𝗜𝘀𝗹𝗮𝗺𝗼𝗽𝗵𝗼𝗯𝗶𝗮 𝗪𝗮𝘀𝗻’𝘁 𝗕𝗼𝗿𝗻. 𝗜𝘁 𝗪𝗮𝘀 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝘁. 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲’𝘀 𝗪𝗵𝗼 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝘁 𝗜𝘁. 💥💥💥

I’ve just finished reading Peter Oborne’s extraordinary book, The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong About Islam.

Oborne is a lifelong conservative. A former Telegraph political editor. An establishment insider. And yet what he has written is one of the most damning indictments of the British establishment I have ever read.

His central argument is simple, and devastating.

Islamophobia in the UK has not emerged organically. It has been manufactured, funded and deliberately sustained by a network of right-wing think tanks, Murdoch-owned media, neoconservative politicians and pro-Israel lobby groups, all of whom have had a shared interest in casting Muslims as a permanent internal and external enemy.

The mechanics are worth understanding.

Policy Exchange, the neoconservative think tank with deep links to the Conservative Party and significant US funding, systematically built a narrative that conflated ordinary Muslim identity with extremism. It placed its alumni at the heart of government, including inside Downing Street itself.

The Quilliam Foundation, presented to the public as a counter-extremism organisation, functioned primarily to reinforce the false division between good Muslims and bad Muslims, whilst doing nothing meaningful to challenge right-wing extremism.

The Trojan Horse affair, a fabricated conspiracy theory about Muslim schools in Birmingham attempting to Islamicise British education, was based on a single anonymous letter. The British state and mainstream media ran with it as fact. It was a lie.

The Prevent programme, supposedly a safeguarding tool, has disproportionately targeted Muslims, with 86% of referrals turning out to be false positives.

And all of it, Oborne argues, has been given oxygen by the post-9/11 war on terror narrative, which needed a domestic enemy as much as a foreign one, and which conveniently justified military intervention across the Middle East and an erosion of civil liberties at home.

This is not a fringe argument. This is a meticulously sourced, forensically argued book by a former chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph.

Islamophobia has been the UK’s last socially acceptable bigotry. It has served powerful interests. And it has done enormous damage to millions of British citizens whose only offence is their faith.

It is time to call it what it is.Activate to view larger image,