The Elephant in the Mosque
What if even these “peaceful Muslims” actually support terror?
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This is a guest essay written by Daniel Saunders who writes the newsletter, “The Beginning of Wisdom.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Imagine that there was a religious group, who were mostly non-white, living as a minority in the West.
Let’s call them the Natmons.
Imagine reading a book that says that Natmons suffer terribly from prejudice and intolerance. They are called names, their special dress codes and dietary laws are mocked, they are forced to break their religious laws in hazing rituals at professional sports clubs, and are generally stereotyped in the media as violent, misogynistic terrorists.
Their charities are debanked without warning and they are referred to the counter-terrorist authorities more often than any other minority group. The government even strips them of citizenship when they break the law at a rate far above that of other minorities.
The book says that a war recently broke out when a non-Natmon state suddenly launched a genocidal attack on civilians in a neighbouring territory. However, when Natmons try to protest about any of this, no one listens. They are silenced. They can’t even get approval for a name for the prejudice they suffer, Natmonophobia.
You’d be shocked. Outraged, even. This is an injustice that must not stand.
But what if I were to tell you that Natmons have a history of imperialism and terrorism. That many Natmons believe they have a religious obligation to subject non-Natmons (“infidels”) to Natmon religious law by force. That Natmons are constantly at war with the only non-Natmon indigenous state in the Natmon religious heartland.
That an unprovoked Natmon attack on this state provoked the war (not genocide) that the Natmons are so concerned about, and that in fact the non-Natmon state was making unprecedented efforts to avoid Natmon civilian casualties. That Natmon states have a history of fighting and persecuting each other for perceived deviance of various kinds.
That the worst terrorist attacks in the West and elsewhere in recent memory have all been carried out by Natmons, explicitly in the name of Natmonism. That many Natmon charities have been found to have links to terrorism. That Natmons have brought the ethnic and religious rivalries of their home regions to the West.
That Natmons have been involved in massive rape gangs over a period of decades. That you’d be accused of Natmonophobia just for raising these points of concern. And that none of this was mentioned in the book you read.
Welcome to the world of “Muslims Don’t Matter,” a thoroughly disingenuous book by former British Cabinet minister, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi.
Let’s get the boilerplate stuff out the way first. Yes, it’s obviously wrong for people to plan or commit violence against Muslim civilians. Yes, it’s wrong to shout “terrorist” at women wearing hijabs in the street.
There are some genuinely nasty, outrageous, sympathy-provoking stories of abuse, racism, even anti-Muslim feeling in the book, although most seem to revolve around the world of British professional cricket, which might indicate that the problem is not as endemic as Warsi thinks.
But these passages just show how overblown most of the book is. Yes, it’s wrong that Muslim members of parliament get offensive letters — but so do black members of parliament, Jewish members of parliament, and female members of parliament generally. It’s not a uniquely Muslim problem. It’s a symptom of a wider collapse in civility in the West.
What about former Member of Parliament Mike Freer, who recently retired from politics after living in fear of his life for defending Israel? He had taken to wearing an anti-stab vest in public. And he isn’t even Jewish! How many Muslim members of parliament are living with that level of fear and persecution?
Warsi sees the West as being massively and unjustifiably “Islamophobic,” a thesis she can only argue by profoundly misrepresenting reality. However, she uses the term widely to shut down debate, which is the usual use of the term.
The title of the book is based on “Jews Don’t Count” by Warsi’s friend David Baddiel. Baddiel frequently and insistently distances himself from Zionism (while insisting he is non-Zionist and not anti-Zionist) and therefore claims to be able talk about antisemitism dispassionately, without automatically relating it to Israel. Warsi doesn’t distance herself from Islamism or terrorism. In fact, the opening passage of her book is a defiant refusal to do this, which renders her book more complicated.
It’s also a lot harder to present Muslims as a beleaguered minority. There are about 15 million Jews in the world, about half living in the only Jewish state, a country the size of Wales, which is frequently attacked by its neighbours.
The U.S. is the only diaspora country with a substantial Jewish population. This compares with nearly two billion Muslims globally, about fifty Muslim states, some of which have massive oil wealth and consequent global political power, as well as a massive and growing Muslim population in the West, particularly in Europe. Again, Warsi doesn’t mention any of this.
It takes her nearly a third of the book before she actually defines “Islamophobia,” a term she has been throwing about since the first page. The definition, a popular one with Muslim activists, states that Islamophobia is, “a form of racism that targets Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” This is question-begging on several counts.
