As someone who’s called Islamophobic and homophobic every day of the week, I can’t help marveling at the speed and skill with which Muslim lobby groups have mastered the language of victimhood so adroitly used by the gay lobby. If I were the latter, I’d be a little miffed at these Ahmed-come-latelys. “Homophobia” was always absurd: people who are antipathetic to gays are not afraid of them in any real sense. The invention of a phoney-baloney “phobia” was a way of casting opposition to the gay political agenda as a kind of mental illness: don’t worry, you’re not really against same-sex marriage; with a bit of treatment and some medication, you’ll soon be feeling okay.

On the other hand, “Islamophobia” is not phony or even psychological but very literal – if you’re a Dutch member of parliament or British novelist or Danish cartoonist in hiding under threat of death or a French schoolgirl in certain suburbs getting jeered at as an infidel whore, your Islamophobia is highly justified. But Islam’s appropriation of the gay lobby’s framing of the debate is very artful. It’s the most explicit example of how Islam uses politically correct self-indulgent victimology as a cover. You’ll recall that most Western media outlets declined to publish those Danish cartoons showing the Prophet Mohammed. Thus, even as they were piously warning of a rise in bogus “Islamophobia” – i.e., entirely justified concerns over Islamic terrorism and related issues – they were themselves suffering from genuine Islamophobia – i.e., a very real fear that, if they published those cartoons, an angry mob would storm their offices. It was a fine example of how the progressive mind’s invented psychoses leave it without any words to describe real dangers.