These different aspects don’t always work in tandem. Indeed, the Brotherhood sometimes finds itself on different sides of political conflict. But such ambiguity can work to its advantage, creating leverage to maximize its interests and undermine its real enemies: to turn them against themselves and each other.

After decades of large-scale Muslim immigration, the Brotherhood as a movement, ideology and style is now firmly established within Western countries. Its positions on such things as decolonization, Islamophobia and Palestine-Israel are now mainstream positions in the West. But the Brotherhood itself, as a body, remains under the radar, clearly present but rarely overt. It operates in the shadows, with assertions about its influence easily written off as conspiracy-mongering.

Yet sometimes this influence becomes visible. In November 2015, former prison governor Ian Acheson wrote to the Ministry of Justice about how a review team he was leading had found numerous examples of Islamist extremist texts in British prison chaplaincies. In evidence to the Commons Justice Committee the following July, Acheson said the books contained “sometimes sectarian, homophobic and incendiary information that was freely available to vulnerable prisoners in many prisons with no obvious control over it”.

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Acheson’s review team looked at eleven prison chaplaincies and found inflammatory texts in nine of them, including titles from some of the main ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood: The Way of Jihad from Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna; Milestones by Sayyid Qutb (also author of Our Struggle with the Jews); and The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

Acheson submitted his final report to Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Justice, in March 2016, with a stripped-down summary released in August of that year. Behind the scenes, he had also written to Gove highlighting what he calls a “significant finding”, beyond his terms of reference. This concerned the Senior Muslim Advisor to the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), which makes sure convicted criminals serve the sentences and orders carried out by courts. The advisor was Ahtsham Ali. Acheson stresses now that he was not making any specific allegations. However, he noted that Ali had appeared on platforms with extremists and had attracted complaints from Sufi imams who felt unfairly discriminated against in the prison appointments process.

Following Acheson’s warning, Gove launched an investigation into Ali. According to the Sunday Times, it found that 140 of the prison imams Ali had overseen the appointment of (around 70%) were from the Deobandi tradition, a conservative Sunni denomination prevalent in British Pakistani communities that has influenced the Taliban and has significant ideological commonalities with the Brotherhood. However, by the time the investigation process was completed, Gove had been sacked and Acheson’s term had ended.

Following the investigation, Ali was exonerated and he remains in his position today. The Ministry of Justice now issues the statement: “There is no evidence that Ahtsham Ali was responsible for extremist texts identified in some chaplaincies.”

But he certainly has strong ‘links’ to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups. Sheikh Abdullah al-Judai, Ali’s long-term teacher and guide, was a founder of the European Council of Fatwa and Research (ECFR), part of the inner network of Brotherhood institutions in Europe. Qaradawi, author of one of the texts that Acheson’s team warned about, was a co-founder of the ECFR and led the organisation for many years. The Iraqi-born Judai is involved in other institutions of that network too: the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), also formerly led by Qaradawi; the charity Islamic Relief, recently deselected as an aid partner by the Swedes but retained as such by the UK; and the European Institute of Human Sciences (EIHS), the main branch of which was dissolved by the French government last year for promoting radical Islamic ideology and justifying armed jihad. Signaling that you are a longstanding pupil of someone with such connections sends quite a message to those in the know.

It is worth taking a moment to discuss Qaradawi, the foremost Brotherhood ideologue of recent times, who died in 2022. Qaradawi acquired a certain notoriety in the West for stating that Islam will conquer Europe via “da’wa [the Arabic term for proselytizing] and ideology” and for advocating a “jihad of necessity” against Israel, including civilians and the “innocent child” as legitimate targets. He also praised violent jihadists in the West for their aims if not their means, for their love of truth and the concern they show for Muslims.

Qaradawi’s The Lawful and the Prohibited In Islam, one of the texts found in British prisons, is an interesting case. Effectively a handbook of Islamic law for Muslims and potential converts in the West, most of it is emollient and even ecumenical, far from being inflammatory. However, this stance emerges from a standpoint of necessary Islamic supremacy. As Qaradawi says, “Islam came to be followed, and not to follow; to be dominant, and not subordinate.”

Among non-Muslims, Jews and Christians at least deserve protection and even love from Muslims, he says, drawing extensively on the Qur’an and hadith — but only if they defer to Muslim dominion. “Neither rabbis nor priests, kings or sultans, have the right to prohibit something permanently to Allah’s servants; if someone does this, he has certainly exceeded his limits, usurping the sovereignty which, with respect to legislating for the people, belongs to Allah … alone.”

Jewish people present a difficult case here. On one hand, Qaradawi says, they deserve respect as People of the Book. But he also condemns them several times for their “rebelliousness”, their deviousness and a tendency to inveigle wealth from others.

Notwithstanding its generally peaceful tone, the book contains a clear threat. If non-Muslims resist the imposition of Islam and its codes of halal (lawful) and haram (prohibited), the latter including such things as the consumption of alcoholic drinks, homosexual marriage and uncovered women in public, then they may be fought against.“In order to keep the Muslim society purified,” he says, “a continuous war must be waged against all belief-systems which originate in man’s ignorance of the divine guidance and in the errors of idol worship.” And it is imperative, he adds, for the Muslim Ummah “to muster military power to the utmost extent of its capacity in order to defend itself.” This is the responsibility of every Muslim, not just governments.

Here we might see the origins of what some observers call the Brotherhood’s “double discourse”; also its “obfuscation” and “dissembling” on such matters when challenged. On one hand there is plenty of generous, peaceful language in Qaradawi’s book to demonstrate how Islam is not a threat to non-believers. On the other hand we find exhortations to violence against those who fail to submit to it.

Whether or not Ahtsham Ali had anything to do with this and other Brotherhood texts being present in British prisons, it is remarkable that someone with such links maintains an overseeing role in those prisons, including over the appointment of imams (leaders) who minister to prisoners.

Ahtsham Ali and Sheikh Judai were both offered the right to reply to the facts and assertions above which concern them, the former via his employer the Ministry of Justice. However, no response was forthcoming from either.

In recent decades, British prisons have become notorious for the domination of Muslim gangs. A Ministry of Justice report in 2019 noted that staff and inmates referred to the gangs as the “Muslim brotherhood”, with former prisoner Steve Gallant, hero of the 2019 London Bridge terrorist attack, describing it as “less an organisation than a network, one fusing Islamist extremism and grievance with the gang discipline of existing prisoner groups”.

This reflects a wider reality of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, as a style and source of inspiration as much as anything. The organisation has grown some serious wings.

***

The Muslim Brotherhood was originally founded by the Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna in Egypt, 1928, which was then nominally independent but dominated by the British. Banna was consumed by the colonisation of his homeland and much of the Muslim world by Western powers and Western modernity. He attributed this partly to non-Muslim strength — but also to Muslim weakness, which he attributed to the abandoning of Islamic principles. Real Islam, he said, was about fighting and defeating non-believers.

Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian nationalist, revolutionary and President from 1954 to 1970, was briefly a member of the Brotherhood in the Forties. A friend and associate of Nasser’s in the Free Officers movement recounted their initiation into the “secret apparatus” of the organisation: “We were taken into a totally darkened room where we heard a voice and, placing our hand on the Quran and a gun and repeating after the voice, we took an oath of obedience and total allegiance for better or worse, to the Grand Master [Banna], swearing by the Book of God and the sunna of the Prophet.”

Nasser soon turned against the Brotherhood (Ikhwan in Arabic), rejecting its insistence on shari’a law in favor of secular nationalism. In response, a Brotherhood member shot at him in 1954 as he was celebrating the withdrawal of British forces from the country. He was not hit. But the pattern was set for Egyptian politics: on the one side, secular nationalists who could draw upon the backing of the military; on the other, the Brotherhood, who drew their strength from within Egyptian society as de facto representatives of Islam. At times, the two forces have cut pragmatic deals with each other. However, their visceral opposition meant this never lasted: witness the coup that overthrew the Brotherhood-led government of Mohamed Morsi in 2013 — and the Rabaa massacre of protestors that followed.

Meanwhile the Brotherhood expanded internationally. Under Nasser’s rule, some members fled: to Saudi Arabia, where they began to exert particular influence in the universities, on Osama bin Laden among others; and to Europe and North America, where they started to pitch up in the Fifties and Sixties.

The institution-building they engaged in on arrival is one of the defining traits of modern Islamism, going to the heart of the Brotherhood’s style and success. For it is fixated on achieving things: on power, strength and winning. In The Way of Jihad, one of the books found in British prison chaplaincies, Banna wrote: “Jihad is an obligation from Allah on every Muslim and cannot be ignored nor evaded.” In another text drawing parallels between Islamic law and Italian fascism, he presented jihad as “the highest goal of humanity in this life.” Islam, he said, “urges its followers to be imbued with the military spirit in war and peace … Therefore, Signor Mussolini is not the only one who calls for this, and these are not the principles of fascism alone.”

A military-style approach to both war and peace has certain implications, including treating those who discard Islam like deserters and encouraging deception, a crucial tactic in war. Such traits don’t mean that the Brotherhood is against peace; nor that it won’t compete in elections — and win them, as it has in Egypt and Tunisia. It is more that peace appears for Islamists in its tradition as a situation that occurs after Islam has won, following the submission of its enemies. Until then, they are always pushing, always contending, seeking to increase their power.

Interpersonal and family relations are as important to this struggle as anything. Qaradawi’s The Lawful and the Prohibited In Islam describes how Muslim women are prohibited from marrying non-Muslim men, yet Muslim men are allowed to marry non-Muslim women, just as long as their wives’ beliefs do not influence the rest of the household. This law, if implemented, ensures that Islam prevails in the family environment wherever at least one partner is a Muslim, continuing through the generations.

Needless to say, this is not the law of a private faith that lets everyone choose their own path in life. Such law, if followed, effectively mandates that Islam can never decline; it can only grow. If followed consistently in the West, as it appears to be for the most part in Muslim communities, then the West will become more and more Muslim over time, making Qaradawi’s prophecies come true.

As founder of the Brotherhood, Banna had developed an ideology with a simple and effective good-and-evil dichotomy, whereby Islam is “the solution”, the source of good which must triumph. Western modernity, by contrast, is the source of evil, which should — and will, inevitably — be defeated. This framing was attractive for many — and the Brotherhood’s reach grew rapidly in the years following its founding. In the Indian subcontinent, it greatly influenced Abu Al-A’la Mawdudi and the Jamaat-e-Islami movement. Two of Jamaat’s members set up the Islamic Foundation, which named one of its halls in Leicester after Banna. Ahtsham Ali of the Prisons Service has spoken there, on the subject of converting prisoners to Islam. The then Prince Charles opened a part of its campus in 2000.

“Banna isn’t talking about a religion in the sense it’s understood in the West,” Shadi Hamid, writes in  Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World, “but about a program to be applied and implemented.” There is no separation between religion and secular politics here like that which emerged out of the Christian tradition. One serves God by maintaining one’s devoutness, but also by winning territory, imposing Islamic law and drawing converts. As Hamid says, the Brotherhood recognized that achieving these things would require patience. “They believed that history — and God — moved with them, and so it was never a question of whether but when they would prevail.” Here we can see the apparent paradox of “Islamo-progressivism”, in which an Islamist movement that appears to be anti-modern is also consumed by “that most modern of assumptions: that history moved with purpose and that progress was inescapable.” As Banna put it, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

Like other revolutionaries, the Brotherhood learned to protect itself through secret methods, establishing the usra (“family”) cell structure and being careful about introducing new recruits. Lorenzo Vidino, who has written two books on it, says: “We have to remember that the Brotherhood is a very selective organization. No one applies to be a member. You are selected based on a variety of skills that the spotters within the Brotherhood identify — and being extremely clever, extremely well-educated, extremely driven are some of the key features they look for. It’s an elite group.”

Once a potential member has been selected, he (always a he, it seems) is given tasks to fulfill in his specialist area — whether in education, politics, finance, media or, nowadays, social media. As recruits prove themselves reliable and trustworthy, they rise up through the different layers of the organization, becoming more distanced from everyday operations. The organizations that members create in turn establish centers of expertise to advance the purposes of the center, operating in unison but without public deference to an orchestrating force. This in turn conveys a crucial appearance of strength and weight — as if its objectives are shared by all Muslims when in fact, a relatively small group of people are behind it all.

It is worth emphasizing the scope and sophistication of this approach. Indeed, Banna even showed signs of digesting Gramscian political ideas, writing of the need to change al-rouh al-’am alazi uhaimin (the hegemonic public spirit) in Muslim countries before targeting state power. The Brotherhood’s aim is to maximize its freedom and therefore the power of Islam wherever it finds itself. It has learned to be flexible and make alliances which help to consolidate its position. As a result it has thrived in the countries that it saw as its principal enemies.

***

On 7th June 2016, just a few months after Ian Acheson submitted his report on Islamism in British jails, Dr Ibrahim Mounir, the elderly Deputy Supreme Guide of the global Muslim Brotherhood, sat in front of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in Westminster as part of its investigation into political Islam. The Brexit referendum campaign was in full swing. In his native Arabic, Mounir told the committee, “What we are hoping for is to achieve Islamic unity. A parallel of that is European unity.”

The Committee investigation came shortly after David Cameron’s Government published the main findings of its review into the Brotherhood. Within 24 hours of Cameron announcing that review in 2014, the Brotherhood had appointed a legal team including the former Director of Public Prosecutions Lord (Ken) Macdonald and threatened legal action against “any improper attempt to restrict its activity”.

Sitting alongside Mounir in Portcullis House were three others with associations to the Brotherhood: Dr Anas al-Tikriti, chief executive and founder of the Cordoba Foundation; Dr Radwan Masmoudi of the Ennahda party in Tunisia; and, in hijab, Sondos Asem, who used to serve as media advisor for President Mohamed Morsi in Egypt and is now a senior news editor for Middle East Eye.

When pressed on how the Brotherhood legitimates and uses violence, each of the witnesses pushed back. Tikriti said there was no evidence for it. Asem stated that such claims were “unsubstantiated” and “misleading”. One might counter that the fact that Hamas was formed as the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood, or that the Brotherhood’s logo features two crossed swords, or that its leading ideologues like Banna and Qutb frequently invoke violence, speak for themselves. But the four held the line, not giving an inch.

Step forward to the present day, Britain looks like something of a redoubt for the Brotherhood and its wider movement. Salah Abdel-Haq, acting leader of the whole organization, has reportedly been resident in London since 2023. Highly-organized marches and protests for Palestine and against “Zionism” have attracted large crowds ever since Hamas’ attack on Southern Israel in October that year. On one occasion, organizers celebrated their success in being allowed to march down Whitehall again with the statement: “We are pleased to report that the police have yielded”: a telling way of framing it. Among the signatories of this statement, we find the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), founded by Tikriti, who described it to the Select Committee as “the closest there is to the Muslim Brotherhood” in Britain. Another signatory was the Palestinian Forum of Britain, one of whose officials was Zaher Birawi, a Palestinian-British journalist who was recently sanctioned by US authorities for his role “clandestinely acting on behalf of Hamas.”

Tikriti, who described the mass slaughter and rape of Israeli citizens on 7th October 2023 as “a lie” and the taking of hostages “a very important part” of any “act of resistance”, has also been advising The Muslim Vote (TMV) organization. He and his sister both signed an open letter released by TMV before the 2024 election, urging Muslims to “unite behind the single Muslim vote candidate” that it had chosen. The organization came from nowhere to back four Muslim “Independent” MPs who were elected to Westminster, also backing former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and various candidates from other parties.

London’s Metropolitan Police recently noted that the marches have “routinely seen arrests for racially and religiously aggravated public order offenses, for stirring up racial hatred and for supporting terrorist organizations. It is not normal to see criminality of this nature or on this scale at what are billed as peaceful protests.” Nevertheless, they have been a significant success for the organizers, mobilizing support from way beyond Palestinian and Muslim diasporas, keeping Gaza at the forefront of public attention, and bringing in support and resources for Muslim Brotherhood causes.

