If you had asked me, even just a few years ago about hate crime and particularly Islamophobia, you would have met with some scepticism. My general outlook is that we should not overburden people with laws and regulations. I also would have argued generally speaking that the police and courts had all the powers they needed to deal with racism.
However, there are plenty of things that we can freely change our mind on and this is an area where my mind has been changing.
I think that the starting point has been around the issue of antisemitism. I have seen how people have hidden behind the language of free speech and fair comment in order to create space for hatred and violence to incubate and grow. I’ve watched as the authorities seem to have been unable to prevent weekly intimidation through Saturday marches over the two years. I also realized that you can’t really call those kinds of demonstrations peaceful, the very act of taking over a city in order to bring about your agenda of fear and hate is a violent one. I came to the conclusion that we needed laws to specifically deal with antisemitism
Now, you know what would happen if someone introduced a bill in parliament to deal with antisemitism. Another MP would amend it to deal with Islamophobia too. There are indeed already efforts to create a working definition of Islamophobia. Christians and free speech activists have objected strongly seeing this as an attempt to silence criticism of Islam
Now, here’s the thing. We should be free to challenge Islam, just as people are free to challenge Christianity. However, what we are seeing is that Islam is often being used as the umbrella term but people are not really disagreeing with the religion or calling people to convert. Rather this is used as a cover for attacks on people, the immigrants themselves become a threat, stereotypes are of specific ethnic cultures (by the way culture itself should be challengable but there is surely a way of doing it in a healthy manner). And these attacks, mainly on South Asian identity and culture are linked to the promotion of a form of ethno-cultural Nationslism.
There are risks of course with getting a working definition. We are further back in working this out than with antisemitism. Even with antisemitism there are challenges, disagreements between Christianity and Judaism can be misread as antisemitic, we want to get the balance between protecting Jews from the evil of racism and fair critique of modern day Israel too. Yet generally speaking we do get the balance right.
So, I’ve concluded that we do need a definition of Islamophobia and that it is right and helpful for The Law to deal specifically with antisemitism and Islamophobia.
Faithroots 