First, Islam is a religion, so linking this to race confuses matters. Not everyone from the Middle East, North Africa, or the Indian subcontinent is Muslim. Not every Muslim is non-white. So how do these concepts relate to each other?
Moreover, Muslims see Jewish and Christian religious figures like Moses (Musa) and Jesus (Isa) as being Muslims — talk about cultural appropriation — so how can we even define “Muslimness”?
More importantly, she does not mention the fact that “Islamophobia” is a concept that originated with Iranian Islamists to deflect criticism of their support for terrorism and jihad. Nor does she give any guidelines to how to distinguish Islamophobia from realistic fears of Islamist terrorism.
In fact, she says we can’t use “Islamist” as a way of pointing out Islamic extremism without blaming all Muslims, because it’s a “dog whistle” for “Muslim.” So how are we supposed to refer to people who cite the Qu’ran to justify mass murder? Or are we supposed to assume that Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, Al-Qaeda and the government of Iran have nothing in common?
Warsi gives the impression that any negative public views of Muslims are due to “Islamophobia,” particularly among Conservative members of parliament and Right-wing journalists, not the result of any Islamist terrorist attacks, which go unmentioned. Presumably we’re supposed to say, “But look at all those Muslims who don’t commit terrorist atrocities” and go on without wondering what is being preached in mosques.
Or maybe we’re just supposed to politely not notice all these people who blow themselves up or stab passersby while shouting “Allahu akhbar!” Pointing this out is the social justice equivalent of pointing out when someone has broken wind, a grave faux pas. We certainly can’t investigate those Muslims being radicalised, since “Prevent” (the government counter-extremism programme) is “Islamophobic” because it investigates far more Muslims than any other demographic.
What if even these “peaceful Muslims” actually support terror?
Which brings me to October 7th. Warsi doesn’t mention Hamas’ atrocities of that day, but she does talk a lot about what happened afterwards. In fact, she continually brings up Israel’s war against Hamas — not that she calls it such, because it would imply the IDF was fighting against someone rather than just slaughtering civilians; she prefers terms like “onslaught” and “alleged genocide.”
She barely mentions other attacks on Muslims worldwide. There is a brief passing mention of the Rohingya which doesn’t even make clear that they are Muslim, and she only mentions the Uyghurs to complain about people talking about human rights abuses by Qatar and not mentioning human rights abuses by non-Muslims.
It’s almost as if only the Jewish state is to be blamed for killing Muslims even in self-defence, whereas non-white nations can slaughter Muslims for no reason without much comment. Almost as if only Jews count. Or non-Palestinian Muslims don’t matter, your choice.
Warsi attacks Suella Braverman for referring to pro-Hamas marches in London as “hate marches,” but it’s hard to know what else to call marches where banners frequently showed the Star of David compared to the swastika, Israel was consigned to the dustbin, and support was voiced for proscribed terrorist organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah. They are voicing hatred of Israel. You can’t dress that up as support for Gazan civilians. Own it.
That’s without going into dog whistle chants about ethnically cleansing Jews “From the River to the Sea.” (Warsi likes a good dog whistle, both to blow and to call out). There is talk about the “Gaza onslaught” but no mention of what happened on October 7th or the celebrations in London while it was still happening.
No mention of the hostages held and abused in Gaza (over a hundred when the book was published). No mention that a survey found 75 percent of British Muslims support Hamas (not Gazan civilians) or that nearly half deny any atrocities were committed by Hamas.
No mention of the fact that “Hamas” is an acronym for “The Islamic Resistance Movement” which might indicate that it’s legitimate to draw wider conclusions about Islam from their actions or at least that peace-loving Muslims might feel the need to reassure non-Muslims that Hamas is not representative of the Islam they practice instead of berating them for “Islamophobia.”
In fact, the book has no mention of Hamas at all, or Hezbollah. Even ISIS is only mentioned in the context of the evil Islamophobic British government wanting to strip citizenship from loyal citizens like Shamima Begum (see below).
Warsi brushes off the antisemitism of much of the Muslim community on the grounds that all communities have it and by implying that Jews are privileged and that antisemitism is taken more seriously than any other type of prejudice. This is insane, hypocritical bigotry.
Warsi relates a lot of scary statistics about increases in Islamophobia, but doesn’t mention much bigger increase in antisemitism since the 2023 Gaza war started, much of it apparently committed by Muslims. We don’t have the hate crime figures for most of 2024 yet, but there were nearly as many hate crimes against Jews as against Muslims in the UK. Given that the Muslim population of the UK is 10 or 12 times larger than the Jewish one, Jews are enormously more likely to be the victims of a hate crime than Muslims.