Primarily, the Brotherhood’s influence can be seen in British Islamist networks, which link its own predominantly Arabic speakers to Urdu-speaking and other Muslim groups in Britain. Bodies like TMV and the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) share the Brotherhood’s emphasis on Muslim “unity” and on using the weight of Muslim presence to influence and dictate public policy. They have had considerable success. The Labour Government’s long-promised definition of Islamophobia, rebranded as “anti-Muslim hatred”, is a case in point, seeking to protect Islam and what we might call “Muslimness” from negative sentiment. The former Conservative Attorney General Dominic Grieve, who chaired the working group that developed the definition, previously carried out a review on behalf of Islamic Relief, a charity in the Brotherhood network, following an anti-Semitism scandal. This last Ramadan, Islamic Relief has been soliciting “zakat” charitable donations via adverts featuring the slogan “Zakat is our Sacred Duty”: striking messaging that suggests a religious obligation to give them money, not far away from taxation — and in line with Qaradawi’s instructions on the using of charities where an Islamic state doesn’t exist.

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The French anthropologist Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, who says she has received death threats for her work, has developed the notion of “frérisme” to describe how the Brotherhood’s influence works. Translating as “Brotherism”, it describes “a blend of ideological coherence and collective identity formulated around a specific vision of global Islamic hegemony, to be pursued with a strategy of slow infiltration that leverages [all] possible allies.” In a report for the ECR group in the European Parliament, she and Tommaso Virgili suggest that these allies “may include individuals and entities that are not part of the MB in any structural sense but are influenced by its ideology and operate accordingly, as well as individuals completely unaware of their role in the plan and even coming from very distant ideological backgrounds, such as the materialist left.” They point out that the Brotherhood has established religious and cultural institutions all across Europe, claiming to represent the Muslim faith and community before the state and public authorities. It has also founded numerous charities, think tanks and trusts that ostensibly have nothing to do with religion, while training a network of professionals “to penetrate all sectors of public life, including education, health, development, business, law and justice.”

Brotherist politics matches what is sometimes called the “radical flank effect”, by which the more moderate wings of a political movement benefit from the presence of more radical elements. This dynamic is on constant display in Islamist politics, as older, more respectable representatives maximize their bargaining power by emphasizing their ability to prevent street violence and terrorism. In this way, some think the emergence of Al-Qaeda and Islamic State has benefited the Brotherist tendency. Alain Chouet, the former head of France’s counterintelligence service, the DGSE, has even said: “Al-Qaeda is only a brief episode and an expedient instrument in the century-old existence of the Muslim Brotherhood. The true danger is in the expansion of the Brotherhood, an increase in its audience. The wolf knows how to disguise itself as a sheep.” We might also note the Brotherhood’s pragmatic alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran, especially via Hamas, currently bringing terror to the West as well as the Middle East.

***

V.S. Naipaul described Islam as “an imperialism as well as a religion.” Its followers are duty-bound to God to impose the ways of their religion wherever they go. Brotherist movements have articulated this commitment through modern ideology and political method. Founded in opposition to Western imperialism, they are now imposing themselves on the West, assisted by naive, unthinking and sometimes self-interested liberals and Left-wingers, including in the present-day Labour Government.

How do you counter something like this, that is both ubiquitous and intangible, that works within the system while eroding it? Some want to follow states like the UAE by banning the Brotherhood itself. However, you might respond: “Ban what?” The Brotherhood’s methods of organizational secrecy hobble such an idea from the start. There is no official organization to be banned. There are individuals who are either likely members of the Brotherhood or have previously been identified as members elsewhere; and then there are the organizations formed by these people, which operate within the letter if not always the spirit of the law.

The strength of Brotherism means something more comprehensive and joined-up would be required. Governments will have to recognize that these movements threaten the foundations of Western civilization, including liberalism, social democracy and conservatism. The Islamist scene is so large, so active and international that it is difficult for even dedicated researchers to keep track of what’s going on even in single countries, leaving policymakers and public in the dark about the organizations and individuals that approach them. In 2020, the Austrian government set up the Dokumentationsstelle Politischer Islam (the Documentation Centre on Political Islam, or DPI) to remedy this, to document and scientifically analyze political Islam, its networks and structures, to raise awareness about religiously motivated political extremism and its threat to democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights. We could do with a similar institution in Britain, with strong links to other countries and, if possible, the EU level, where Brotherhood network institutions are prominent lobbyists.

Western governments also need to offer a more convincing, attractive alternative to Islamic rule, re-founding their own weakened polities by gathering around core principles like individual freedom, legal equality and what we might call “civilized tolerance”. State bodies will have to refocus on core tasks, enforcing the law without fear or favor and dismantling the special carve-outs that multiculturalist structures have facilitated — and which undermine the state’s authority. They will also have to recognize that large-scale immigration has a negative impact.

Our governments should say they won’t work with, engage or financially support Islamist-related groups. They should also make it illegal for public bodies to give public goods — including public space — to them. They should reinforce the duty of public sector employees, such as those who work for the prisons service, to serve all citizens, not giving preference to certain identity groups.

Then there is the question of charitable status. In Britain, charities receive Gift Aid from the Government, since religion is recognized as a public good. Mosques, Muslim groups and even individuals exploit this widely. According to some researchers this helps Islamists to engage in political work full-time, giving them a major advantage over secular political movements. We should legislate to change this. Either Islam should be disqualified as a beneficiary of charitable status, or all religions should be.

Qaradawi, as the premier Brotherhood ideologue of recent decades and a keen advocate of using charities to exert Islamic power, called his approach wasatqiyya or the “middle way”, suggesting moderation. Yet this apparently moderate form of Islam explicitly calls for the Ummah to see itself as a military force wherever they find themselves, waging a permanent war against alternative beliefs and lifestyles. There is a clear ideological link here to violent attacks committed in the name of Islam. We are fools to not recognize and act on it.

Western democratic states should not be subsidizing movements that are encouraging war-like attitudes to groups other than their own while working towards their destruction. Unfortunately, unbelievably to many, this is what the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to do.

***

A previous version of this piece wrongly named Sheikh Abdullah al-Judai as an author of one of the texts Ian Acheson warned about. We apologise for the error.

The answer is that they have all been shortlisted for Islamophobe of the Year awards by the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), a British campaign and advocacy group with close links to the Iranian government.

It all sounds like a bit of a joke. The “Commission” used to promote the Awards in a semi-comedic style: as an irreverent swipe at those who have shown hatred to Muslims in public life. But there was always a bad smell about all this: having a laugh, about hatred. The apparently light-hearted format enabled fierce denunciations of others for the same reasons that are getting people killed. In 2015, the IHRC gave another of its Islamophobia Awards to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo — just two months after jihadis slaughtered 12 people at the magazine’s offices in Paris.

The origins of this unsavoriness are no secret. In his 2023 review of the Prevent anti-extremism program, William Shawcross described the organization as “an Islamist group ideologically aligned with the Iranian regime”, with a history of “extremist links and terrorist sympathies”. Until recently, the IHRC’s director was Saied Reza Ameli, also secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution.

Nevertheless, thanks to its campaigning on Islamophobia, the IHRC has had a notable influence on British public life. And Islamophobia is now a pressing concern of the British state and Labour government.

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How can we best understand this concept of Islamophobia? One of its problems is how it seems to mean whatever the likes of the IHRC dislike at any given moment. The literal meaning, though, is implicit in the word: Islam-phobia. It suggests an irrational fear of Islam, prompting questions of whether fear of Islam is itself irrational (a view that would match Islamic doctrine) or whether versions of that fear can be rational.

From the Islamist scene in Britain, a group called Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND) has placed itself at the forefront of efforts to identify and combat Islamophobia. It provided significant support for a landmark report in 2018 by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims, co-chaired by current Health Secretary West Streeting MP.

MEND stated that Islamophobia was:

“…a prejudice, aversion, hostility, or hatred towards Muslims and encompasses any distinction, exclusion, restriction, discrimination, or preference against Muslims that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.”

This, you might say, is a maximalist position. In a cutting response to the APPG report for Policy Exchange in 2019, Trevor Phillips, John Jenkins and Martyn Frampton noted that “the comprehensiveness of the behavior that MEND seeks to place beyond the pale is striking”. A whole smorgasbord of other potential definitions can be found in the APPG publication. Some of these definitions came from academics. One came from the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), a grouping of Muslim governments from around the world. The OIC described Islamophobia in 2007 as “the worst form of terrorism”. In a follow-up report, it said:

“Islamophobia signifies the contemporary proliferation of discrimination against Muslims and distortion of Islam and is partly due to the ignorance and lack of understanding of Islam in the West. It would be an unfortunate error of judgment in believing that Islam is linked to terror; that it is intolerant of other religious beliefs, that its values and practices are not democratic; that it favors repression of freedom of expression and undermining human rights.”

The APPG report makes similarly bold claims, the core one being that “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” The behaviors it deemed Islamophobic include those which are already illegal, such as threats of violence, and discrimination at work. But the report also claims that Islamophobia encompasses Muslim students failing to win places at top-level universities, and the schools inspectorate Ofsted questioning whether young girls should be wearing the hijab. And if you think these definitions are overly expansive, then you might already be an Islamophobe. Another example of Islamophobia, the report says, is “accusing Muslims… of exaggerating Islamophobia.”

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Islamophobia is a total wrong, it appears: blasphemous but also irrational and immoral; rooted in Western racism and ignorance. And from it arises the error of thinking there is any link between Islam and young Muslim men yelling “Allahu-Akbar” (“God is Great”) as they plunge knives into passers-by on European streets. As the OIC points out, this would be unfortunate. Not wrong, inaccurate or unfactual, but unfortunate and an error of judgment.

These claims are worth unpacking, not least for how they demonstrate the characteristic Islamist fusing of a so-called “mediaeval” religion with the techniques and styles of Western secular modernity, particularly progressive social science.

From the Islamic perspective, Islam cannot be associated with bad things because it represents submission to a perfect God. All problems associated with Islam and Muslims therefore must originate outside Islam. For the more ideological sociologists and historians meanwhile, bad things in society necessarily have their root cause in Western culture, capitalism, Whiteness, colonialism, Englishness and the rest.

These two perspectives come together in what we might call Islamist sociology, which treats Islam as a force of progress in the world. Progressive ideology is particularly amenable to Islamists, for it conveys the ideas that believers are on the right side of history. History is on their side. The world is moving in their direction. If you do not accept their version of truth, you will eventually lose.

The West’s ignorance of this perspective matches the Islamic notion of “jahiliyya”, which describes the age of ignorance before the Prophet Mohammed received the word of God. Applied to Western countries, it supposes that we are in a pre-Islamic state of ignorance. Mainstream Left-wing history and social science see things in a similar way. In this view, Muslims and other immigrants serve as a motor of change, bringing us to a higher historical state.

In this way, the notion of Islamophobia helps to bring together Islamic and Western intellectual traditions. It converts Islamic law — or merely the desire of Islamists to punish those who displease them — into secular rationalist and moral language, helping to mobilize both Muslims and non-Muslims in support. In effect, it works as a form of linguistic laundering: converting religious authority into a general, all-consuming rationality and morality. This makes it an effective tool. Critics of Islamophobia often speak of how it gets “weaponized”. This assessment is accurate, for the concept is consistently used as a prop to punish, but also to deter and bring others onboard via the appearance of strength. At the very least it is a form of social technology, working to advance the group’s aims, to build the size and strength of the group, and to weaken its opponents.

In this regard, the lack of an agreed definition can be a strength. The nebulousness of “Islamophobia” grants maximum flexibility to those who deploy this weapon. It is a weapon that can be used freely to denounce anyone who displeases Islamists and their allies. It can be invoked against the authorities, to intimidate and win concessions. And it can be used against fellow Muslims, as a more ecumenical version of takfir. (Takfir is excommunication from Islam, or society, potentially meriting death).

If we are not to be Islamophobic, it seems we must defer to Islamists, to their interests and their interpretation of their religion as perfect. We must bow to Islamists’ authority to decide the boundary between right and wrong in relation to Islam. This fits into the Islamic distinction between the “dar-al-harb” (the House of War) and the “dar-al-Islam” (the House of Islam): assigning all bad things in the world outside Islam, to a state of war. Through this framing, Islamists can bypass inconvenient issues like the “grooming’”(or “rape”) gangs and Islamic terrorist attacks. The culprits are not the individuals involved, but external forces: lax morals in Western society, colonialism, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine and discrimination against Muslims in the West.

This distinction between the House of War and the House of Islam helps explain another of the Islamists’ tendencies: that of inveigling themselves with the authorities one minute and denouncing them in the strongest terms the next. There is a tension here. Islamists see the West as a place which, while not of Islam at the moment, at least has or might have arrangements with its representatives. At the same time, the House of War is implacably hostile to Muslims and must be fought against. The APPG report points towards the latter in describing Britain as an “Islamophobic environment”: it is another way of describing a House of War.

In this framing, like the closely related idea of systemic racism, everything is touched by Islamophobia and so everything will have to be changed to defeat it. From the track record of advocates, their maximalist approach and their intolerance of differing views, they will likely never be satisfied.

Nevertheless, the British state is trying to satisfy them. Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, recently set up a group “to deliver a definition of Anti-Muslim Hatred/Islamophobia within six months”. Explaining the creation of this group, the government said that “incidents of anti-Muslim hatred reached the highest number on record in 2024.” The group’s chair, the former Conservative minister Dominic Grieve KC, said the group’s task was to balance the pressing need to impose a definition on behalf of British Muslims “with the unwavering requirement to maintain freedom of thought and expression under law for all.”

Eventually the Government will have to decide: between censorship and freedom. If a definition is indeed agreed and, as activists demand, operationalized, the effects will be significant. Media reporting will become even more fraught with risk, leading to a more aggressive culture of self-censorship. Academic work likewise: further undermining the culture of truth-seeking in universities. To resist the demands of Muslim activists in the workplace will become perilous for both bosses and employees, clearing the way for Islamic practices to be embedded in daily routines while others are blocked for being discriminatory. At Michaela School, for example, the activists have been temporarily set back, but will eventually win.

It seems that Western traditions of free speech and inquiry, already straining under repeated attacks, will no longer apply in relation to Islam and Muslims in British public and institutional life. And so gradually, seemingly inexorably, Britain will continue its weary progress into becoming an Islamic state in all but name. Islamophobia is a crucial tool in the battle to make that happen: a startlingly effective social weapon.

Every multicultural society, it turns out, has the Tommy Robinsons it deserves. Which is to say that if you fetishise identity and create a hierarchy of identities, whereby some are protected and defended while others are stigmatised and attacked, you’ll end up with a less than harmonious society. It also turns out that if you reward “marginalised” non-white identities, many whites will bristle against this and start reasserting their own white identity — or search out those who will do it for them.

It is from this toxic context — the “Lebanonisation” of the UK, as Sam Bidwell strikingly describes it — that Robinson has emerged, becoming the first white “community leader” here. But unlike his counterparts in the “Muslim community”, no British politician or senior police officer would be seen dead breaking fried bread with Robinson. If Robinson has a victim-complex, it is in part because he is one and because he seems to go out of his way to be one. Indeed, it’s almost as if he enjoys being a victim and the sense of righteousness and authenticity this gives him.

Robinson’s arrest on Friday at Folkestone police station, where he was charged under the schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act for refusing to hand over the pin to his mobile phone, and his return to custody immediately after, will further solidify his victim narrative. This will surely be compounded by his appearance today and tomorrow at Woolwich crown court on separate charges relating to repeating libellous statements he made about a Syrian refugee back in 2018.

Though he wasn’t there for it, Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally still went ahead, with podcaster Liam Tuffs hosting in his place. I watched a livestream showing the main speakers and I sat through the whole of Robinson’s new documentary, which was shown in its 124-minute entirety. It is titled “Lawfare: Lust, Fear and Loathing — and the UK riots”, which is a bit of a mouthful, lacking the punch and clarity of, say, “The Rape of Britain”, Robinson’s 2022 documentary about Asian grooming gangs. Robinson must have intuited this, because he spends the first 15 minutes performing the yeoman’s work of explaining its subtitle. In short: lust refers to the greed of the elites and their desire for power, fear is about the elites’ capitulation to Islam, and loathing denotes their contempt for ordinary people and Britain.

The documentary begins with an encomium to Peter Lynch, who last week committed suicide in prison. Lynch, 61, was serving two years and eight months after he pleaded guilty to being part of a violent mob outside a migrant hotel in Rotherham during the peak of this summer’s anti-immigration riots; he had shouted “scum” and “child killers” at police. The judge who sentenced Lynch called him a “disgraceful example of a grandfather”, but for Robinson he is a martyr-like figure whose sacrifice exposes the cruel face of a two-tier system of criminal system in the UK.

