The thinnest, dumbest religion of our times has got to be Muslim victimhood. Pretty much everyone in officialdom bows to its dogmas, dutifully crying about the ‘epidemic’ of ‘Islamophobia’. The ‘fascist fires’ of Islamophobia will ‘end up engulfing us all’, says the Guardian, the closest thing this cult of self-pity has to a propaganda rag. Everyone needs to calm down. Even the mildest intellectual prodding disproves the doctrines of the Islamophobia industry.

Consider the claim that a mosque is attacked every five days in the UK. Sounds serious. Catastrophic, in fact. If Muslim places of worship are being violently menaced at a rate of more than one a week, we clearly have a serious problem. Thankfully, it’s undiluted bullshit.

The heroic Andrew Gilligan, the Spectator’s one-man warrior against the lunatic claims of the identitarian mob, has done the digging. He examined the insistence of the British Muslim Trust (BMT) that ‘a mosque is now attacked every five days in the UK’. That claim was splashed across the mainstream media. There was an especially alarming report on ITV News. Not one hack thought to ask: ‘Is this true?’

The BMT is paid millions of pounds by the UK government – ie, us hard-working muppets – to ‘monitor anti-Muslim hatred’. And yet in Gilligan’s words, it has ‘made multiple false claims about attacks on mosques’ and ‘other claims’ for which it ‘refuses to provide evidence’. An organisation that is meant to be about ‘protecting Muslims’ is actually ‘terrifying them with exaggerated claims about their places of worship being under attack’, he says.

He spent a week asking the BMT for the data behind its scary claims. It said it ‘[didn’t] have time’ to send out such info. Lol, what? Eventually, it sent him a list of the six most serious, arson-based attacks. But only two of them were acts of arson against mosques. One – brace yourself – was arson against ‘a building labelled as a synagogue’. It was an attack on the former East London Central Synagogue, which is not even under Muslim ownership. Even the cranky mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, called that an anti-Semitic attack. Claiming anti-Semitic arson as anti-Muslim arson is wild.

One of the other arson attacks was not on a mosque but on a Muslim Welfare Association, and the cops said it was not religiously motivated but was likely ‘related to a dispute between homeless people’. An arson attack in Blackburn was also not on a mosque but on the rear entrance of a derelict property next to a mosque. An arson attack in Batley was likewise not on a mosque – rather, it involved ‘someone setting fire to some rubbish outside a building under construction’. A new Crusade it ain’t.

Then, at last, the BMT published the data, no doubt in response to Gilligan’s probing. And its stats were even more mad than we might have expected. It gave info for 78 ‘attacks’. But only 40 really counted as ‘attacks’. And of those 40, says Gilligan, ‘about a third [were] clearly false’. In Gilligan’s words: ‘They were either not attacks, or were not directed against mosques, or both.’

To grasp the sheer farce of it all, consider this: the BMT’s list of ‘attacks against mosques’ included protests outside the Al-Mahdi Islamic Centre in Glasgow. Who were these protesters? Anti-regime Iranians. They were Muslims agitating against the Islamic Republic’s merciless slaying of Iranian rebels. And they did it outside that mosque because it is widely considered ‘Scotland’s unofficial base for the [Iranian] regime’. Its imam even attended the funeral of that anti-Semitic old goat, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. To call such protests an ‘attack on a mosque’ is to twist the truth to a psychotic degree. It is Orwellian-level dishonesty.

Also included in those 78 ‘attacks’ were peaceful protests against the building of new mosques in Cumbria and Middlesex. I hate to break it to the British Muslim Trust, but English liberty entails not only the freedom of religion but also the freedom to be irreligious. So long as those protesters were saying ‘Don’t build this’, rather than storming into a pre-existing mosque and shouting ‘Fuck Muslims’, then their gathering was not bigoted but an act of free expression. Other ‘mosque attacks’ included an imam in High Wycombe receiving an ‘abusive letter’ and a scholar affiliated with a mosque being subjected to ‘abuse online’. I could equally claim that the abuse I get online is an attack on the Roman Catholic Church.

Gilligan says the BMT’s report certainly tells an ‘appalling story’, just not the one the BMT thinks it does. He’s right. The story it tells is of a needy, cloying, narcissistic cult of victimhood that has blown up – no offence intended – among the self-elected representatives of the Muslim community. I am morbidly intrigued by the Islamic Victim Complex and its hell-bent determination to depict Muslims as eternal sufferers, even if it means strangling truth. What it proves is how valuable the currency of victimhood has become in the 21st century, to such an extent that people will invent oppression in order that they might bask in the demeaning glow of official pity and state funding.

So many Muslim community groups seem to exist for the sole purpose of playing the victim card. I was once branded a promoter of ‘fringe Islamophobic ideas’ by the Muslim Council of Britain. My crime? I used the word ‘Islamofascist’ to describe the terrorists who slaughtered 200 Christians in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday in 2019. That barbarism included the bombing of a Sunday school, where Bible-reading kids were so savagely maimed that some could only be identified by their teeth. Yet the bigot was me for saying ‘fascist’ rather than the fascists who carried out that atrocity. You can call me an ‘Islamophobe’ till you’re blue in the face – I’ll always refer to the Sri Lanka bombers as Islamofascist scum.

The crazy thing is that it’s the indulgence of Muslims, not the oppression of them, that is the most serious problem facing the West today. Anti-Muslim bigotry definitely exists, and every decent person should call it out. But ‘Islamophobia’ is a nonsense term designed to ringfence Islam from criticism and thus flatter it as a perfect ideology no mere pleb may query. It wasn’t ‘anti-Muslim hatred’ that motored the Charlie Hebdo massacre or the beheading of Samuel Paty or the daily shouting down of Christians and others in the West who think Islam is wrongheaded – it was Islamo-indulgence. We have given a whole new generation of Muslims the crackpot idea that their religion is so wonderful that no lowlife infidel may ever criticise it. Now that is dangerous. It grants Islamist mobs a licence to punish ‘blasphemers’ and it directly grates against Muslim interrogation by encouraging young Muslims in particular to conceive of themselves as perpetual victims in a hostile society rather than as ordinary people who should grow the hell up.

How interesting that one of the supposed ‘mosque attacks’ was in Batley. Actually, says Gilligan, some rubbish was set on fire. That’s the part of England where a schoolteacher was savagely hounded into hiding for displaying an image of Muhammad in his classroom. You think we’re going to blub over the lighting of some litter in the same place a public servant was demonised and threatened by a mob of Islamic fundamentalists? Get real. Britain’s problem right now is not the victimisation of Muslims – it’s the emboldening of an Islamist mindset that runs counter to every principle of liberty our forebears fought for.