Debunking the Islamisation Myth - Edmund Standing

Am putting up a link to this paper as it's well worth a read. Preface to the paper below.

I am an atheist, a secularist, and an anti-fascist. I have no interest in defending Islamic religious

beliefs, nor the Qur’an (quite the opposite, in fact). I also have no time for those who seek to

understand’ Islamism or downplay the abhorrent nature of religious fascism. That said, I am also

committed to a rational and just approach to my fellow human beings, seeking to treat them in the

same way, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and so on. To think Islam as a set

of beliefs is false and potentially dangerous is not the same thing at all as thinking that all Muslims

are inherently dangerous or that I should view them as qualitatively different to other human

beings.

In the post-9/11 West, we have seen the worrying growth of a paranoid, bigoted approach to

Muslims which increasingly views them as an undifferentiated mass, as an inherent Other, and as a

powerful fifth column conspiring to destroy the West and enslave it to Sharia law. This approach to

Muslims shares much in common with the approach to Jews found amongst those who believe the

Protocols of Zion is an authentic document, and the ‘Islamisation’ myth is increasingly looking like

a Muslim-themed variant of Protocols belief.

In Britain, militant anti-Muslim bigotry has now reared its head in the form of the English Defence

League, an organisation founded with the explicit aim of combating ‘Islamisation’. The EDL is an

organisation that has been set up to fight a mythical enemy and, in failing to find this enemy, it

seems inevitable that the next phase of the campaign will be to target Muslims as a whole, and

there are strong indications that this is already happening. The ‘Islamisation’ myth, then, urgently

needs debunking, and this report is my contribution to that effort.