There’s something I’ve been struggling to articulate for a while, and that’s the double-whammy of Islamophobia and anti Corbyn bias.

Corbyn’s perceived affinity with Muslims - through his foreign policy stances in particular - has been used as a dog whistle for the right.

He’s been castigated as a “Terrorist sympathiser”, “soft on extremism”, and portrayed as anti-semitic because of his longstanding support for the Palestinian struggle.

This has gone hand-in-hand with a demonisation of Muslims in his constituency as particularly illiberal.

These aren’t just the narratives of the far-right. Such views were pushed hard by the Conservative Party and right-leaning papers.

I wonder where Darren Osborne could’ve gotten the idea that Jeremy Corbyn is a terrorist sympathiser from

Election messaging doesn’t cease to have an effect after an election ends. Darren Osborne said in court today that killing Sadiq Khan would be “like winning the lottery.”

Remember this election editorial from Zac Goldsmith smearing Sadiq Khan?

So we've got three dynamics overlapping at play.
1) That proximity to Muslims (or being Muslim) is reason to suspect split allegiances.
2) That being critical of the War on Terror is tantamount to treason.
3) Historicising terrorism is the same as condoning it.

And the outcome is a pervasive sense that Muslims are unwelcome in political life, unless they utterly capitulate to the logic that other Muslims - the 'bad' ones - are to be policed out of public life.

What's more, it turns dissent - of any kind - into something to be viewed as inherently dangerous, especially if such dissent is with regards to the construction of threats to the body politic.

The actions of Darren Osborne are not the invasion of an extremist ideology, but the deadly consequence of a persistent reliance on fear and othering as electoral strategy, nurtured at the heart of our political establishment.