[noemon]

The Conservatives have been accused of failing to take the issue of Islamophobia seriously by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), which is calling for an independent inquiry into a problem it said had “poisoned” sections of the party.

Conservative party officials insisted they were treating the issue seriously, but the MCB cited nine cases of anti-Islam sentiment from Tory politicians and candidates since April, calling it “the tip of the iceberg”.

Sayeeda Warsi, the party’s former chair, said she had spent more than two years trying and failing to get her successors and Theresa May to engage with the problem, and warned that the Tories faced a wider institutional problem of Islamophobia.

Labour, which has faced its own recent controversy over antisemitism, said the Conservatives had shown a “systematic leadership failure” on the issue.

A letter to the Tory party chair, Brandon Lewis, from the head of the MCB, Harun Khan, called for a “genuinely independent inquiry”.

He listed two months of incidents involving members, including one who shared a message which called Muslims “parasites” and another who posted a photo of bacon hanging from a door handle with the caption “protect your house from terrorism”.

Khan questioned why no action had been taken against Bob Blackman, the Harrow East MP, after he re-tweeted an anti-Islam message from the hard-right activist Tommy Robinson, and hosted a hardline Hindu nationalist, Tapan Ghosh, in parliament.

Blackman said he accidentally re-tweeted the Robinson post and had not known in advance that Ghosh was being invited to last October’s event.

We are calling for an independent inquiry into Islamophobia in the Conservative Party following more than weekly occurrences of Islamophobia in the party last month

Warsi, now a Tory peer, said she backed the MCB’s call, adding that it was “a shame” that it could potentially require such a public rebuke for the Conservatives to start treating the subject with proper seriousness.

“What I would like to see is, first of all, people within the party stopping denying this is an issue and then starting to acknowledge the extent of the issue, and then setting out a clear pathway of how we’re going to deal with it,” she told Sky News.

Warsi said she had raised the problem with “successive chairmen” and had written personally to May to seek action.

She said: “Each time it kind of seems we’ve said, ‘Yes, we take these issues very seriously’ and then shrugged our shoulders and moved on.”

She said the problem went beyond the actions of a few candidates, saying the party must also look at the “terrible Islamophobic, anti-Muslim campaign” run in 2016 when Zac Goldsmith stood for London mayor against Labour’s Sadiq Khan.

The MCB letter also cited Goldsmith’s campaign as evidence of a wider problem in the Conservatives with “dog whistle anti-Muslim racism”.

Labour MP Rupa Huq said the cumulative record of the Conservatives pointed to “the very definition of institutional racism - not merely bad apples, but a systematic leadership failure to address both personal prejudice and systemic unfairness”.

She said: “The Tories’ failure on Islamophobia is desperately disappointing. But for Britain’s Muslims it’s worse than that. If the people who claim to be leading this country are shirking their responsibility to protect all the communities living here, it sends an appalling message. It makes racists inside and outside their party think they can get away with it.”

Huq said she felt there had been “a glaring difference between how Labour is responding to antisemitism and how the Tories have reacted to this”, saying Jeremy Corbyn and Labour officials had taken notably more action.

A number of Muslim Conservative party members told the Guardian that they felt the issue had been marginalised, with one saying his reaction to the MCB letter was: “How refreshing - this is something that all Muslim Conservatives are feeling.”

Khan’s letter to Lewis called for an independent inquiry into Islamophobia among not just Tory members but also the party’s structures and campaigns. The MCB is pushing for the publication of a list of incidents where action has been taken, the launch of an education programme and a public commitment to tackle bigotry.

In response to the letter, a Conservative spokesman said: “We take all such incidents seriously, which is why we have suspended all those who have behaved inappropriately and launched immediate investigations.”

The Guardian

When Ahmed (not his real name) joined the Conservative party six years ago, he thought it was a natural fit. “A lot of Muslims share conservative values,” he says. “I stood to be a councillor and there was talk of me going on to the party lists to become an MP.”

He says he worked hard during election time, increasing the south Asian vote in his ward in Yorkshire. But a simple question about postal votes to the MP suddenly made him feel like he did not belong in the party. “I just asked a question,” he says. “In no way did I insinuate that I was going to do anything silly or illegal regarding postal votes. But his response was ‘This is the UK, sunshine’. It was really patronising – would he have said that to someone not of colour? He was inferring that I wasn’t British.”

He then overheard other members talking disparagingly about another candidate of Pakistani heritage in a different ward. Not long after, he heard another party member say “the only good Muslims are Ahmadiyya Muslims”. “That’s like saying the only good Christians are the Coptics,” he says. “It’s insulting to all the others.”

