Islamophobia: A Word for Cowards
'Created by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons'.
In March 2021, a teacher at Batley Grammar School showed his students a Charlie Hebdo cartoon during a lesson on blasphemy and free expression. The image came from the French satirical magazine whose writers and staff had been massacred six years earlier by Islamists. Twelve people were shot dead that day. For publishing a picture.
The lesson was part of the approved national curriculum. The teacher had taught it before without incident, but this time it sparked protests at the school gates, denunciations from “community leaders” and a torrent of threats.
Four years later, that teacher and his family remain in hiding. No one has been arrested for threatening him. His career is over, and his children attend school under false names.
This didn’t happen in Tehran or some other theocratic state. It happened in Yorkshire – in the country that gave the world Chaucer, Mill and Orwell. It should have provoked national outrage and an instinctive defence of freedom. True, 60,000 people petitioned to have the teacher’s job reinstated, but the establishment’s response was noticeably muted. The political class averted its eyes, the police stood down, and the media moved on. Where there should have been moral courage, there was cowardice. And where there should have been shame, there was only fear and calculation.
The message was clear. Intimidation works – especially when the career-ending accusation of “Islamophobia” hangs over every decision.
Andrew Cummins once said – in a line often credited to Christopher Hitchens – that Islamophobia is “a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons”.
Let’s take a closer look at how each part works.
“Islamophobia” and the fascists who created it
The term “Islamophobia” was popularised in the late 1970s by theocratic regimes facing criticism of Islamic governance, particularly from dissidents within Muslim-majority countries. As Pascal Bruckner observed, Iranian fundamentalists “invented the term ‘Islamophobia’ formed in analogy to ‘xenophobia’. The aim of this word was to declare Islam inviolate. Whoever crosses this border is deemed a racist”.
The strategy was brilliant: conflate ideology with identity. Make criticism of Islamic doctrine equivalent to attacking Muslims as people. Borrow the moral force of anti-racism to shield ideas from scrutiny. As Bruckner notes, the term is “deliberately unspecific about whether it refers to a religion, a belief system or its faithful adherents around the world”.
Although Western governments have resisted explicit blasphemy laws, the strategy has been able to achieve similar results through institutional policy and the manipulation of anti-discrimination frameworks.
But there’s an obvious anomaly here, and it reveals itself as soon as you apply the same rationale to other belief systems. Can you critique Christianity without accusations of Christophobia? Can you question Marxism, capitalism, Zionism – any ideology – without being labelled bigoted against its adherents? You know the answer. Secular democratic societies defend these rights scrupulously.
Only with Islam have we accepted that scrutinising ideas equals hatred of people.
We first saw this pattern emerge in 1989 with Salman Rushdie, who went into hiding after publishing a book. Then came the apologists. “He was being provocative”, they said. The script has been the same for all religiously motivated violence ever since. Charlie Hebdo: “They provoked Muslims”. Samuel Paty beheaded: “French secularism is inflexible”. The Batley teacher forced into hiding: “The lesson wasn’t necessary”.
Notice who gets blamed. Not the people making death threats. Not the ideology cited to justify violence. It’s always the actual victim for “causing offence”. This is blasphemy law in all but name – certain statements about religion are prohibited because they offend. Different mechanics, same effect.
“Islamophobia” and the cowards who use it
The Batley teacher’s story is a grim reminder of how institutional capitulation works. Here was someone who taught a lesson that was approved by the curriculum; an independent investigation later cleared him of any wrongdoing. No matter. In the face of intimidation and the charge of Islamophobia, his career was destroyed and he went into hiding.
How did we get here? The answer is simple but devastating: self-preservation. Defending the teacher would have cost the school more in reputation than abandoning him would have disturbed its conscience. It’s a calculation made over and over by institutions whose instinct is always to preserve reputation and avoid accusations of racism. It works because a demoralised public will eventually let the matter slide. They’ve seen it all before.
Take Steven Greer. The Bristol University professor was fully exonerated after teaching about religious violence. The university dropped his course and left him to the wolves anyway. He wore a disguise in his own city.
Each week brings another act of surrender.
And now the state wants to formalise this cowardice. In February 2025, the British government established a working group to define “Anti-Muslim Hatred/Islamophobia.” The proposed definition is elastic enough that almost anything could fall into its grasp. Islamophobia, it says, “is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”
In other words, anything that might offend anyone who identifies as Muslim.
It should be obvious what follows. Censorship won’t come from government prosecutions but from every institution pre-emptively protecting itself. Universities will “sanitise” curricula and publishers will reject “problematic” manuscripts. Employers will be doing everything in their power to avoid the risk of being “Islamophobic”. The state won’t need to silence anyone because everyone will silence themselves.
“Islamophobia” and the morons who are manipulated
We’re not talking about stupid people. These are educated, influential, and often genuinely compassionate individuals, but they’ve walked into a linguistic trap. They think defending Muslims against hatred requires defending Islam from criticism. They can’t distinguish between protecting people and protecting ideas.
The manipulation of those who weaponise “Islamophobia” preys on liberal guilt. Muslims face genuine discrimination in Britain. True. Therefore, any criticism of Islamic doctrine must stem from prejudice. False.
It’s a category error dressed in the language of rights, tolerance and compassion.
Who pays for this moral and intellectual confusion? It’s the likes of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who advocates for women’s rights after fleeing Somalia, surviving genital mutilation, escaping forced marriage, and renouncing Islam. Western progressives call her an “Islamophobe.” And then there’s Maajid Nawaz, former Islamist turned reformer, who receives more hostility from British liberals than from the extremists he opposes.
A genuine anti-racism movement would protect these people. Instead, they’re abandoned while institutions congratulate themselves on their own sensitivity.
There is a cruel irony in all of this. A definition that claims to protect Muslims in fact silences Muslims who need protecting the most – the Muslim women fighting for equality and ex-Muslims fleeing religious violence. They’re treated as “bigots” and “Islamophobes”.
Again, the “morons” aren’t fools. They’re people whose empathy has been used against them, who now conflate protecting people with shielding ideas from examination. They believe tolerance demands making certain facts unsayable.
Britain abolished blasphemy laws in 2008, recognising that protecting ideas from criticism was incompatible with free inquiry. Now, under the auspices of people desperate to display their progressive credentials, blasphemy returns wearing a keffiyeh.
Liberal democracy rests on one premise: we can disagree about beliefs without destroying each other. We resolve differences through argument, not violence.
The Batley Grammar School teacher has been in hiding for four years for teaching a lesson about religious violence and free expression. Salman Rushdie hid for a decade before an attacker stabbed him on stage. He survived the fatwa, but his Japanese translator was not so lucky. Neither were the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. Neither was Samuel Paty.
An official Islamophobia definition is on the cards in Britain. However carefully worded, it will formalise cowardice into policy, protecting ideas rather than people.
The teacher from Batley Grammar School is still in hiding.
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Yeah, I mean, anything with the ending "phobia" has been grotesquely misused by the Left to the point that it has mostly lost all meaning.
Wonderful piece. I remember my first pang of political homelessness watching Maryam Namazie try to give a talk at Goldsmith’s University. She was standing up for women and fellow Muslims suffering under theocrats only to be viciously heckled by a group of theocratic thugs(all men). The student org then took the side of thugs and called her a racist. And yet, the groupthink prevails.