This has gotten worse since October 7th, but the broad statistic, that Jews are much more likely to be the victims of hate crimes than Muslims, has been the case for a long time. Warsi says nothing about this.
Warsi says that governments have not engaged with Muslims for years, except a few moderate individuals she dismisses as self-interested, presumably because they are critical of aspects of contemporary Islam.
She does not mention the Tony Blair government’s attempts find a moderate Islamic representative leader or body and their having to abandon different candidates when they say something outrageous, most notably when Sir Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain said that Islam forbids attacks on civilians, but attacks on Israeli civilians are permitted because there are no real civilians in Israel.
She alleges that Labour and the Conservatives abandoned Muslims over Gaza. She does not really present any evidence for this, so it’s hard to argue against it, but my thoughts are:
This is simply not true, as Labour policy shifted during the conflict from support for Israel to calling for an unconditional ceasefire and some arms-sale restrictions on Israel.
Does she really think that a minority of four million should get to dictate policy for everyone? Does she not understand how democracy works?
It’s not clear what “listening to Muslims” would involve — a call for a ceasefire, the cessation of all arms sales, the denouncing of Israel and saying it has no right to defend itself, and massively reorienting British foreign policy based on the anger of a minority? This seems to be what she wants.
This is without even getting into what happened on October 7th and what exactly Israel should have done in response, but it’s hard to see the Palestinians as innocent bystanders somehow caught up in this by bad luck when so many participated in the attacks and have acted as human shields and decoys for Hamas.
It’s hard to place yourself in someone else’s shoes and see what they see based on their experiences. But if you think that the British media and political class favours Jews/Israelis over Muslims/Palestinians, I don’t think there is enough common ground for a conversation. We’re living in two different realities.
Warsi complains about National Health Service doctors being disciplined for openly supporting Gaza. She doesn’t mention what they were supporting, Hamas’ actions on October 7th. Nor does she mention that often they were verbally or physically abusing Jewish patients. (There are no accounts I’ve seen of Jewish doctors abusing Muslim or Arab patients.)
She speaks of Palestinian doctors being arrested by the IDF without mentioning that they were Hamas terrorists. As I was reading the book, two Muslim nurses in Australia were fired after claiming to have murdered Israeli patients; I’m sure Warsi would present that as “they were fired for supporting Gazans against Israel.”
Similarly, when nearly a third of Muslims support Sharia law as the law of the land in the UK, yes, British Muslims do need to make clear where they stand and accept the consequences. Jews don’t want halakhah (Jewish law) as the law of the land. Nor do other religious minorities want their religious law as the law of the land. It’s that simple.
Then there are the points she doesn’t make. She says Muslims don’t need to declare that they don’t support violence. Well, Jews shouldn’t need to plead that we want peace, because we’ve proven it, through the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, the Gaza disengagement in 2005, the large Jewish peace lobby.
Hamas never accepted the Oslo Accords; the Palestine Liberation Organization said it did to the West, but told Muslims it was just a ruse. There are no Palestinian equivalents of Peace Now, J Street, Rabbis for Human Rights, Breaking the Silence, B’tselem, and all the other Jewish pacifist-going-on-anti-Zionist groups out there.
For all the myriad problems that these groups have, many being more “pro-Palestine” and “anti-Zionist” than pro-peace, they do show the extent to which the Jewish conversation is geared towards peace, not violence. But still, we’re accused of being racist, murderous, imperialist, expansionist, apartheid, and so forth.
Why shouldn’t Muslims, who have no real “pro-peace” groups, be accused of the same? There is no Palestinian peace lobby because, except for a handful of brave individuals like Bassem Eid and Mosab Hassan Yousef, no Palestinians are willing to speak publicly of peace involving acceptance of a Jewish state, only its destruction. (The most they will speak of is a Palestinian-majority state with a tolerated Jewish minority.)
Warsi writes about Shamima Begum losing her citizenship as if it’s about her skin colour, not support for terrorism. She skirts over what Begum did in supporting some of the most vile terrorists on the planet, instead talking about her wearing sleeveless tops and baseball caps to try to win support from British people, because that’s obviously more important than being an active participant in a raping, murdering, looting, enslaving death cult.
