The Islamophobia Industry

It could well have served as an alternative title for this exhaustive survey of the cancerous virus generated throughout the US and increasingly in Europe to demonise Muslims and their religion.

Nathan Lean's book reveals the unholy alliance of hate-obsessed right-wing extremist nut cases with highly organised and powerful interest groups such as Murdoch's Fox News empire and the influential zionist lobby who weave their tapestry of lies picturing a global Islamic conspiracy to impose sharia law throughout the Western world.

Western political establishments with a largely servile media in tow know only too well the value of injecting fear into the public consciousness in order to prevent domestic unrest.

There's need to consult Orwell's 1984 to understand the need for those in power to establish an external enemy ever ready to destroy us.

Even now, as the hopeless Afghanistan venture runs into the sand, Big Brother turns to the deserts of northern Africa to seek a fresh neocolonial bloody conflict to exploit.

One doesn't have to believe in conspiracy theories to recognise that September 11 2001 played into the hands of the Islamophobes. Virtually all subsequent revolutionary activities can be presented as the evil intentions of the ubiquitous al-Qaida - a useful tool to avoid questioning the true sources of the problems that can be droned out of existence.

In his penultimate chapter Lean turns to look "across the pond" where it could be speculated, at least by US commentators, that even the obscene mass slaughter by Norway's neonazi Anders Breivik might well have some "specific jihadist connection."

Lean notes that the US has always needed alien monsters to fear - "crude blueprints for a world that exist only in the minds of the deranged."

Yet in general Europeans display a healthy scepticism which hopefully will provide protection from what Lean describes as "a hate ideology that is fast becoming institutionalised."