All the familiar confusions and obfuscations appear in this article, and in the controversy itself. “Racism” of course is part of this problem, and yet Islam is still not a race, and Muslims (as well as jihadis) are found among people of all races.
The lead paragraph claims that “Islamophobia” is found in Britain as well as in the ranks of the Conservative Party, but the article then goes on to discuss alleged hate crimes against Muslims. While there may be hate crimes committed against Muslims in the UK, although these need to be defined and carefully documented so as to ensure that it’s not just a matter of rude looks and the kind of impolite comments that everyone must endure at one time or another, it is extremely unlikely that Conservative Party officials are committing these alleged hate crimes. Here again what is at play is the conflation of hate crimes with opposition to jihad violence and Sharia oppression: some Conservatives have demonstrated that they oppose jihad, and that’s being lumped in with vigilante attacks on innocent Muslims as all part of the same “Islamophobia.”
The UK is having a national debate over “Islamophobia” while the term is being used in wildly divergent and contradictory ways, and no one can come up with a definition of the term that is acceptable to everyone.
“UK Conservatives face fresh pressure over Islamophobia allegations,” Arab News, November 7, 2022:
LONDON: The UK’s governing Conservative Party has been accused of ignoring rising Islamophobia in Britain and within its ranks as new figures show a surge in anti-Muslim hate crimes nationwide, The Independent reported on Monday.
Government figures show that hate crimes targeting Muslims in the UK rose by 28 percent in the last year, accounting for 42 percent of all recorded religious hate crimes in 2021/22.
For the past five years, Muslims have accounted for the highest proportion of religious hate crime victims, figures show.
Within the Conservative Party, questions remain over the result of a probe into MP Mark Spencer, who was accused of Islamophobia by a fellow MP.
Cabinet Secretary Simon Case last month said the investigation into Spencer’s actions remains “outstanding.”
In a letter to Conservative Party Chairman Nadhim Zahawi, Labour chair Anneliese Dodds questioned the government’s alleged inaction on Islamophobia.
“It is deeply concerning that I must again raise the issue of Islamophobia directly with the chair of the Conservative Party,” she said.
“As Islamophobic hate crime is on the rise, the Conservatives need to show they are serious about tackling this insidious hatred, both in society and within their party. Denial of the issue simply isn’t good enough.”
Zahawi previously rejected criticism that the Conservatives are suffering from an Islamophobia problem, saying he “did not recognize institutional racism in the party.”…
Dodds asked Zahawi whether his party would end the “bizarre practice of refusing to use the term.”…
Imam Qari Asim, a senior British Muslim figure who took part in consultations with the parliamentary group, warned earlier this year that the government “had not engaged with him at all.”
He added that officials “completely failed to undertake any steps to facilitate the work of establishing a new definition in the last three years.”
gravenimage says
UK: Conservative Party accused of ignoring rising Islamophobia in the country and within its ranks
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What? Some British Conservatives think that being invaded by illegal supremacist Muslim rapists and Jihadists is a bad thing? Oh, the humanity!
clem.alford@talk21.com says
Islam is the problem which ever political party has to deal with it. Islam is against secular society in favour of Sharia. The Islamists are the problem.
Jayell1 says
It hardly requires an intellect capable of a Ph.D in astrophysics to understand that rejecting a patently fabricated fraud like islam is a perfectly proper response for those whose cognitive faculties are correctly informed and intact, and that attempting to counter any such rejection by concocting some cock-and-bull thesis that rejecting this particularly transparent and odious fraud is symptomatic of a mental/intellectual impairment such as a ‘phobia’ when it is clearly is nothing of the kind, can only be a fatuously inappropriate presumption of idiocy by those who are quite incapable of any more than projecting their own congenital idiocy onto others – and stupidly expecting it not to be noticed!!
If the British People have proved anything over the last 1,000+ years, it is that their cognitive faculties have probably been more in order than most of the rest of humanity, which is why at least 66% of the global population speak English as a first or second language and they have been prime contributors to at least 55% of all human advances in modern times; and this is precisely why they have always had the sense to reject transparently-contrived, antedilvian, spuriously primeval pseudo-‘religious’ concoctions such as islam because it would have been very clear to all that such an incoherent catalogue of sanctified depravity would be a crudely retrogressive passport to nowhere – as witnessed by the fact that muslims around the world have achieved virtually nothing at all over the last 1,400 years and continue to contribute nothing of any constructive value except vulgar criminality; and the ridiculously inaccurate Arabic language remains a backwater in global communications. Yet these preposterous primeval impostors invite themselves to places like the UK where they’ve never been welcome and presume to lecture those who’ve achieved infinitely more they’d ever achieved on the ‘sins’ of an intellectual impairment of which they themselves are probably the world’s prime and most pathetically deluded examples!