Robinson’s main complaint is that the anti-immigration rioters were unfairly demonised as far-Right thugs animated by racism and Islamophobia. It is a powerful argument and Robinson makes a good case for it, giving a direct voice to those who were on the receiving end of the demonisation, who make it clear that they had genuine concerns about uncontrolled immigration, particularly around crime and safety. The documentary is worth watching solely for this testimony, which is given to the excellent and empathetic Sammy Woodhouse.

If you’re Keir Starmer and live a life of privilege far from a migrant hotel, it is perhaps easy to dismiss these concerns as atavistic spasms of racism, but then Starmer’s wife doesn’t live in Rotherham and hasn’t been sexually harassed and followed back home by one of those hotel occupants, as several interviewees relayed that their young daughters had been.

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Robinson also makes a compelling case that the rioters were treated with a severity that was not only disproportionate and unjust but transparently inconsistent with how the British state manages other violent protesters who march under the banner of BLM or Palestine. This theme resonates so strongly with Robinson because of his own sense of personal victimisation at the hands of the British state and media.

He is especially aggrieved by the accusation that he circulated misinformation that stoked the riots and had egged on the rioters; he points out that while it was kicking off in Southport he was kicking back on a sun lounger in Cyprus and calling for calm. This accusation, he suggests, would have more purchase if his accusers themselves didn’t trade in spreading misinformation and stirring up racial tension. It would also have more purchase, he argues, if immigrants themselves didn’t brutally rape and murder people across British towns and cities.

Where Robinson goes wrong, however, is his tendency to paint all migrants with the same toxic brush, his tendency to go off-topic (he includes a clip from Ross Kemp’s “Extreme World” in which Kemp speaks to gang members in South Africa about how rape is a hobby) and to see uncontrolled immigration as part of some conspiracy on the part of self-hating elites to destroy Western culture. No doubt the elites are full of self-hating guilty liberals, but the idea that they’re deliberately trying to orchestrate the downfall of the West credits them with an agency they might not possess.

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Robinson’s most fervent critics seem to take a special pleasure in monitoring his myriad legal entanglements and will no doubt be thrilled to see him go to prison. They are the sort of progressive activists who, while advocating for maximum penal severity when it comes to people like Robinson, would plead clemency for “minoritised” violent offenders. They are not credible and shouldn’t be listened to.

Because Robinson, whatever else he is, is credible. He also deserves a proper hearing, not because he’s a teller of unpleasant truths, although he can be, but because if we’re to live in the multicultural utopia of balkanised Britain, then the grievances he voices demand to be heard and taken seriously. Of course progressives will recoil at this, but they created the sectarian shitshow of communal sensitivities and credible messengers so they had best prick up their ears.

Robinson’s chief problem is his tendency to elide his own personal grievances with the political woes of the people he claims to speak for. The draconian severity with which the authorities put down this summer’s riots is synonymous in his mind with what he sees as his own tyrannical persecution by the British state. The political risk for Robinson, then, is that he’s so preoccupied with the latter that it engulfs the former. But if he can rein in his narcissism and temper some of his rhetoric, who knows what heights this community leader might reach. And if he is jailed this week, he will be able to bathe in the musky smell of martyrdom and hope to return from prison with even greater renown and credibility.

And so India’s culture wars wearily carry on, pitching liberal secularists against Hindu nationalists yet again. This particular battle has already claimed its first life in Maharashtra: a 40-year-old electrician died in a stone-pelting contest provoked by an Instagram post about the indie drama. Meanwhile, 20-somethings at a Jammu hostel pummelled one another into hospital beds, after one of them voiced the rather outré opinion that the film was “worth watching”.

It most certainly wasn’t. It’s 138 minutes of my life that I will not get back. Here is a production that falls into the dominant genre in contemporary Indian filmmaking: the deranged docudrama. Militarism and a muscular Hinduism, ChatGPT scriptwriting and CGI cinematography, combine in these epic fantasies of unblushing Modi-ana, as myriad villains get their comeuppance: Muslim militants in The Kashmir Files, Pakistanis in Uri: The Surgical Strike, opposition parties in The Accidental Prime Minister, and all three in the biopic, PM Narendra Modi.

In The Kerala Story, Muslim fundamentalists are once again the villains of the piece. The theme is “love jihad”, an oxymoronic term that refers to a conspiracy theory now ubiquitous in India. Lascivious Muslim men, so Modi’s publicists have it, are seducing unsuspecting Hindu women only in order to convert them and increase the number of Muslim babies. This is the Indian version of the Great Replacement Theory, pedalled by the ruling BJP. Muslims are conspiring to become a majority, the argument goes, in order to impose sharia rule on Hindus and, ultimately, obliterate Hinduism altogether.

The director Sudipto Sen’s sleight of hand is to weld love jihad with another Hindu nationalist bugbear: actual jihad. So, we find Shalini, the tragic heroine, abandoning her nursing degree to take up with a Muslim man, who carries her away to an Isis boot camp in the Afghan desert. Her fate as a suicide bomber destined for Syria seems sealed. But then — spoiler alert — a drone, the deus ex machina of our times, spots her. She is whisked away to a Gitmo-style military prison, where she spills the beans about a ginormous terror network set on converting and killing Hindus in their millions. So far, so trite. So why are liberals up in arms?

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Sen’s spurious statistics, together with the echolalia of the unthinking press, seem to be the main source of outrage. Shalini has it that 32,000 Hindu women from Kerala, all victims of “love jihad”, lie buried in the sands of Syria. In interviews, Sen has stood by that number. Maths clearly isn’t his forte. Only around 500 Hindus convert to Islam every year — generally not to become Isis fighters but, in the main, to marry outside their faith. (At its peak in 2017, Isis counted a mere 37 Keralite recruits and sympathisers, as a convincing database put together by Sara Perlangeli and Dhruva Jaishankar shows.) But liberals need not worry about Sen’s trouble with numbers — or, indeed, his trouble with Muslims. For as propaganda goes, The Kerala Story is piss-poor. If anything, it reflects worse on Hindus than Muslims.

In fact, what the film does is show why it is so easy to convert Hindus. The impetus for Shalini’s conversion betrays not so much the pull of Islam as the push of Hinduism. Flashbacks reveal a life of stifling domesticity and sexual harassment. Evidently, Hindu patriarchy didn’t have much to recommend it. The same goes for the individualistic vacuity of Hindu family life, an instructive contrast with the communal conviviality of its Muslim counterpart.

Shalini, admittedly, might be overreading things here. If Muslim families seemed closer to her, it is because, generally speaking, Muslims in India are poorer than Hindus, and richer Indians have a preference for nuclear over extended families. Likewise, if Hindu women — in her experience — were more likely to be pawed and groped in shopping malls, it is largely because they are more likely to come out of the confines of the home. Nevertheless, Shalini is smitten by the pedestrian theology of her pious Muslim roommate, Asifa. The naughty gods of Hinduism, about as craven and lustful as in the Greek epics, are no match for the pensive prophet. And when Asifa throws a hijab over Shalini’s head, ridding her of unwanted male attention, the good Hindu girl is lost. So utterly convinced is Shalini of Islam’s virtues that not even ludicrously grim jihadists gleefully cutting up bodies and dismembering women for wearing lipstick can shake her faith. That this is how Hindu nationalists choose to depict women — by turns credulous and treacherous — is revealing.

Something, one suspects, is rotten in the state of Hinduism. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the Dalit architect of India’s constitution, put his finger on it in 1956, the last year of his life. After decades spent trying to reform religion, it dawned on him that women and the lower orders got a raw deal not because of the corruptions of Hindu belief but rather because of Hindu belief itself. It was, above all, a doctrine of “graded inequality”, a social order held together by “an ascending scale of hatred and a downward scale of contempt”. There was no more to it. He converted to Buddhism, as do thousands of Dalits every year on the anniversary of his birth.

The Hindu obsession with conversion, then, speaks to a constant source of insecurity among its believers. The system works only so long as everyone accepts their station, which is why, when even a few leave the fold, it sets off a moral panic. During the colonial period, the threat stemmed from that adventitious agent of emancipation, Christianity. A vestigial fear of the faith remains central to Hindu nationalist thought today, church burnings being common enough in the eastern tracts of India. But over the past 100 years or so, it was instead Islam that frightened the living daylights of caste Hindus, as I argue in my book Another India.

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Indeed, the very origins of Modi’s BJP lie in the fear of conversion. Its parent organisation, the Sangh Parivar, was born in the Twenties out of panic about lower caste conversions to Islam and Christianity. Most spectacularly, in 1981, more or less coinciding with the birth of the BJP, an entire village of Dalits embraced Islam. Class politics in India always needs to find a religious register. At the outset, these Dalits had contemplated converting to Buddhism before deciding against it, Islam being the epitome of subalternity. The shock of Islam was designed to draw Delhi’s attention to the injustices of the caste system as well as the enormity of state neglect.

In response, Brahmins embraced proselytisation — historically alien to Hinduism. Missionary orders were set up and converts won in elaborate shuddhi — purification — ceremonies. More recently, Modi’s reign has been coeval with the Ghar Wapsi campaign, a concerted drive to, as it were, “return” converts back to the House of Hinduism. Christians and Muslims are won over, often under duress, to their “true” faith, their foreign-sounding names replaced with suitably Hindu ones.

The war against “love jihad” is of a piece with this vision. Starting in the late 2000s, Hindu nationalists set about cracking down on miscegenation. These days, marauding gangs break up mixed couples in ice-cream parlours, cinema halls, and even register offices, forestalling marriages in the nick of time. It’s an uphill struggle, but Hindu nationalists seem to be winning. Interfaith relationships are on the decline.

All the same, and perhaps counterintuitively, liberals ought to take comfort from films like The Kerala Story. Sure, it offends the viewer’s intelligence, but I’m not convinced that the film should be banned because it offends Muslims. For in carping about conversion, not least the effortlessness with which it is secured, Sen and his ilk are unwittingly making the case against Hindu hierarchy: exposing the very real factors that push people away from the nationalists’ faith, rather than confirming the conspiracy theory about Islamism. Here, then, is a truth about Hindu nationalism. It’s brutally effective when violently evangelised, but the minute it tries to persuade, its propaganda goes hopelessly awry.

For years, they targeted me, calling me an “Islamophobe”. I am a Muslim. But I had had the temerity to call out Muslim establishment leaders who won’t acknowledge the Islamic extremism lying at the heart of crimes such as those of the Boston Marathon bombers. I am far from alone in suffering harassment on LoonWatch. Other Muslim reformers — such as Syrian-American physician Zuhdi Jasser and Pakistani-Canadian writer Raheel Raza — were also targeted; so, too, were ex-Muslims — including Somali-American author Ayaan Hirsi Ali — and agnostic thinkers such as comedian Bill Maher and scientist Richard Dawkins. Indeed, LoonWatch has denounced conservatives in general, as well as the FBI, the US military, the state of Israel and, more recently, Hindus and the state of India. I wondered: who was behind this network?

After a decade of research, I have revealed the architects of LoonWatch in my new book, Woke Army. They are none other than officials at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, which presents itself as the face of American Islam and the nation’s largest Muslim “civil rights” organisation. It is anything but. Rather, CAIR is a front for an extremist form of Islam. (The organisation didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.) I also discovered that it is not acting alone. Although the internet often makes cancellations seem like spontaneous uprisings, the kind of character assassinations taking place on LoonWatch are targeted attacks by a loosely organised coalition of leftists and Islamist sympathisers. They seek to destroy, in the court of public opinion, anyone who strays from the “progressive” party line.

You’ve heard their catechisms: racism, not freedom, is America’s bedrock; white people are oppressors and black people are oppressed; meritocracy is white supremacy. And, as my own trolls so often implied, it is unconscionable to link Islam to the ghouls who murder in the name of Allah. Opinions straying from these principles cannot be tolerated.

These puritans are prolific beyond LoonWatch. I first encountered them after the beheading of my friend and colleague, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, in 2002. He was kidnapped in Karachi and then killed for being American, Jewish and of Israeli heritage. Danny’s savage murder in the name of Islam propelled me from the news pages to the opinion pages, where I rejected the extremism of my friend’s killers and advocated for an Islam compatible with human rights, women’s rights, and secular governance. For this, I was pilloried, labelled not only an “Islamophobe” but also a “Zionist media whore”. I was accused of being an agent of Israel, and of having sexually transmitted diseases. My son, born after his father abandoned us, was called a “bastard”.

The creation of LoonWatch — a watering-hole for these extremists — presented an opportunity to unmask some of the individuals enabling this hate. In 2018, I filed a defamation lawsuit, Nomani v. John Doe et al., winning the power to subpoena internet service providers for the real identities of 48 “John Doe” anonymous attackers. This led me to a treasure-trove of files, including one that revealed the identity of “Zuhair Thomas”.

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His order was recorded in GoDaddy’s internal “Shopper Info” files with the note: “Verified by Fraud Dept — Customer OK”. But data in the documents makes it possible to identify “Zuhair” as Muhammad Tauseef Akbar, a staffer at CAIR’s Chicago chapter, who used the moniker “Garibaldi” to harass critics of the organisation. Over the years, the bills for the account he set up were paid by the credit card of Ahmed Rehab, a longtime official with CAIR’s national headquarters and the executive director of CAIR Chicago. Rehab’s email, home address and work phone number appeared on the documents, although he used “Emperor” as his fake name on LoonWatch. This GoDaddy account also bought other websites on which CAIR critics were anonymously attacked — including IslamophobiaToday.com and IslamophobiaSucks.com.

Akbar and Rehab didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment, but an attorney did respond on behalf of the anonymous “John Doe” defendants. She wrote little more than: “My name is Lena Masri, and I represent persons affected by the subpoenas you have issued against GoDaddy and Twitter.” Lena Masri is the National Litigation and Civil Rights Director at CAIR.

It’s clear that Muslim ideologues have allied themselves with leftist activists to exploit the freedoms of the West. Their aim, which they are pursuing relentlessly and often viciously, is to utterly discredit Muslim reformers, in order to promote a system of beliefs that runs counter to democratic values. These individuals, and the organisations they work for, seem determined to eliminate as much discussion of Islamic extremism as possible; the actual enemies of civilisation, in this twisted narrative, include the “Israeli apartheid state”, “white supremacists”, and more recently “Hindu extremists”. And these anonymous trolls have borrowed one of the most pernicious tools of the American Left to fuel their propaganda machine: critical race theory, which divides the world into white oppressors and oppressed people of colour. In the LoonWatch world, any criticism of Islam is a racist ploy to harm all Muslims. This framing is a diabolical co-opting of civil-rights language aimed at protecting people who are in fact determined to stamp out the civil rights of their critics. But we have reached a turning point.

Establishment Muslims and their far-Left sympathisers strike more openly now. Earlier this month, on the floor of the Virginia Senate, state Senator Ghazala Hashmi, a Muslim American from India (no relation to Javad Hashmi), hurled the “white supremacist” smear at another Indian-American woman of colour, albeit a Hindu one. Her name is Suparna Dutta. Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin appointed her to the Virginia Board of Education last year. On January 31, this year, the Virginia Senate Privileges and Elections Committee voted unanimously, 14-0, for her nomination. Every Democrat was on her side. But when the issue arose in the state Senate, a cohort of allegedly “progressive” Democrats derailed her appointment, in a 22-18 vote straight down party lines.

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What had Dutta, an advocate for meritocracy in education, done to deserve this? She had had the gall to call out the educrats who were behind the illegal dismemberment of the merit-based admissions process at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) — replacing it with a race-based process that, a federal judge ruled, discriminates against Asian students. In other words, in the name of “anti-racism”, real racism is being practised. With Dutta, in 2020, I got involved in the campaign to oppose this new “progressive” policy at TJ, where my son was a pupil. At one point, a school board member promoted the anti-Israel, antisemitic narratives of CAIR officials. At another point, teachers were instructed not to call the 9/11 hijackers “terrorists”.

Just as Dutta was labelled a “white supremacist”, I, too, was labelled a bigot for protesting against these policies. In September 2020, Virginia Education Secretary Atif Qarni, a Democrat, barred me from speaking at a town hall meeting he was hosting, though I was there as the TJ parent-teacher association representative. He claimed I belong to an “extremist” organisation: the Muslim Reform Movement, which advocates for women’s rights, human rights and secular governance.

