The racism of never criticising Muslims

There has been a surge in the racism of low expectations in recent days. It has centred on the Muslim community. It is wrong – ‘phobic’, no less – to criticise the regressive social views held by some Muslims, left-wing campaigners claim. Any pondering of the possibility that sections of the Muslim community hold less than enlightened views on homosexuality or the rights of Jews to live as free, equal citizens is itself racist, they cry. It’s horrible and unfair. They doll up this desire to protect Muslim attitudes from scrutiny in the language of anti-racism, but it is the opposite. It is time we talked about the racism of not criticising the Muslim community, of refusing to subject Muslims to the same kind of social discussion that every other community in an open, democratic society might expect.

It springs from the Batley and Spen by-election. Keir Starmer’s crowing about his party’s ‘fantastic’ victory there – Kim Leadbeater won by 323 votes – cannot disguise the fact that Labour’s internal woes and tensions have, if anything, intensified off the back of Batley and Spen. The latest Labour infighting is over Muslim voters. Following George Galloway’s strong showing among Batley and Spen’s Muslim community – he came third, with 8,264 votes – Labour officials and activists are fretting that they might now be losing that community that they (arrogantly) presumed would always vote for them. And the Labour left and the self-elected spokespeople for the Muslim community claim to know why – it’s because Labour has refused to take up issues that Muslim voters are interested in (Palestine, Kashmir), and it’s because the centrists around Starmer are being too critical in relation to Muslim attitudes.

There was a firestorm when a ‘senior Labour official’ – anonymously, of course – suggested that some Muslim voters in Batley and Spen were angry with Starmer’s Labour because of its efforts to tackle left-wing anti-Semitism in the party. The official said Labour is ‘haemorrhaging votes among Muslim voters, and the reason for that is what Keir has been doing on anti-Semitism’. ‘Nobody really wants to talk about it’, he or she said, ‘but that’s the main factor’. Another Labour source said the party had ‘lost the conservative Muslim vote over gay rights and Palestine’, prompting more fury from the identitarian set. ‘How dare you suggest that conservative Muslims have a problem with gay rights?!’, they were essentially saying, which, when you think about it, is a truly bizarre question.

These critical noises about the attitudes that exist in certain quarters of the Muslim community confirm that some in Britain’s political class ‘hold Muslims in contempt’, said a writer for Jacobin. Ali Milani of the Labour Muslim Network said the Labour media briefings that mentioned Muslim attitudes on homosexuality and anti-Semitism were a ‘slap in the face’ to Muslim voters. It is ‘deeply upsetting’, he said, ‘for the commentary to be so deeply rooted in Islamophobia’. Mustafa Al-Dabbagh of the Muslim Association of Britain accused Labour officials of ‘briefing frankly Islamophobic statements’. The Guardian’s Owen Jones said that anyone who suggests Labour is doing badly because Muslims voters are ‘bigots’ is a racist – ‘and they must face the consequences of their racism for the rest of their political lives’. Strewth. Redemption be damned.

Let’s leave to one side the eye-swivelling irony that much of the handwringing commentary about the Labour officials who suggested that Labour is losing because some Muslim voters have regressive views is coming from the kind of people who spent the past five years saying that Remain lost because ordinary people have regressive, dumb and racist views. Let’s also leave to one side the fact that the Labour officials quoted in the press were expressly not talking about all Muslims but rather about conservative Muslims – who, like conservative Catholics or conservative Jews, are fairly likely to think that two blokes getting it on is a bit iffy, and possibly evil. The more pressing question is this: is it really racist to draw attention to the unenlightened views that lurk in sections of the Muslim community? Couldn’t one argue that it is more racist not to talk about these things?