UK government adviser sacked over comments on Islamophobia
The UK government has decided to sack a senior adviser after he suggested in an interview that the problem of Islamophobia is not real.
The government said on Wednesday that Sir Roger Scruton had been removed from his post as chairman of government commission on building better quality housing after he endorsed Islamophobic comments by Hungarian President Viktor Orban who has accused Muslims of trying to invade the West.
Scruton said in an interview with the New Statesman that Islamophobia was a hoax made up by the Muslim Brotherhood, the most popular political party in the Muslim world.
He said Islamophobia was a propaganda word “invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue”.
Scruton, a major academic known for his philosophical ideas, is a close friend of Orban, a prominent far-right politician and a committed Islamophobe who has previously referred to refugees coming to Europe to escape war and poverty in the Middle East as “Muslim invaders”.
The controversial figure has endorsed Orban’s other views, especially those made against American billionaire businessman George Soros who Orban believes is running an empire from his place of birth in Hungary to advance the interests of the Jews worldwide.
Scruton’s comments about Islamophobia come amid a clear surge in hate crimes against Muslims in the UK and other Western countries.
Inspired by prominent Islamophobes in Britain, an Australian man massacred some 50 Muslim worshippers in two mosques in Christchurch in New Zealand last month.
The Opposition Labour party called for Scruton’s removal from the government, saying his language is instigating hate against the Muslims.
“These comments by Roger Scruton are despicable and invoke the language of white supremacists,” said Dawn Butler a senior Labour MP who serves as shadow women and equalities minister, adding, "His claim that Islamophobia does not exist, a few weeks after the devastating attack in Christchurch, is extremely dangerous, and his defence of the prejudice stoked by Viktor Orban’s government in Hungary is appalling.”
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