Do Muslims Count?

The ugly truth is that Islamophobia is not just tolerated, but actively exploited by a British political and media system that treats Muslims as second class citizens

Imagine there was a major political party whose leader had a long record of making antisemitic comments and commissioning others to write pieces attacking followers of that faith. Imagine that same leader had openly mocked how orthodox Jewish people dressed, and that there was a big spike in assaults against Jewish people following his comments.

Imagine that opinion polls also showed that a large proportion of the party’s members held deeply antisemitic views. Imagine that not only were these views widespread within the party, but that the party leadership itself ran a major election campaign in the country’s capital city in which they played on antisemitic fears about Jews as part of an attempt to smear their Jewish opponent. 

Imagine that during that campaign the party targeted leaflets at people from other faiths and ethnicities warning that this Jewish person would seek to take their personal belongings away. Imagine too that this campaign was publicly defended by senior figures inside the party and that the frontman for it was later rewarded with a peerage for his troubles.

Now replace the words Jewish with Muslim and antisemitism with Islamophobia and you will start to understand quite how deep the problem of anti-Muslim hatred really is in British politics.