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Over the past several days, I have worked with Dutta through the night to trace the roots of the campaign against her. The day after the Select Committee approved her nomination, February 1, Dutta got into a back-and-forth with fellow board member Anne Holton, the wife of powerful Democratic Senator Tim Kaine. Dutta was supporting an effort to remove divisive ideology from Virginia’s history curriculum. Holton advocated for socialism and said the US Constitution wasn’t “remarkable”. Dutta, referencing her experience as an immigrant from India, begged to differ. This enraged her critics.

On the night of February 5, the Twitter account @RedForEdVA — a teachers’ union group that self-describes as supporting socialism — posted grainy photos from a parents’ rally that took place in Fairfax County, Virginia, in October 2021, which far-Right activists had tried to hijack, unbeknown to Dutta and other parents. By the next morning, activists on Twitter were equating the protest to the infamous Charlottesville Unite The Right rally and and the riots of January 6. Shortly afterwards, a Facebook account, Herndon-Reston Indivisible, shared an online campaign, led by the “Virginia Grassroots Coalition”, which includes about 51 far-Left groups; it declared: “Don’t let the Virginia Senate Confirm a Far-Right Extremist to the Board of Education.”

In six days, Dutta had gone from unanimously approved to being a pariah, because of beliefs and events that have nothing to do with her. Plenty of Muslim leaders publicly trashed Dutta, including Raheel Ahmed, a Pakistani-American mosque leader in Manassas, Virginia, and Atif Qarni, the former education secretary who smeared me as an “extremist”. Democrat leaders apparently accepted their criticisms unquestioningly. After Dutta was rejected, Democratic lawmaker Chap Petersen told constituents that “mosque elders” with important connections had called him. Those familiar with the calls say that one was from Rafi Ahmed, the Pakistani-American chair of an organisation representing northern Virginia mosques, and that his message was: “Vote no on Suparna Dutta. She belongs to an anti-Muslim extremist Hindu organisation.” Ahmed shared no evidence, and didn’t respond to requests for comment. He is part of a network of Muslim establishment organisations. It includes CAIR.

This network is dangerous. It purports to stand for the admirable principles of racial justice and equality. But it is distracting the public from illiberal Islamism by loudly and perpetually accusing the institutions, history and people of the United States of blanket racism. Claiming to have the moral high ground, the Woke Army attacks anything and anybody that stands in its way. It’s time to see this project for what it is.

Khan was shot last week at a political procession he had convened as part of his reckless agitation to topple Pakistan’s legitimate government. The failed assailant confessed he wished to assassinate Khan for leading Pakistanis astray; he succeeded only in lionising his target. Khan’s supporters are spinning his survival as evidence of their master’s superhuman qualities. But he is neither martyr nor saint: he remains one of the most pernicious political personalities in the world today.

Khan was first lofted into the prime minister’s office in 2018, in a vote manipulated by what Pakistan’s human rights commission described as the “blatant, aggressive and unabashed” interference of his sponsors in Pakistan’s mighty military, which has governed the Islamic republic directly or indirectly for most of its existence. Opponents of Khan were relentlessly harried and intimidated. Many Pakistanis experienced the election as a “soft coup”.

It is a measure of Khan’s incompetence that, despite the backing of the khakis, his party failed to secure a majority in parliament and had to enter into coalition to form government. One theory in Pakistan is that the military denied Khan a majority to keep him in check.

Khan had spent long years auditioning for the military’s favour. His very public conversion from dim-witted tabloid fodder in the West to a chillingly prudish regurgitator of anti-Western bromides in Pakistan eventually brought him the reward he craved. Some argued that Khan was wearing a mask. If so, the mask devoured his face. Khan, like the Egyptian radical Sayyid Qutb, recoiled from the West with the rage of a convert.

In 2005, for instance, Newsweek published a short article on the alleged desecration of the Koran by US soldiers. The story went unnoticed until Khan, sensing an opportunity, read every line of it at a press conference. “This is what the US is doing,” he bemoaned, “desecrating the book on which our entire faith is based.” Khan’s outraged performance provoked days of religious rioting in which 17 people were killed and dozens more gravely injured. The story was later debunked and retracted. But Khan never showed a hint of contrition. Instead, seven years after that inaugural bloodbath, he went to the hospital where Malala Yousafzai was given emergency treatment and advanced a theological defence for the Taliban’s “holy war”.

The public purveyor of iman — faith —struggled in private, according to those around him, with the haram habits he had picked up in the West. One of his ex-wives told Vanity Fair that Khan sniffed huge quantities of cocaine every night during their 10-month marriage in 2015. The momin who never tired of delivering hectoring prelections on human dignity to the West apparently also used racist language in private. He could not have been unaware of the consequences of such bigotry: after all, a kinsman of his had overseen the slaughter of three million Bengalis — a people denigrated by Pakistani officials as “black monkeys” — in 1971.

Nonetheless, as prime minister, Khan pledged to remake Pakistan into a new Medina. He took a third wife, a fully veiled clairvoyant who claimed to have had visions of his triumphs, and subordinated his temporal duties to the task of establishing himself as the champion of the Islamic ummah.

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His reign embodied the confusions that have stalked Pakistan ever since its invention in 1947. Is it the homeland of Indian Muslims? Or is it the truncated residue of the medieval Arab-Islamic invaders of India? No other country celebrates its own despoilers as Pakistan does. The Arabs had stormed Sindh, now in Pakistan, in the 8th Century and spent weeks slaughtering the natives and plundering their riches. But those conquerors are the heroes in Pakistani lore, and the country’s great public works carry their name. Faith has complicated Pakistanis’ relationship to Pakistan: are they natives or aliens, progeny of the soil or foreign implants on it? Are they Indian or Arab? These aren’t academic questions: the massacre of Bengalis in 1971 was animated by the belief that they were, as the US consul-general in Dhaka at the time put it, “heretics” corrupted by veneration for their pre-Islamic customs.

Khan exemplified this crisis of identity. As prime minister, he behaved less like the leader of his country and more like the delegate of a pre-eminent global community posted in its South Asian outpost. His identification with faith eclipsed all other affinities. He radiated contempt for India, the land of his kith, and raised the spectre of nuclear war with it — but claimed kinship with faraway Turkey and Saudi Arabia in the name of faith.

The worsening plight of ordinary Pakistanis became the least of Khan’s concerns in office once he set himself up as the tribune of oppressed Muslims and began routinely lashing out at the West and other non-Muslim governments for their treatment of his co-religionists. But just as the preacher of austere faith could reconcile himself allegedly to the ecstasies of cocaine in private, the champion of Muslim dignity made convenient exceptions to his own rules in public.

The man who decried France for its “Islamophobia” gladly pitched for Zac Goldsmith’s mayoral campaign even as it sought to smear his Muslim opponent as a terror sympathiser.

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Denouncing Indian democracy as a sham and all of India as the 21^st-century avatar of Nazi Germany for the depredations of the Hindu-supremacist regime of Narendra Modi, Khan shrugged off the concentration camps in Xinjiang, where China is torturing millions of Muslims by re-enacting some of the most degrading atrocities from the Nazi repertoire. Heading a system that formally grants its religious minorities the status of second-tier citizens, bans them legally from holding the state’s high offices and enshrines capital punishment for blasphemy against Islam in law, Khan pushed a resolution through parliament castigating Emanuel Macron for victimising France’s Muslim minorities. Vilifying the West for its prejudices, he became the most vocal champion and apologist of the Taliban.

Self-unawareness, the condition of leading a state forged in victimhood, matured into self-destructive delusion. Khan equated tweets and incoherent rants against Modi— another exponent of religious nationalism who wants to turn India into a Hindu facsimile of Pakistan—as diplomatic victories for Pakistan. He received succour from supposedly “liberal” voices whose revulsion for Modi’s brand of nationalism turned them, absurdly, into apologists for Khan’s variant of it.

In the end, it was Pakistan’s military that became unsettled by Khan’s ruinous fixations. Khan, who turned up in Moscow as Vladimir Putin’s esteemed guest on the day the Russian president launched the invasion of Ukraine, had become intolerable even for an outfit that has supported terrorism for decades. The ringmasters had treated him as a pliable monkey; but he, addled by power, was going rogue and threatening to burn down the lucrative circus they had built.

The opposition, invigorated by the growing rift between the erstwhile collaborators, called a vote of confidence in April. Khan’s claim that the military was colluding with his political rivals sounded far-fetched because it loathes the Sharifs, who lost to Khan in 2018, even more. But the military did abandon him and refuse to come to his rescue. Orphaned, he became the first prime minister to be thrown out of office by a vote in parliament.

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Out of power, Khan amplified a self-serving backstory: he described himself as the casualty of a sinister plot by America and its agents in Pakistan. Israel, naturally, was added as a co-conspirator. Khan then toiled hard, according to Islamabad, to sabotage a financial package from the International Monetary Fund to help Pakistan after it was devasted by biblical floods.  Once again, the hardships of his own people did not seem to worry the internationalist who was more preoccupied with the welfare of the Palestinians and Indian and European Muslims.

Khan’s gambit began yielding profits: in a country conditioned by decades of anti-Western, anti-Hindu and anti-Jewish rhetoric, a significant section of the society came to view him as a soldier of Islam and a victim of its enemies. His party won a series of by-elections.

Then, in October, the Election Commission of Pakistan convicted Khan of pocketing gifts from foreign dignitaries, disqualified him from membership of parliament, and barred him from public office for five years. An investigation published by the Financial Times in July disclosed that a Pakistani conman currently facing a possible sentence of 291 years in a US jail for financial fraud had funnelled millions of dollars to Khan’s party via a charity. But the revelations only strengthened the conviction of the faithful. And they answered Khan’s call to bring down the government of Pakistan through protests and marches.

Khan has already accused his successor, Shehbaz Sharif, of orchestrating the attack on him — and threatened grave consequences if the prime minister refuses to quit. Khan lives. And we should feel a measure of gratitude for this: he is a husband and a father. But Khan has seldom exhibited sympathy for others and is now threatening to intensify his street protests. So our gratitude must be tempered with some anxiety at what might lie ahead for the country he claims to love. As a Pakistani lawyer who has worked with Khan in the past told me on the day of the shooting: “The only person who benefits from the shooting on Mr Khan is Mr Khan.”

This was Pakistan’s third blasphemy-related incident in just seven days. Earlier that week, a mob had set fire to a police station after it refused to hand over a man accused of desecrating the Quran. A couple of days earlier, four men were arrested for asking the local mosque to make a funeral announcement for a Christian.

Pakistan is only one of 12 Muslim-majority countries to carry the death penalty for blasphemy; 20 others implement harsh prison sentences. And blasphemy laws are frequently cited. Over the past fortnight, they have been used to censor schoolbooks in Northern Syria, curb digital freedom in Indonesia, send a Saudi man to death row over a tweet, and sentence renowned Egyptian lawyer and thinker Ahmed Abdo Maher to five years in prison.

It is in Pakistan, though, where the crime of blasphemy is most ferociously punished. But not through the courts. Pakistan likes to call itself a “democratic republic”, and therefore shies away from actually judicially executing anyone for sacrilege — unlike, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia. But the state has been known to turn a blind eye to Islamist mobs meting out vigilante justice. Many of the perpetrators actually argue that it is the state’s “failure to hang blasphemers” which means punishment has to be carried out extrajudicially. This claim was echoed in the aftermath of the Sialkot killing by the leader of the Islamist party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazl (JUI-F), who said: “If the state won’t punish those who insult the prophet then such incidents will happen.”

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The Islamist mobs are now so emboldened that they will freely target not only religious minorities, but also dissenting Muslims — the “wrong” kind of Muslims — even if they practise and believe in Islam. They have burned down Christian homes, vandalised Hindu temples and destroyed “sacrilegious” mosques belonging to the Ahmadiyya Muslim sect; they have lynched university students, 10-year-olds and even those who had memorised the Quran by heart.

The vigilantes gain their strength from two contrasting, but similarly morally corrupt, sources.

The first, of course, is the Pakistani state itself. The military, who are the de facto rulers of the country, prop up radical Islamist outfits as assets. These range from militia, which might give the state strategic influence in a neighbouring nations, to Islamist pressure groups, which would keep civilian leaders in check if the army’s stooges felt like staging a coup. Groups like the JUI-F could easily mobilise madrassa students against any authority figures by accusing them of working against Islam.

The current Prime Minister, Imran Khan, is really just a puppet, maintaining the democratic façade of this military-ruled realm. He described the Sialkot lynching as a “day of shame” for Pakistan. But he also sends unhelpfully mixed messages about the radical Islamists Tehrik-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), whose slogans the lynch mob were chanting.

The TLP has a powerful hold on the state, which it manipulates through orchestrated street violence. It was formally banned in April for its sustained violent action over the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. But then, in November, after weeks of violence in which four police officers were killed, and dozens of civilians injured, the TLP was removed from the terror list and 2,000 detained members were released. I’m sure Khan’s motivation is partly ideological; back in April, he was reassuring the group that they “shared the same goals”: to eradicate blasphemy against Islam. But I’m sure, too, that the two million Islamist votes that the TLP mustered in the 2018 elections had something to do with it.

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Khan has also, on several occasions, vowed to export Islamic blasphemy laws to the West, so that people over there are similarly “scared of blaspheming against our prophet”. Khan already has many allies in this quest: when Western media refuse to publish the images that lead to satirists or teachers being massacred by jihadists, blasphemy law is upheld. It is reaffirmed whenever educational institutions are intimidated into shunning any critique of Islam, or any learning that makes Islamists uncomfortable. Blasphemy laws are also endorsed when the Council of Europe celebrates Islamic sexism by synonymising the hijab with freedom. The Islamic blasphemy law was formally implemented when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that critique of Islam’s prophet goes beyond the limits of free speech.

Freedom of speech is a now rapidly shrinking human right. For instance, the term “Islamophobia” is conveniently used by progressives to paint satire, or critique of the religion, as racism against the entire Muslim people. Of course, moderate Muslims in the West respond to Islamist violence by excommunicating the radicals among their community, echoing exactly what the jihadists say of them: they are not following “true Islam”. But this is a cop-out: it still allows the moderates to partake in outrage over ‘offences’ such as blasphemy, while shunning any responsibility towards addressing the most violent manifestations of that outrage.

As a result, while Islam remains the only religion that still promotes punishment by death, progressive voices don’t seem particularly interested in preventing that practice in the Muslim world. This absolute dearth of resistance emboldens Islamist leaders to call for global blasphemy codes, using tactics reminiscent of Western social justice warriors: they equate the drawing of cartoons with perpetrations of Muslim “genocide”, and accuse anyone who questions these claims of having a phobia of Islam.

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And yet, as long as the law in around two thirds of Muslim countries upholds harsh penalties for criticising Islam — and as long as Islamists are killing individuals over cartoons published in the West — fear of Islam seems perfectly rational.

There is perhaps no place where this fear is more rational than in Pakistan, where all it takes is an allegation of blasphemy for a lynch mob to attack, where a cabinet minister justifies the latest mob violence by saying that “murders happen when emotions are high”, and where the Prime Minister lauds the world’s most notorious terrorist, Osama Bin Laden, as a “martyr”.

The hollow leadership of Pakistan won’t address blasphemy-related violence unless it’s under international pressure. This should start with the West’s self-avowed moderate Muslims, who should take a clear and unequivocal stance that prioritises humanity over their religion. For if they cannot muster the moral courage to say that no one should be killed for blasphemy regardless of what Islam says, or doesn’t say, they might as well stand with the Sialkot mob.

For many, the ethnicity and heritage of the only person facing charges in this case, Ali Harbi Ali, were wholly irrelevant to his alleged behaviour. Acknowledging that Ali is of Somali background, we were told, is racist and xenophobic. He must only be identified as British.

As someone who was born in Somalia, I find this absurd. Of course a suspect is not a murderer because he has a Somali background — and Ali is not a murderer until proven as such. But denouncing facts as racist — especially when the person in question was referred to Prevent, and police and security services believe he may have been inspired by al-Shabaab in Somalia — forces a dangerous ignorance on the public.

Yet it is just one of a number of fallacies that continue to dominate almost every discussion about Islamist-driven terrorism — fallacies that are promoted by both the media and British authorities. Indeed, it strikes me that our efforts to counter Islamist attacks are hindered by at least three other misconceptions: our insistence on describing a perpetrator as a “lone wolf”, our obsession with online self-radicalisation, and the idea that “all extremisms are created equal”.

