Crying ‘Islamophobia’ Is a Gift to Islamists

This has been a pet peeve of mine for years. Islam is not a race! Jihadists come in all colours and ethnicities. The only thing they have in common is their hatred for the West.

From The European Conservative

By Lauren Smith

By rebranding legitimate criticism of Islam as racist bigotry, religious extremists like the Muslim Brotherhood now have a terrifying grip on public discourse.

The UK’s national inquiry into Pakistani-Muslim grooming gangs might already be undermined by the Labour government. As political scientist and pollster Matthew Goodwin laid out in a column for the Sun last week, on the same day that Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced he would be going ahead with an inquiry after all, it was also pushing to expand the definition of Islamophobia in a move that threatens free speech. 

In February, the UK government set up a new working group—chaired by former Conservative attorney general Dominic Grieve—to create a new definition of Islamophobia. The group has recently launched a “call for evidence” to help develop a definition that “will help ministers and other relevant bodies understand what constitutes unacceptable treatment and prejudice against Muslim communities.” 

Of course, discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity is already against the law in the UK, under the Equality Act (2010). It is quite clear that this new definition is based more around shutting down any and all criticism of Islam or even Islamism than it is about protecting Muslims from any real prejudice. 

As Goodwin points out, this push to redefine Islamophobia goes back to a 2018 report by an All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), which declared that Islamophobia is “rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” This definition was officially adopted by the Labour Party in 2019 and is no doubt along similar lines to what Starmer hopes the new working group will come up with. 

There are endless problems with this. Firstly, Islamophobia cannot be “rooted in racism” because there is no Muslim race. Islam has thrived everywhere from Tunisia to Somalia to Albania and has adherents who otherwise have virtually no common ethnicity or culture. 

More importantly, the phrase “expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness” is a deeply sinister one. What, exactly, constitutes an “expression of Muslimness”? This is so vague it could mean anything. In practice, it opens the door to classifying any criticisms of Islam or Muslim communities as a form of racial hatred. Goodwin reminds us that the original APPG report actually classifies talking about grooming gangs as a “subtle form of anti-Muslim racism” and a “modern-day iteration” of “age-old stereotypes and tropes about Islam and Muslims.” 

Of course, we know now that the horrific grooming gangs that orchestrated the mass rape of white, working-class girls across the UK were overwhelmingly Pakistani-Muslim in origin. They were able to operate as extensively and for as long as they did because of the insular Muslim community, as well as because authorities feared they would be branded Islamophobic for drawing attention to these crimes. 

This pattern—where ‘Islamophobia’ is used to silence uncomfortable discussions about Islam and Islamism—is by no means confined to the UK. It is part of a broader trend across Europe, where Islamist-linked groups are working to shape public discourse and stifle criticism under the guise of anti-discrimination. 

Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in France. Last month, the French government published a shocking report on the influence of political Islam, particularly in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood, in France and beyond. The report detailed how the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational Islamist movement, and the Council of European Muslims (CEM)—a group believed to be disseminating the Brotherhood’s ideology in Europe—have managed to infiltrate mosques, schools, sports clubs, and local politics in France and elsewhere in Europe. More worrying still, it found that “the movement has developed a network of pan-European institutions established in Belgium close to the EU institutions.” While the group attempts to appear outwardly moderate, the report states that internal documents contain anti-Semitism and calls for Muslims to avoid integrating into Western societies. 

One of CEM’s chief concerns, according to one expert, is for “criticism of Islamist positions to be seen as Islamophobia.” For example, “the Muslim Brotherhood calls it Islamophobia to want to ban the veil in the public sector,” as France has done. In other words, it aims to rebrand legitimate debate about gender equality and secularism as bigotry, in an attempt to shield Islamism from criticism. 

Islamist influence goes to the very heart of the EU. CEM’s youth branch, the Forum for European Muslim Youth and Student Organisations (FEMYSO), frequently collaborates with the European Network Against Racism on campaigns targeting racism and Islamophobia. In this way, it has been able to legitimise its concerns by framing them around ‘anti-discrimination’ advocacy. 

The findings of the French report sparked debate about who and what the EU is funding. Around 30 MEPs—including the Sweden Democrats’ Charlie Weimers—have called on the EU to set up its own investigation into organisations receiving money from Brussels that might potentially be linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Weimers already commissioned a report in 2019 that found that FEMYSO had received around €275,000 from the EU between 2007 and 2019. Belgium—where at least five municipalities in the capital are controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood—could be the next country to commission a similar investigation. 

This kind of influence is a grave threat to freedom of speech. As we saw in the UK recently, the arrest of a Turkish man, Hamit Coskun, for burning a copy of the Quran in public has raised fears that we are quietly reintroducing blasphemy laws under the guise of protecting Muslims from Islamophobia. Similarly, across the Channel in France, Lille University cancelled a lecture by Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, an expert on the Muslim Brotherhood, because she was deemed to be ‘racist’ and ‘Islamophobic.’ Bergeaud-Blackler has also had to seek out police protection for two years, due to threats she’s received for writing about Islamism. 

It is no accident that, across Europe, the playbook hinges on controlling definitions. If you control the language, what counts as ‘hate’ or ‘discrimination’, you control the debate. If governments and supranational bodies like the EU are willing to outsource that control to actors with an explicitly ideological mission, the result will be a culture in which valid questions about integration, secularism, and religious influence can no longer be asked without fear of social or even legal ramifications. 

Any right-thinking person already knows that asking questions about Islam’s treatment of women, its teachings on blasphemy and apostates, or its role in shaping parallel communities is not racist. This is a necessary part of living in a free society, where no ideology—religious or otherwise—is above scrutiny. If we abandon this principle out of fear of offending certain groups or being accused of ‘Islamophobia,’ we only encourage more division and conflict. Allowing Islamism to take hold in our institutions under the banner of tolerance is both naïve and dangerous. A society that tolerates this kind of subversion will not stay free for very long.