In late May 2018 the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) attacked the conservative party of Great Britain for “Islamophobia” in an open letter (here).

The letter lists nine examples of “Islamophobia”:

5 April: Mike Payne, who shared an article which called Muslims ‘parasites’ who ‘live off the state and breed like rabbits’.

17 April: Alexander van Terheyden, who called Islam a ‘violent political ideology’ comparable to fascism and communism.

20 April:Darren Harrison, who was alleged to have links to Generation Identity, an anti-Islam organisation with strong links to far-right groups across Europe. [Emphasis mine]

24 April: Phillipa Auton, who retweeted a tweet from Tommy Robinson and tweeted ‘Revoke Muslim immigration, repatriate and secure European borders..’ as a means of keeping Europe safe.

25 April: Peter Lucey who liked a page by right-wing extremist Tommy Robinson and Geert Wilders, the anti-Muslim Dutch politician, and made a number of posts about Islam and the English Defence League. [Emphases mine]

27 April: Nick Sundin, who tweeted the “Prophet Mohammed was a ‘f****** paedophile”.

1 May: “Karen Sunderland, who called Islam ‘the new Nazism’.

1 May: David Boston posted a picture of bacon hanging on a door handle as a way to ‘protect your house from terrorism’.

23 May: Stephen Goldsack had formerly been the “Scottish security adviser” for the BNP in 2001, which led to the Muslim Council of Scotland accusing the Conservative Party of a “deep problem” of racism and Islamophobia.

Taking these one by one:

Mike Payne’s comment is reprehensible. It shows clear and unpleasant anti-Muslim bigotry. It is something that all people should condemn wholeheartedly.

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Terheyden’s comment is about Islam not Muslims. It is an attack on what he perceives as a ‘violent political ideology’ comparable to fascism and communism. Given the continual violence by Muslims in the name of Allah and the religion of Islam the first part is hard to disagree with – at least unless you subscribe to the counter-factual view that “Islam is the religion of peace” as touted to those who do not understand that one form of peace in Islam (“Sakinah”) is a religious ecstasy that comes over Muslims when they are engaged in murdering non-Muslims.

As to the second, Islam has resulted in the deaths of far more people than either fascism or communism, thus on this metric his association is fair. Furthermore, the form of Islam that is fastest growing today is orthodox Islam which is totalitarian in nature – witness the use of “Takfir” to ‘justify’ the killing of fellow-Muslims whose beliefs and practices do not coincide with those of the latest group to take up arms to wage sword-Jihad “fi sabilli Allahi” (“in the way of Allah”). On this metric also, Terhayden is not inaccurate.

Thus Terheyden’s comment is legitimate as an expression of opinion (and a well-founded one I think).

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Darren Henderson is pilloried for ALLEGED links – no evidence offered – to Generation Identity (GI) which is termed an “anti-Islam” group. From my reading it is more a collective of nationalist groupings that seeks to preserve the European nature of Europe, thus they are against the Islamisation of Europe (hence they are “anti-Islam” in the MCB’s view). Admittedly their view of preserving Europe would include preserving a “white” majority, but is any other ethnic group supposed to cheerfully become a minority in its own homeland?

But let’s assume the GI is everything its detractors say it is. Even then Henderson’s “crime” appears to be one of an alleged link to the group. Contrary to what appears to be the belief of the MCB, allegation is not proof. We are not yet, for example, Pakistan where an allegation of “blasphemy” is deemed proof of a capital offence when the allegation is made by a Muslim concerning a non-Muslim.

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Phillipa Auton’s tweet states that stopping Muslim immigration and securing Europe’s borders would make Europe safe. On one level this has some sense: there is little to no Islamic terrorism in Countries without Muslim populations, curious that, isn’t it?

But it is certainly over-statement. Doing those things would not make Europe safe, it might make Europe safer. As far as I am aware there are no groups of terrorists actively slaughtering Europeans on an almost weekly basis that do not claim to be affiliated to, or else are claimed by, Islamic terror groups.

That said, and in the desire to be fair-minded, it is a broad-brush statement that implies a falsehood: that Muslim = terrorist.

The problem, of course, if working out which Muslims are “extremists” (that is orthodox) and which are not. Something that Europe has signally failed to do for decades, although (again to be fair and even-handed) the doctrines of Islam (such as Taqqiya, Kitman, Tawriya, Maruna, etc.) do make this more difficult – as the Sahih Hadith of Al-Bukhari says: “We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.” Al-Bukhari recorded that Al-Hasan said, “The Tuqyah [taqqiya] is allowed until the Day of Resurrection.”

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The smear of Peter Lucey is quite egregious. Tommy Robinson, whatever one may think of him, is not “far-right” – or rather he is only if you accept the Leftist view that “far-right” means “anyone who disagrees with leftist orthodoxy”; thus this is a cheap (actually free) shot. Neither is Wilders “anti-Muslim”, he is certainly anti-Islam in the sense of the ideology, but that is not the same thing.

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Sundin tweeted that the “Prophet Mohammed was a ‘f****** paedophile”.

