The British establishment is rotten with Islamophobia

Keir Starmer and Lindsay Hoyle deliberately triggered an Islamophobic panic to save their own skins, loads of Tories amplified it, and the media refuse to call out the lack of evidence.

Everyone who was paying attention last week saw Keir Starmer and the clearly compromised Speaker Lindsay Hoyle deliberately trigger an Islamophobic panic in order to obfuscate their own corruption.

They pretended that they sabotaged the SNP Gaza ceasefire motion because of unspecified threats from Palestine solidarity protesters, rather than to stave off a looming Labour rebellion against Starmer’s belligerent refusal to call Israeli genocide and war crimes what they are.

Tory MPs like Lee Anderson and Suella Braverman predictably jumped on the Starmerite Islamophobic panic by spouting ugly Islamophobic conspiracy theories that Islamists have control of the country.

The right-wing media amplified all the Tory hatred and Islamophobic conspiracy theories while the liberal-capitalist press unquestioningly regurgitated the unsubstantiated Starmerite claims of threats and violence, and hand-wrung over MPs safety.

Despite being far from alone in spreading Islamophobic hate, former Tory Deputy Chair Lee Anderson is the only one to have been punished for it. And that’s because he was too thick to pin the blame on unspecified protesters or the Muslim community in general, and directed his Islamophobic conspiracy directly at Sadiq Khan.

Starmer and the Labour right blamed their parliamentary sabotage on unspecified threats from unspecified protesters, while (aside from the idiocy of Lee Anderson) the Tories have targeted their Islamophobic hate at protesters in general, Muslim communities in general, and the unspecified Islamists who have apparently taken over the country at some point in the last 14 years of Tory rule!

Barring Lee Anderson’s stupidity, the messaging from both parties is virtually identical. Exaggerated claims of unspecified Muslim threats, belligerent refusal to call out Israeli war crimes and genocide, and authoritarian hankering for even greater clampdowns on the longstanding British right to engage in non-violent political protest.

Aside from a tiny minority of journalists (such as Peter Oborne and Owen Jones), the press consensus has been to throw their support behind the Islamophobic rabble-rousing of their particular faction.

And what’s most damning about the whole thing is the lack of evidence.

When Tory MP Rachel Maclean claimed there had been "extremely aggressive & violent protests from Islamist extremists" outside parliament, nobody pointed out that the protests were peaceful, broadly multicultural, and the complete lack of arrests you’d have expected if a violent mob had really descended on parliament.

When Starmer and Hoyle claimed they did what they did because of "threats" and "violence" from Palestine solidarity protesters, nobody asked why the perpetrators have not been reported to the police, or why their names have not been made public so that the vast majority of entirely peaceful Palestine solidarity protesters can distance themselves from unacceptable intimidation tactics.

Both sides of the establishment order are riddled with Islamophobia, genocide complicity, and tyrannical urges to crush the British public’s remaining rights to engage in protest and hold their political representatives to account.

And the only individual to be held to account for any of it is Lee Anderson because he was too thick to understand the rules of the Islamophobic game the rest of them are playing, and engaged in clearcut defamation rather than evidence-free claims and generalised insinuations.

The evidence is clear that Labour are riddled with Islamophobia (the Starmerite Islamophobic panic that kicked the whole thing off, the Forde Report, the factional abuse of Muslim Labour MPs, party insiders calling the exodus of Muslim Labour councillors over Starmer’s genocide complicity "shaking off the fleas" …).

The evidence is clear that the Tories are riddled with Islamophobia (the Anti-Muslim conspiracy theories of Lee Anderson, Liz Truss, Suella Braverman, Rachel Maclean, Paul Scully, and Rishi Sunak’s refusal to even admonish most of them).

And virtually the entire media class have proven themselves complicit with the Islamophobic rabble-rousing of their favoured faction, rather than doing their jobs and pointing out the lack of evidence behind all of these lurid anti-Muslim claims and conspiracy theories.