The Face of Modern Britain: Jihad’s Triumph

It turns out that I have found something to agree with Keir Starmer about. During Ramadan this year, the prime minister described Muslims as “the face of modern Britain.” I think that is correct. Whether it is also something to be happy about is another question. The PM, for his part, couldn’t be more pleased. Muslims in Britain, he went on to say, are “a success story when it comes to diversity.” Was that qualification—“when it comes to diversity”—a nod to reality? Or was it merely his capitulation to some sort of self-imposed linguistic quota according to which he must punctuate two out of three pronouncements with the word “diversity” or go without his pudding?

The jury is still out on that. But it is clear that the prime minister is very concerned about linguistic rectitude. For the last couple of years he has been trying to come up with a definition of “Islamophobia” that he could get past the troublesome partisans of free speech and enroll on the statute books as a hate crime. To date, he has had to compromise and substitute “anti-Muslim hostility” for the crisper-sounding “Islamophobia.”

Longtime readers will know that I have often poked fun at the term “Islamophobia.” Although you can find instances of the word from a century or more ago, the term was popularized in its current sense by the Runnymede Trust, a left-wing British think tank, in 1997. In some ways, the use of “Islamophobia” as a term of abuse was a brilliant move, both psychologically and politically. What a coup to have been able to paint one’s ideological opponents as by definition mentally disturbed. After all, a “phobia” is a species of mental illness, an irrational fear or hatred of something. But the question arises: is it irrational to fear or hate partisans of a religion that explicitly wishes to compass your death or destruction? I ask for the parents of Daniel Pearl, the 3,000 victims of 9/11, and the many thousands of now-deceased people who found themselves on the receiving end of “the religion of peace.”