Clinically this is wrong. I won’t bore you with the clinical definition, but technically ol’Mo wasn’t a “paedo”.

He WAS a child-abuser. So Sundin should have tweeted “Mohammed was a ‘f****** child-abuser”. Something that a section of his followers have been diligently following up on in the UK for decades as the continual revelations about “Asian” (i.e. 95%+ Muslim) child-sex grooming gangs demonstrates.

That said, if I were to ask “Joe Blogs” what a “paedo” is, he would say (at his politest) “someone who has sex with a child”. Thus all Sundin is guilty of is using a layman’s definition of the term “paedophile” in an otherwise entirely accurate tweet.

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What Sunderland actually said was: “The thing is, religion undermines the hard fought for values and tolerances of progressed countries… suppresses free speech and is auto immune from criticism. This is toxic and where the hostility comes from. Religion is totalitarian. Islam has become the new Nazism.”

Thus her attack was on all religions, not just Islam, although she does single out the religion – not Muslims – as being the worst of a bunch of ‘similar’ totalitarian doctrines.

One may or may not agree with her, either in general or in the specific, but she is entitled to her view and it is one with a foundation in fact, as shown above.

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Boston’s picture is a bad attempt at humour, with a point. In the UK only the followers of one ideology are carrying out murderous attacks and they do have an aversion to bacon. Given how society is ever more required to clutter its open spaces with “Islamophobic vehicle barriers” to protect the public using those spaces, I would regard Boston’s picture as, perhaps, an ironic take on this issue.

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Goldsack, it appears, was a member of the BNP (which was – it hardly exists any more) a nasty and racist party. The point here is that the MCB is unwilling to countenance that in seventeen years a person may have moved on in their beliefs. The MCB also makes the ludicrous claim that his presence in the Tory party means that the “Conservative Party [has] a deep problem of racism and Islamophobia.”

I wonder how the MCB would react if it were suggested that “once an extremist Muslim always an extremist Muslim” and fingers were justifiably pointed at its members on that basis?

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By now the points should be pellucidly clear. Most of the MCB’s objections are to statements about the ideology of Islam,  or they are smears or the dredging of history.

That the MCB conflates dislike of Islamic ideology with anti-Muslim bigotry (note how the list starts with the latter before moving seamlessly to the former) is also no surprise; Definitions of “Islamophobia” also conflate the two.

I will not rehearse the arguments as to why this is egregious except to note that the intent of the definition is to provide a silencing technique to shut down critique of Islam’s ideology under the guise of “hate”.

Neither will I rehearse the incredible danger posed by UK and similar european “hate” legislation that makes the crime purely subjective.

What I will say is that once “critique of Islam = hate” is fully accepted then prison awaits those who so dare, and it will be the least tolerant and most easily offended who will define the boundaries of the crime.

The letter is, however, unintentionally ironic.

Although I am certain the MCB would not admit to it, there are at least two ironies:

Firstly the MCB is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) who have as a stated aim that “The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’” with all the word means. “The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America [and Europe] is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…” See here for full details.

Thus the MB, which lies behind the MCB, has the intent of destroying western civilisation by immigration and Jihad.

Thus it is utterly hypocritical for the MCB to object to those who think that Muslim immigration and Jihadi ideology pose a threat to western civilisation, the MB states bluntly that it does.

The second irony comes from the fact that the UK’s labour party has been embroiled in an on-going row over anti-Semitism for years now.

Shami Chakrabarti’s inquiry was deemed by many a whitewash (and for which she got a peerage) and the “problematic” incidents keep on rolling in – from Corbyn and the mural down.

What is not acknowledged is that much of the anti-Semitism comes from Labour’s Muslim MPs and councillors, a depressingly large number of whom, MPs and Councillors alike, have been caught making anti-Semitic statements.

I am therefore inclined to wonder whether the MCB is engaged in a distraction exercise, especially given the rather thin gruel of the listed allegations (which were, presumably, the worst they could come up with), in an attempt to take the focus off Labour and anti-Semitism and place it on the Conservative party and “Islamophobia”.

The intent could be at least three-fold.

Firstly to put “Islamophobia” back into the spotlight to prove “Muslim victimhood” and re-enable its use as a stick with which to beat the majority population.

Secondly, to distract from the growing evidence of Muslim anti-Semitism in the UK (which is but a pale shadow of anti-Semitism in the wider Muslim world).

Thirdly, if the MCB can smear the Conservative party as “Islamophobic” it can virtually guarantee the “Muslim vote” (which is less monolithic than either the MCB or Labour thinks) for Labour and it’s open-door migration and multicultural, politically correct policies which all, just coincidently no doubt, aid the aims of the MB in the destruction of the west.

What should concern the reader is that whilst this particular example refers to groups and parties within the UK it demonstrates how “Muslim advocacy groups” may manipulate public perceptions by playing on western senses of liberality and tolerance, all the while whilst privately espousing very different aims and objectives, from placing Islam above critique to “eliminating and destroying … Western civilization”.

And that is what should be most disturbing.