Take that first fallacy. As unpleasant as it may be to acknowledge, I suspect numerous victims of Islamist extremism might be alive today, if those in charge of preventing terrorism recognised that Islamist extremists are anything but lone wolves.

In a liberal society, it is appealing to think of suspects of Islamist terror as solitary actors. As a matter of principle, we uphold the importance of individual freedoms, rights, and responsibilities, while our judicial system assumes that individuals are responsible for their actions. We also recognise the importance of not maligning an entire community because of the extremist views of a few of their fellow believers. This is particularly crucial when the historical relationship between a particular minority and their new country is fraught with memories of colonialism.

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But while individuals responsible for terrorist attacks may conduct their attacks alone, they still emerge out of communities or networks of like-minded individuals, whether in-person or online. They learn from teachers, imams or instructors the radical ideas that inspire their violence. This is not to say that their entire family or community is extremist — only that these individuals find and are exposed to people who are. Little is known about the background of the murder suspect, Ali, but we can be certain that if found guilty, he would not have plunged a knife into a total stranger, possibly picked at random, wholly of his own accord. Someone or some group would have inspired these actions.

Since last Friday, we’ve heard from a number of people who reportedly knew Ali, all of whom have expressed shock at his alleged crime. Yet it seems hugely unlikely that no one in his immediate circle would have picked up on any extremist tendencies. After all, the Somalian communities are very social. Unlike in traditional Western families, where individuals live an atomised life within an atomised society, a Somali family typically lives together in one household, where everyone is involved in everyone else’s business.

Gossip is a way of life. Solitude is not an option, even more so during the pandemic when families not only lived together but were home more often. It is likely, therefore, that key signs of radicalisation — a shift in language, withdrawal from society, increased frequency of praying and attending mosque — would be noticed by various family members.

When that does happen, you might expect a person’s family to become more involved, to pull them back into their community. But that isn’t always the case. Imagine, for example, that you are a family member of a potentially radicalised individual from a highly tight-knit community. You notice something of concern — but might it be best to keep quiet? Are you a sinner if you report your brother to a programme led by non-Muslims? What does it mean for your relationship with God and the afterlife? What kind of traitor would report their own blood to the authorities?

Or perhaps you are just a non-Muslim colleague or friend of the individual. You may notice a change in behaviour, but are you really going to go forward and report them, with the possibility of being labelled a racist or an Islamophobe? Who would report a potentially innocent person, just for observing their religion?

Lone wolves, then, do not come out of nowhere. They are inspired by other radicals and they are noticed by their community. The problem is that the community then keeps quiet.

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A similar fallacy looms over our understanding of online radicalisation, which does not occur in a silo, between the individual and their computer screen. The individual has to be susceptible, in a place of vulnerability, where Islamic radicalism can easily set in.

Though there is much about Ali that we are yet to learn, we do know that his father was Harbi Ali Kullane, a former government official in Somalia. Since the attack, reports have presented Kullane’s Twitter profile as a testament to assimilation, displaying his support for Captain Tom and the England football team. It has also been reported that, while working in Somalia, he faced threats from al-Shabaab.

And yet I suspect his attitude to his new country is more nuanced than has been presented. It is striking, for example, that not a single news outlet has flagged a tweet by Kullane from 2017, in which he suggests: “the 5-pointed star [on the Somali flag] represents the aspiration of a nation and the misery inflicted by British colonialism. Let’s not sugar coat this #Somalia.” Given that Kullane moved to the UK in the Nineties, his comment suggests an antipathy to Britain that has so far been ignored.

The last fallacy that must be confronted is the belief that all forms of extremism are created equal and should be treated as such. Under the British counter-terrorism Prevent programme, Islamism is lumped together with other forms of extremism, such as far-Right extremism, and handled with a similar approach. But while Right-wing extremism is a threat that should not be downplayed, its causes and motivations are totally unrelated to radical Islamists. They should be distinct and handled separately.

The only way to prevent Islamist terrorist attacks is to understand the lexicon of the Islamists. It is vital to understand the historic heroes that inspire them, the hadiths that speak to them, the myths and legends that motivate them, and the materials that are put into their hands. It is important to know not just the history of Islam, but also the history of the nation that is connected to the radicalised individual.

This kind of specialisation is not possible when so many in the UK cry Islamophobia at every turn. The only way to ask family and community members to come forward and report potentially radicalised individuals is to win their confidence. Individuals have to feel that they can safely approach the authorities without repercussion. They also deserve to know that the situation will be handled by someone who deeply understands the issues at hand. As Nik Adams, a counter-terrorism police officer, explained brilliantly, we need people who can recognise “how significant the seemingly insignificant might be”.

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Given the ineffectiveness of Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy, and the blinkered approach to reporting since Sir David’s murder, that will be an uphill struggle. But it is not impossible: Prevent is undergoing an independent review, led by the capable William Shawcross, that will report in December and produce suggestions on how it can be improved.

More importantly, I believe that, by and large, the Islamic terrorist narrative is waning. al-Qaeda is a skeleton of what it was two decades ago, while the spectre of ISIS continues to serve as a real-life deterrent to what living under a caliphate requires. Even the Muslim Brotherhood narrative is stale and petering out. Yes, the Taliban may have taken control of Afghanistan, and the threat of Islamism in Africa remains deeply concerning and often ignored. But taken in its entirety, radical Islam does not have the same potency it once did.

So even if Sir David’s death is proven to be a terrorist incident, the defeat of radical Islam in Britain is still attainable. But achieving that requires us to bin the fallacies regurgitated after every attack. If we don’t, the pattern of seemingly random terrorist violence will persist.

True, even in 2021, some groups such as the resurgent Taliban and Boko Haram — to say nothing of the Iranian regime — remain committed to a type of Islamist militancy that includes an emphasis on violence, with all the human suffering that entails. But for the most part, jihadist militancy has proved unpopular among Muslims, often inviting a violent counter-reaction. Its promise of an Islamist dream state has lost its appeal.

Yet Islamists in the West appear to have found a possible solution that sidesteps, at least for now, the use of explicit violence. The core of this alternative strategy is to focus as much as possible on dawa.

Nearly 20 years after 9/11, Westerners still remain unfamiliar with dawa. In theory, the term simply refers to the call to Islam, a kind of invitation; Westerners would recognise it as part of a proselytising mission. In practice, however, Islamists rely on dawa as a comprehensive propaganda, PR and brainwashing system designed to make all Muslims embrace an Islamist programme while converting as many non-Muslims as possible.

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Among Western analysts, dawa — which became a tool of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 20^th century — has traditionally received far less attention than militant jihad, though observers have emphasised its importance in the “humanitarian” activities of Hamas.

In Unveiled, the ex-Muslim Yasmine Mohammed compellingly describes her difficult marriage to the Egyptian jihadist Essam Marzouk. Yasmine commented on the rivalry that exists between jihadists (such as her ex-husband) and ostensibly “non-violent” Islamists:

“The truth is that Essam hated the [Muslim] Brotherhood: he thought Islamists were a bunch of pansies. He was actually aligned with a more militant group in Egypt called Al Jihad, who were the Egyptian wing of Al Qaeda. Both Islamists and jihadis have the same goal — to spread Islam — but they have different methods. Islamists want to do this through passive means such as politics, immigration and childbirth.”

This important point is often lost on politicians in Western countries. For no matter what misguided retired CIA officials may claim, groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood are neither moderate organisations nor pluralist partners in civil society. Islamist groups are certainly not likely to prevent the radicalisation of young Muslims. Instead, as one observer noted more than a decade ago, “the history of the Brotherhood movement shows, in fact, that it has operated by and large not as a firewall against jihadism, but as a fertile incubator of radical ideas in a variety of locales”.

In a cynical way, Islamists achieve far more through dawa than when they confine themselves to simply blowing things up and stabbing people to death. The threat is not as obvious. Jihad and the use of violence tend to provoke an immediate response. With dawa, on the other hand, it is possible to talk about charity, spirituality and religion — and then compare it to normal religious proselytising missions. In a free society, what reasonable person would take issue with that?

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But dawa is also about building networks: local, regional and international. In The Call, Krithika Varagur revealed both the enormous global scale and opaque nature of these efforts. Saudi Arabia, in particular, has channelled billions of dollars into dawa — with much of it directed into the US.

In the West, these regimes are not given much thought, nor is the Islamist infrastructure in the United States. Nonetheless, Islamism is spreading within Western institutions, and it’s largely thanks to an unlikely alliance: dawa has recognised the alluring power of “woke”, and has started to adopt the language of civil rights and multiculturalism.

Of course, this is not an entirely American phenomenon, but the energy in our progressive movement has taken this cooperation one step further. In France, by contrast, “Islamo-gauchisme” (Islamo-Leftism) is much more likely to be correctly identified as a threat to the model of universal, secular and republican citizenship. In Britain, it remains less prominent, confined to fringe politicians such as George Galloway, who believes that “the progressive movement around the world and the Muslims have the same enemies”.

Yet as historian Daniel Pipes has noted, the relationship between Islamism and extreme Leftism is nothing new. In 2007, Oskar Lafontaine, former chairman of Germany’s Social Democratic party, noted: “Islam depends on community, which places it in opposition to extreme individualism, which threatens to fail in the West. [In addition,] the devout Muslim is required to share his wealth with others. The Leftist also wants to see the strong help the weak.”

But the internal tension between “wokeism” and Islamism is never far away. Just look at Al Jazeera, which uploads documentaries about transgender rights on to its social media channel, while broadcasting sermons suggesting husbands should beat their wives on its Arabic station.

Nevertheless, the two movements do share objectives. Both are anti-West and anti-American. Both have a critical attitude towards “capitalism” based on individualism. True, the Islamists have been around for much longer. But Islamist ideologues are willing to co-operate with non-Muslim Leftists as long as it serves their purposes.

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To their credit, some on the Left refuse to countenance Islamism, as they become increasingly aware of the contradiction between supporting universal human rights (including women’s rights) and the demands of Islamists. In France, for example, the centre-Left former Prime Minister Manuel Valls courageously denounced Islamo-Leftism without the least hesitation.

In the United States, however, such vocal opposition from the Left is increasingly rare. Indeed, at the 2019 Netroots Nation conference — America’s “largest annual conference for progressives” — multiple panel discussions and training sessions reflected the Islamist agenda, frequently coalescing around a critique of Israel while neglecting the toxic role played by Hamas in perpetuating the conflict. Meanwhile, Linda Sarsour, a feminist organiser and co-chair of the “Women’s March”, has made her support for Islamism more explicit: “You’ll know when you’re living under Shariah law if suddenly all your loans and credit cards become interest-free. Sounds nice, doesn’t it?”

In government, too, Islamism’s capture of progressivism has become increasingly clear. Turkey’s Islamist President Erdogan might lead one of the world’s most brutal and repressive regimes, but that hasn’t stopped Ilhan Omar, the Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, from expressing support for him. No doubt she was inspired by Erdogan last year when he proclaimed that “social justice is in our book”, and that “Turkey is the biggest opportunity for western countries in the fight against xenophobia, Islamophobia, cultural racism and extremism”.

Erdogan, in effect, was explicitly using progressive rhetoric. It’s a move that’s since been mirrored in Iran. The Tehran Times ­— which describes itself as “a loud voice of the Islamic Revolution” — recently attacked former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for his “deep-rooted Islamophobia”. And in March, Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif “lauded the determination of Islamic countries to address Islamophobia as one of the main challenges facing the Islamic Ummah [community in the West]”. Islamists, in other words, are becoming skilled at wrapping themselves in a mantle of woke words, while engaging in systematic brutality and repression within their own countries.

To this new alliance between Islamism and progressive rhetoric, there is no simple response. Dawa, by its very nature, is inherently more difficult to fight than jihad. But those who believe, as I do, in a free, open, pluralist society need to be aware of the nature and magnitude of this new challenge. After two decades of fighting Islamist terrorism, we have a new and more subtle foe to contend with. Wokeism has long been regarded as a dangerous phenomenon — but only now are we starting to see why.

The facts are appalling. They are grindingly familiar and disturbingly novel – a collision between the murderous certainties of fundamentalist Islam; a well-meaning school lecture; and the mendacious, conflagratory power of the internet. On October 6, Mr Paty, 47, a much-liked history and geography teacher in a dull Paris suburb, produced for his middle school civics class a pair of the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed which provoked the attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine five years ago.

How can publishing such cartoons be justified, he asked the teenagers, if they offend people of the Islamic faith? Where does the freedom of expression end and respect for others’ feelings begin?

These questions are not easy, Mr Paty explained. That is why fundamental principles exist in democratic states such as France to help people of different faiths and opinions to get along without murdering one another (as they have in not-so-distant parts of French history). The complexities are the lesson. But this lesson cost Mr Paty his life. Ten days later he was dead – decapitated by a 19-year-old Chechen refugee to France as he walked home from school.

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One of the pupils, a 13-year-old Muslim girl, had given her father a misleadingly lurid account of the lesson – from which she was absent. The father, with the help of a radical imam, started a campaign on the internet to have the teacher sacked. The lesson – or a false and inflammatory account of the lesson – became a cause celèbre on radical Islamic sites on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Parents at the school received as many as 10 messages day, some from Algeria and other Islamic countries, calling Mr Paty a “criminal”, a “thug” and a “paedophile” and demanding that he should be sacked.

The murderer, Abdullakh Anzorov, was a Chechen Muslim, born in Moscow 19 years ago. He did not know Mr Paty or the school. He lived in Evreux in Normandy, 60 miles away.  It is likely — but not certain — that he acted alone, enraged by the lies that he had read on the web.

Anzorov followed Mr Paty as he left the Collège du Bois d’Aulne in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, north west of Paris last Friday evening. He attacked him with a 12-inch butcher’s knife, stabbing him in the arms and abdomen and then beheading him. Anzorov was shot dead by police a few minutes later.

Twelve people have been arrested, including his father, grandfather and brother and the parent and imam (apparently unknown to Anzorov) who started the hysterical hue and cry online.

I happen to know Conflans-Saint Honorine. I used to go to a Lycée close to the Collège du Bois d’Aulne to talk to their English classes about journalism, football, France and Britain. Conflans is not the sort of the troubled inner Paris suburb where poverty and crime is rampant. It is a pretty village now encased in a concrete commuter belt for the modestly well-off of several different origins and  religions. The kids I met there were always polite and curious.

A large, shocked crowd of pupils, parents and other well-wishers which gathered outside the school on Saturday included many Muslims. “Something like this, here? It’s unthinkable,” said Brahim, a local man who is running a campaign to build a mosque (without any opposition).

In the grim litany of islamist terror attacks in France in recent years, the killing of one teacher may seem relatively unimportant. It will soon be the five-year anniversary of the Bataclan and associated attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015 which killed 130 people. Nine months earlier, in February 2015, 17 people died in the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher supermarket – for which 12 alleged associates of the terrorists are currently on trial.

But forget the numbers. Mr Paty’s lone murder has struck a raw and angry nerve in France – and not just because of the appalling manner of his death. Tens of thousands of people turned out to mourn and honour the teacher in demonstrations in Paris and other French cities on Sunday.

Secularism is France’s state religion, the soil in which French democracy grows. The state guarantees a freedom to believe, and a freedom not to believe. It must otherwise be neutral on all religious questions. Teachers in state schools, though poorly paid and often criticised, are regarded as a front-line infantry, or secular priesthood, which passes on these Republican values of tolerance, freedom of expression and secularism to new generations.

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The fact that Mr Paty was brutally murdered precisely for trying to explain these principles has made him into a kind of Republican martyr. There is talk of him being buried in the Panthéon, the secular cathedral on the Paris left bank which is the last resting place of great French men and women.

Mr Paty, though, was not the only target of last Friday’s attack. Anzorov also left a garbled message for the President, posted moments after the murder: “To Macron, leader of the infidels, I have executed one of your dogs of hell…Calm down others like him or we will inflict on you a severe punishment.”

This was obviously influenced by the furious response in parts of the Islamic world to a speech Macron had given in Les Mureaux two weeks ago. Les Mureaux is a more troubled, multi-racial, outer suburb of Paris in the Seine valley 20 kilometres west of Conflans. In the speech, the President proposed new action to prevent French Muslims from becoming a separate community who give their allegiance wholly to the Koran rather than French laws or values.