While he was not directly racially abused by other party members, seeing Islamophobic comments on local party Facebook groups was common, he says. “It wasn’t a nice experience in the party. Those in the right of the party you felt a sense of being looked down upon, they were patronising you. The whispers weren’t nice at all. But now those same members are very Islamophobic on their Facebook posts, now you see it quite openly.”

A party member in the West Midlands says he made a complaint to the Conservatives’ regional headquarters, after an older councillor made a racist remark during a meeting. “It was totally brushed under the carpet; they didn’t want to know,” he says. “They just said ‘don’t worry about it, he’s an old man’.”

He contacted the Muslim Council of Britain after seeing other complaints about Islamophobia in the party. “When I saw the letter, I thought how refreshing – this is something that all Muslim Conservatives are feeling,” he says. “Only Muslims can feel Islamophobia and only black and ethnic people can feel racism – if you are not black or Asian you are not going to feel it. But they say to you ‘it’s nothing, it’s you, you’re reading too much into it’. But I can feel it, it’s how people look at you when you go to pray, or when you are fasting. It’s in how people talk to you.”

When no action was taken over the member who used racist terminology, it made him feel like he was “on the outside”, he says. “My dad has been here for 60 years, but it makes me feel like we are back in the days of Enoch Powell; it makes me feel like we haven’t moved on at all.”

“It’s a problem throughout the party. It’s rampant because people don’t understand Islam. They think it’s a religion based on terrorism. We don’t think Isis are Muslims. They are a bunch of idiots, we believe they are terrorists like everyone else.”

Another councillor did not want to be named because he believed it would be political suicide. “They’d put me under a bus for speaking about it,” he says.

He feels his progress in the party has been blocked because of his religion. “It was fine in the local party until I showed some ambition,” he says.

After he pushed to advance in the party, barriers suddenly appeared and he was made to feel like his face did not fit, he says.

“They use terms like ‘the right sort of candidate’,” he says. “I sometimes wear a skull cap and people came to me and said that the local party leader had said that I looked too Muslim and I wouldn’t be accepted.”

He says he has complained about the issue, but feels he cannot push it any further. “You mention Islamophobia and they run for the hills. The problem is too many people have too many friends in high places, so nothing is ever done about it.”

The Guardian

[Zionist Nationalist]

Islam is the enemy of the west and its values

[The Sabbaticus]

Immigration from 'Islamic' countries to Western nations automatically means assuming the religio-cultural burdens of these immigrant communities. In this case the persecution complex of a hyper-belligerent religious identity movement, with the actual Western inhabitants being automatically typecast as the 'perpetual villain' in any situation. The Tories don't have an 'Islamophobia' problem, because the entire concept of 'Islamophobia' automatically assumes that any non-Muslim is an anti-Islamic aggressor until proven otherwise.

The real question is when these Islamic agitators are going to accept that the British are their moral superiors in almost every regard. Thanking them for their profound generosity, kindness, compassion and most importantly, their seemingly endless capacity for turning the other cheek, seems like the least they could do. Instead the British receive non-stop vitriol and bile from a thankless horde of immigrants who have foisted their foreign problems on them.

[skinster]

Islam is the enemy of the west and its values

Nope, zionism is.

[Albert]

I doubt conservatives are in anyways "Islamophobic". As the imprisonment of Tommy Robinson with them being in power proves.

[skinster]

[Verv]

I enjoy how there is blatantly anti-white, anti-male sentiment floating around which actively vilifies any sort of positivity towards whiteness, yet this is something that the media thinks it is acceptable to concentrate on.

No doubt, too, that these tepid Tories offer up only cuckservative critiques of Islam as opposed to anything that is really fundamental and hard hitting.

These sorts of articles only serve to push the overton window to the left and cannot be treated as overly serious. It is just part of the media's media blitz against the Right.

[skinster]

[Decky]

These sorts of articles only serve to push the overton window to the left and cannot be treated as overly serious. It is just part of the media's media blitz against the Right.

The media's bias against the right? In the UK? Where 90% of reporting on Corbyn is negative? Where the media worship the royal family like they were gods? Yea Verv the British pro capitalist centre right media is basically Pravda.

[AFAIK]

Experiencing racism is part of living in a foreign country. Grow a thicker skin.

[Atlantis]

The real question is when these Islamic agitators are going to accept that the British are their moral superiors in almost every regard. Thanking them for their profound generosity, kindness, compassion and most importantly, their seemingly endless capacity for turning the other cheek, seems like the least they could do. Instead the British receive non-stop vitriol and bile from a thankless horde of immigrants who have foisted their foreign problems on them.

