Britain Doesn't Need An Islamophobia Blasphemy Law

My Response to the government's Islamophobia/Anti-Muslim Hatred Definition Working Group call for evidence

The Labour government’s Islamophobia/Anti-Muslim Hatred Definition Working Group call for evidence ends tomorrow, Sunday, the 20th of July. You can respond to it here.

I have posted my response below. It is imperative that as many of us as possible do so. It only takes a few minutes to counteract the government’s attempt to gerrymander the results by conducting closed-door consultations with disreputable Islamic lobby groups, and allowing a disproportionate number of responses to come from grievance-mongering Islamist groups like the Muslim Council of Britain.

---

When referring to discrimination, prejudice, bigotry, hatred or violence directed at Muslims, which term do you think should be used? For instance, ‘Islamophobia’, ‘anti-Muslim hatred’, ‘anti-Muslim racism’, ‘anti-Muslim prejudice’, 'Muslimophobia' etc.

Criticism of Islam.

Please tell us your reason for suggesting this term.

The state should not use terminology that imposes a chilling effect on debates about Islam. Islam should be subjected to scrutiny, inquiry, and criticism like any other religion or ideology. "Islamophobia" uses clinical language to conflate legitimate criticism with irrational fear. Dr. Gilles Kepel and Abdur-Rahman Muhammad claim the Muslim Brotherhood invented the term as "a thought-terminating cliché conceived ... for the purpose of beating down critics.” Likewise, "hatred", "prejudice", or "racism" use morally-loaded language to conflate legitimate criticism with irrational, unjust bigotry.

Do you think the UK Government should adopt a definition of Anti-Muslim Hatred/Islamophobia? (any definition would be non-statutory)

No

Please could you tell us more about why you think that?

The 2019 APPG definition said conversations about the grooming gangs scandal are “a racist attempt to ‘other’ Muslims in general”. Camden Council cited “to characterize Muslims as being ‘sex groomers’” as an example of Islamophobia. Whistleblowers were silenced and the authorities covered up the Pakistani grooming gang scandal because they feared being called racist or upsetting “community cohesion”. Any definition of Islamophobia or Anti-Muslim Hatred will compound this chilling effect by conflating necessary conversations about racial and religious motivations of grooming gangs with racism.

Do you think Anti-Muslim Hatred/Islamophobia is also a form of racism?

No.

Please could you say more about why you think that?

Does the government intend to write into law the Islamic belief that Muslims are a race (Ummah)? If not, defining Islamophobia as racism conflates an immutable characteristic with a set of beliefs.

1 in 5 Muslims in British prisons are white converts. Am I racist toward them for criticising claims in the Quran?

Are Sunni Muslims racist toward Shiite or Deobandis when disagreeing on doctrine?

All claims of racism, Islamophobia, and bigotry are perception-based. There is no impartial standard by which they can be judged.

The Working Group claims it will be non-statutory, but Dominic Grieve expressed a desire to see it “embedded in university speech codes … to curb ‘micro-aggressions”.

Will students, academics, and faith societies be persecuted by universities for perception-based offences against Islam?

Will the guidance inform sentencing, like when the Public Order Act 1986 was used to convict Hamit Coskun for burning a Quran? Criticism of Islam is not racism, and should not be punished.

Should any of the aspects below feature in a definition of Anti-Muslim Hatred/Islamophobia? Please tick all that apply.

None ticked.

If you wish to, please can you give an example(s) of anti-Muslim hatred/Islamophobia that you have witnessed, experienced or read about over the last two years?
Please refrain from disclosing personal information about other people involved in these examples - such as their name, address.

I have not, but many individuals have been threatened, intimidated, silenced, and attacked for criticising Islam or violating Sharia law.

A teacher at Batley Grammar School remains in hiding after a mob of Islamists threatened him for showing a cartoon of their Prophet Muhammad in a lesson on blasphemy. A schoolboy in Wakefield dropped a Quran, and local police brought his mother to a mosque to beg for forgiveness.

Journalists like Andrew Norfolk and MPs like Suella Braverman were called Islamophobic and racist for reporting on Pakistani grooming gangs.

Hamit Coskun was (allegedly) stabbed and assaulted by two men for burning a Quran in protest. The assault was used to justify his conviction under the Public Order Act.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali had a lifetime fatwa against her pinned to the body of her murdered friend, Theo Van Gogh, for creating a film criticising Islam’s repressive treatment of women.

Enforcing Islamophobia laws does the bidding of Islamists by insulating them from criticism.

---

---

That the government desire a definition of Islamophobia to silence critics is a foregone conclusion. The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Faith, Communities and Resettlement, Lord Khan, conceded that the 2019 definition “proposed by the APPG is not in line with the Equality Act 2010, which defines race in terms of colour, nationality and national or ethnic origins”. Angela Rayner chose to convene a new committee, to formulate a different definition than that 2019 one, which the Labour party officially adopted while she served in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet.

We don’t know which groups or individuals have been consulted as stakeholders as part of this Working Group. When Nick Timothy MP asked if the Muslim Brotherhood were involved, he was refused an answer.