He promised a law on “secularity and liberty” to combat extremist Islamist indoctrination by forbidding the teaching of children at home after the age of three and by ending the “importation” of foreign-financed imams. Mosques will be placed under greater surveillance. State funding will be available to mosques which sign a charter on secularism and democracy.

Macron rejected calls to ban or restrict French Muslim women from wearing headscarves in public. He recognised that many of France’s Muslims had been let down by successive governments. He admitted that France had created its own social and economic “separatism” by dumping poorer people in suburban ghettoes with poor housing and few jobs.

The speech was – with some quibbles — generally well-received by moderate Muslim organisations in France. It produced a storm of fury amid more radical French Muslim groups and some governments of Islamic countries, including the Chechen one. It was also savaged by some successful and well-integrated Muslims in other European countries, including Britain. They accused Macron, inter alia, of racism, insulting Muslims and trying to create a “caliphate” or “French Islam”.

Macron wants to centralise Islam with state approved imams, institutions, and texts. If he succeeds, it would make France the rightful heir to the Ottoman Empire and the first Caliphate in western Europe. He will succeed where the Muslim Brotherhood failed. I'm living for it tbh

— Mehreen Khan (@MehreenKhn) October 2, 2020

Much of this criticism was rooted in ignorance of French history and the principle of state secularism. France is not a ‘Catholic country’ but the state owns all the churches and rents them to ‘The Church’. Creating a similar system of state aid to support a moderate Islam with a French accent does not, in that context, seem so outlandish.

France has, proportionally, the largest Muslim population in Europe – between five and six million, or just under tenth of its people. Many – probably as many as a half – are non-practising. The great majority are law-abiding and accept the primacy of national laws. But there has been a shift in the last 20 years, even among moderate muslims, towards a more overt expression of their faith and sense of Islamic identity.

There has also been a rise in home-grown Islamist terrorism. Most of the atrocities committed in the name of Islam in France in recent years — from the attack on the jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, to the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacking in 2015 and the Nice truck attack in July 2016 — have involved French-born or long-term French domiciled Muslims.

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Macron’s speech, clumsily worded in places, offered no snap solution. It offered a long-term strategy to create a barrier between the majority of the French Muslim population and a minority of extremists. This approach has been attacked, in the wake of Paty’s murder, by the Right and Far Right in France as a feeble response to the Islamist threat. Marine Le Pen of Rassemblement National called for a “real war against the poison of radical Islam…a real war to eradicate it finally”. Bruno Retailleau of the centre right Les Républicains said that “Islamism” must be “thrown out of the country by force”.

These are largely meaningless words. What sort of force exactly? What kind of real war? Most of France’s muslims are French and French born. They are not going anywhere. Any violent attempt to isolate an extremist but often submerged minority could prove disastrous.

The attitude of some Muslim intellectuals is equally obtuse. Their criticism of Macron’s speech seemed to float in a moral  vacuum in which events like the Bataclan or 9/11 or Manchester Arena for that matter – never occurred. Anti-muslim feeling exists in France — and did so before radical terrorism. But to minimise Islamist violence, and dismiss all attempts to contain it, as products of  endemic, European  “Islamophobia” is disingenuous or dishonest. A section of the French Left – certainly not all – has also been complicit in this intellectual dishonesty.

Some supposedly moderate Muslims reacted to the attack by blaming France and the French culture of free speech. Roshan Salih, editor of the British muslim news site Five Pillars, tweeted on Saturday: “Charlie Hebdo must be shut down immediately by French authorities. This racist, Islamophobic rag is causing community relations to completely break down with its repeated provocations.”

#CharlieHebdo must be shut down immediately by French authorities. This racist, Islamophobic rag is causing community relations to completely break down with its repeated provocations. They are literally crying fire in a crowded theatre. Freedom of speech isn't worth civil war.

— Roshan M Salih (@RmSalih) October 17, 2020

Salih and others say that Charlie Hebdo is clearly “islamophobic” because it would never similarly attack the Catholic church. Oh no? The magazine once published a front page cartoon in which the Bible, the Torah and the Koran were shown as giant toilet rolls. Charlie Hebdo is religiophobic. It is also frequently crude and unfunny — and in French law and according to the French cultural tradition, it has the right to be so.

Macron’s long game to remove the extremist influence from Islam in France isn’t without its flaws. But if not this approach, then what? Separating the great majority of moderate, hard-working, law-abiding French Muslims from the violent, anti-western propaganda of the extreme is in their interests. Their lives are already complicated by every Islamist atrocity. They would suffer most from the kind of ill-formulated civil war that Ms Le Pen contemplates.

There are reasons for hope, however. Extremist anti-western Islam has tried to foment retaliatory violence against the Muslim community — and thereby push more of them towards their own destructive misreading of Islam. Overall, that strategy has failed. The radical strategy was also to bring to power in France, and other western countries, a generation of hard-line politicians who would pursue anti-Muslim policies — not just anti-terrorism policies. That has not happened yet either.

But simple-sounding responses and explanations, whether offered by French politicians or by radical Muslim intellectuals, are not the solution. They are part of the problem. We should heed Mr Paty’s lecture to the 13 and 14-year-olds of Collège du Bois d’Aulne at Conflans-Saint Honorine.We should cling to the principles of tolerance and freedom which western societies have evolved from their own dark centuries of intolerance and violence. The principles are often muddled and confusing. But that is the lesson. Complexity is the lesson.

The strange thing is that the piece was a defence of Muslim women’s right to wear the full veil, and a condemnation of the Danish government’s decision to ban them. It was a couple of nasty little throwaway lines that caused the outrage, rather than the content itself.

Now, the NGO Tell MAMA, which records anti-Muslim incidents, has said that the piece was followed by a 375% surge in abuse and attacks on Muslims. The Guardian goes further, saying that the comments “led to a surge in anti-Muslim attacks”.

That sounded absolutely extraordinary to me. A 375% increase is enormous. So I thought I’d have a closer look.

The report records all “anti-Muslim incidents” received by Tell MAMA. That includes offline and online incidents, and also both verbal abuse and physical assaults. Tell MAMA says that it received 1,282 reports of anti-Muslim incidents in 2018, and that it “verified” 1,072 of them, 745 of which were offline.

Johnson’s “letterboxes” column was published on Monday 5 August 2018. In the week before that, Tell MAMA “received 8 reports of street-based (offline) anti-Muslim attacks”, by which I think they mean all incidents. But in the week afterward, the 6th to the 13th, “this jumped to 38, an increase of 375%”.

Suggested reading

How racist is Britain?

By Tom Chivers

If I’ve read it correctly, and they’re referring to all verified offline incidents, then 745 incidents a year translates to a bit more than 14 a week, on average. So the eight reported the week before was anomalously low, making that 375% increase sound much more dramatic.

Still, 38 is 165% above the average. But, again, I can’t work out whether that’s unusual. The report doesn’t give weekly breakdowns, so I can’t see whether the numbers are usually pretty steady around the average, or if they jump up and down a lot. If the former, then a week of 38 is surprising; if the latter, it might not be. (I have asked Tell MAMA for more information, but so far, I haven’t heard anything; I’ll add an update here if I hear back from them.)

They do have a breakdown by month, which shows in August there were around 70 of these incidents, about the same as April, May and June, and rather lower than March, which had a little over 80. The Tell MAMA report says that the March spike was driven by a horrible letter-writing campaign called Punish a Muslim Day which called for anti-Muslim attacks on the 3 April.

I think, though, that the really standout thing about these numbers is how tiny they are. For instance, there were only 327 verified anti-Muslim incidents online in the whole of 2018. I can’t believe for a second that there aren’t more than that every day on Twitter alone, if “anti-Muslim incident” includes abusive language.

Suggested reading

Dominic Cummings is no chicken

By Tom Chivers

There are more than three million Muslims in the UK. Tell MAMA recorded about 1,000 anti-Muslim incidents, on and offline, and said that the police recorded nearly 2,000 more (they say there’s no overlap). If those numbers are the whole story – and Tell MAMA are very clear in saying that they’re not – then at most one in 1,000 British Muslims were the victims of anti-Muslim abuse of some form last year. I would be amazed if that’s not a huge underestimate.

What that means is that it’s much less likely that the Tell MAMA numbers are recording real underlying change. It’s like an opinion poll – the smaller your sample, the less likely it is to be representative of the population. In real opinion polls, the pollsters try to get around that problem by finding a representative sample, and weighting it where it is not.

The Tell MAMA numbers come from people who contact Tell MAMA, which is a non-random, non-representative sample of the population. It could, for instance, be simply that, in the aftermath of high-profile events such as Johnson’s column, anti-racist projects such as Tell MAMA get more publicity and so get more reports. Given the difficulty of teasing out media effects on real-world behaviour, that sounds more likely to me than a single column, behind the Telegraph paywall, causing a 375% spike in incidents.

The question, of course, is what is really happening with anti-Muslim hate crimes and abuse. Unnervingly, hate crimes recorded by the police have gone up dramatically in the past few years: from a little over 40,000 in 2011/12 to nearly 100,000 in 2017/18. Racially motivated crimes have gone up from 35,000 to 70,000; religiously motivated ones from 1,600 to 8,300.

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How the powerful are perverting the truth

By Graeme Archer

But those increases, according to the police themselves, are largely due to the police getting better at recording these sorts of crimes, and a growing public awareness of them leading to more reporting. A Home Office hate crime report, using the Crime Survey for England and Wales data, reports that the total number of hate crimes has in fact dropped, from around 300,000 in 2007 to about 184,000 in 2018, although religiously motivated incidents have stayed roughly steady at about 38,000.

Interestingly, there was some evidence (not from the CSEW but from Home Office figures) of some spikes after major incidents – but those incidents were huge national news stories, such as the EU referendum or the five terror attacks in 2017, not pay-walled columns. And even they aren’t anything like the 375% increase Tell MAMA claims; they’re larger spikes in a spiky line.

So the problem is both less and more than the Tell MAMA report suggests, I think. Boris Johnson’s reckless column gets far more notoriety than it deserves; it may have caused a few isolated incidents, but I would be astonished if it had the sort of major effect it claims. But hate crimes in general are much more common than the small numbers Tell MAMA records.

Tell MAMA aren’t a polling company: they exist to give Muslims a place to report the abuse and attacks they find themselves on the end of. I don’t blame them for trying to collate that data and turn it into something useful. But the media should know better than to take the dramatic numbers it comes up with at face value, assume a causal link where none can be shown, and then plaster the whole thing under a dramatic headline. Britain already feels like a powder keg, and these are just more sparks flying around.

A new report from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change returns us to this fraught subject. “Narratives of Hate: The Spectrum of Far-right Worldviews in the UK” takes a look at a number of groups which it identifies as “far-Right”. These are: Generation Identity England, Britain First, For Britain and the British National Party. The report states that if these groups are “left unaddressed”, then they will “continue to sow division in Britain”.

In its assessment, the report takes the beliefs of these groups and compares them with those of the Norwegian terrorist, Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in July 2011. His views, according to the TBI, provide “a clear baseline to examine other extremist messages in the far Right”.

All these groups, according to the report, hold views which include “Believing that Islamist scriptures promote violent jihad and terrorism”; “Claiming that Muslim immigration to Western countries is paving the way for implementing Sharia and Islamic laws, and ‘Islamifying’ Europe”; and “Suggesting that Muslims are more prone to committing acts of sexual violence and rape”. Another accusation made by all these groups is that the authorities and the media have been “covering up crimes committed by Muslims and immigrants”.

Suggested reading

The great Brexit untruth

By Douglas Murray

I am uncomfortable with the idea of using a terrorist or mass murderer as a ‘baseline’ measure. After all, if some madman tomorrow committed an atrocity in the name of the environment, free healthcare or any other idea, would the TBI use this as a reason to tar as a violent extremist anyone who held the same beliefs?  Political violence, by its very nature, steps beyond the ordinary run of political discussion.

But there are pools and swamps of opinion in which people do swim before they commit atrocities. And it probably is worth trying to work out what it is there that leads someone towards violence. To do so, however, is a complex process, and we are all, to some extent, learning as we go along on. The list of arguments provided by the TBI shows how difficult this is.

For instance, there are indeed people who accuse all Muslims of terrible things, as laid out in the list. By doing so, they are clearly uttering an untruth, as well as showing an ugly, bigoted tendency to smear an entire group based on the practises of a small few. What, though, if someone were to point to the fact – which numerous reports including this one from the Muslim-run Quilliam Foundation have shown – that men of Muslim background are ‘over-represented’ (that is, compared to their proportion in the general population) in gang ‘grooming’ cases. And what if someone were to say that the authorities and the media have been involved in ‘covering up’ such crimes?

Suggested reading

The dark games played by political extremists

By Douglas Murray

To suggest that there had been a concerted, orchestrated cover-up which involved every portion of the state and media might sound like a wild exaggeration. It might sound deeply conspiratorial. But the problem is that it is not wholly untrue. It is only an exaggeration – in fact, we only know of the grooming gangs in Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, Oxfordshire and other places because some brave individuals from the political and media establishments broke ranks and reported these horrific stories.

Andrew Norfolk of The Times, for example, spent years chasing the Rotherham story, including speaking to many of the victims. He reported on this and subsequent cases in spite of people still (even then) attempting to charge him with ‘racism’ and ‘Islamophobia’ for reporting the story.

It’s problematic for the Blair assessment, too, that we know that there were cover-ups, and that these were duly exposed. In 2013, Alexis Jay was tasked by Rotherham’s council with looking into the crimes that had occurred there. Her report found that there had indeed been a systematic failure to address the cases when they had come out. And that the rape of children as young as 11 had been ignored by the local police and by the local council, among other authorities.

The Jay report – like Louise Casey’s which followed – found that a culture in which people feared accusations of racism was one of the reasons that these dreadful cases had been able to go on as long as they had. Likewise, there are reliable and verified reports going back a decade and half showing that the media and authorities have often cooperated to ‘pull’ reporting of such horrific stories, to allay other concerns.

Suggested reading

'Nazi hunts' are a sign of our hyperventilating times

By Douglas Murray

So here lies the problem with the Blair Institute’s claims. They seek to draw a line designating as ‘extreme’ some views which are also true. Given that the cover-ups have been proved – and officially registered – why should saying as much be cause to label someone as ‘far-right’ or linked to a mass murderer?

The answer appears to lie in the move from ‘some’ to ‘all’ and from ‘cases’ to ‘endemic’. It is true that some groups – including those which the TBI identifies – may be guilty of wild exaggeration. But all politics – and you may say all political debate – relies on a degree of exaggeration to make a point. The Institute might consult with its founder if it seeks any pertinent examples. And though most of us tire or are turned off by such exaggerations (generally realising in the process that the person in question cannot be trusted), it is some leap to say that an exaggeration should demand the intervention of the law.

Yet the TBI seems to think it should. It argues that depending on where various opinions sit on its scale of extremism, the groups it looks into ought to be ‘designated’ as ‘hate groups’. It calls for political leaders to, among other things, “Stop problematic groups and stem their narratives”. Suggestions for how to do this would include ensuring that ‘designated hate groups’ would be ‘impeded from appearing on media outlets or engaging with public institutions’. But all would not necessarily be lost for the groups in question. “Hate designation would be time-limited and automatically reviewed, conditioned on visible reform of the group.”

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Why should Boris trust Channel 4?

By Douglas Murray

Beneath the bland and unassuming presentation, this, and much else in the report, is in some ways extraordinary.  What is one to say of a situation in which government officials could designate and ban from all media – including state-run and privately-owned media – groups whose views and expressions they disapprove of, pending official investigation and evidence of that group’s realignment with views which are more acceptable? Such a plan would be authoritarian even if the groups in question were guilty of spreading constant and provable lies.

Yet the problem the TBI inadvertently highlights is that while everything these groups say may be unpleasant and ugly, not everything they say is false. Some of the things the Institute would have them banned for saying are true, or true in part.

Here is the test for a society, and indeed a test for independently-financed organisation like the one which produced this report. Where somebody is wrong, they should be shown to be wrong. Where they are wrong in part, they should be shown to be wrong in part. But, as with Islamist groups, asking the state to decide on such matters demands that the state be infallible in making such decisions. Drawing lines in these areas is hard. A fact that the Tony Blair Institute has perhaps unwittingly demonstrated.

