Jewish Chronicle, 11 June 2004

There’s nothing like smearing someone as a racist for making friends and influencing people. Reading through the report by the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, my eye was caught by a short extract from a column of mine. This, I discovered, was exhibit A in my arraignment as an ‘Islamophobe’, or ‘anti-Muslim racist’. (Er, how can one be an anti-Muslim racist when Islam is not a race but a religion? Don’t ask).

It turned out that the dock in which I had been put was pretty crowded. I shared it with Julie Burchill, Sam Brittan, Polly Toynbee, the Press Association, Denis MacShane, Martin Amis and Uncle Tom Commentator and all. Even the Commission for Racial Equality got it in the neck. Indeed, it seemed that anyone who had ever said anything about Muslims or Islam in the context of terrorism or jihad, or who had not paid sufficient attention to the institutionalised regime of quotidian terror being directed against British Muslims, was an anti-Muslim racist.

The media’s preoccupation with Omar Bakri Mohamed or Abu Hamza was singled out as Islamophobic because these guys got more coverage than moderate Muslims. By this reckoning, newspapers playing the anti-phobe card should give Osama bin Laden fewer column inches than your average person on the prayer-mat at Regent’s Park mosque, who has done nothing of any note whatsoever.

Of course, all this would be absolutely hilarious if it wasn’t so sinister and frightening. Unfortunately, it will serve to fuel the twisted thinking that causes so many Muslims to think of themselves as victims of this society, which then ratchets up their hostility and lets them refuse to take any responsibility whatever for what is done in the name of their religion.

Because you’d never know from reading this document that a war had been declared on the west in the name of Islam. You’d never know there was a dreadful problem with radical imams up and down the country, who were turning boys from decent, law-abiding Muslim homes into recruits for Islamic terror — as attested by their distraught parents. You’d never know that, according to a Home Office report leaked to the Sunday Times, an estimated 10,000-15,000 Muslims in Britain support al Qaeda.

Now that may be a small fraction of Britain’s Muslims, but it’s still a hell of a lot of people to be supporting a terror outfit that is dying to spray Sarin round Oxford Circus station. Yet according to this commission, it seems we must not report any of this because it apparently implies that the community as a whole is not moderate and so any such report is Islamophobic.

Indeed, every single bad thing or disadvantage associated with the Muslim community — poverty, overcrowding, poor educational achievement, unemployment and so forth — was adduced as evidence of institutional Islamophobia. No mention of the fact that all these disadvantages are due to cultural factors such as very large families, the fact that many Muslim women don’t work, or the inherent poverty of those who have come from illiterate peasant communities in the Indian sub-continent. Instead, Britain was painted as being motivated by an inexplicable malice towards Islam, played out through ‘institutional Islamophobia’.

What phooey. The real purpose of this report is to censor legitimate and indeed necessary comment and analysis of Islam and terrorism and the relationship between the two, and further demonise those who dare make the connection. And before the Muslim Council of Britain writes in to complain, no I am not saying most Muslims support terrorism; the vast majority are demonstrably law abiding, but it is positively dangerous to deny there is a problem within their religion.

And anyway, just what do they mean by ‘moderate’ when Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the ‘moderate’ MCB, has accused Israel of ‘creeping genocide’, a ‘Final Solution’, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and deliberately killing Palestinian children? Or when the ‘moderate’ Muslim Weekly ran a prominent article claiming that the Fathers for Justice protesters who hurled purple flour in the Commons chamber were not protesting fathers at all but a Zionist plot? Or are such questions also ‘Islamophobic’?

One should not be surprised that this report is designed to suppress and to intimidate. The commission’s chairman Dr Richard Stone, who also chairs the Jewish Council for Racial Equality, played an unforgettable and chilling role on the Macpherson inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence murder, where he tried to force the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Condon to confess to the sin of institutional racism. ‘ I say to you now,’ urged Stone, ‘just say, “Yes, I acknowledge institutional racism in the police”…Could you do that today?’ Never mind the facts, just feel the fervour of that absolution!

Thus will we be found guilty of thought-crime by these witch-hunters, and truth stood terrifyingly on its head and decent people defamed, unless we all —Muslim and non-Muslim alike —make a stand against such moral inversion and intimidation.