Letters: Johnson's burka '˜gaffe' bid to stir up anti-Muslim hysteria

Boris Johnson's latest comment attacking Muslims (Scotsman, 7 August) was not a 'gaffe'. It was a strategy of scapegoating and political filth thought up by Trump's strategist Steve Bannon.

Boris Johnson has been accused of deliberately whipping up anti-Muslim hysteria

Johnson and other senior Brexiteer MPs Jacob Rees Mogg and Michael Gove recently met with Steve Bannon. Bannon is a fanatical nativist. He masterminded Trump’s election to the US Presidency. Johnson is now enacting a ploy thought up by Bannon. They know that Brexit will be a disaster of Biblical proportions. The Brexiteers are seeking to whip-up anti-Muslim hysteria for their own political ends.

However the self-righteous indignation by Johnston’s fellow Tories and media figures, who claim they are shocked by his statements should be, dismissed with contempt. The blathering of this offensive imbecile expresses only in more concentrated form the perpetual hysteria one hears every day. Johnson is the product of a diseased political environment. Johnson’s attack on Muslims, however, is the latest episode in a campaign which has been ongoing for some 15 years. Since the so-called “war on terror” was declared 15 years ago Muslims have been targeted.

During every imperialist war, the government seeks to cultivate the most backward and racist sentiments. The “war on terror,” which has led to the deaths of at least a million Muslims, is no different, creating an environment in which racist hysteria is relentlessly promoted in the media. In 2008 the Cardiff School of Journalism did a survey of newspaper articles on Muslims in UK newspapers. It involved nearly 1,000 articles written since the year 2000, noting the content and context of articles pertaining to Muslims and Islam.

READ MORE: Islamophobia in the Conservative Party: The accusations that led up to the Boris Johnson controversy

The findings showed that 69 per cent of the articles presented Muslims as a source of problems not just in terms of terrorism but also on cultural issues, and that 26 per cent of the articles portrayed Islam as dangerous, backward or irrational. Since the Blair years there has been an established pattern. The government’s response to any and every questioning of its foreign and domestic agenda is to resort to the crudest forms of political propaganda based on nationalism, xenophobia and efforts to panic the population with the threat of terrorist atrocities.

Alan Hinnrichs

Dundee