The Council called on Prime Minister Theresa May, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and all other party leaders to adopt a new working definition of “Islamophobia”, in an attempt to pressure the reluctant Home Office to adopt measures to please Muslims.
The definition was set out in a report published last year, stating: “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”
The Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, Harun Khan, warned that political leaders should “all understand the importance of listening to communities” and that he awaited a “positive response” about the adoption of the definition.
Home Office minister, Victoria Atkins, said that the department had no intention of adopting a “definitive definition” of Islamophobia, adding that there were “many definitions of Islamophobia” and that “we have very effective monitoring systems of all race-hate crimes”.
But pressure has been mounting since the report was published.
The Daily Mail was forced to take down a report from its website that described the French capital as “Powder Keg Paris” after a French activist, Marwan Muhammad, complained about the heading.
According to Muhammand, the title was “Islamophobic”. The article described how 300 000 illegal migrants were living in the suburb of Saint-Denis, north of Paris, where drug dealing, crime and poverty were rampant due to “immigration on a mammoth scale”.
A conservative candidate for a council by-election in Merthyr Tydfil, a town in Wales, was also recently suspended after sharing social media posts critical of Islam. Labour Assembly Member Dawn Bowden maintained that the posts by Laurel Ellis were “Islamophobic”.
A spokesman for the Welsh Conservatives refused to defend Ellis and said instead that the party seeks “to reach out to, and represent, all communities and people from all walks of life in Wales”.
The Sunday Timesreported that not a single Christian was among the 1 112 Syrian refugees resettled in Britain in the first three months of 2018, because the Home Office agreed to resettle only Muslims and rejected the four Christians recommended by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
The Guardian has instrumental in promoting a “deep connection” between Europe and Islam. It stated that “historically” the worlds of Europe and Islam are “deeply intertwined” despite the sad historical record of conflict between the West and Islam.
The Independent reported that the British government received information detailing the activities of Muslim pedophile gangs in Rotherham as far back as 2002 but failed properly to act on it, apparently out of fear of being accused of “racism”. A large-scale inquiry was not launched until a decade later.
At the start of new school year in the UK in September last year, thousands of Muslim pupils in Blackburn, Burnley, Hyndburn, Nelson, Preston and Rawtenstall boycotted school meals after the decision by the Lancashire County Council to stop supplying schools with unstunned halal meat introduced by concerned animal activists.