I AM NOT in the least bit interested in the Macron state visit. The French president is on his way out politically and barely controls his own government, and despite the gushing analyses from the BBC, I don’t think the fatuous Charles is helping with his reference to ‘irregular migration’.
He most certainly isn’t helping with his declaration that there are ‘no borders’ between Britain and France. I don’t know if he has realised that we have left the EU and, since Brexit, there most decidedly is a border. It runs down the median line through the Channel and our problem lies not in its absence but in the lack of enforcement.
For the sovereign to be detached from reality isn’t new but it is dispiriting in the current situation where we as a nation face an existential threat from mass migration and find that the King is rooting for the bad guys. The slender thread that links him with the people gets more fragile by the day.
As for France, the infidelity of this nation is part of our history and I made my views known once again on Twitter, with a post stating that ‘I’m in favour of reactivating Air Ministry Spec 27/32 for a light day bomber, which required an aircraft to be able to fly to Paris, drop a 1,000lb bomb and return to England.’
When I added my usual badinage by asserting: ‘There are few problems in this world which could not be resolved by bombing Paris,’ I was surprised and encouraged to see how many people agreed.
My somewhat cynical view, though, puts me once again at odds with the national dailies, with the Times treating the state banquet as a celebrity outing. We were informed that Elton John and Mick Jagger were amongst the 160 guests and given the vital news that the Princess of Wales was ‘wearing the lover’s knot tiara and earrings from the late Queen with a dark red silk creponne-gathered evening gown with caped back detailing, and a lily of the valley embroidered evening clutch’.
It’s really unsurprising that so many people go elsewhere for their news. Although I suppose there’s always been a market for this sort of tat, and American women of a certain age drool over it.
Anyway, I was far more interested in the carry-over from the 7/7 anniversary, echoes of which are still driving an energetic conversation which, in the round, will have far more impact on our future lives than the state visit, especially as the discourse is being tagged on to the consultation on the definition of islamophobia.
To give him his due, the one MP who seems to be taking this very seriously is Nick Timothy who is marshalling opposition against its adoption, calling for readers of his website to take part in the ‘rigged consultation process’.
Timothy would prefer the term ‘Islamophobia’ to be dumped, and where there is ‘discrimination, prejudice, bigotry, hatred or violence directed at Muslims’, he wants to see the term ‘anti-Muslim hatred’ used ‘as defined in existing law and jurisprudence’.
The trouble is, though, that I don’t think he is reading the Muslim house magazine 5 Pillars which is also addressing the issue with an article headed: ‘The term “Islamophobia” is not fit for purpose and fails to protect Muslims in law’.
This is the view of Ayesha Khan from the Association of Muslim Lawyers, who argues that Muslims should urge the government to drop the word ‘Islamophobia’ from official discourse and use the term ‘anti-Muslim hatred’ instead, thus offering Muslims more legal protection from hate crimes.
On that basis, Timothy and Khan would seem to be at one, except that while the MP relies on the definition ‘in existing law and jurisprudence’, the Muslim lawyer wants the term to cover ‘abuse, discrimination, or violence directed at people because they are Muslim, or perceived to be’.
That means, Khan says, ‘it includes hate based on ethnicity, culture, appearance, language, clothing and names, all of which Muslims are regularly targeted for’.
It moves the conversation away from abstract religious debate to focus squarely on the human cost of hatred, she says, asserting that it ‘protects ordinary Muslims including women in hijab, men in beards, and Muslim children in schools, and ensures their safety is taken seriously’.
What Khan is trying to do here is take ‘anti-Muslim hatred’ out of the reach of Article 10 of the Human Rights Act and its protection of the right to freedom of expression, shifting the focus from religion to ‘the people being abused’, preventing ‘far-right actors’ from claiming that they are merely ‘criticising Islam’ and then relying on Article 10 ‘to defend their abuse’.
Where this would leave us, I am not so sure. For all the references in the Public Order Act 1986, there is actually no statutory definition of ‘hatred’, the term generally taken to mean intense hostility or animosity toward a group.
In the context of a prosecution, though, if Muslims are treated as a racial rather than a religious group, the threshold for action includes threatening, abusive, or insulting conduct, with the prosecution being required to show either intent or likelihood of stirring up hatred.
This is as broad as it is long and, with the pro-propensity of the target group to clamour for victim status, ‘insulting conduct’ could have an uncomfortably broad application.
A timely illustration of this propensity comes in a sympathetic BBC piece headed ‘London mayor urged to do more to tackle Islamophobia’, which retails the experiences of Muslim Hina Bokhari, the London-born daughter of Pakistani parents.
Says Bokhari: ‘The threats we face as Muslim Londoners are not abstract or hypothetical – they are immediate, real, and growing’, as she complains that ‘Islamophobia has been getting steadily worse since 9/11, and was exacerbated by the 7/7 Tube and bus attacks and then by the conflict in the Middle East’.
It does not seem to have occurred to Bokhari that if her ‘brothers’ – as her fellow Muslims are quaintly called – insist on periodically slaughtering their fellow man and then partake in noisy and disruptive demonstrations in support of homicidal Middle East terrorists, then there might be an element of pushback.
In the annals of victimhood, the Guardian excels itself with a piece written by Geneva Abdul, herself an immigrant, under the heading: ‘We are in a dangerous place: British Muslims on the fallout from 7/7 attack 20 years on’.
The sub-head tells us that ‘Many feel counter-terrorism policies and brazen Islamophobia have increased hostility and isolation experience by community’, while the victim du jour is imam Qari Asim, allowed as he is to wail: ‘The emotional and social toll of 7/7 on Muslim communities was profound and is felt by many to this day’.
Asim hails from the Leeds-based Makkah Masjid mosque, which was associated with the radicalisation of the 7/7 bombers. He is also a trustee of the Hope Not Hate Charitable Trust, the organisation which declared that the conversations about the grooming gangs scandal were ‘aimed at (and can achieve) harm to individual Muslims and is not rooted in any meaningful theological debate but rather in a racist attempt to “other” Muslims in general’.
As well as being a member of Angela Rayner’s Islamophobia working group, Asim – the very picture of integration with his host community – is just the sort of person to give a dispassionate view of the state of play.
But, for an inkling of just how distorted the discourse has become, one must turn to the Times which has a piece headed ‘Muslim Council “acted in bad faith by trying to suppress reporting”,’ retailing a report by the Policy Exchange think tank.
With Andrew Gilligan as the lead author, the report explains how the prominent Muslim Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) is a bad-faith actor, distorting the narrative to such an extent that it even condemned accurate coverage of Islamist terror attacks as Islamophobic.
Gilligan himself wrote for the Times on this with a piece headed: ‘Activist group wants to stifle discussion of Islamism’, warning that any official definition of Islamophobia, which seeks to impose ‘appropriate limits to free speech’ about Muslims would give ‘bad faith actors’ such as CfMM ‘a dangerous new weapon’.
Recalling my recent blogpost on the Bradford Mirpuri community, I wonder how well this would fare in the face of zealots armed with new Islamophobia laws, where we are not even allowed to criticise the clothing of these primitives and their fragile egos.
Given that my piece went semi-viral on Twitter with nearly 400,000 views and well over 4,000 ‘likes’, as well as being republished elsewhere, I suspect that further efforts in this domain might have me spending time in Armley Jail.
These are dark times where not only are we being shat upon by our government from great heights, we risk being locked up for complaining about it. But never mind. The Princess of Wales was resplendent in her dark red silk creponne-gathered evening gown. What’s there not to like?
This article appeared in Turbulent Times on July 9, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
