Home Secretary Mahmood’s weasel words over Muslims and Jews
BRUCE NEWSOME
THE Home Office has a shocking record of Islamocentrism, ignoring Islamist crimes against white Britons while exaggerating the risks for Muslims from white Britons.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is making the Home Office more Islamocentric than ever. She is the Labour Party’s leading hope for retention of Muslim voters. She highlights her own faith as motivation for her politics, and is woefully inaccurate in her portrayal of the risks to Muslims versus other Britons.
David Starkey speculates that Sir Keir Starmer has promoted Mahmood to appease a leftist Muslim base that resents his U-turn on refusing an inquiry into Muslim rape gangs, and his delay in recognising Palestine.
In 2019, seven in ten Muslims voted for Labour. In 2024, that dropped to six in ten. Four pro-Palestinian ‘independents’ defeated Labour’s Parliamentary candidates in 2024. More than a year later, some Muslim Labourites don’t think Starmer tough enough on Israel, and are organising to displace Labour MPs in 2029. The Green Party and Your Party are explicitly appealing for Muslims to defect.
Mahmood is the Islamocentric sop to the Muslim base, while pretending to be the Labour Party’s voice of reason to the rest of us.
As a shadow minister, Mahmood joined protests for direct action against British companies doing business in Israel. As a minister, she loves speaking about how her faith provoked prejudice, but helped her to overcome all barriers to become the first Muslim Justice Secretary and how her faith informs how she governs.
As a shadow minister and Justice Secretary, she championed Labour’s campaign pledge to outlaw ‘Islamophobia’. Criminalisation of Islamophobia would make easier the privileging of pro-Palestine marchers, the persecution of Christian preachers, the harassment of critics of anti-Semitic tweets, the arrest of counter-protesters against anti-Semites (including, infamously, a bystander arrested for ‘provoking’ protesters by being ‘openly Jewish’), and the denial of bystanders filming pro-Palestinian marchers. Criminalisation of Islamophobia would make easier the repression of opposition to illegal immigrants, most of whom are Muslim.
Mahmood provoked these concerns. She characterised British flag-wavers as ‘white’, ‘male’ and ‘bad’, and as organised by the English Defence League. She offered no evidence. As Justice Secretary she surely knew the counter-evidence, such as the Pink Ladies.
As soon as she became Home Secretary in September, she doubled down on the Home Office’s argument to the courts that asylum-seekers’ rights trump those of local residents.
She did repudiate the plan to outlaw ‘Islamophobia’. She says she does not wish to ‘create further conditions that increase hatred . . . because then people feel like one group is getting special treatment against another group’.
Sounds sensible, but the administration is still considering its plan to outlaw Islamophobia. At the least, the administration will release an official definition of Islamophobia, which will be used further to suppress legitimate discussion of Islam.
In her first speech as Home Secretary to the Labour Party Conference, Mahmood complained that ‘patriotism . . . is turning into . . . something more like ethno-nationalism, which struggles to accept that someone who looks like me, and has a faith like mine, can truly be English or British’.
Her speech contains at least two references to her faith, but nobody else’s.
That was the same speech in which she promised that unless the discontent of millions of patriots is addressed, ‘division in this country will grow’.
Within the first minute of the subsequent interview, in front of a supportive audience at the Labour Party conference, she complained of a trend to ‘ethno-nationalism,’ voiced by ‘some people that we will never ever be able to convince, and we shouldn’t try to, because their worldview is completely different, and in my worldview they deserve to be condemned, and there’s no conversation to be had’.
This reminds me of Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ (half of Donald Trump’s supporters) in 2016.
Perhaps Mahmood doesn’t mean the majority of Britons who support her political opponents. Perhaps she means only supporters of Reform UK, whose immigration reforms she described as ‘worse than racist’ (despite adopting some of them). But even if we reduce Mahmood’s basket of deplorables to Reform’s supporters, she’s still writing off more than a third of intended voters.
At the end of her opening statement in that interview, Mahmood called for ‘tolerance and generosity.’ Hmm. That’s quite a contradiction between how she behaves and how she calls on the rest of us to behave.
Later, in answer to a different question, she said: ‘We’re very good on the left of politics of showing solidarity and . . . I love that about the Labour Party and the way that the left, you know, feels comfortable doing that. But I’m also not willing to write off potentially millions of my fellow citizens in this country as Muslim-haters. Like I feel like there’s a responsibility to reach across to people to work out why that’s happening . . .’
Yet she had written off millions of fellow citizens minutes earlier. How does the left’s latest self-appointed Queen of healing division justify writing off British patriots? Or her political opponents? Or Reform voters? Or supporters of immigration reform?
She did not acknowledge anti-Semitism until more than 17 minutes into the interview. She used the semantic frames ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ 17 times in that interview, ‘Semitism’ and ‘Jew’ 3 times. That was at the end of September, days before the deadly Islamist attack on a Manchester synagogue on October 2.
Mahmood went to the synagogue to condemn anti-Semitism. But she refused to stop coincident protests against Israel, or the longer-planned celebrations of the second anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel.
She could have said that she would no longer use her legacy authoritarian powers to repress freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Instead, she dishonestly claimed she had no such powers. Then she announced plans for more powers.
That was before Birmingham Council banned fans of an Israeli football team playing Aston Villa, nominally on ground of safety, but really because majority Muslim locals petitioned majority Muslim councillors in a majority Muslim city to ban them, calling to mind the Muslims of Amsterdam who organised a ‘Jew Hunt’ when the same Israeli team played there. Around 30 assumed-Jews were injured: seven were hospitalised.
Mahmood, following Starmer, condemned the council’s decision, and claimed that she heard of it at the same time as the public. But later we learned that she had known about the council’s decision a week before the public found out, and she hadn’t objected. Her constituency is a mile from Villa Park; she barely defended it in 2024 from a pro-Palestine activist.
Mahmood is Islamocentric. She is the worst choice to lead the Home Office in a time of rising Islamism and official privileging of Islamism.
This article (Home Secretary Mahmood’s weasel words over Muslims and Jews) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Bruce Newsome
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