But it is the BBC, rather than the politicians, which has come under most pressure. An unlikely array of opponents have lined up to criticise the lamentable programme, including George Osborne’s Evening Standard and the Daily Mail. And the main subject of contention has been not the dire production standards, but the selection of guests. Members of the public were brought on during the debate to ask questions of the candidates, and two of them have now been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

Most striking is Abdullah Patel, an imam who asked the candidates about ‘Islamophobia’ and demanded that they agree on the importance of words. It was an obvious attack on Boris Johnson and his almost unanimously misrepresented comments in his Telegraph column last year about Muslim women who wear the burka.

I say unanimously misrepresented because it has been forgotten in the intervening period that the article was a defence of people’s right to wear whatever religious garments they want. Furthermore, this mild criticism of the appearance of a burka has everywhere been turned into ‘an attack on Muslim women’, as though all Muslim women wear the garment. It’s a deliberate and dishonest misreading of the column.

Suggested reading

The reason people peddle lies about Farage

By Douglas Murray

In any case, it transpires that he imam who asked the question has a somewhat chequered set of views himself. As the media have revealed in recent days, Imam Abdullah Patel is not what you might call a philo-Semite. In fact, he seems to have rather unpleasant views about Jews and Israel in particular.

On rape, too, he seems to have not entirely enlightened views. As he inventively put it in one Tweet, “it takes 2 to tango”. He was suggesting that if a woman is alone with a man, then rape should not come as a great surprise to her. Which tells us far more about the Imam’s views than it tells us about other women or men.

Questions have been asked, and not answered, about how somebody who holds such views could have been selected and passed screening by the BBC to then be asking a question (which was itself highly loaded and sectarian) of the men vying to be next UK prime minister.

The other questionable guest is one Aman Thakar. Mr Thakar, it turns out, is a Labour party apparatchik. That might explain why he asked a question which pushed the five contenders to commit to a national election. Mr Thakar – who is a solicitor by profession – has also been subject to scrutiny following his appearance, and, before it was taken down, his social media history combed through.

Suggested reading

The dangers of post-truth journalism

By Douglas Murray

To the delight of a certain number of people, one of his Tweets from earlier this year read “Hitler’s abuse of the term nationalism is, to me a nationalist, the most harmful part of his legacy”. This has been pounced on by those who would like to take down Mr Thakar and the BBC as well as anybody who is close to the current, rather morally compromised, Labour party.

It is harder to work out exactly what Mr Thakar meant by his Tweet, since his account no longer exists. But it is not quite honest to portray him as having sparked a ‘Nazi storm’ or anything else that should cause him to be suspended from his job, as he has now been. The law firm, Leigh Day, for whom he worked says that it is conducting an internal investigation into the Tweet. For no fee I think I can save them the time. The Tweet would appear to be a sarcastic response to comments made by the American commentator and activist Candace Owens which were themselves dishonestly reported.

In February, off-the-cuff comments by Owens at an event were dishonestly used to portray her as in some way pro-Hitler. People such as Aman Thakar leapt on the bandwagon and attempted to ruin the reputation of Candace Owens by falsely claiming that she – a black, female Republican – is actually a Nazi. And now it is Mr Thakar’s turn, in kind, to be dishonestly represented in the press as a Nazi, and to have his career destroyed in turn.

There are many attitudes one might take towards all this. Not least among them is to simply say ‘Oh, how the wheel becomes it’ and move on. One political side can chalk up its own dishonestly acquired set of corpses and the other can pile up theirs.

Except that in the days since the BBC debate, and the backlash to it, two things have begun to disturb me.

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Teen Vogue's idiotic hypocrisy

By Douglas Murray

The first concerns Imam Patel. It seems to me that the larger failing is not the imam’s nor even the BBC’s for having him on (wise though it may have been to have vetted his views in advance). The imam is a member of the public and should be as free to question politicians as anyone.

The disgrace was that, in answering, Sajid Javid advocated a policy (having a Conservative party ‘investigation’ into ‘Islamophobia’) which he does not believe in. And the Home Secretary was in turn able to persuade all four other contenders to agree to the same policy – even though most if not all of them were or are also opposed to implementing it.

In other words, the weak link that has been shown here is the politicians, and perhaps the political class as a whole, which finds it exceptionally hard to hold onto any principles at all in public. In that respect, you might argue that the BBC show did do what it was supposed to, and successfully exposed the candidates.

Suggested reading

Can we reform our rancid political debate?

By Douglas Murray

The other qualm, which is linked to this – and which has been absent from the coverage – is that there is something slightly disturbing about all the background searches and potential career annihilation of all those who have (politically and religiously slanted though they certainly were) merely asked questions of politicians.

It has become clear in our politics in recent years that – fine though some people in politics undoubtedly are – we seem to be paying the price for making politics so unattractive. Why would anybody with a life, a history or any desire to enhance their standing in this world, want to go into politics?

Hot on the heels of this thought comes another. What happens when those who question their representatives are put through the same fine-toothed comb, and on occasions disingenuous, wringer? What effect will this have. Who will bother to engage with politicians and in our politics?

That’s what bothered me most about the BBC show. If the whole political arena is so dangerous an environment for public and politicians – for questioners and answerers – alike, then what kind of democracy will we have at the end of that process?

At the same time, democracies are struggling to supply some of the good things that they have been associated with in the past – such as ever improving standards of living, accountable decision making (as globalisation removes more decisions from the nation) and a sense of a broad equalisation of status and esteem among citizens.

The last of those supply problems arises from the new system of status stratification by education, and in particular higher education, that has turned us into what has been described as “diploma democracies” — political systems in which the main political parties and broader public sphere are increasingly dominated by the views and priorities of the highly educated and liberal minded, notwithstanding a few tabloid newspapers and some angry corners of the internet.

Further reading

What the populists get right

By Matthew Goodwin

Stable, open democracies require representation of all the main strands of opinion in a society, and if significant interests are excluded they will find a way of making themselves heard. This is what has happened with the great democratic ‘rebalancing’ represented by Brexit, Trump and continental European populism.

This rebalancing is messy and disruptive and encounters resistance and push-back, and right now one of the main battle grounds is the British Conservative party.

Historically, the party has prided itself on being a broad church, absorbing all non-extreme views on the Right of politics. This tradition appeared to be at least partly abandoned by the Cameron/Osborne modernisation of the party, in which continuity with New Labour social policy was prioritised, and socially conservative views were largely excluded and seen as politically damaging. (The grudging exceptions to this story were the ill-fated “tens of thousands” immigration target and, eventually, the referendum concession.)

This move by the Conservatives effectively excluded a large body of national opinion from Parliament and continues to unbalance our politics. The militant ‘zero tolerance’ policy pursued by a small niche of metropolitan opinion, which patrols the public conversation seeking out heretics to expel, aims to keep it unbalanced.

Consider, as evidence, the recent sacking by a Conservative government of Roger Scruton, Britain’s most eminent conservative philosopher, for his tendentious comments about Muslims. And the ridiculous comments from David Lammy MP, the Nigel Farage of the Left, on Sunday about how retweeting something from a German populist party is an expression of Nazism.

Further reading

What the populists get right

By Matthew Goodwin

Yet a large body of opinion in this country hold opinions that are anathema to much of the progressive worldview: about 45% of people support the death penalty, about 65% think that immigration has been either too high or much too high, around half the population want to leave the EU, 62% of people think that Britain “sometimes feels like a foreign country”, the vast majority of women and men want modification not abolition of a gender division of labour, 58% of people think that newcomers are not integrating well, about one third of the population say they would prefer to live in an area where almost everyone is from the same background and 44% of whites say they would mind a little or a lot if a close relative married a Muslim.

Not all of these views are equally reasonable but, instead of excluding the people who hold them, would it not be preferable to persuade them to change their minds? Isn’t that how a democratic conversation is meant to function? Some of those views are gradually shifting in a more progressive direction as a result of the expansion of higher education and the generational shift, but not all of them.

Most people with such views are decent citizens, who are comfortable with ‘modern Britain’ but tend to think it is changing too fast. And it cannot be said often enough that the vast majority also accept the broad outlines of race, gender and sexuality equality – though might argue with equality activists about what equality actually means.

Academics have shown a steady drop in levels of racial prejudice since the 1980s. Only one per cent of the population now admit to being very prejudiced against people of different races (and they are almost all over 50), a negligible proportion say they do not want someone from a different race as a neighbour, less than 10% strongly disagree with gay marriage.

Further reading

Why I welcome the Economist's mea culpa

By David Goodhart

Moreover, the constant insinuation, repeated by David Lammy on Sunday, that since Brexit, Britain has experienced a rising tide of violence and hatred against minorities is contradicted by the only reliable piece of evidence we have: the Crime Survey of England and Wales finds that hate crime is on quite a sharp downward trend, including in the period covering Brexit (when there was a brief spike in harassment).

Nevertheless, the partial suppression of legitimate small-c conservative views in the public domain, reinforced by our first-past-the-post electoral system denying representation to overtly populist parties, has ended up giving us Brexit instead.

Contrast this with continental Europe which has absorbed, accommodated and domesticated populist opinion over the last 20 years. Several populist parties have now taken part in government coalitions and in many cases, such as the Finns in Finland, have split and re-formed. The general direction of travel is towards less extreme views with experience of office tempering the views of leaders and most activists: consider the Freedom party in Austria and the People’s party in Denmark. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has gradually moved away from support for France leaving the EU and not just because of Brexit.

Further reading

Will our Brexit conflict ever be resolved?

By Giles Fraser

The Italian populist coalition has also just provided a good recent example of this domestication. Both the 5 Star Movement and Lega Nord were seduced by the anti-MMR vaccine cult and had promised to abolish a law banning children from attending school unless they had received jabs against 10 diseases. But when the 5 Star education minister was faced with an outbreak of measles in schools the party abruptly dropped its opposition to vaccination and in effect adopted the policy it had previously repudiated.

The influence has, it is true, worked the other way too and populist parties have influenced mainstream ones, most notably in the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark and the UK too (despite first past the post). But this is surely democracy working its magic, not some kind of poison injected into the system. One reason such socially conservative views are not going to fade away swiftly in this country is because they tend to be popular among the fast-growing and often religiously observant ethnic minorities.

“There is a feeling that commonly held values are being eroded and disregarded by an elite that believes it knows better,” wrote one prominent ethnic minority MP by the name of David Lammy in his book Out of the Ashes about the 2011 riots, a book that opposed a ban on smacking and excoriated the hedonism, nihilism and hyper-individualism of the ‘double liberalism’ of 1980s market economics plus a 1960s ‘anything goes’ worldview. The David Lammy of 2011 would surely have attracted the attention of the ‘zero tolerance’ policemen of 2019.

A constitutional reform programme that would give us some variant of proportional representation and so a political voice in Parliament for legitimate populism and social conservatism is not going to happen soon. Which means that the Conservative party must return to its broad-church tradition, as the Brexit result seems to be mandating.

Further reading

Europe's democratic difficulties

By Helen Thompson

This is not rocket science. George Osborne, who was tweeting gleefully in support of the sacking of Roger Scruton, has a reputation as a fearsome political strategist but he must take quite a large part of the blame for his party’s current slump in popularity, as not only the author of an excessive austerity but also of a high-handed liberalisation of the party that turbo-charged Ukip and led to Brexit.

The obvious thing would have been to balance a liberal move, such as gay marriage, with something for the more conservative-minded family lobby – such as the right of couples bringing up children together to share their tax allowances thereby making it far easier for one parent to stay at home when children are young.

Instead, the Conservative leadership have found themselves cornered by a shallow, metropolitan worldview without the intellectual resources or political confidence to create the new kind of liberal-conservative settlement that the country and their future success requires.

In the long run, the main party of the centre-Right remains better equipped to lead that new settlement because it is easier for the Conservatives to shift Left on economics, as they did at the last election, than it is for the Labour party to shift Right on culture in the direction of a David Lammy (2011) Blue Labour politics.

But escaping the clutches of the ‘zero tolerance’ sectarians will not be easy, as exemplified by the Scruton episode, which speaks to a larger nervousness about the Muslim and Islamophobia question.

Further reading

Pakistan is betrayed by its blasphemy laws

By Farzana Shaikh

The party has allowed itself to be painted as having an Islamophobia problem on the basis of a few prejudiced statements by local activists and councillors and an unscrupulous campaign against Sadiq Khan. Sayeeda Warsi, the former party chairman, has played a central role in this as she attempts to turn herself into one of the key gatekeepers to Muslim Britain, describing the Muslim experience in the past decade as a “brutal” one. The BBC and other news outlets uncritically recycle the claim in part to provide balance to the anti-Semitism charge against the Labour party.

Very few Muslims, who now make up about 6% of the population, are Tory voters or members and there is very little knowledge of Muslim communities and politics in the higher ranks of the party. This has made it harder for the party to distinguish genuinely moderate and reform-minded Muslim leaders from those associated with the Islamist strain of politics that encourages separation.

And it makes the party and country incapable, it seems, of having a reasonable discussion about aspects of Muslim life that makes British society more wary towards their fellow citizens of Muslim background than towards other minorities.

For Muslims do, on average, live more separate, and often poorer, lives than other minorities. Many of them come from traditional societies and now often live in the most depressed parts of post-industrial Britain: 46% of the Muslim population lives in the 10% most deprived local authorities. Only about one third of Muslim women work, they are more likely than other minorities to speak a language other than English at home, rarely marry out, and still hold to norms that are more authoritarian, patriarchal and collectivist than the increasingly liberal, egalitarian and individualist British mainstream.

Moreover, British Muslim attitudes on homosexuality, blasphemy, religion in politics, even conspiracy theory accounts of 9/11, tend to have more in common with global Muslim opinion than with the rest of British society.

Given that a large proportion of British people have no Muslim friends – in 2004, this was 90% – and, from the Rushdie affair via grooming gangs to jihadists acting in the name of Islam, Muslims are often associated with extremism, it may not be so surprising that, as I described above 44% of whites say they would mind a little or a lot if a close relative married a Muslim (35% of British Pakistanis feel the same about a relative marrying a white person).

Further reading

Steve Hilton's populist revolution

By Henry Olsen

It is true that some Muslims do suffer discrimination and harassment, probably more than other minorities, but there is no evidence that it is increasing. And it is not Islamophobic to raise these real issues of tension and difference. What we need is a deeper conversation about segregation and how to engineer more and better interaction across the Muslim-non-Muslim divide, plus a focus on the achievements of the growing Muslim middle class, rather than more intense policing of conversations at Tory cocktail parties.

The Conservative party should stop believing what their enemies say about them, remind themselves that they are the first party to appoint someone of Muslim background to one of the highest offices of state, and face down the zero tolerance sectarians.

In fact, if the party is to rise to the challenge of leading the post-Brexit settlement across the country’s great value divides, it needs to apply that reasoning across Conservative thinking on all social and cultural matters.

He sounds like a lot of university students, especially Scottish ones. Scots, after all, are famously outspoken and Scotland is at the headwaters of that period of European history known as ‘The Enlightenment’.

However, the year was 1696 and Aitkenhead had made the mistake of airing his views within earshot of Tron Kirk in Edinburgh High Street. He was charged with and convicted of blasphemy. On 8 January 1697, he was marched from the Tollbooth by St Giles’ Cathedral through the streets and hanged at the gallows mid-way between Edinburgh and Leith.

Thomas Aitkenhead was the last person to be executed for blasphemy in Britain. He was 20.

He’s not particularly well-known. But nor do many people know that blasphemy laws are still pervasive across the EU – and Europe more widely. They are coming to realise that now, though, in the wake of last week’s decision by the European Court of Human Rights to uphold Austria’s blasphemy law.[1. The ruling criminalised a woman — anonymised in the judgment as ‘E.S.’ although her identity is widely known among lawyers and journalists — for saying in a 2009 seminar that Muhammad married a six-year-old and consummated the marriage when she was nine. The Prophet of Islam, E.S. went on to argue, was a paedophile. What she said is the generally accepted historical version of events in the Muslim Ummah. She was convicted, effectively, for telling the truth about a particularly toxic bit of religious history.]

Further reading

Why we must not tolerate intolerance

By Benedict Rogers

The last successful blasphemy prosecution in England and Wales took place in 1977.[2.  Whitehouse v Gay News Ltd [1979] AC 617 at 635, HL, per Lord Diplock.] Ireland only repealed the clause criminalising blasphemy in its Constitution on October 26^th (yes, that’s last Friday), and Norway had a blasphemy law until 2015. Among other things, Norway’s was used — briefly — to ban Life of Brian. Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Portugal, and Greece all still have either blasphemy laws or hate speech laws directed to preventing religious vilification, which amount to the same thing.

