Somewhere in Britain at this moment, a man and his young family are living a life in secret. They go about their lives under false identities in an unfamiliar town or city, making new acquaintances, but never revealing who they are or what brought them there.
The Batley Grammar School teacher, as we know him today, remains in hiding. No one has been arrested for threatening him, his career is over, and he will spend the rest of his life knowing that he’s the target of Islamist rage.
I don’t know what was in his lesson plan, except that it was about blasphemy and free expression. It wasn’t the first lesson he’d given on the topic, and it followed the approved national curriculum. Charlie Hebdo was in there somewhere. If I’d been teaching the lesson, I might have asked the students what motivates some among us to murder twelve people for publishing a cartoon. Perhaps he did the same.
What we know for certain is that the lesson led to protests outside the school gates, along with denunciations from “community leaders” and the sort of threats that would make anyone want to stay out of sight.
This all happened exactly five years ago and made two messages clear to anyone paying attention. First, intimidation works. Second, those with the power to do something about it will not merely look away; they’ll recast the intimidation as a legitimate grievance.
The career-ending accusation of “Islamophobia” has hung over every discussion of Islam in the West for decades. In Britain, which leads the world in self-sabotage, a formal definition has now arrived, rebranded as “anti-Muslim hostility”. It’s carefully worded and accompanied by caveats that claim to protect criticism, ridicule, and academic debate.
Near the end, it drops in a line like an afterthought:
“This is a working definition and, as with all working definitions, it may need to evolve over time as understanding of the issues develops.”
Evolve how? Upon whose “understanding”? It’s not cynical to wonder what this means and where this leads. It’s not an exaggeration to call this a blasphemy law in all but name.
A few days after the definition was formalised, London Mayor Sadiq Khan led a sex-segregated public Islamic prayer session in Trafalgar Square.
Nick Timothy, a member of parliament, remarked:
”Too many are too polite to say this. But mass ritual prayer in public places is an act of domination…I am not suggesting everybody at Trafalgar Square last night is an Islamist. But the domination of public places is straight from the Islamist playbook…”
Timothy’s X post was exactly the kind of thing protected by the definition’s own terms. Still, the Prime Minister responded with synthetic indignation, demanding he be sacked for his "utterly appalling" remarks. The Attorney General, Lord Hermer, opted for whataboutery: “Would they have a problem if I, as a Jewish man, were praying in public?”, he asked – as though the concern were about prayer rather than ideology; as if it wasn't Islamists who were forcing teachers into hiding, threatening autistic children for accidentally scuffing a book, and detonating themselves at pop concerts. As if religion were an irrelevant detail when men were gangraping children on an industrial scale in the forgotten towns and cities of the UK.
“Islamophobia”, in a line often credited to Christopher Hitchens, is “a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons”.
It's an elegant compression of something we all know to be true – including, and perhaps especially, those who are first to deny it.
The fascists who created it
Theocratic regimes popularised the term “Islamophobia” in the late 1970s after facing criticism of Islamic governance, particularly from dissidents within Muslim-majority countries.
Aided by the burgeoning left-wing NGO industry, they borrowed the moral force of anti-racism by making criticism of Islamic doctrine equivalent to attacking Muslims as people. It’s a move that hides its flagrant dishonesty by tapping into Western sensibilities – the preference for tact and good manners over cultural ineptness. Conflating criticism of Islam with bigotry toward Muslims shields the theology behind the person. What better way to make that scrutiny feel gauche among people who pride themselves on their progressive credentials?
It makes no sense, obviously. As soon as you apply the same logic to other belief systems, it falls apart. 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, when Salman Rushdie went into hiding after publishing a book. Perhaps nothing captured the strangeness of that moment better than Cat Stevens, the singer-songwriter who had converted to Islam and become Yusuf Islam. Here he is, endorsing the murder of a fellow artist in a panel discussion shortly after the fatwa.
Years later, in an astonishing display of victim-blaming, Baroness Shirley Williams, a prominent Liberal Democrat politician, said of Salman Rushdie:
“This is a man who has deeply offended Muslims in a very powerful way, who’s been protected by the British police against threats of suicide [sic] for years and years at great expense to the taxpayer…”
Christopher Hitchens responded by calling the remark “contemptible”, which, of course, it is.
The script has been the same for all Islamist 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”.
Always, the reflex is to blame the victim rather than the people who follow through on their death threats. Always, the preoccupation is with the supposed offence that was caused, not the murderous response to it.
