Elon Musk’s Crusade

In a world of alternative facts, Elon Musk acts as the high priest of disinformation

In a world of alternative facts, Elon Musk acts as the high priest of disinformation. The world’s richest man has exploited his platform, X, to embark on a vitriolic anti-Islam tirade with real-world consequences. It is unfathomable that he believes his incendiary messages are based on reasoned evidence and intellectual rigour. But truth and integrity are expendable commodities in this new world of democratised lies. Musk appeals to a radicalised Western population experiencing the repeated shocks of a flailing empire.

Let me start by saying the heinous crimes undertaken by deplorable men across towns and cities, mainly in the north of England, must be condemned in the strongest terms. Not only did they cause unspeakable harm to their victims, but they also stained the communities from which they came and gave ammunition to a far-right intent on besmirching Muslims and Islam. Their actions have nothing to do with the faith to which they may have been born; rape, alcohol, drugs and violence – are all abhorrent actions to which Islam gave the labels ‘munkar’ (evil) and ‘fahisha’ (indecency). These horrific reports, subsequent prosecutions and the Jay Inquiry findings in 2022 were met with absolute horror by the vast majority of Muslims and the immeasurable harm caused by those with Muslim names.

But Musk’s cynical attempt this past week to resuscitate this story and the virulence of this attack has been jaw-dropping. Basic facts have been embellished and misconstrued to give the false impression that Pakistani Muslims make up 84% of child rapists in the UK, despite the Pakistani community totalling just 2%. This figure had been previously debunked; it came from the discredited Quilliam Foundation, whose ‘partisan’ report was denounced by academic Ella Cockbain as ‘shoddy pseudoscience’, lacking the basic integrity of research. Yet its presence in the public domain has given the statistic a life of its own, and Musk lent it credibility by publicising it. In reality, according to the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse, British Pakistanis account for 2% of child abuse defendants. Incidentally, the white population makes up 83% of England and Wales and accounts for 88% of those accused of child abuse – all broadly in line with the ethnic makeup of the country.

Professor Alexis Jay, who presided over a seven-year-long public Inquiry, pointed out in her 2022 report that the disparity with which this crime is recorded by police forces across the UK “makes it impossible to know whether any particular ethnic group is over-represented as perpetrators of child sexual exploitation by networks." She went further in a recent Radio 4 Today Programme interview, stating child abuse was not limited to any one group in society.

Musk’s claims, mostly made through trigger-happy reposts of questionable persons, suggest there was a reticence to deal with the horrors of these gangs because law enforcement would be labelled racist or Islamophobic, which Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson brands the “malevolent myth of multiculturalism”. It’s open season on Muslims. Sections of the political and media class have been salivating at the unrestrained assault Musk’s intervention affords them.

Musk implies that the Labour Party remained silent in the heartlands of Rotherham, Bradford, Telford, and elsewhere because they depended on the ‘Muslm block vote’. One would conclude the opposite if anyone followed the recent general election campaign. Labour could not care less about Muslim votes, predominantly in its safe seats. For sure, there has been a horrid block vote, but its importance has been overplayed – Gaza continues to show the indifference Labour has shown to its Muslim constituents.

The failed Conservative Party leadership contender Robert Jenerick, who on some days makes Nigel Farage look like a woolly liberal, opines, “We have seen millions of people enter the UK in recent years, and some of them have backwards, frankly medieval attitudes to women”. This is not merely a dog whistle – Jenerick is using a bullhorn. Muslims are culturally uncivilised, a kind of language that has in the past justified imperialism and military intervention. It’s the same civilisational superiority that makes it perfectly acceptable to positively sit back when tens of thousands are massacred in Gaza. Another variety of Gallant’s ‘human animals’.

Jenerick’s party leader, Kemi Bedinoch, in the Conservative Party leadership race to the bottom, said, ‘all cultures are not equally valid’ and that ‘Western values’ are superior to others. At Prime Minister’s Questions this past week, she derided the All-Party Parliamentary Group’s definition of Islamophobia, claiming incorrectly that calling out the identity of grooming gangs would come under its classification of Islamophobia. Forgetting to mention that the APPG definition, albeit flawed, was the product of a collaborative effort by cross-party parliamentarians, including her own. But in a world of social media sound bites, her reference to Muslim, Pakistani, rape gangs, and Islam would be sufficient to earn plaudits from Musk.

Undergirding this media and political frenzy are the fundamental tensions that pervade Western societies, as summed up by the obnoxious Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson: “a self-loathing Western world which sees merit in every culture but its own.” The West has lost its way. According to this narrative, its ‘decline’—stagnated economies, lower living standards, failed wars, broken politics, and an epidemic of sadness and discontentment—can be attributed to its cultural impotence.

In this emasculated world, the sexually licentious barbarian, a common trope of old deployed against Muslims to justify conquest, has been resuscitated by resurgent white nativists. It’s a comfort blanket of an explanation to rationalise this crumbling Western order. Andrew Tate, who loves to appeal to any passing profitable opportunity, has found another bandwagon to ride, “third-world migrants” that come to Europe, in Tate’s words, “would import high testosterone men” who could act as “fearsome predators” in an “emasculated West”. The language mirrors The Great Replacement Theory, which positions migration as a liberal plot to consolidate a project to dilute white civilisation.

Musk, reeling from the backlash he recently received from the American nativist right when he called for an increase in high-skilled legal immigration and reform of H-1B visas, felt it necessary to over-compensate by unleashing his crusade. His language played to the Trump base by mirroring their talking points. The consequence is to make a particular kind of prejudice against Muslims an acceptable discourse. This past week in the UK, the so-called Overton window has tilted toward the racist Tommy Robinson, who has now earned a Nelson Mandela-like status in some quarters. The consequence is a frenzied, politicised, hate-driven public debate that further pushes Muslim voices away from the public square.

Decline is an ugly affair. And the decline of this empire, however slow and terminal, is leading to ruptures that require the othering of Muslims to give elites space to continue an economic and military order that feeds a few at the expense of the many.