Enforcement varies across countries. Poland and Greece will send you to gaol, while Spain and Italy will let you off with a small fine. Scotland, meanwhile, still has a version of the blasphemy law that killed Thomas Aitkenhead but — given it hasn’t been enforced since 1843 — most Scots lawyers are of the view that it’s no longer a crime. Austria, as we now know, disposes of blasphemy with a fine.[3.  In E.S. v Austria, the Court was asked to rule on whether conviction under Article 188 of the Austrian Criminal Code — which criminalises disparagement of religious doctrines — contravened Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 10 protects freedom of expression. A version of Article 188 has existed in Austria for centuries; its application was extended to Islam — during the Austro-Hungarian Empire — in 1912. In considering Article 10, the Court also turned its attention to Article 9 of the Convention, which protects freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. The Court chose to balance Article 10 against Article 9 because Austria has a blasphemy law on its statute books. In making its ruling, the ECHR held that a fine of 480 euros plus costs “was at the lower end of the scale”.]

An awful lot of the commentary over the past week has been downright hysterical. On top of the failure to appreciate how common laws of this type are, people were convinced that an EU-wide blasphemy law had been introduced; that Muslims were now entitled to protections denied Christians and Jews, and that mocking Muhammad would be impossible in future.

All the Court has done, however, is hold that an Austrian law making it a crime to ‘disparage’ religion is compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.[4.  The ECHR falls under the auspices of the Council of Europe. It rules only on matters to which signatory parties have consented. It has nothing to do with the European Union or the EU’s supranational court, the European Court of Justice. The ECJ doesn’t defer to municipal law — it’s there to rule on questions of EU law in member states — and is much more powerful and better-resourced.] The law here is Austrian and applies only in Austria.

Further reading

John Milton: smug liberal and free-speech warrior

By Polly Mackenzie

That said, civilised countries should not have blasphemy laws. Blasphemy laws don’t just stop people criticising or joking about religion; they stifle reasonable debate. They are routinely used to silence critics, often — in the case of Islam — apostates. There is ample evidence Muslims who want laws to protect their Prophet and their feelings are prompting fear of Islam over the long term and contributing to support for anti-immigration populists. Austria is itself a prime example of this phenomenon: the Freedom Party that’s done so well in recent elections (it’s now part of the country’s governing coalition) has done so in large part by banging an anti-Islam, anti-refugee drum.

But many countries don’t only have ‘blasphemy laws’; they have ‘hate speech laws’ too. Some countries, after repealing their blasphemy laws, have gone on to enact ‘religious vilification laws’ — typically as part of a suite of hate speech legislation.

In England, for example, the Blair government — two years before abolishing the common law offence of blasphemy — introduced the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, which criminalises “threatening words and behaviour” or “written material” that evinces the intent “to stir up religious hatred”.

In Ireland, the process is unfolding before our eyes — the Irish Council for Civil Liberties is calling for the introduction of hate speech and hate crime laws in the wake of the referendum result. Ireland doesn’t yet have this sort of legislation in place, because it has been using its blasphemy laws to do that sort of ‘work’.

Religious vilification laws, like blasphemy laws, turn on the protection of religious doctrine. In Islam, for example, they’ll disallow the depiction of Muhammad in cartoons; in Christianity, they’ll prevent the sexualisation of Jesus Christ.[5.  See Wingrove v. United Kingdom [1996] ECHR 60.] This is also why Christian blasphemy laws (as they have been in Austria’s case) can be repurposed to protect Islam: the two monotheisms are theologically similar on this point. In fact, the only organisations opposing the repeal of the blasphemy clause in Ireland’s Constitution were Islamic.[6.  See further Barry, Aoife. ‘Muslim scholar could seek legal advice if Irish media republish Mohammed cartoon’ TheJournal.ie] It is things like this that make those concerned with Islam’s capacity to integrate into liberalism so nervous.

Human history has been amply soaked in blood from religious wars, in large part because religious people take their doctrines seriously. However, the experience of religious belief — and any feeling of hurt from another’s disbelief in it — is a subjective one. It’s very difficult to convey to modern people why heretics were once burnt at the stake, or even why someone like Aitkenhead was executed.

Further reading

How the powerful are perverting the truth

By Graeme Archer

Yet subjective feelings of this type are central to all conceptions of hate speech — whether they concern religion, race, sex, or orientation. The words ‘hurt’, ‘offend’, ‘harm’, and ‘insult’ are used in legislation as a matter of routine. By this logic, if a punch hurts and harms, so can words: words are construed as capable of damage on a par with violence.

This is precisely why the American First Amendment lawyer Ken White argues that hate speech isn’t capable of legal definition — because baked into any such legislation is the claim that certain words cause direct harm in the same way a violent act does. The problem with this is that what is hateful to one person may be amusing or even meaningless to another. As a result, “hate speech is whatever someone in power thinks it is”, White suggests. It’s important here to note the distinction here between hate speech and incitement, which is a crime. Incitement requires a causal link between speech and the commission of a crime. Hate speech does not.

It is such US-style legal reasoning that led Irish politician Councillor Keith Redmond to call hate speech (all of it) “secular blasphemy law” during Ireland’s referendum campaign, and to argue that hate speech laws generally and religious vilification laws in particular amount to “blasphemy by the back door” — and constitute a direct assault on freedom of speech.

Further reading

Why the transbullies are a threat to us all

By Julie Bindel

Something similar is happening to freedom of speech in Britain. Blasphemy laws may be long gone but other ways have been found of shutting down unwelcome interventions. In the past 12 months, two prominent comedians — Markus Meechan (“Count Dankula”) and Graham Linehan (Father Ted; The IT Crowd) — have been criminalised for things they have posted online (the former convicted and fined; the latter made subject to police warning). The favoured silencing instrument in the UK is not, however, hate speech legislation, which is seldom used. It’s Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, criminalising “grossly offensive” online speech.

Its approach is uneven – ridiculously so. Because Section 127 only applies online, people can make the most outrageously racist, sexist, or bigoted jokes at, say, a comedy club or down the pub. If, however, their speech is recorded and finishes up on the internet, they’re in trouble. Thousands of people have been convicted under this statute — we’ve only heard about Meechan and Linehan because they’re famous. It is Section 127 that allows police up and down the country to pitch up on people’s doorsteps — while loosely throwing the phrase “hate speech” around — for something they’ve posted on Facebook or Instagram.

Both Europe and the UK need to draw lines concerning freedom of speech and the extent to which we protect religious sensibilities and prevent subjective feelings of offence. Blasphemy has metastasised into hate speech across the continent, which — coupled with various high-handed attempts to micromanage the internet — means freedom of speech now only truly exists in the United States.

“Antisemitism, or any hate, become dangerous when three things happen. First: when it moves from the fringes of politics to a mainstream party and its leadership. Second: when the party sees that its popularity with the general public is not harmed thereby. And three: when those who stand up and protest are vilified and abused for doing so.”

He concluded:

“All three factors exist in Britain now. I never thought I would see this in my lifetime. That is why I cannot stay silent. For it is not only Jews who are at risk. So too is our humanity.”

He’s right about the rising tide of religious and racial intolerance, fuelled by populism from the far-Right and the far-Left. It’s driven by a mix of factors and manifests itself in the form of identity politics, religious nationalism and extremism. The result is discrimination and persecution.

The intolerance is widespread. Few places are untouched. Here is an illustrative but by no means exhaustive run through:

In Burma, mainstream democratic politicians pander to militant Buddhist nationalists, resulting in a genocide of Muslims. In Indonesia, moderate Muslim politicians play the religion card and flirt with ultra-conservative clerics. India is led by a Hindu nationalist with a record of stoking hatred of religious minorities.

In Pakistan, where the notorious blasphemy laws have been a source of grave injustice for four decades, the new prime minister Imran Khan, on first appearance no extremist, is bolstering his religious credentials in ways which do not counter intolerance. On 7 July this year, at a rally of Muslim leaders, he promised to defend the blasphemy laws.

Further reading

Who's pulling the Pakistan prime minister's strings?

By James M. Dorsey

In Sudan, religious leaders continue to face criminal charges for resisting illegal but officially sanctioned seizures of church property. And in parts of the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Egypt, Iran and of course Iraq and Syria, religious minorities continue to suffer.

Such intolerance is on the rise not only in countries where extremists from the majority religion have influence, but in countries which are officially atheist. In China, Xi Jinping’s regime has launched a crackdown on religion that has fallen upon Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Daoists and practitioners of the spiritual movement known as Falun Gong. Churches have been closed or demolished, hundreds of crosses torn down, bibles confiscated or destroyed, and children under the age of 18 banned from going to religious services.

In some parts of the country, Christians have been forced to take down paintings of Jesus Christ and replace them with portraits of Xi. In China’s western region of Xinjiang, it is reported that one million Muslims are now in ‘re-education camps’, taken away without warning simply for reading the Qu’ran, praying, abstaining from pork or alcohol, or wearing ‘Islamic’ dress.

So bad is the repression that Human Rights Watch published a detailed report – Eradicating Ideological Viruses: China’s Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang’s Muslims – and the United Nations has spoken out.

Vietnam’s Communist regime is also pursuing a campaign of persecution against its minorities, pressurising them to recant their faith, forcing eviction, denying access to public services; there is arbitrary detention, imprisonment, beatings, torture and sexual abuse. Defenders of religious freedom, such as Pastor Nguyen Trung Ton and the Hoa Hao Buddhist and legal expert Nguyen Bac Truyen, are in prison, and there are reports of deaths from torture and ill-treatment in custody.

Further reading

Why does the Pope trot out antisemitic tropes?

By Giles Fraser

In North Korea there is absolutely no freedom of religion or belief at all. Anyone who fails to demonstrate anything other than absolute, unwavering loyalty to the ruling Kim dynasty is punished severely; Christians face a lifetime in prison camp and in some cases execution.

In some countries, intolerance is driven by the government, while in others it is primarily non-state actors, but often with government complicity. In Indonesia, for example, the current president, Joko Widodo, is widely regarded as a defender of pluralism and a friend of minorities. Yet faced with re-election next year and an opponent, former General Prabowo Subianto, who is expected to play the religion card, President Widodo has chosen as his running mate a 75-year-old ultra-conservative Islamic cleric and head of the Indonesian Ulama Council, Ma’ruf Amin.

Human rights defenders are appalled at the choice, for Amin was responsible for the fatwa which landed the former governor of Jakarta, in jail on blasphemy charges. For Mr Widodo to pick for his vice-presidential candidate a man who was not only responsible for jailing the popular Christian governor, thereby delivering a hammer-blow to Indonesia’s reputation for pluralism, but one who also authored edicts restricting the construction of places of worship and the activities of Ahmadiyyas (a sect of Islam widely accused of heresy and persecuted by other Muslims), advocating the criminalisation of homosexuality, supporting female genital mutilation and promoting shari’a by-laws, is something of a setback for moderates in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation.

Mr Widodo’s defenders will argue that his choice has neutralised the religion question. Nonetheless it is a sign of the times that he felt the need to bolster his religious credentials rather than stick to his true instincts as a pluralist.

Further reading

Aristotle's answer to identity politics

By Henry Olsen

Indonesia’s reputation for religious pluralism has been increasingly threatened over the past two decades. The Ahmadiyya have faced periodic violence and restrictions throughout the country, and on the island of Lombok hundreds of Ahmadis are living in displacement camps because their homes were destroyed in violence.

On 13 May this year, three Christian churches in Surabaya were attacked by islamic suicide bombers within minutes of each other. Shockingly the bombers all belonged to one family: the parents had strapped explosives to their daughters, aged six and eight, and their teenage sons. At least 13 people were killed, and dozens injured. Against this backdrop, blasphemy laws continue to be misused, most recently in the case of a Buddhist woman in North Sumatra, jailed for 18 months simply for asking a mosque to turn down the volume on its loudspeakers.

Religious intolerance and violent extremism are not the same, but as the Wahid Foundation’s Alamsyah M Dja’far told me, “if intolerance increases, the threat of radicalism increases, and that will change the face of Indonesia”. It’s happening already. I was told this month of a Muslim man who asked his 12 year-old son what he had learned at school that day. “We learned about ‘kafir’ [‘infidel’],” his son replied. When his father asked what they had learned about infidels, his son replied simply: “We learned that they must be killed.”

Further reading

Why are so many left-wing progressives silent about Islam's totalitarian tendencies?

By Julie Bindel

Such anecdotes are reinforced by footage showing marching children at a kindergarten in east Java, dressed in black robes and niqabs, wielding assault rifle replicas, with the theme “Fight with the Messenger of Allah to Increase Faith and Piety”. As Reverend Gomar Gultom, General Secretary of the Communion of Churches of Indonesia, told me, “the seed of radicalisation has spread throughout Indonesia”.

At its most extreme, intolerance leads to ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and genocide, as we have seen in Burma. When I visited the refugee camps on the Bangladesh-Burma border in March almost everyone I talked to had seen loved ones raped or killed and villages burned.

I met Rohingyas whose eyes had been shot out and limbs blown off. “The Burma army was trying to drive us out of our land,” said Saiful, a young student from Maungdaw who escaped over the mountains. “They made it impossible for us to stay – how could we survive?” My abiding memory, though, is of 16-year-old Khalida, lying paralysed on the floor of her bamboo hut.  She had been shot multiple times in her leg, and was unable even to sit up.

“More than 300 Rohingyas in my village were killed by the Burma army in their attack,” she told me. “My father, two sisters and one brother were killed. My mother was also shot but survived.” Her 18 year-old brother, Mohamed Rafiq, fled their village before the military attacked, and discovered her among hundreds of bodies when he returned. They managed to flee to Bangladesh, where she could receive medical treatment.

Further reading

Why don't we care about Christians in the Middle East?

By Giles Fraser

It’s not only believers who are persecuted. Freedom of religion or belief, as detailed in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is a fundamental human right for everyone, of every belief and none, and it protects the freedom to not believe as much as the right to believe. Alexander Aan is an atheist jailed for his beliefs. After writing on Facebook that he did not believe in God, he ended up in jail. There are similar cases in many parts of the world, as the annual report of the International Humanist and Ethical Union details.

In our divided world, intolerance comes from every quarter – from religious extremists towards perceived heretics in their own religion, adherents of other religions, secularists, woman, the LGBT community and others; and from militant secularists and atheists, either in authoritarian regimes or within society, towards those of other beliefs. It comes from all directions – theological, ideological, political and socio-economic. Sometimes it is out of genuine, if narrow-minded, conviction, but more often it is mixed with political motivations, perhaps tied with conflicts over land, natural resources and influence. It tears families, nations and the world apart.

To counter it, we need to promote freedom of religion or belief for everyone, everywhere, and strengthen the mechanisms we have available for this. The United Nations has a Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Religion or Belief, Ahmed Shaheed; the European Union has a Special Envoy, Jan Figel; the United States has an Ambassador-at-Large, Sam Brownback; Britain has recently appointed the Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Lord Ahmad, as the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy on the issue; and countries such as Norway and Denmark have equivalent representatives.

Their roles must be supported, their influence strengthened. And we must strengthen initiatives to counter intolerance and extremism and promote dialogue wherever possible. There are various plans available already – agreed at gatherings at Rabat, Marrakech and Beirut for example – and they should be more widely implemented.

Further reading

The unlikely rise of China's 'boss Christians'

By Chloë Starr

All hope is not lost. There is still humanity amid the monstrosity. Within hours of the attacks on Surabaya, people of all faiths came to the churches to offer condolences and help clear up the wreckage. Such gestures took place across the nation. In Jakarta, two young Muslim women handed out roses to the congregation during mass at the Cathedral. It’s an important part of town. Jakarta’s Cathedral stands across the street from Indonesia’s largest Muslim place of worship, the Istiqlal Mosque: it’s symbolic of Indonesia’s pluralism.

In our world today, divided by political and religious tensions, we need to support those who will go to the place of worship of another faith with roses, not bombs. In so doing, we can overcome the hatreds of every stripe that are sweeping our globe. We need to open our doors to our neighbours. The titles of Jonathan Sacks’ books give us a nudge in the right direction: The Dignity of Difference; The Home We Build Together; To Heal A Fractured World. We should heed his hints.