Thursday, 7 March 2024

Islamophobia and Racism

There is an argument that Islamophobia is a type of racism.  There has been a rise in this before the October 7th attacks by Hamas, but this has increased much further since. In addition to this, there has also been a huge rise in antisemitic abuse in UK since that evil Hamas attack, probably because of the reaction by the current Israeli government and the civilians that they appear to be killing saying that they are terrorists. 

While being Jewish is to belong to a race, Hitler and the Nazi's showed that, Islam takes in people of any creed.  Due to this, being Islamophobic is not racism.  There was an argument that it was with the comments of Lee Anderson about Sadiq Khan being under the control of Islamists, but he also said that Starmer was.  In addition to this, a recent court case, while not based on Islamophobia, has shown that the Conservatives are more than willing to accuse anyone, white or not, of being led or in favour of extremists.

I do however think that there is a big overlap with racism and Islamophobia, but it should be mentioned that Islam faces unjust prejudice in the UK from various ethnic minorities