If this is not satire, you are a died-in-the-wool racist.

To claim that kindness is a white virtue unknown to non-whites is so ignorant that it defies description.

Experiencing racism is part of living in a foreign country. Grow a thicker skin.

That is true to an extend, except that whites living abroad usually lead a privileged life without ever being the target of racism.

[Verv]

:lol:

The media's bias against the right? In the UK? Where 90% of reporting on Corbyn is negative? Where the media worship the royal family like they were gods? Yea Verv the British pro capitalist centre right media is basically Pravda.

I do not really understand where you are coming from on this, Decky.

The media is notoriously socially liberal and pro-immigration basically everywhere.

It was the center right folks that barred various Americans from going to Britain based off of fears that they were right wing extremists.

It's kind of like I'm supposed to not be able to have any kind of position on the government being too liberal because the center right is liberal, yet, it is right, so, lol verv i don't knwo what you're talking about...

Sure. OK.

IDK?

Will you discuss it with me seriously if I simply clarify that the cucks are liberals?

[Rich]

The Conservative party is a Jewish supremacist party that knows full well that's its first duty is to serve the interests of Israel. Note serving the interests of Israel, often involves putting on a fake impartiality, it may even involve showing fake concern for the plight of the Palestinians, all the better to gain credibility to defend Israel.

So a key plank of Jewish supremacist strategy in Britain is that no party must be allowed to emerge on the right that is outside of Jewish supremacist control. UKIP were tolerated while they were just an anti Euro outfit, but as soon as they threatened to develop into something more, they had to be brought to an end. So the Labour party came out and put huge effort into making sure that Conservative candidates won and were not defeated by UKIP. The British Labour party sacrificed, being in government in order to serve its Jewish supremacist masters. If the right had split Labour would be in 10 Downing Street now. Even Nigel Farage meekly accepted orders when he was told it was time to end UKIP.

Note, there is little doubt that Jewish supremacists were central in the creation of the EDL. Jewish supremacist recognised that there had to be some outlet to let off steam against Islam, so they deliberately set something up that had incoherent, unsustainable narrative. Something that could never morph into a genuine anti Sharia political party that Jewish suprematists were unable to control.

[Ter]

The Conservative party is a Jewish supremacist party that knows full well that's its first duty is to serve the interests of Israel. Note serving the interests of Israel, often involves putting on a fake impartiality, it may even involve showing fake concern for the plight of the Palestinians, all the better to gain credibility to defend Israel.

So a key plank of Jewish supremacist strategy in Britain is that no party must be allowed to emerge on the right that is outside of Jewish supremacist control. UKIP were tolerated while they were just an anti Euro outfit, but as soon as they threatened to develop into something more, they had to be brought to an end. So the Labour party came out and put huge effort into making sure that Conservative candidates won and were not defeated by UKIP. The British Labour party sacrificed, being in government in order to serve its Jewish supremacist masters. If the right had split Labour would be in 10 Downing Street now. Even Nigel Farage meekly accepted orders when he was told it was time to end UKIP.

Note, there is little doubt that Jewish supremacists were central in the creation of the EDL. Jewish supremacist recognised that there had to be some outlet to let off steam against Islam, so they deliberately set something up that had incoherent, unsustainable narrative. Something that could never morph into a genuine anti Sharia political party that Jewish suprematists were unable to control.

Holy sweet mother of Jezus, Mohammed, John Smith, Abraham, and whoever is in charge of the Witnesses of Jehova. There are so many conspiracies in this post that I had to go lie down for half an hour to straighten out my head.
@Rich please tell us where you get these ideas from.
I regularly get the Minutes of the weekly Meetings from the Zionist High Council of Elders but I never saw anything remotely like what you posted.

[Rich]

Today's Israel is obviously in many ways extremely different to Nazi Germany. However they are the same in that they were both explicitly founded as race states. The Israeli states is a Jewish state for the Jewish race. Nazi Germany was a German state for the German race. This is different from say the United States, Britain, France. They may in the past been dominated by racism but they were not founded as race states and they are now engaged in a desperate race to destroy their ethnic majorities as quickly as possible. In addition Judaism is an explicitly racist religion, it is not universalist like Christianity or Buddhism. It doesn't even have the fake cover of Universalism that Islam has. Jewish circumcision is an act of primitive tribal racism, a far more extreme mutilation than the SS blood tattoo.

The establishment narrative is that Israel is an ordinary western country, with normal (for 2018) immigration policies. That Judaism is not a racist supremacist religion and that Gentiles should respect it. But that Islam is a religion of peace. Three utter lies, but put them together and you get the most preposterous narrative. There's nothing wrong with Muslims yet at the same time Israel's treatment of the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza is justified, and that's it OK to deny people the right to return who were driven out in a campaign of murder and terror.

