¿Dónde están los islamófobos?

La elección del laborista Sadiq Khan como alcalde de Londres destruye el mito de la izquierda del odio británico a los musulmanes

SP!KED.- Sadiq Khan’s victory in the London mayoral contest raises a big, awkward question: where are all the Islamophobes?

Where’s that seething mob of Muslim-haters that the liberal media have been warning us about for 20 years now? Where is that ‘dread and dislike of Muslims’ the Runnymede Trust fearmongered about in 1997? Whatever happened to ‘Britain’s new disease – fear of Islam’, which the Independent tub-thumped about a few years back? Where’s the ‘rising scourge of anti-Muslim hatred’?

‘We’ve underestimated the scale of Islamophobia’, experts said; apparently, ‘we are today no closer to tackling anti-Muslim hatred’, they claimed, just months ago. Yet now, in the capital city of this apparently Islamophobic nation, this diseased country, a Muslim has just won the largest direct political mandate in British history. Khan – or just Sadiq, as he’s affectionately known by most Brits – got 1,310,143 votes, beating the Tories’ Zac Goldsmith, who got 994,614 votes.

Sadiq’s win isn’t only a blow to the Tories, and maybe a bit of a worry for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, if the Khan-v-Corbyn stories are to be believed. More fundamentally, more brilliantly, it explodes the propaganda of the Islamophobia industry. It shatters the claim that Brits have a weird, racialised problem with Muslims, which has been made for more than a decade everywhere from the Guardian to those endless studies of our allegedly warped attitudes. It suggests that if there is any swirling, irrational fear in modern Britain, it isn’t among ordinary people who are in a panic about Muslims – it’s among the media and political set, who are in a panic about ordinary people and their allegedly foul, prejudiced ways.

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