For while woke activists in the West might still speak of Muslims as a bloc, if not a blob, elsewhere in the world Muslims are at war. Two of the most powerful Muslim-majority nations, Iran and Pakistan, got dangerously close to all-out conflict this week. Tell me: who should the ‘Muslim community’ in Britain or the US or Canada support in this violent border skirmish?

For years, there’s been a gaping disconnect between the way Western observers speak about Muslims and the actual Muslim experience. Between our elites’ reduction of Muslims here in the West to a single entity, a throng that believes the same things and feels the same pain, and the growing Balkanisation of the Muslim-majority world.

The West’s guardians of opinion often slam celebs for treating Africa as a single country, and yet they’re equally guilty of flattening out the religious, cultural and territorial complexities of the Muslim experience. Their rush to fashion a new oppressed class, a people they might marshal as part of their indictment of the wickedness of the West, has ironically denuded Muslims of their diversity, and even their humanity.

This disconnect has really come to life in recent weeks. All the talk in right-thinking circles in the West has been of Muslim unity. Both ‘the Muslim community’ over here and ‘the Muslim world’ more broadly are as one in their rage with Israel and love for Palestine, we’re told. Reuters used the sweeping term ‘Muslim animosity’ to describe the vibe in both the West and the East.

Media outlets in the US and Europe frantically report that ‘Muslim voters’ might ditch Joe Biden over his support for Israel and turn against Labour in the UK, on the basis that Keir Starmer has been insufficiently pro-Palestine. That term, ‘Muslim voter’, conjures up an image of a samey, single-issue citizen, faithfully traipsing to the polling booth to register the uniform ‘animosity’ his kind feel.

Things are more complicated. They always are. Guardianistas might get a kick from reporting on the anti-Israel, anti-West fury of ‘the Muslim world’, but they’re rather more coy on the brazen failure of that world to offer assistance to civilians in Gaza. Egypt, for instance, which borders Gaza, is flat-out refusing to take refugees from the Israel-Hamas War.

They’d pose a security threat, apparently. Countless lives could have been saved had Egypt permitted the construction of refugee camps in the Sinai. We hear little of Egypt’s complicity in Gazans’ suffering, however, because our activist class prefers the moral thrill of cheering on ‘Muslim animosity’ towards Israel and the West to the hard task of analysing Arab states’ fatal betrayal of the Palestinian people.

There are 22 Arab states, spreading from the Middle East across North Africa, and all have closed their borders to Gazans. King Abdullah II of Jordan put it bluntly shortly after the start of the Israel-Hamas War: ‘No refugees in Jordan, no refugees in Egypt.’ Though perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by Jordan’s willingness to leave Gazans in what leftists and Islamists rather madly refer to as an ‘open-air concentration camp’.

This, after all, is the state which, in Black September in 1970, fought a war with the Palestine Liberation Organisation in which thousands of Palestinians died. One wonders how many of the woke youths hitting the streets of London and NYC to weep for Palestine have heard of Black September. Perhaps they block out any fact that shakes their fairytale about evil Israel vs a justly angry ‘Muslim world’.