Britain’s Islamic Blasphemy Board

Keir Starmer is suffering from subterranean approval numbers since last summer’s election. The most damning stories of their eight months in office have been the murders and subsequent riots by second-generation Rwandan, Axel Rudakubana in Southport, and the rape of thousands of girls in fifty towns and cities by predominantly-Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs. The response to both, so far, has been to label vast swathes of the concerned public — including Labour’s own voters — as “far right”. A leaked Home Office report compounded the hostility, by calling the grooming gangs scandal a “grievance narrative” invented by “right-wing extremists”. But never one to miss an opportunity to make a bad situation even worse: the Labour government has now decided to create an Islamophobia council, to criminalise any conversations about the aforementioned scandals as being racist.

The definition of Islamophobia that the council on is likely to use is the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims’, which reads:

“Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”

Despite the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Faith, Communities and Resettlement, Lord Khan, conceding that the definition “proposed by the APPG is not in line with the Equality Act 2010, which defines race in terms of colour, nationality and national or ethnic origins”, the government seem set on adopting it anyway. One indicator is that former Conservative attorney general, Dominic Grieve has been “recommended” to chair the council. Grieve told the Telegraph that he had not received a formal offer to chair the council, but is “willing to consider it.” Previously, Grieve chaired the Citizens’ UK Commission on Islam, and was the Chief Guest at an Muslim Council of Britain Awards Ceremony in 2011 — despite the Council being banned from all engagement with Whitehall. Grieve also provided the foreword to the APPG report which debuted the definition. Grieve wrote,

“I greatly welcome this report, which makes an important contribution to the debate as to how Islamophobia can best be addressed. It is well researched and can give all of us food both for thought and positive action.”

That same report said that conversations about the grooming gangs scandal are

“aimed at (and can achieve) harm to individual Muslims, and is not rooted in any meaningful theological debate but rather in a racist attempt to ‘other’ Muslims in general, associating them with the crime our society sees as most abhorrent of all. This strategy has been actively pursued by far right groups including the BNP and EDL but has also been indulged – especially, as our previous research has shown, in relation to ‘grooming gangs’ – by mainstream politicians of all of our main political parties.” 

“We also found that age-old stereotypes and tropes about Islam, such sexual profligacy and paedophilia or Islam and violence, and their modern-day iteration in the ‘Asian grooming gangs’ or ‘Bin Laden’ labels re-emerge in discourses and dispositions which heighten vulnerability of Muslims to hate crimes”

Among the 52 councils that have adopted it, Camden Council cited the following as an example of Islamophobia:

“Using the symbols and images associated with classic Islamophobia (e.g. Muhammed being a paedophile, claims of Muslims spreading Islam by the sword or subjugating “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” minority groups under their rule) to characterize Muslims as being ‘sex groomers’, inherently violent or incapable of living harmoniously in plural societies.”

At the precise time that the grooming gang scandal gains global awareness, and while new trials continue in Bradford and Rochdale, the Labour government are seeking to criminalise conversations about the perpetrators for being “Islamophobic”. 

Another prospective member is Qari Asim MBE, the senior Imam at Makkah Mosque in Leeds, and Chair of the UK’s Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board. In 2022, Asim was removed from his role as deputy chair of the government’s Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group, after supporting Muslim protests against the film The Lady of Heaven being shown in British cinemas. Why he had such a role under the Johnson government is yet another example of Conservative self-harm, as in 2018 Asim shared a Guardian article that accused Boris Johnson of having “white privilege”. Asim opposed the previous Batley Grammar School protests, which sent a teacher and his family into hiding after he showed cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammed in a lesson about blasphemy and censorship — but only because protestors might “fan the flames of Islamophobia and provoke hatred or division.” Asim wrote, “I sympathise with the parents and pupils because sadly, this is not the first time we have seen offensive images of Prophet Muhammad being used.” No comparable sympathies were expressed for the teacher who remains in hiding, afraid for his life. 

Notably, Asim is also a trustee of communist activist group HOPE not Hate’s charitable organisation. HOPE Not Hate conducted the Birmingham focus groups for the APPG’s report. The government-funded group have been embroiled in a number of controversies, including: praising Stalin’s genocidal Red Army at their events; using a fraudulent passport to deceive subjects of their latest documentary Undercover: Exposing the Far Right; and spreading a hoax about racists committing acid attacks against Muslim women, which was cited by Islamic militias as a reason why they took to the street in last year’s riots. Despite this, a number of Labour MPs also remain trustees of HOPE Not Hate, including Government Whip Anna Turley, Antonia Bance, Gurinder Singh Josan, and Sarah Owen. Owen is  vice-chairman of the group’s Parliamentary Group. Labour Baroness Ruth Smeeth was, until July, a director of HOPE Not Hate. Were a Conservative or Reform MP to set up a Parliamentary Group with Nazi sympathisers, they would quite rightly be removed from the Commons. But the same standard doesn’t apply to communists like HOPE Not Hate.

Other groups involved in crafting the APPG definition include the Runnymede Trust, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), and the National Union of Students (NUS). The Runnymede Trust is infamous for having introduced the term to British politics in 1997 — after it was first invented by the Muslim Brotherhood to invoke taboos around homophobia and the Holocaust, and silence critics of Islam. Both Ayaan Hirsi Ali and myself have written about how the MCB was established by the Muslim Brotherhood; how they were banned from government engagement after their Deputy Director-General, Dr Daud Abdullah signed the Istanbul Declaration, interpreted as a jihad against the British Navy, in 2009; and how their former deputy secretary-general, Mohammed Kozbar praised Hamas’s founder as “the master of the martyrs of the resistance”. MEND, too, criticised the government as “anti-democratic” for proscribing Jihadist group Hizb ut-Tahrir in January 2024; after they called for “Jihad” and “Muslim armies” to rise up following October 7th. 

