Paris attacks: Worriers about Islamophobia a bigger problem than Islamophobia itself

Is Islamophobia the driver of ­Islamic terrorism? Some observers think so.

They argue that if only we in the West were nicer to Muslims, if only we didn’t diss their prophet, then angry terrorists wouldn’t shoot us, bomb us, execute ­cartoonists.

Everything from the 7/7 bombings in London to the Paris atrocities last week has been linked to our alleged mistreatment of ­Muslims.

The Guardian newspaper in Britain wonders if French “discrimination against Arabs” may have been a big factor in pushing French youth towards Islamic State.

A writer for The New York Times says feelings of “exclusion and disrespect” among French Muslims is what motored the bloodshed. He says Islamophobia provides “fertile soil” in which “anger (can) grow”. After Paris, he says, France must “openly ­embrace Muslims”.

The Grand Mufti of Australia caused a stink with his claim that there were “causative factors” to the Paris assaults, including the “racism (and) Islamophobia” faced by French Muslims.

In short, we’re nasty to them, that’s why they kill us.

These worriers about Islamophobia always insist they aren’t ­offering a justification for terrorism. But they are.

They imply that murderous ­assaults are at least an understandable response to being disrespected. They provide the Paris nihilists with a posthumous explanation for their barbaric behaviour: “I was treated badly, therefore I killed people.”

The sly justifiers of barbarism have no explanation for why earlier generations that faced far worse discrimination — the blacks of the American south, for example — did not blow up concert halls packed with youths.

But leaving to one side the utter nonsense of linking mass murder with societal disrespect, there’s an bigger problem here. Which is that these observers get things entirely the wrong way around.

It isn’t Islamophobia that alienates Muslim youth and incites in them such a powerful sense of grievance that some of them ­develop violent urges.

No, if anything, it’s the ­obsessionwith Islamophobia that does this.

Look — the only people responsible for terrorist attacks are the terrorists themselves, not any people or ideas that once may have offended them. These people have free will, and they use it to murder and maim.

But if we’re determined to find a context in which their fury may have festered, then we will do better to look not at Islamophobia but at the Islamophobia industry — that well-funded multicultural machine that trawls endlessly for evidence of anti-Muslim hatred and seeks to convince Muslims that Europeans, Americans and ­Australians hate them.

This chattering-class sport of exposing mob prejudice against Muslims has surely done the most to convince some Muslims that society hates them, so maybe they should hate society back.

The elitist panickers about Islamophobia have been out in force post-Paris.

The bodies were barely cold before these fearers of the masses were predicting a bovine pogrom.

It’s the great irony of the fashionable concern with Islamophobia: it presents itself as a stand against prejudice, yet it’s fuelled by prejudices of its own. It is built on a view of ordinary people as ­irrational, easily switched to ­violence, itching to burn down a mosque.

And like all prejudice, it is largely fact-free: no terror attack has been followed by widespread anti-Muslim violence. Isolated attacks on mosques, yes. A pogrom? No.

In terms of social cohesion, and social peace, the fear of Islamophobia — what we may call Islamophobiaphobia — is a bigger problem than Islamophobia itself.

The Islamophobia industry, funded by officials, uncritically fawned over by much of the media, does two really bad things.

First, it gives Muslims the impression that criticism of their religion is wicked.

Indeed, when the idea of Islamophobia was invented in the 1990s, primarily by aloof think tanks such as the Britain-based Runnymede Trust, the concern was entirely with policing criticism of Islam and shooting down the idea that Western values are ­superior.

Runnymede, whose 20-year-old definition of Islamophobia informs the global debate, said Islamophobic speech included claims that Islam was “inferior to the West”.

It implored the political classes to present Islam as “distinctively different but not deficient”, as being as “equally worthy of respect (as Western values)”.

So from the get-go, the Islamophobia industry was about reprimanding opinion, punishing moral judgment, so that even the belief that Western democratic values trumped Islamic ones came to be pathologised as a phobia.

It was about imposing relativism, not challenging racism.

And we wonder why some radical Western Islamists hate and threaten those who mock their faith.

They’ve grown up in nations in which criticism of Islam and a preference for Western values have been demonised. They’re kind of the armed wing of the Islamophobia industry.

The second bad thing this industry does is convince Muslims that the world hates them.

With their bumped-up stats and often shrill claims, it’s surely the Islamophobia-obsessed think tanks and journalists, not isolated Islamophobes, who have made some Muslims feel like aliens.

The consequences of the elite project of cultivating Muslim fear are dire.

The Islamophobia industry censors and divides, making whites feel they can’t express moral concerns about Islam and making Muslims feel like an ­utterly removed group.

It may not cause but it certainly contributes to a feeling of injury among some Muslims, especially younger ones.

I’ve seen this on campuses in Britain, where radical Islam is growing. When I speak for Islamic societies at universities, I’m often shocked by people’s attitudes.

Their capacity for self-pity is ­profound; their suspicion of Western society is palpable.

Did they learn these attitudes from a finger-wagging imam on the internet? Perhaps.

Or maybe they picked it up from the messages they receive every day from mainstream media and public life, from progressive hand-wringers, all desperate to convince them that society and its vulgar inhabitants despise them.

The Islamophobia industry, and more importantly the late 20th-century creed of relativistic non-judgmentalism that fuels it, makes it harder to do the very thing we must do post-Paris: argue unapologetically for the values of liberty and democracy, for all the good, amazing stuff about Western society, and assert that these things are better than Islamism.

The rise of terror that is justified as a punishment of those who ­criticise Islam (the Charlie Hebdo massacre) or as an assault on the everyday values of the West (the Paris massacre) shows that ­­ultra-violence can spring from relativism.

Many make the mistake of viewing relativism as an “anything goes” creed, in which you can do whatever you like.

Not so. The cult of relativism punishes one thing extremely harshly: moral judgment, moral discrimination, the idea that some ways of life are ­better than others.

That the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were executed for valuing liberal values over Islamic ones, and if the good citizens of Paris really were attacked for their ­nation’s alleged Islamophobia, then this should remind us, ­brutally, that barbarism is a close cousin of relativism.