It is not ‘Islamophobic’ to stand up for Jews and Western civilisation

I’ve had a lot of flak in my career. But I never imagined I’d be condemned for expressing horror at the parading of an emaciated Jew through the streets by a mob of anti-Semites. I never thought I would get it in the neck for using the word ‘medieval’ to describe a swarm of men who surrounded and jeered at a terrified half-starved Jewish woman. And yet here we are.

The Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) – the most batshit wing of the Muslim Council of Britain, and that’s saying something – has published another whiny ‘report’ about the British media’s coverage of Islam and Muslims. This time its target is the Spectator, a publication I am proud to contribute to. It is titled No Mere Spectator: Anti-Muslim Hosility in Britain’s Oldest Political Magazine. The front cover is illustrated with a cartoon of a snooty-nosed posh bloke in a Union Jack dicky bow perusing the Speccie as he chomps on a fat cigar. Remember, lads, we’re not allowed to caricature Muhammad but they can caricature Brits till the cows come home. Them’s the rules under asymmetrical multiculturalism.

The column of mine that really seems to have got their goat – no offence! – was published in January last year. It was about the vile spectacle of Hamas’s handover of Arbel Yehoud, the young woman seized from her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz during the Islamofascist invasion of Israel on 7 October 2023. She was held for 482 days. She was entirely alone. She was deprived of food. Her gaunt, ashen face was a testament to the maltreatment she suffered under the cruel yoke of her racist captors.

I wrote angrily for the Spectator about the barbaric theatre of her handover to the Red Cross. Yet the CfMM seems angrier with me than with the gun-toting scum who humiliated a Jew before the eyes of the world. It reprimands me for calling the handover a ‘medieval spectacle’. It tells me off for referring to the brutes who paraded their malnourished prey in the streets as ‘armies of anti-Semites’. It rebukes me for saying this ritualistic Jew-taunting was ‘sport for radical Islamists’.

What is going on here? Why is a media think-tank attacking a journalist for feeling revolted by the sight of a terror-stricken Jew being jostled through a howling crowd? The CfMM spies racism in my commentary. Of course it does. It says it is unclear whether my phrase ‘armies of anti-Semites’ refers only to Hamas or to the entire crowd of possibly just curious Palestinians. What, the crowd that included burly men who mocked and filmed the terrorised Jew? Yeah, they’re anti-Semites too.

As for ‘medieval’ – apparently l deployed that word not as a ‘precise historical reference’ but as a ‘civilisational judgement’ designed to ‘[position] the crowd as temporally and morally primitive’. You know what? Fuck off. First, ‘medieval’ and ‘primitive’ mean wholly different things. Buy a dictionary. Secondly, it takes ethno-narcissism to dizzying new heights for someone to read an article about the racist subjugation of a Jew and turn it into a discussion about the wounded feelings of Muslims. This is self-regard on smack. These are hitherto untapped depths of self-pity.

It’s moral relativism, of course. I’m being censured for daring to assert civilisational values – for making a ‘civilisational judgement’, no less – against a frothing mob that got a sick kick from the existential terror of a Jew. Perhaps the people in that crowd are just differently cultured? Maybe their feelings are valid? Everything’s valid these days. But it’s something worse, too – it’s moral inversion. Turning a story about the largest act of anti-Jewish persecution since the Holocaust into a hubristic screed on hurty words about Muslims is repulsive. This isn’t about you, babe. It’s about Jews.

That my piece on Arbel Yehoud has been included in a report on ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ is all the proof we need that the ‘Islamophobia’ industry is a scam whose mission is not to defend Muslims from discrimination but to police and punish political opinion. Not one word of my piece expressed ‘anti-Muslim hostility’. It expressed hostility to Hamas, to fascist terror, to Jew hatred. Under the guise of ‘defending Muslims’, the CfMM is chilling legitimate discussion, seeking to limit what we can say about Islam, Israel, Gaza, religion and a whole host of other things. Deploying religious grievance to crush public debate? It’s medieval!

The whole report is crazy. It analyses 3,733 Speccie articles about Islam and related issues. It found that 57.4 per cent of them were ‘biased’ or ‘very biased’. Bear in mind that this includes me calling Hamas cunts. It mauls Spectator writers for ‘delegitimising the idea of Islamophobia’ (guilty as charged), for using the phrase ‘Islamic terrorism’, and for obsessing over ‘so-called “grooming gangs”’. Keep up – they’re called rape gangs now, given the reams of evidence we have that these gangs of mostly Pakistani men raped hundreds of white working-class girls. Seems it’s not only ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ to be outraged by the mobbing of an Israeli woman but also by the subjugation of English women.

The report wangs on about me, Douglas Murray, Julie Burchill, Gavin Mortimer, Rod Liddle – fine company! Burchill – who’s also a spiked columnist – rattles the pious pricks because she ‘defends the right to make jokes about Islam’. Call the ayatollah! ‘We’re always told that making jokes about Islam is “punching down”’, she wrote in March 2023. ‘But tell a migrant worker-slave in Qatar or a gay man in Dubai or a spirited woman in Iran that the world’s wealthiest and fastest growing religion is powerless.’ The CfMM’s fun-sponge scribes accuse her of ‘invoking human-rights abuses’ in ‘three separate state contexts’ and ‘attribut[ing] them collectively to Islam as a unified religious force’, which has the effect of reinforcing a moral ‘asymmetry’ that is… oh, I can’t go on. The humourlessness is asphyxiating. Guys, someone disagrees with you. It’s fine. You’re going to give yourselves a hernia.

It’s so telling which articles of mine get on their wick. I’m criticised for saying there has been an ‘orgy of anti-Semitism’ in the West since 7 October. I’m slammed for saying the keffiyeh classes are motored less by ‘concern for Muslim life’ than by ‘contempt for Israel’. I’m accused of using the word ‘Islamist’ in a ‘broad, undefined’ way. O’Neill is too vague in his piece on ‘what he calls the “Jew hunt of Amsterdam in 2024”’, the report says. Erm, it wasn’t me who called it a ‘Jew hunt’ – it was the anti-Semitic mob itself, which expressly hit the streets in order to ‘hunt’ the ‘cancer Jews’ who had travelled to watch Maccabi Tel Aviv.

And of course I’m told off for my pieces on the rape gangs. Especially a 2017 piece in which I commented on the ‘palpable reluctance’ of the state and polite society to ‘confront the particular problem of some Muslim men’s disdain for white working-class girls’. Apparently that’s Islamophobic. It isn’t. I stand by every word. The safety of working-class girls matters to me infinitely more than your feelings.

There’s a side-splitting irony in this bonkers report. It quotes a phrase of mine from a Spectator piece I wrote 11 years ago. It quotes it three times, including in the foreword, which is written by Peter Oborne. That phrase is ‘dainty sensibilities’ – I was criticising the cloying offence-taking of the professional misery guts who stink up our activist classes. How dare you say we are exhibiting ‘dainty sensibilities’, asks this 146-page report about the mean media and its mean words. You couldn’t make it up. But the CfMM is right about one thing: I am making a ‘civilisational judgement’. I judge that Hamas is morally inferior to Israel, that Islamism is morally inferior to secularism, and that shitting your pants when you read something you don’t like is morally inferior to just laughing it off. And everyone is welcome on my civilisational side: Christians, Jews, Muslims, ex-Muslims, non-believers, everyone. Because we don’t discriminate against people, only against ideas.