Senator Saddam claims that Virginia is in the middle of an ‘Islamophobia’ crisis. The second Muslim selected for the state senate, after Ghazala Hashmi, who is now acting as Virginia’s Lt. Governor, the Bangladeshi immigrant, from a country where non-Muslims are being murdered in the streets, has made complaining about ‘Islamophobia’ in his new home his signature issue.

Sen. Saddam Azlan Salim’s first priority has been a bill to define ‘Islamophobia’. The most notable thing about his bill SB 624 ‘Assault and battery; definition of “Islamophobia”, penalty’ is how completely unnecessary it is. Virginia already has multiple layers of hate crimes enhancements for assaults motivated by race, ethnicity and religion. During Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s term, the legislature has already passed SB 7 (Senate Bill 7) and its counterpart enhancing the assault charge for anyone who “intentionally selects the person against whom a simple assault is committed because of his race, religious conviction, gender, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, color, or ethnic or national origin.”

That should cover Islam and Muslims. And yet Sen. Saddam introduced a 3 page bill with 10 clauses in its first section a whole lot of whom do nothing more than add (including Islam) where it isn’t remotely needed or useful. For example “because of his race, religious conviction (including Islam), gender, disability, gender identity” or “because of his race, religious conviction (including Islam)”. Islam appears to be the only religion being singled out this way.

Why provide Islam with this privileged status? Because it makes Islam distinct, which is a step towards making it superior, and making Islam distinct and superior is the religious mission of all believing Muslims.

This isn’t about making sure that attacks on Muslims are prosecuted, but about providing Islam with special privileges.

And it’s about using supposed crimes against Muslims as bait for Islamophobia indoctrination. The Islamophobia ‘switch’ in SB 624 comes after the ‘bait’ about assaults. First, the bill sets out a definition of ‘Islamophobia’ which transforms a term created by Islamists seeking to impose their religion on society into an official legal term.

Notably, the definition in SB624 states that “Islamophobia means malicious prejudice or hatred directed toward Islam or Muslims.” This distinction is legally significant as ‘prejudice’ towards Islam distinct from prejudice towards Muslims. For example, in the UK burning a Koran has been prosecuted as a form of hate towards Islam. And that opens the door to blasphemy law.

Having malicious prejudice towards Muslims is perfectly sufficient in prosecuting an assault or a case of discrimination. Islam however is a religion and just like any religion or any other belief system, people have the right to be opposed to it as long as they don’t mistreat others.

The use of “Islam or Muslims” embeds the first stage of blasphemy law inside Virginia law.

But that’s the whole reason why ‘Islamophobia’ was manufactured as a political term. Unlike ‘racism’ or ‘antisemitism’, it’s not hatred towards a group, but towards an ideological abstraction. ‘Islamophobia’ legislation isn’t protecting persecuted individuals, but the status of an ideology. And those forms of ‘protection’ invariably turn out to ban ‘blasphemy’ against Islam by censoring cartoons, art (at least one art professor was fired for showing paintings of Mohammed in class) and any public criticism of the Islamic persecution of women, minorities and all non-Muslims.

SB 624 claims that it’s not trying to “regulate or restrict any speech, expression, or belief”, but by including a definition of ‘Islamophobia’ that mentions ‘Islam’ and puts it first, it’s laying the groundwork for doing exactly that.

Compare this to HB 2261 under Gov. Youngkin, which Islamist and leftist groups urgently opposed, which defined antisemitism and which did not mention ‘Judaism’, but rather defined it as a “hatred toward Jews and includes rhetorical and physical manifestations of hostility or hatred that may be directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals or their property, the Jewish community, or Jewish institutions and religious facilities.” In all of these cases, antisemitism involved hatred against Jews, synagogues or other facilities, not ‘Judaism’.

Why doesn’t Sen. Saddam’s ‘Islamophobia’ bill use that as a model? Because it’s not about protecting Muslims from violence, but about imposing Islam as a legal concept on Virginia.

The object of SB 624 and every effort to define ‘Islamophobia’ isn’t Muslims, it’s Islam. The pretense that Muslims are facing violence and need a new bill to protect them falls apart because the very definition is aimed at protecting ‘Islam’, the religion, not the individuals.

Virginia’s extensive hate crime codes already amply protect Muslims from anything and everything. The only ‘gap’, from the Islamist perspective, is the status of Islam.

The ‘Islamophobia’ definition of SB 624 gives a distinct and special status to Islam, it defines Islam as an entity that must be protected by the government and the law enforcement agencies whom the bill obligates to use this definition of ‘Islamophobia’ when prosecuting hate crimes. And that paves the way for criminalizing Koran defacement and Mohammed paintings.

It’s telling that Virginia’s highest profile ‘Islamophobia’ case was a lie. And it happened in Fairfax County, which is represented by Sen. Saddam Azlan Salim. Darwin Martinez Torres, an illegal alien MS-13 gang member, killed Nabra Hassanen, a Muslim teenage girl, and rather than blaming Fairfax’s sanctuary policies that enabled Torres to be there roaming the streets, Islamist groups and their radical allies falsely blamed ‘Islamophobia’ and intimidated local authorities, including prosecutors, into propping up their hoax. Police initially correctly stated that it was road rage before being forced to spread the lie that it had been motivated by Islam.

The evidence that it was a ‘hate crime’?

In the words of a Washington Post reporter “hitting a 17-year-old girl with a bat and dumping her body in a pond would be an act born of hate.” Perhaps, but not of Muslims or of Islam.

Nabra Hassanen’s murder was used to promote the myth that there was an ‘Islamophobia’ crisis in Virginia and SB 624 is the next stage in which Islamists profit by creating a distinct legal status for Islam. That is how one lie about ‘Islamophobia’ becomes a state law.

Front Page Magazine