Not sure why people are shocked that the party which spent nearly 10 years killing, torturing and disappearing Muslims as part of the ‘War on Terror’ was riddled with Islamophobia at a senior level.

Tony Blair specifically tried to justify the 'War on Terror' as being a battle against 'radical' or 'reactionary' Islam - rather than a secular war for power, control and hegemony in the middle east, seen as stregetically important region because of its vast energy reserves.

New Labour spent years deliberately and knowingly linking 'Islam' and 'terrorism' in the popular imagination. You knew it was bullshit when Blair didn't include Saudi Arabia, a British ally, in his definition of 'reactionary' Islam, but did include relatively secular Syria.

So we have to be clear that New Labour wasn't killing, torturing and disappearing Muslims *because* they were Muslim. They were killed because they got in the way of U.S. and British designs on 'the middle east' and Central Asia, and their religion was almost incidental.

But they couldn't really come out and say 'We're killing, torturing and disappearing all these people to advance the interests of British capitalism', because that sounds obscene. So instead they had to pretend they were fending off a civilisational threat from the Muslim hordes.

New Labour had a whole coterie of supporters in the liberal press who helped them push this narrative of the 'War on Terror' being a progressive war against 'reactionary' Islam, or sometimes 'Islamofascism': Martin Bright, Nick Cohen, Joan Smith, etc.

The news would being daily stories of the horrors the U.S. and U.K. were committing as part of the 'War on Terror'. And yet still these people, and the Labour right in general, banged on about this being a war in defence of freedom and liberal values, to which Islam was inimical.

The repercussions of that period are being felt to this day, with Islamoiphobia still normalised and still rife within British society.