It takes a lot of energy to sustain this drivel, even though as I have explained before the "rebels" at both extremes, Islamophobic Zionist fanatics on one side and Jew hating Palestinian loving fanatics on the other actually help stabilise the system. This doesn't happen by accident. But neither does it mean there's some giant conspiracy. Small numbers of die hard ideologues can shape and focus a much larger amorphous group of people.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

It is just part of the media's media blitz against the Right.

It's an attempt at leveling the playing field, as Labour has been under pressure for alleged anti-semitism.

[Rich]

Britain is a very important ally for Israel. The Tory party's dominance of British politics is a vital security interest for Israel. Labour can no longer be trusted to defer to Zionist interests. Hence it is vital to keep most Islamophobes, and lets be clear a substantial percentage of the British population are to some degree Islamophobic, inside the Tory tent. An alternative party on the right would be a very serious development. Anti establishment poseurs are tolerated, but there are limits. There's no doubt that Nigel Farage tested those limits, but at the end of the day he was still an anti establishment blow hard poseur.

Brexit is a Jewish supremacist's wet dream, setting one White Gentile nation against another.

[Decky]

I do not really understand where you are coming from on this, Decky.

The media is notoriously socially liberal and pro-immigration basically everywhere.

It was the center right folks that barred various Americans from going to Britain based off of fears that they were right wing extremists.

It's kind of like I'm supposed to not be able to have any kind of position on the government being too liberal because the center right is liberal, yet, it is right, so, lol verv i don't knwo what you're talking about...

Sure. OK.

IDK?

Will you discuss it with me seriously if I simply clarify that the cucks are liberals?

What re you talking about? Of course the centre right media is pro immigration, the right is pro immigration.

The right belive in free market capitalism. That means a free market in goods, labour, and capital. If the British media had a left wing bias it would be very different in its reporting on migration that its current right wing stance. The left shoot to kill when they see someone illegally crossing a border. Maybe you have heard of the Berlin wall?

The Conservative party is a Jewish supremacist party that knows full well that's its first duty is to serve the interests of Israel. Note serving the interests of Israel, often involves putting on a fake impartiality, it may even involve showing fake concern for the plight of the Palestinians, all the better to gain credibility to defend Israel.

So a key plank of Jewish supremacist strategy in Britain is that no party must be allowed to emerge on the right that is outside of Jewish supremacist control. UKIP were tolerated while they were just an anti Euro outfit, but as soon as they threatened to develop into something more, they had to be brought to an end. So the Labour party came out and put huge effort into making sure that Conservative candidates won and were not defeated by UKIP. The British Labour party sacrificed, being in government in order to serve its Jewish supremacist masters. If the right had split Labour would be in 10 Downing Street now. Even Nigel Farage meekly accepted orders when he was told it was time to end UKIP.

Note, there is little doubt that Jewish supremacists were central in the creation of the EDL. Jewish supremacist recognised that there had to be some outlet to let off steam against Islam, so they deliberately set something up that had incoherent, unsustainable narrative. Something that could never morph into a genuine anti Sharia political party that Jewish suprematists were unable to control.

It is not random chance the the Tories act like this, I expect Benjamin D'Isreali took steps to ensure things would never change when he was leader of the Conservatives.

[ThirdTerm]

Sayeeda Warsi, the party’s former chair, said she had spent more than two years trying and failing to get her successors and Theresa May to engage with the problem, and warned that the Tories faced a wider institutional problem of Islamophobia.

Theresa May is unlikely to take action against racism in the party and she had made some unsavory comments about immigration in the the past, which is similar to Thatcher. Currently, the Tories are back in the 1980s with the Brexit prime minister. David Cameron was a respectable guy who tried to do something about it with Baroness Warsi, who was the first Muslim woman to serve in the cabinet under him.

Linda Freedman, who was elected to the Edgware ward in the most recent local elections and now sits as a Tory Councillor in Barnet, was suspended after tweets emerged showing her expressing support for the detention of Muslims in a response to a Washington Post article.

Freedman was responding to US actor George Takei’s article, titled “They interned my family. Don’t let them do it to Muslims” with a (now deleted) tweet, where she said:

“They interned my German ones for 1 year during WW2. It was the right thing to do for the sake of security.”

Linda Freedman was wrongly accused of Islamophobia for defending the internment of German citizens in Britain. It was the right thing to do in my view, too.