She presents Begum as a failure of Britain, rather than a failure of Islam, as if hundreds of non-Muslims Brits were signing up to support ISIS. In a sense, it is a British failure, since Britain should never have allowed Islamism to become established in this country, but the main cause is Islam, not “Britain.”
Yes, it is troubling that the state can take away a native-born person’s citizenship and I worry about the precedent being set, but Warsi can’t admit that Begum did much that was wrong, just a youthful indiscretion. What Muslims do doesn’t matter. She says that Jews could lose citizenship under this precedent because of their right to move to Israel, but doesn’t ask why Jews are not worried about this. Hint: It’s because there are no British Jews queuing up to join terrorist armies.
The rest of the book follows the same pattern. Warsi attacks the British counter-extremism programme “Prevent” for Islamophobia, but does not state that most of its workload and that of MI5 consists of dealing with radicalised Muslims — although she would say that simply proves it to be “Islamophobic.”
She complains about the debanking of Muslim “charities,” complaining about the debanking of Islamic Relief in particular, without mentioning that it is banned as terrorist-related in the United Arab Emirates, which can hardly be considered “Islamophobic.”
She mentions hate preacher Abu Hamza, but says that most Muslims saw him as so extreme that he was probably a double agent working for MI5. Apparently, there aren’t any “real” Muslim extremists. So, who is responsible for terrorist attacks like those of 7/7 and London Bridge? She doesn’t talk at all about the attitudes of the Muslim world about Israel, Jews, the West, and “infidels” now or in the past. It’s just a list of grievances with no context or history.
Just for a final insult, in the closing pages, Warsi draws comparisons between the Dreyfus Affair in 19th-century France and the position of contemporary Muslims, pointedly not mentioning that while Dreyfus was falsely accused of being a German spy, many Muslims have genuinely committed deadly terrorist attacks. (She also doesn’t mention the role of the Dreyfus Affair in starting the Zionist movement, unsurprisingly.)
I came to this book hoping it wouldn’t be a case of special pleading, asking for special protections for Muslims who don’t want to distance themselves from terrorists, but who also want to be able to call loudly for the violent destruction of Israel and the West with a teeny tiny bit of plausible deniability. I was disappointed.
Warsi doesn’t make an argument for Islam being a peace-loving religion. She just asserts that we should never question its bona fides and that to do so is “Islamophobic.” This is a book written in profoundly bad faith.
Warsi is asking for Muslims to be excused from the consequences of their views and actions. Essentially, she’s saying that Muslims don’t kill people, guns and bombs (and cars and kitchen knives) kill people, and it’s “Islamophobic” for Westerners to ask who is wielding those weapons and why.
If Warsi thinks that Muslims matter, she should be concerned about Islamic violence, not just violence against Muslims by white people and Jews. Muslims are the main victims of Islamic violence. Muslims kill more Muslims each year than all Western nations put together, including Israel. This was the case even 20 years ago, when the Second Intifada, the Afghan Warm and the Iraq War/Insurgency were all running simultaneously.
She says the Rishi Sunak government was “Islamophobic” and even viewed Muslims as less than human because they said nothing about the deaths of “30,000” Gazans. (Needless to say, she relies unquestioningly on Hamas’ casualty figures, which have been shown to be faked and don’t even pretend to separate combatants and non-combatants.)
Yet she does not mention far more egregious wars and persecutions of Muslims by Muslims in Syria and Yemen. Again, Palestinians are human beings, but many other Muslims are not, according to Baroness Warsi.
For Warsi, not to mention Muslim-on-Muslim violence is either staggering (and probably willful) ignorance or utter duplicity. Either way, it makes it hard to take her book seriously.
The worst of it all is that I think she actually means every word. It’s not taqiya (lies permitted by Islam to deceive non-believers and further the cause of Islam). She genuinely can’t see why so many Westerners hate and fear Islam and no other non-Western religion.
October 7th has no place in her mind. One day, Israel just decided to bomb thousands of Gazans, all of them unarmed civilians. Nor do September 11th or July 7th appear in her consciousness. Terrorist attacks happen by themselves, without causes or consequences.
It’s insane.
There is little to no Islamophobia. But there should be a LOT MORE. Islam is dangerous, sees itself as at permanent war with the West, infects and ruins every country where it gets a foothold and in the face of all this plays permanent victim. It's maddening and why has the Western ruling class made the collective decision to accept it?
Completely right! Warsi is an unpleasant individual! She was expelled from the Conservative Party for fraud. All she does is moan about Islamophobia.