill.
It’s always about submission via conquering and jihad. The only ”peace” involved is when you’re truly subjugated, and it’s not like they need to be in a majority to establish this. They only require the involvement of ‘useful idiots’ and influential traitors ( hello Labour, universities and Lefty terrorist-supporters! ), of which there are plenty in the West, and then it’s ‘game over’. The always excellent Robert Spencer explains, but this poisonous rhetoric is going on all the time ( online, mosques, prisons…) and nobody cares because ‘cultural differences’. If people did care there’d be no Sharia courts, for a start;
”Muslims believe Allah appointed them to conquer the world and he commanded them to wage Jihad (total warfare) against unbelievers until the entire earth will be under the rule of Allah
Every Muslim knows that and everything Muslims do is must be for that cause.”
https://x.com/Shariakill/status/1880576775111205111
And I don’t know what’s going down in Sweden as there’s been a mass shooting at a school. We just have ”adult male” as far as descriptions go, so it could be another of those neo-Nazi nutters like in Norway years ago, or even another trans lunatic on psych meds, as in the U.S, but expect more details as info filters out. Not the typical M.O of your average jihadist though;
”Several people have been killed and dozens injured after a gunman opened fire on an adult school campus in Sweden, according to reports.
Swedish broadcaster SVT reported that several people were dead and 15 were injured after the attack on the Risbergska School, Örebro, some 200 km (125 miles) west of Stockholm on Tuesday.
Police have not confirmed this but said five people had been shot, with four of those currently undergoing surgery in hospital.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/sweden-shooting-school-orebro-suspect-risbergska-latest-news-b2691987.html
Excellent—and all true
It would appear that using threats, intimidation and violence works with our betters.
Muslims will continue to vote themselves into power over the next decades, and once they have an majority, that will be the legal end of Democracy in the UK. Thank you Labour.
Those who live by the sword will die by the sword. Matthew 26:52
Even if, through jihad, Islam conquered the world, ultimately they would still fail as a result of their own internal fighting.
I am a very reasonable puppy who does not hold discriminatory views against jews, chinese, sikhs, hindus, eskimos, red indians, west indians, tutsis, hutus, or irish, (and not even the French) and I am prepared to take any individual on his personal character.
However as a group I find it is impossible to avoid having disciminatory feelings against muslims (I didn’t used to).
My heartfelt wish is that they would all f### off back to Pakistan, and leave us in peace.
Whether that was the plan all along, to seed division and increasingly hatred I don’t know, but actually it’s a fairly obvious result of the bollocks they’re doing.
Many Leftist intellectuals would assume they would assimilate into British society. but that theory hasn’t aged well. Mark Steyn’s theory that diversity is where Nations go to die was quite prophetic.
It’s beyond comprehension to give people a special protection when their sect is based on a book which claims to be the final word of a deity that cannot and must not be challenged, and that any such challenge should be met with the death of the challenger.
Do Labour want civil war? Because they’re going a long way towards fomenting it.
The answer to your question is an unequivocal ‘yes.’
Better that they show their true colours, but I’m in little doubt that there are many in the Labour party who hate this country and want to see it collapse.
Fine. Deport all Muslims. Make the law defunct. Job done.
Bearing in mind the Labour problem with pandering to the Muslim voting bloc, what chance is there of the final document being neutral? If they don’t reform postal voting, then a document that’s not sufficiently pro-Islam could lead to more people turning away from Labour and using the postal vote scam to maximise the effect. serves them right, but not much consolation for the rest of us.
Is Reform going to pledge to scrap this so called ‘Islamophobia’ Blasphemy Law?
Given the current trajectory, item (c) in the proscribed list is bang on course for becoming true.
This is the home of Magna Carta, we gave free speech to the world. This will also close down speech for activists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali who renounced her religion and escaped to Europe hoping to find sanctuary, only to find Muslim immigrants targeting her for apostasy.
The destruction of our country is happening in realtime and quickly too, right before our eyes.
The man in Manchester who burned the Koran is surely going to have a rough time of it with the ‘cultural enrichers’ now GMP have seen fit to share his personal data all over social media. Also, lo and behold, much like many before him, he’s obviously had the frighteners put on him as he’s pleaded guilty. To my mind, this sort of thing is just yet more proof that a country has been Islamified. We’ve seen the recent evidence of this in Sweden with the murder of Salwan Momika, which many are calling a ‘political assassination’, and it’s reported the Swedish PM did not condemn his murder. What we really need is a bit of a social experiment and have someone ( preferably non-white ) burn a Bible in a busy public space with police in the vicinity, and see what reaction they get;
”Greater Manchester Police (GMP) have publicly named a man and disclosed his street address and local area after he was charged with allegedly burning pages of the Quran, despite the clear and immediate risks posed to those accused of ‘blasphemy’ by radical Islamists.
