Why are senior Tories citing an Islamophobic Labour conspiracy theory as fact?

Despite no evidence that anyone ever threatened MPs so much that they had to remove reference to Israel's war crimes from a parliamentary ceasefire motion, senior Tory MPs treating it as true.

On Friday the Prime Minister made a panicky and profoundly anti-democratic "emergency statement" on extremism in which he claimed that "longstanding parliamentary conventions have been upended because of safety concerns".

He was clearly referencing the Islamophobic panic that Lindsay Hoyle and Keir Starmer decided to trigger in order to draw attention away from their decision to sabotage the SNP’s Gaza ceasefire motion and stave off a major Labour Party rebellion against Starmer’s infuriating refusal to call Israeli genocide and war crimes what they are.

Former Tory immigration minister Robert Jenrick went even further in the Daily Mail, claiming that "parliament caved to threats of violence from a mob of Islamists and far-left extremists" in "one of the darkest days of our democracy".

The narrative has well and truly taken hold, and it’s now recited as gospel, despite the fact that nobody has provided any evidence whatever of anyone making threats of violence against MPs if they refused to vote for the SNP ceasefire motion that referenced Israeli "collective punishment of civilians" instead of supporting Starmer’s watered-down ceasefire amendment that didn’t.

If such unlikely threats had been made then the perpetrators should have been reported to the police, and their names made public so that the overwhelming majority of peaceful Palestinian solidarity protesters could distance themselves from such unacceptable tactics.

There are no police reports of any such thing actually happening, no names have been made public, and there’s absolutely no justification for Jenrick’s claim that these unspecified threats from unspecified people were made by "Islamists" and the "far-left".

Yet somehow, despite the absolute absence of evidence, this story is recited over and again as fact by establishment politicians, who then go completely unquestioned and unchallenged by Britain’s dreadful political media class.

The lack of evidence is so glaring that the politicians who have been spreading this conspiracy theory are forced to pad out their allegations with other examples of so-called extremism.

Both Rishi Sunak and Robert Jenrick cited George Galloway’s by-election win in Rochdale as an example of Islamist extremism. As if the thousands of voters who turned their backs on Labour and the Tories there did so because the people of Rochdale have suddenly become a bunch of dangerous Islamist extremists, rather just being sick of all the lies and the genocide complicity of the Westminster establishment parties.

Tory Deputy Chair Rachel Maclean resorted to lying about a violent mob intimidating MPs outside of parliament, but there’s absolutely zero video evidence of any such intimidation actually having taken place, nor any of the police arrest reports you’d expect if people had been violently threatening MPs in such a way.

Labour MP John Sweeney claimed that a violent mob stormed his constituency office, terrifying and intimidating his staff. The video evidence shows a peaceful protest, and the police say no such violent invasion took place, and that somebody simply let them through the door.

Sunak cited the projection of the words "from the river to the sea" onto the houses of parliament as another example of this so-called extremism, but where were his words of condemnation when the Israeli Prime Minister used the exact same turn of phrase to speak about Israel invading and occupying even more land in the middle east?

If the words are so offensive when Palestinians use them to say they should be free, why on earth are they acceptable when Netenyahu uses them to promote even more Israeli land theft, occupation, and subjugation?

The only things the Islamophobic panic-mongers can point to that actually happened are the democratic election of an anti-genocide campaigner they don’t like, and the projection of some words onto the side of a building, neither of which amount to the "threats" and "violence" that supposedly made MPs fear for their lives so much they removed reference to Israeli collective punishment from a parliamentary ceasefire motion.

The weirdest thing about all of this is why senior Tories like Rishi Sunak and Robert Jenrick are pushing and exaggerating Lindsay Hoyle’s Islamophobic panic, instead of criticising the way Lindsay Hoyle and Keir Starmer colluded to rip up parliamentary convention and effectively hand the SNP’s opposition day over to the Labour Party.

Wouldn’t it be in the Tory party’s strategic interests to aim their fire at the Labour leader, highlight how Labour leaned on the Speaker to corrupt parliamentary procedure, and point out that Labour insiders actually bragged about their bully-boy tactics against the Speaker before the Islamophobic panic was hastily cooked up to divert fire away from them, and onto Britain’s Muslim community.

No doubt Starmer’s inner circle of right-wing ghouls are absolutely delighted at how this has all panned out.

They’ve converted a scandal about their own corruption of parliamentary procedures into an anti-Muslim hate fest, and it’s been so successful that senior Tories are now citing Hoyle’s evidence-free Islamophobic conspiracy theory more than they’re talking about it themselves!

It’s like they knew that an Islamophobic panic would be like catnip to the Tories and the rabid capitalist media hack pack, so they fed them an Islamophobic conspiracy theory to cover their own corruption, then retreated into the background to watch the explosion of hateful rhetoric and totalitarian hankering they’d been hoping for.

From a purely strategic point of view it was a masterclass in misdirection from the Labour Party, but from a moral perspective it’s utterly obscene.

The Labour Party has already been under fire for it’s hierarchy of racism, the internal abuse of Muslim politicians, their complicity with Israeli genocide against Palestinian Muslims, and Starmer’s outright refusal to engage with the critical findings of the Forde Report … and now they’ve thrown British Muslims to the wolves to save their own skins.

The depravity isn’t just limited to Lindsay Hoyle and the Labour Party for creating this Islamophobic conspiracy theory, or to the Tories and right-wing press for going feral over it.

The so-called liberal press are complicit in their silence.

You can see that most of the liberal hack pack are clearly pleased that Hoyle’s Islamophobic panic drew negative attention away from their boy Starmer, so they’re happily saying nothing to put the record straight, and gleefully taking pot shots at Tories like Lee Anderson for being so stupid that he resorted to outright slander because he didn’t understand the rules of the evidence-free Islamophobic insinuation game the rest of them have been playing.

Only a few creditable outliers like Owen Jones and Peter Oborne have attempted to explain what actually went on, but that’s clearly not enough to counteract all the divisive rhetoric and conspiracy theories that Labour deliberately kicked off to obscure their own parliamentary sabotage.

Starmer’s inner circle figured that the Tory party is absolutely riddled with extremists who despise Muslims even more than they do themselves, and deliberately fed into this Tory extremism to save their own skins.

Seeing Tories like Sunak and Jenrick reciting Hoyle’s evidence-free Islamophobic panic as indisputable fact just goes to prove that Labour’s disgusting cynicism worked even better than they could probably have imagined.