UK LABOUR TOP DOGS SLAM TRUMP AS "ISLAMOPHOBIC" FOR CRITICIZING
LONDON MAYOR SADIQ KHAN
BY ROBERT SPENCER
SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/07/uk-labour-top-dogs-slam-trump-as-islamophobic-for-criticizing-sadiq-khan; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
“The chattering-class concern with Islamophobia is not about protecting Muslims from genuine discrimination or violence (both of these things are already illegal), but rather is about ringfencing Islam and all Muslims from criticism, surrounding this one religion with a blasphemy-deflecting forcefield. So any commentary on Islam or even on influential Muslims can be casually batted aside as ‘phobic’.”
Yes. This has been going on for years, and is already quite far advanced.
“It isn’t Islamophobic to criticise Sadiq Khan,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, July 13, 2018:
…Trump is saying that Sadiq is ‘responsible for terrorism’, says Labour’s shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry. He didn’t say that, though. He simply said Sadiq has done a bad job on terrorism – the same way many, many people said Tony Blair did a bad job on terrorism and may even have stoked it up with his foreign interventions. Trump’s comment on Sadiq is ‘Islamophobia and it is racist’, Thornberry said.Labour MP David Lammy said, ‘The real reason Trump blames my friend Sadiq Khan for the terror attacks last year’ – he didn’t do that! – ‘is simple. He hates that London chose a Muslim mayor.’ Lammy offers no evidence for this. But why should he? In the increasingly grating grievance politics of identity and victimhood, proof counts for nought and inference is always enough. Criticise Islam, you hate Muslims. Wonder about the wisdom of mass immigration, you’re racist. It’s automatic. Maybe I’m racist for criticising David Lammy.Dawn Butler, Labour spokesperson on equality, slammed Trump’s ‘ugly dog-whistle politics’. In short, she can’t prove that his comments on Sadiq were racist, but she can imply that they contain some kind of secret code that will be audible to more vulgar Britons – the ‘dogs’ in that analogy – who will have their innate ‘Islamophobia’ stirred up by their American master. This genuinely prejudiced view – that Trump could provoke the uncouth underbelly of British society to acts of hatred or violence – is now widespread online.Everything about this dash to brand Trump an Islamophobe for criticising the London mayor is worrying. It confirms that the chattering-class concern with Islamophobia is not about protecting Muslims from genuine discrimination or violence (both of these things are already illegal), but rather is about ringfencing Islam and all Muslims from criticism, surrounding this one religion with a blasphemy-deflecting forcefield. So any commentary on Islam or even on influential Muslims can be casually batted aside as ‘phobic’. Even worse, today’s spat shows that now political debate, never mind differences on religion, can be demonised with the Islamophobia brand. Is it Islamophobic to criticise Sadiq? Must we all hold our tongue because he is of Asian and Muslim origin? Isn’t that, erm, a little racist – treating a brown-skinned politician more gently and cautiously than you would a white one?And this is worrying because of what it tells us about the Corbyn-led Labour Party: that it has been swallowed up by the infantile politics of grievance, identity and offence-taking. These are no longer traits limited to the so-called ‘snowflake’ generation or people in academia – rather, political parties themselves now embrace and weaponise overblown identitarian sensitivity and self-pity in order to chill political criticism, silence certain opinions, and exercise greater control over what it is permissible to say in public life. People are using Trump’s visit to talk up the division and crisis he has apparently visited upon the American republic, but right now I am more worried by the insight we are getting into the further drift of British political life into the elitism and censoriousness of identity politics.