The 47-year-old man has now pleaded guilty to causing racially and religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm, and distress after setting fire to the Islamic holy book in Manchester city centre, during a livestream on social media.
At Manchester Magistrates’ Court, the prosecution said the act had caused distress to a bystander, Fahad Iqbal, who attempted to intervene. In a victim impact statement, Iqbal told the court: “I was quite shocked, disgusted, and offended. I’m a Muslim. I still can’t believe someone would do this. When he began to burn the Quran, my heart was about to break out. This is the most emotion I have ever felt.”
Despite his guilty plea, GMP’s decision to disclose his personal details has provoked serious concerns, given the well-documented dangers faced by those accused of blasphemy. The Free Speech Union (FSU) believes GMP should have liaised with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) before making these details public. The failure to do so will almost certainly result in a direct threat to his life.”
https://freespeechunion.org/manchester-police-name-quran-burning-suspect-despite-threat-to-life/
We are At War , surely we are ????
I think we need to scrap the term “racist”.
The fact is that if thousands of people of other races come to your country and all exhibit the same cultural deficiencies then it’s perfectly fine to generalise about all of their race.
I think it’s completely normal to generalise about everything – it’s the only practical way to navigate the world a lot of the time. I’m not sure you can accurately say that they “all” exhibit the same cultural deficiencies though – but that’s not a reason to want to limit close to zero the importation of alien cultures.
New policy has to go through Parliament doesn’t it ?
Next:
Toothfairyophobia or
Santaclausophobia
religion status…..with drastic punishment for those who dare to mention…. ?
When it comes to criminal rape gang crime, it is morally and ethically wrong that a particular group in society has protection in law from being mentioned as responsible.
But Islam is not just a Religion. It is a Political and Legal System as well. The idea that that there should be laws against criticising Politics or Laws is totally absurd. Our Political Class of handwringers are capitulating in order to hoover up the votes of Muslims because they know that by 2050 half the country will be Muslim. They will sell out their own grandmothers for votes.
A remarkably short-sighted theory. Why would this people care very much for traditional British institutions once they’re no longer the traditional institutions of the majority of the population? They didn’t immigrate into parliament, that’s just something they had to put up with. And in particular, why would they vote for a party which wants to castrate their sons and sterilize their daughters to turn them into bad imitations of each other with the help lots of hormone pills they’re supposed to pop like bonbons, which wants to run noisy gay street sex parades through their living quarters and make heating and normal human food unaffordable or unavailable to them?
Labour of today are the liberals of the 19th century, a party set to disappear alongside the special interest group which begat it. It’s replacement will probably called the Sharia party or something like that.
So the police will have an excuse to solve even fewer crimes and more White citizens will be labelled as ‘far right’.
Rayner clearly likes to choose a side instead of working for the whole country.
The 2019 APPG report on Islamophobia relied on sociological sleight of hand to create a patently nonsensical definition and then produced the list, shown above, of examples of offending attitudes with no logical connection to that definition and which would appear unobjectionable to the majority of non-Muslims.
In doing so, by attempting to defend the indefensible, the group made themselves and their efforts look ridiculous. I have little doubt that the next attempt, with added input from the towering intellects of Angela Rayner and Qari Asim, will produce something even more ridiculous and unworkable. I look forward to observing the farce.
The Establishment is making it very clear that the only way a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society can function in the west is to operate in an Authoritarian manner:
suppress Free Speech; “special laws for special people;” demoralise the native population by revising and denigrating their history; surveillance; and draconian punishment of the native population if they dare step out of line.
They’re turning governance of the UK into a carbon copy of Honecker’s East Germany.
Very good observation.
I’d just like to make it clear that, as a female, I would never consider marrying a Muslim because of their misogynistic attitude to women and their religion’s teachings about “a woman’s place in society.” And if I had a daughter, I’d be doing everything I could to ensure they knew my views.
Just so you know I’m not being Islamophobic, the same applies to an Orthodox Jew and a Jehovah’s Witness.
This is a potentially diabolical situation. It is almost unbelievable that we would enable anything close to this. But then I remember, we’re taking Labour here; people who hate this country and everything it stands for.
This could have profound implications for the future of the UK – modern blasphemy laws must be opposed.
The rozzers will be very busy arresting tens of thousands of blasphemers, if this comes to pass. I guess a few folk (Tommy Robinson et al), will be made an example of, and given even more draconian sentences, in the hope of scaring the rest of us into compliance. But I will continue to be factual and reasoned, and take my chances with a jury, if it comes to it.