UK Independence Party MEP Nigel Farage has threatened to sue over Tory leader David Cameron’s claim that UKIP contains “closet racists”. According to the Guardian, Farage cited the recent expulsion of four Italian Northern League MEPs from UKIP’s grouping in the European parliament after one of the League’s leaders wore a t-shirt printed with cartoons satirising the prophet Muhammad. Farage said: ‘We thought the Italian Northern League were OK. But they have become Islamaphobic to an extent we find unsettling … We adopt a firm line on immigration and asylum. But you haven’t got to be racist to do that’.”
This would be the same Nigel Farage who, according to former UKIP leader Alan Sked, rejected the inclusion of a statement on the party’s membership form opposing discrimination against minorities. “We will never win the nigger vote”, Sked quotes Farage as saying. “The nig-nogs will never vote for us.” As for anti-Muslim bigotry, former UKIP member Aidan Rankin has recounted his disillusionment with the party: “I listened, with increasing loathing, to a repertoire of anti-Muslim barbs from people who knew nothing whatsoever about Islam and were proud of their ignorance…. Islamophobia pervades its internal dialogue.”
John Sutherland interviews US feminist Phyllis Chesler. “Chesler’s critics say the vehemence of her language points to Islamophobia. A piece she wrote last month for the controversial webzine Frontpagemag.com suggested that ‘a small but organised number of Muslim-Americans and Muslim immigrants … are currently seeking to begin the Islamisation of America’. It went on to compare the Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan to Hitler. The blog Islamophobia Watch suggested that this signalled ‘the point of total dementia’.”
Thus the headline to a 
In February, in response to the Danish cartoons crisis, Deepa Kumar published an excellent critique of the way in which a section of left and liberal opinion in the US had “accepted and internalized right-wing arguments like Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis which sees the West as a force for enlightenment and the East as barbaric”.
“… to this day, Islam has retained its imperial ambitions. The last great Muslim empire may have been destroyed and the caliphate left vacant, but the dream of regional and world domination has remained very much alive…. Like the leaders of al Qaeda, many Muslims and Arabs unabashedly pine for the reconquest of Spain and consider their 1492 expulsion from the country a grave historical injustice waiting to be undone. Indeed, as immigration and higher rates of childbirth have greatly increased the number of Muslims within Europe itself over the past several decades, countries that were never ruled by the caliphate have become targets of Muslim imperial ambition. Since the late 1980’s, Islamists have looked upon the growing population of French Muslims as proof that France, too, has become a part of the House of Islam. In Britain, even the more moderate elements of the Muslim community are candid in setting out their aims…. this world-conquering agenda continues to meet with condescension and denial on the part of many educated Westerners.”