The enemy within

I've had quite an interesting (and concerning) morning. I attended an academic conference at the Leeds Library entitled "Reflecting on the Riots: Racism, Islamophobia and Community Resistance". I went out of curiosity. It was hosted by activist academic Dr Waqas Tufail. It largely conformed to my my expectations. Basically a social sciences love-in but with a particular Islamic slant.

As such, the audience composition could very well have been straight out of a Harry Enfield sketch - right down to the obese disabled black woman wheezing in the corner. I expected it to have at least some veneer of academic inquiry, but it didn't take twenty minutes for them to start ranting about genocide in Gaza, and the oppressions they face in campus because of the university's "Zionist affiliations". I figured that was coming when they opened up their university branded laptops plastered with "free Palestine" stickers.

It was was hugely ironic that these people had set themselves up to talk about countering the "far right" when the kind of rhetoric I heard from them was pretty much exactly the same as "anti Zionist" far right only peppered with woke terminology about decolonisation.

What it was, though, was thinly veiled Islamism (political Islam) masquerading as a civil rights endeavour, wearing academia as a skinsuit. We have often discussed "suicidal empathy", but what we see here is the "suicidal gullibility" of our institutions who will gladly give houseroom to these creatures in the name of diversity. The same ilk who describe grooming gangs as a "moral panic". They sit there dressed in Islamic cultural garb like butter wouldn't melt in their mouths. One of the lead speakers, Professor Salman Sayyid even had the audacity to complain that while universities maintain a secular stance, they still close for Christmas.

His basic complaint, as I understood it, is that anyone with Muslim traits ("Muslimness") faces systemic discrimination, and that a de facto white supremacy exists, that enforces an invisible "apartheid". They spoke about the flag of Palestine being a unifying symbol of the struggle they face against Islamophobia in the West. They're basically romanticising Hamas's jihad as resistance, which pretty much tracks given how the flag has been adopted wholesale by political Islam in Britain.

They then spoke of the rising threat of ethno-nationalism as basically an ethnic revanchism, as the tides of history turn towards repatriation - implying that repatriation as a policy has now become mainstream. You will not be surprised to learn that Islamophobic oppression umbrella applies also to "refugees" - and Refugee Action was in attendance. Basically, the open borders academic blob with a side order of Islamo-leftist resistance. They see ethno-nationalism as the primary threat and something that must be deconstructed. The notion of Britain as a white, culturally Christian country is something to be overcome in their eyes - to establish Islam on an "equal" footing.

I had hoped to stay longer, perhaps making a discreet exit by lunchtime (because all academic conferences are tedious), but I thought I might venture a question after the first session. Since the discussion was around the riots last year, which they have diagnosed as Islamophobic, I wanted to venture the point that the riots took on a life of their own after British voters had voted to end mass immigration and what they got instead was an explosion of legal and illegal immigration. There was clucking from the room as I was formulating my question and I was not permitted to finish, so I walked out in disgust. I'd already had enough of the thinly-veiled antisemitism.

Not that it mattered. Their answer wasn't important. I got the measure of them. This is the same school of thought behind the push for the adsorption of de facto blasphemy laws. The Islamist threat has learned how to camouflage inside the institutions, adopting the garb of anti-racism.

Here you can see why the average academic is so badly out of touch. They look at rooms like that and they genuinely believe the ethno-religious makeup (peppered with middle class female social sciences academics) is a true reflection of modern multicultural Britain and cannot envisage, even for a nanosecond, why anyone might object to having their country reconfigured for the benefit of foreigners. Still, it's nice that they declare their malevolent intent so openly. It seems that ethno-nationalism is our best defence against it.