When his colleague, Claire Coutinho MP, met with the Labour minister responsible for the Working Group, she was told that grooming gang victims and free speech advocates would not be consulted during the evidence-gathering process; and was not given confirmation that the results of the consultation would be published when completed. She was not given the names of the individuals or groups participating in the consultation, despite the general public having to live under the looming threat of the application of this guidance in law, their workplace, their universities, or even to the business of government (like the grooming gang inquiries).

Former Conservative attorney general, Dominic Grieve is chairing the Working Group. Grieve chaired the Citizens’ UK Commission on Islam, and was the Chief Guest at an Muslim Council of Britain Awards Ceremony in 2011 — despite the Council being banned from all engagement with Whitehall. Grieve also provided the foreword to the APPG report which debuted the definition. Grieve wrote,

“I greatly welcome this report, which makes an important contribution to the debate as to how Islamophobia can best be addressed. It is well researched and can give all of us food both for thought and positive action.”

That same report said that conversations about the grooming gangs scandal are

“aimed at (and can achieve) harm to individual Muslims, and is not rooted in any meaningful theological debate but rather in a racist attempt to ‘other’ Muslims in general, associating them with the crime our society sees as most abhorrent of all. This strategy has been actively pursued by far right groups including the BNP and EDL but has also been indulged – especially, as our previous research has shown, in relation to ‘grooming gangs’ – by mainstream politicians of all of our main political parties.”

“We also found that age-old stereotypes and tropes about Islam, such sexual profligacy and paedophilia or Islam and violence, and their modern-day iteration in the ‘Asian grooming gangs’ or ‘Bin Laden’ labels re-emerge in discourses and dispositions which heighten vulnerability of Muslims to hate crimes”

Among the 52 councils that have adopted it, Camden Council cited the following as an example of Islamophobia:

“Using the symbols and images associated with classic Islamophobia (e.g. Muhammed being a paedophile, claims of Muslims spreading Islam by the sword or subjugating “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” minority groups under their rule) to characterize Muslims as being ‘sex groomers’, inherently violent or incapable of living harmoniously in plural societies.”

At the precise time that the grooming gang scandal gains global awareness, and while new trials continue in Bradford and Rochdale, the Labour government are seeking to criminalise conversations about the perpetrators for being “Islamophobic”.

Other groups involved in helping Grieve craft the APPG definition include the Runnymede Trust, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), and the National Union of Students (NUS).

The Runnymede Trust is infamous for having introduced the term to British politics in 1997 — after it was first invented by the Muslim Brotherhood to invoke taboos around homophobia and the Holocaust, and silence critics of Islam.

Dr. Gilles Kepel alleged that the Brotherhood devised the term to seek “symmetry” with antisemitism, and link opposition to Islam with the same objectionable views that produced Nazism and the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Former Islamist, Abdur-Rahman Muhammad corroborated Kepel’s account, confirming that members of a Muslim Brotherhood outfit, the International Institute for Islamic Thought, conspired to “emulate the homosexual activists who used the term ‘homophobia’ to silence critics.” Muhammad wrote in 2010 that, “This loathsome term [Islamophobia] is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliché conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics.”

The Muslim Council of Britain, as detailed in a previous post, has (via its Centre for Media Monitoring) instructed newspapers and broadcasters to not call Jihadi John a terrorist, not describe Hamas as Islamists, and said “Terror attacks cannot and should not be described as unqualified acts of ‘jihad’ given they breach the rules of ‘jihad’.”

In 2009, a government report found that 80 per cent of British-trained imams were Deobandi, and affiliated with the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). It also alleges that the the MCB was created and dominated by the Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami and was a “focus of controversy for its linkages to Islamist movements”. In 2015, a British government report said that “for some years the Muslim Brotherhood … played an important role in establishing and then running the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB).”

Yet, the Muslim Council of Britain are still allowed charitable status, and receives funding from the Department for Work and Pensions. They have instructed their members to respond to this consultation, to slant the conclusions toward insulating Islam from criticism.

MEND, too, criticised the government as “anti-democratic” for proscribing Jihadist group Hizb ut-Tahrir in January 2024; after they called for “Jihad” and “Muslim armies” to rise up following October 7th.

In 2005, three Jewish students resigned from the NUS Steering Committee after being met with hostility for criticising Hizb ut-Tahrir. In 2022, the former Conservative government cut funding for the NUS over allegations of antisemitism. A 2023 report confirmed pro-Palestinain activism by NUS members led to “antisemitism as well as hostility towards Jews which has not been challenged sufficiently robustly or proactively by NUS.” Despite this, Grieve wants universities, with student unions run by the NUS, to enforce this Islamophobia definition on campus.

So the APPG definition was written by a number of Muslim activists, who have unsavoury ties to Jihadist groups, and exhibit a number of bigotries of their own. Nonetheless, Keir Starmer seems set on keeping his promise to London Mayor Sadiq Khan: to apply his experience as a prosecutor to pursue a “zero tolerance approach” to Islamophobia.

---

Please respond to the consultation before time runs out.