My letter appears in Standpoint
Standpoint magazine, a new political magazine published by the Social Affairs Unit, a centre-right think tank, pubished a letter from me in response to an attack by Douglas Murray on Peter Oborne’s exposé of Islamophobia earlier in the summer. Half of my last paragraph was edited out (much less than was eliminated from my letter to the New Statesman about a BNP agitator being mistaken for a mere “ditzy woman” in one of their articles), but the gist of it was delivered. Here’s the unedited version (the bits they removed are italicised).
Dear Sir,
Douglas Murray, in his lame response to the recent Dispatches programme which exposed the upsurge of vilification of Muslims in the media and its effects on Muslims in this country, resorts to the time-honoured tactic of questioning the legitimacy of the term “Islamophobia”. I do not dispute that it is a misnomer, as a lot of neologisms (like “homophobia”, from which it is likely derived) are; however, the term means bigotry or prejudice against Muslims. Of this, there is plenty of evidence.
Anne Frank once noted that when a non-Jew does something bad, people held it to be the work of that person alone, while any bad thing a Jew does was thrown at all Jews. Douglas Murray, responding to the stories about mobs or large groups of Muslims which turned out to be false, responds with examples of what Muslims have done as individuals or in small groups. There is no trend towards Muslim doctors or dentists refusing to treat female patients they deem improperly dressed, so what is the relevance? It is a classic example of the old type of prejudice being visited on a new enemy.
The spate of inflammatory stories about Muslims is nothing trivial. These are often about happenings which are quite rightful (as with Muslims being able to book, and pay for, modest single-sex swimming sessions), or insignificant, or nothing to do with Muslims at all, as with council jobsworths allegedly “renaming Christmas” or banks removing piggy-banks to avoid offending Muslims. With such stories, Muslims cannot win: if it is shown that they are not done in response to Muslim demands, it can be said that “Muslims don’t even have to ask”.
That “exaggerated and faked stories abound in journalism” is not an excuse. If newspapers printed such stories about individuals, particularly wealthy ones, they would risk being sued for libel. As they are about an entire community, the worst they can expect is an unfavourable ruling from the PCC. However, reporting of an inflammatory nature is a common precursor to violence, and we do not need to go as far back as Nazi Germany to find examples; in recent years, we have indeed witnessed attacks on obvious Muslim individuals in the UK, one of which left an imam blind, and buildings. For Muslims to fear violence is quite rational when it is quite acceptable for us to be defamed on the front page of a national newspaper.
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