It is hard to know how the thousands being prosecuted for thought crimes these days, from one end of Europe to the other, are likely to respond to this weekend’s damning confession by Trevor Phillips.
Twenty years after ordering a pivotal UK report which introduced the West to a newly-defined concept called ‘Islamophobia,’ the admission by the former head of the Commission for Racial Equality, that his report’s contents had “got almost everything wrong,” is nothing short of seismic.
Phillips’s recent remarks were detailed in a feature article, for Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper, prompted by the most comprehensive study ever conducted into the values of the UK’s Islamic population.
The full results of the survey What British Muslims Really Think is set for broadcast on Wednesday, by Channel 4. The findings revealed by the polling giant ICM, so far, deal a knockout blow to the ‘tiny minority of extremists’ narrative dominating discussion of mass Muslim immigration for decades.
ICM’s data outlines the “unacknowledged creation of a nation within a nation, with its own geography, its own values and its own very separate future.”
Research also highlights, “a chasm opening up between Muslims and non-Muslims on such fundamentals as marriage, relations between men and women, schooling, freedom of expression and even the validity of violence in defence of religion.”
Over half of the UK’s booming Muslim population, for example, would like to see homosexuality made illegal. Worse still, nearly a quarter of Muslims in the UK would prefer to live in fully Islamized enclaves solely governed by Sharia law. While “one in three British Muslims support the right [sic] of a man to have more than one wife.”
Phillips’s article even describes a conversation with Amra, a female Sharia court judge, detailing “advice for the aspirant bigamist,” which calls into question the on-going legal standing of such tribunals. At no point during their cosy chat does anyone mention that they are discussing the facilitation of a criminal offence made illegal in Britain in 1861.
The revelations in the Sunday Times also highlight the alarming “contempt for white girls” among Muslim males in Britain. “The ICM survey provides a torrent of data that backs up the impression that this is a community whose idea of women’s equality lies eons away from the mainstream,” writes Phillips.
Yet given the estimated one million victims of the UK’s Islamic child-sex slavery gangs, over the last twenty years, one feature of Phillips’s article is more striking than any other.
His eagerness to park blame for the issues, thrown up by ICM’s research, on “the problem with Britain’s white liberal elite” instead of at his own front door.
The godfather of today’s global ‘Islamophobia’ industry, Trevor Phillips, commissioned a landmark report as head of the little-known Runnymede Trust racial equality think-tank, in 1996. It was published the following year.
In the wake of the 2005 London bombings on 7/7, huge amounts of public money were funnelled into Muslim advocacy groups, first in the UK, aimed at tackling a form of bigotry largely invented eight years earlier. Due to a catalogue of failures since that time, some 400 ISIS jihadists now walk the streets of Britain.
Islamophobia: A Challenge For Us All, fundamentally reclassified a word that had been little used in Europe before 1997 – other than by Iranian refugees, resident in France in the eighties, who first coined it to bully their females into wearing the veil.
Though intended to document and prevent hate crimes, committed against Muslims, the Runnymede report rapidly transitioned into classifying ‘Islamophobia’ as a mental pathology – deemed to have eight separate characteristics.
These included seeing Islam as barbaric, irrational or sexist (Class 3). Considering Islam to be violent, aggressive, threatening or supportive of terrorism, were also guilty signs (Class 4). Even thinking of Islam as a political ideology (Class 5), or unlikely to be subject to moderation and reform (Class 1), were all part of the newly identified – and named – form of bigotry.
Influential global Muslim lobby-groups soon pounced on ‘Islamophobia’ as a means of pushing for the criminalisation of criticism of Islam, world-wide, impacting as far afield as the United States and at the United Nations.
In the decades that followed, ‘Islamophobia’ rapidly turned into a way of dismissing all legitimate concerns over the real-world social or criminal consequences of Islamic doctrine – or uncontrolled mass Muslim immigration – as rooted in prejudice.
Yet it was within the corridors of the European Union (EU) where a fixation with spurious ‘Islamophobia’ eventually reached its most absurd crescendo, even as every news cycle became dominated by terrorism caused by a hatred for non-Muslims instead.
The EU’s first event dedicated to the protection of fundamental rights, scheduled for 1 October 2015, had originally concerned protecting free speech. Following last January’s Charlie Hebdo massacre, the issue could scarcely be said to be more vital to Europe’s cultural survival.
Yet the EU’s Fundamental Rights Colloquium was soon reformatted, and became primarily focussed on combatting ‘Islamophobia’ and curtailing online free speech instead.
This should come as no surprise to seasoned EU watchers, given the Europe-wide criminalisation of certain forms of ‘hate speech’ in 2010, in line with the continents rapidly transitioning Islamic demography.
Such measures have resulted in the identical severity of sentences being faced by outspoken critics of mass Muslim immigration across Europe, since that date: Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, to Mogens Camre in Denmark, from Christine Tasin in France, to Lutz Bachmann in Germany.
Since the nineties, ceaseless lobbying within media and government circles by the ‘Islamophobia’ industry has been hugely successful. Especially, by organisations that profit from pretending that rude social media posts constitute actual ‘attacks’ against Muslims.
Such efforts have largely ensured that those publicly critical of Islam do not merely have the inevitable possibility of murderous violence to contend with – they lose their jobs, their friends, and risk imprisonment too.
Trevor Phillips’s inability to see the root causes of Britain’s Muslim integration crisis, in 2016, mirror the failures of the original Runnymede Trust report two decades earlier. It made no effort to delve into Islamic doctrine either.
Bemoaning the failures of assimilation in Blackburn, for example, whose 30 per cent Muslim population is “barely mixed with white” Britons, Phillips turns to Anjum Anwar for advice.
“How I treat the stranger and family members is according to sharia,” the Muslim woman tells Phillips, while dressed in a “close-fitting headscarf.” The Sunday Times article goes on to describe Anwar as someone who “spends her time actively promoting integration.”
That the likes of Trevor Phillips are still so wilfully ignorant, of those facets of sharia law, and the Quran, actively prohibit Muslims from emulating or even befriending non-Muslims (Q3:28), goes a long way to explaining Europe’s integration crisis.
For critics of ‘Islamophobia,’ it is often felt to be “a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.” A quotation often misattributed to the late, great Christopher Hitchens.
As head of the UK’s Commission for Racial Equality between 2003 and 2012, Mr Phillips famously had a bust of Lenin on his desk. He does himself a disservice with his recent contrition, and should own up to the distressing worldwide repercussions of his highly effective revolutionary zeal.
George Igler, a political analyst based in the City of London, is the Director of the Discourse Institute.
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