Warning: this column may soon be illegal

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/theelectionwhereeverybodyloses/media.mp3″ title=”Listen to Douglas Murray discuss Islamophobia” startat=1350]

Listen

[/audioplayer]A couple of weeks back I wrote an article headed: ‘Call me insane, but I’m voting Labour.’ Among the many hundreds of people who reacted with the rather predictable ‘Yes, you’re insane’ was my wife, Mrs Liddle. She pointed out that Ed Miliband had vowed that upon being elected, Labour would make Islamophobia a crime. ‘So,’ she concluded, with a certain acidity, ‘not only will we be substantially worse off under a Labour government, but at nine o’clock on the morning of 8 May the police will arrive to take you away. You are voting for a party which will both impoverish and arrest you. You are a moron.’

Yes. She has a point. I hadn’t realised that Ed was going to make Islamophobia a crime. Part of me rather agrees with criminalising these sorts of psychological conditions — I have always thought that agoraphobia, for example, should be against the law, as I cannot abide people who whine about how they can’t go out to places. Get a grip. And I have never had much time for linonophobes, either: string is incredibly useful and to be scared of it is just stupid. Bang these people up, I say. Similarly, pentheraphobia, which is an irrational hatred of one’s mother-in-law. Not pleasant. A short term in prison would sort all of these people out.

But Islamophobia? That seems to me an entirely rational response to an illiberal, vindictive and frankly fascistic creed. I am not a Muslimophobe — I am well aware that enormous numbers of Muslims do not subscribe to all of the particularly unpleasant tenets of Islam as it is practised and preached today. Not all of them wish to chop your head off or stone you to death or simply imprison you for not being one of them, or for being homosexual, or Jewish, or for renouncing your faith because you’ve suddenly realised that it is illiberal, vindictive and fascistic.