In 2005, three Jewish students resigned from the NUS Steering Committee after being met with hostility for criticising Hizb ut-Tahrir. In 2022, the former Conservative government cut funding for the NUS over allegations of antisemitism. A 2023 report confirmed pro-Palestinain activism by NUS members led to “antisemitism as well as hostility towards Jews which has not been challenged sufficiently robustly or proactively by NUS.” So the APPG definition was written by a number of Muslim activists, who have unsavoury ties to Jihadist groups, and exhibit a number of bigotries of their own. Nonetheless, Keir Starmer seems set on keeping his promise to London Mayor Sadiq Khan: to apply his experience as a prosecutor to pursue a “zero tolerance approach” to Islamophobia. 

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner will chair the new sixteen-member council. Before the 2024 election, Rayner was recorded pleading with men in an Ashton-under-Lyne mosque to vote Labour, by promising to prioritise a ceasefire in Gaza in the next Parliament. A number of cabinet ministers almost lost their seats to “independent” Muslim MPs, running on a single-issue ticket of a ceasefire in Gaza. A cynic might say Rayner’s interest in this council is a purely expedient attempt to consolidate the Muslim vote, and save her colleagues’ careers. After all, when asked to define Islamophobia last September, by Reform MP Lee Anderson, Rayner failed — despite repeatedly promising to “root it out”. Health Secretary and Brutus-in-waiting, Wes Streeting might be help, given he wrote the APPG definition. Streeting staved off a Muslim independent challenge to his seat by only 528 votes — which might why, as a gay man, he is so interested in insulating Islam from criticism.

Perhaps Rayner had forgotten that, while serving as shadow Education Secretary under Jeremy Corbyn, her Labour party formally adopted the APPG definition. She chose to retain the definition while Chair of the Labour Party between 2020 – 2021, and while serving as Deputy Leader of the Opposition from 2020 – 2024. Support for the APPG definition is still on Labour’s website. Surely, Rayner must know what Islamophobia means, since she has promised to eradicate it for six years? Rayner is also proposing a council on anti-Semitism, but she may have a harder time defining that, given she was happy to serve in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet for four years.

Even if this definition is not adopted, Britain already has a de facto blasphemy law in place. In the manifesto that Rayner campaigned on, Labour promised to “reverse the Conservatives’ decision to downgrade the monitoring of antisemitic and Islamophobic hate.” As the Home Secretary has since announced, this means the police recording more non-crime hate incidents against school-kids, vicars, and other members of the public, in an effort to prove their antiracist credentials. Using the Public Order Act (1986), the police have enforced Sharia-style standards of criminalising causing offence against Muslims. The threat of random Jihadist violence, and persecution by one’s own government, produces a chilling effect on lawful criticism of Islam.

Free Englishmen were appalled when Pakistani-heritage Labour MP, Tahir Ali asked Keir Starmer to “commit to introducing measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions.” Ali referred to a UN Human Rights Council resolution, which condemned burning the Quran as an act of religious hatred. Although the UK was one of twelve member states who voted against the motion, its authorities adhere to it in spirit. On the same day as news broke of Labour’s Islamophobia council, a man was convicted of “racially or religiously aggravated intentional harassment or alarm” by burning a Quran in Manchester. The man in question did so in protest, at the site of the Manchester Arena bombing memorial, because his daughter had been killed in the Israel/Hamas war. Nonetheless, the courts and press referred to complainant Fahad Iqbal as “a victim”. Iqbal said:

“I was quite shocked, disgusted and offended. I’m a Muslim. I still can’t believe someone would do this. When he began to burn the Quran my heart was about to break out. This is the most emotion I have ever felt.”

The police then released the man’s name, and the name of the street he lives on — issuing, in effect, a proxy fatwa, by providing to Jihadists all the information they need to seek retribution. 

This occurred just five days after the execution of Iraqi-born anti-Islam activist Salwan Momika, in his home in Södertälje, Sweden. In 2023, Momika wrapped a Quran in bacon, set it alight, and kicked it. He was charged with “agitation against an ethnic group” — presumably, the Ummah. He sought asylum in Norway in 2024, but was arrested and deported back to Sweden. The irony already highlighted by Ayaan Hirsi Ali is that, thanks to Europe’s permissive immigration and asylum policies, we have created the conditions where legitimate refugees from Islamist regimes are persecuted by our state, and assassinated in extrajudicial honour killings. Momika’s co-defendant, Salwan Najem, was convicted, and ordered to pay a fine. Presiding judge Göran Lundahl said freedom of expression is not “free pass to do or say anything”.

Whether through ideological capture, or careerist cowardice, Britain’s government and civil service have capitulated to the demands of censorious Islamist activists. The self-referential APPG definition of Islamophobia is simply a cudgel used to silence political opponents — just as the Jihadists of the Muslim Brotherhood intended, by inventing the term. The only solace we may seek is in refusing to abide by this insidious blasphemy law. If Christian martyrs refused to renounce their faith and submit to tyrants, then we can do no less than live by our convictions too.