Rip van Normal

🚨 Angela Rayner is expected to appoint an “Islamophobia tsar” by the end of this week, to help enforce the Government’s “anti-Muslim hostility” definition — Islamophobia by another name. As the Free Speech Union warned from the outset, the definition has been used to silence people who criticise, debate or mock Islam. Those targeted include politicians such as Shadow Justice Secretary @NJ_Timothy, @RupertLowe10 and Reform UK’s @RobertJenrick, as well as private citizens. It is a state-approved Islamic blasphemy code. Earlier this year, FSU Policy and Research Director @DavidRoseUK exposed troubling connections between Islamist organisations and all five individuals the Government hand-picked to sit on the working group that drafted the definition. Now the Government is refusing to say which organisations took part in the consultation that shaped it. @NJ_Timothy submitted a Freedom of Information request and was initially told that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government had deleted every submission — in apparent breach of the Government’s own data policy. The Department later admitted that it does hold the responses, but it still refuses to say which organisations or individuals took part and influenced the definition. What is the Government covering up? Did Islamists help to create a state-approved blasphemy code? @AngelaRayner has serious questions to answer. On Tuesday, the Prime Minister met Muslim community leaders in Downing Street and told them: “We want to counter any form of hatred, discrimination, Islamophobia, wherever we find it.” Sitting next to him was Akeela Ahmed, one of the five members of the working group. In 2018, she called for the Islamophobia definition published by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims to have “legal power” so that it could be “implemented by the government and the police”. She later told MPs that Islamophobia “cannot simply be reduced to or restricted to hate crime”, complaining that a columnist could write about a “Muslim problem” without it being treated as Islamophobia, “or simply being seen as free speech”. She also wanted the definition to cover “microaggressions during school runs”. All of this considered, there is little reason to hope that whoever becomes tsar will be good news for free speech. Among the frontrunners is Sayeeda Warsi, the former Conservative Party co-chairman and now a crossbench peer. She has refused to distance herself from extremists, claiming that doing so would be “playing by the rules set by the racists”, and has said that the term “Islamist” is “often a fig leaf used by Islamophobes to disguise their bigotry”. The FSU has launched a legal challenge to stop this definition. Parliament abolished the blasphemy laws in 2008; we will not allow a new one to return under a new name. Help us stop an Islamic blasphemy law in Britain 👇