[skinster]

The Tories haven’t just popularised Islamophobia – they’ve gentrified it
The lack of pressure on Theresa May to act is an alarming indication of where rightwing politics is taking Britain
The Conservative party has a problem with Muslims. It is not a few bad apples; not a few social media posts taken out of context. The problem has been growing unchecked for years, despite warnings by Muslim party members, and has now become so normalised that incidents are being reported with alarming frequency. Last week, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) called for an independent inquiry into Islamophobia following more-than-weekly occurrences in the party last month. In these past four weeks alone, Conservative party representatives and candidates have called Islam “the new Nazism”, posted a picture of bacon on a door handle as a way to “protect your house from terrorism”, and shared an article that called Muslims “parasites” who “live off the state and breed like rabbits”.

Muslim party members also reported casual racism linked to the religion, and conversations where it was heavily implied or overtly spelled out that to get ahead in the party, they had to shed as much of their Muslim identity as possible. This is now a pattern. Peter Oborne wrote last week that in his research over the years he has shown that it is impossible for a practising Muslim to make his or her way to the very top of the Tory party.

Prejudices do not just land at the door of certain parties. They bubble upwards from some foundational corruption. There is a reason that the anti-Muslim bigotry that has developed over the last two decades nested on the right, and found a home in the Conservative party. There is an overlap between specific antipathy towards Muslims and general hostility towards immigration, a cornerstone Tory attitude. And there is a reason it has intensified under the auspices of today’s party. A nativist government tone sharpened after the Brexit vote and overtures to the far right have won over Ukip voters and even ex-BNP supporters.

Just as antisemitism on the left arises from a warped, conspiratorial view of a world in which Jews are enablers of powerful interests that conspire against the weak, anti-Muslim prejudice on the right arises from an obsession with immigration gone haywire, hence Muslims are hordes, invaders, breeding like rabbits and changing the culture with their creeping sharia.

Hate speech against Muslims also conveniently channels a racial element that on its own would meet with far more opprobrium. There are many fig leaves that cover the naked prejudice, such as: people have legitimate concerns about immigration; Muslims change the culture of a place far more than people of other religions do; is it so wrong for a nation to want to preserve its culture? A handy manual for this sort of obfuscation is Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe: a masterclass in how xenophobia can take on a respectable shape by sublimating prejudice towards Muslims – and by extension immigrants – into a legitimate cultural anxiety.

But the biggest fig leaf of all is that, somehow, it is all just legitimate criticism of Islam, that no one really has an intrinsic problem with Muslims. There is not much value in arguing against this logic because it is a set-up. Those who have been grappling with the whole “Islam is not a race” diversion for a while now know that it is obvious that hate speech, mockery, calling for internment and damaging people’s employment prospects, as studies have found, is not a legitimate interrogation of a faith. The religion-not-race canard is a threadbare semantic excuse deployed cynically by those who know that, once the religion element is stripped away, all that is left is the racist bigotry.

A party that engages in populist rhetoric against immigration, the party of the Windrush scandal and the “go home” vans, is the natural home for the politics of fear. Zac Goldsmith’s shameful smear campaign against Sadiq Khan still stands as its monument. On Sunday morning, the home secretary, Sajid Javid, dismissed the MCB’s claims, citing its supposedly “favourable comments” on extremists, and refusing to engage with the fact that senior Tories, journalists and junior party members have all made the same claims. This is deliberate strategy. Raise the spectre of extremism and just hope everyone moves on.

Of course legitimate interrogation of Islam can be, and is often, mislabelled as anti-Muslim prejudice, just as legitimate interrogation of Israel is often mislabelled as antisemitism. But it really is not hard to also see that, just as antisemites use Israel to hide their prejudice against all Jews, anti-Muslim bigots use Islamic extremism to excuse theirs.

But the similarity ends there when it comes to popular condemnation. The difference in the public outcry against Labour and Conservative failures to tackle effectively race and prejudice issues in their parties is telling. We have become inured to the sharpness of the tone against Muslims, because criticising Islam has lent a civilising comfort to those who just don’t like Muslims, and Islamophobia has been successfully twinned with immigration in the public consciousness. There will be precious few pundits calling for an inquiry or radio shows asking callers whether Theresa May is fit to lead a party whose members bully and stigmatise Muslims. There will be few voters at the ballot box who will shun the Tory party because it makes their fellow citizens feel unsafe.

Pressure must continue to grow on May to tackle the problem, but the only way that can happen is if the cause is taken up by others, not just the MCB. The present situation says much about the Conservative party and the alarming direction in which rightwing politics is taking the country. We’re seeing Islamophobia not just popularised, but gentrified.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... are_btn_tw