How’s this for a little trip through the looking glass? In Great Britain, the “anti-fascism” group Hope Not Hate has compiled a long list of “anti-Muslim” campaigners that includes— devout Muslims.

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Nawaz says, the list

— conflates genuine — anti-Muslim bigots, with academic, journalistic and intellectual critics of Islam — including beleaguered ex-Muslim voices — and further, it throws reform-Muslim activists into the mix for good measure. In a plot twist befitting of a Monty Python sketch, one of those — was a headscarf-wearing, devout Muslim American woman called Raquel Saraswati. Raquel’s crime, for which her life was deemed to be worthy of putting at risk, was that she campaigns against honor-based violence.

Concerned Muslims exposed that absurdity, and Hope Not Hate took Saraswati’s name off the list, casting doubt on the rigor and thoughtfulness with which it was compiled in the first place. Other Muslims remain:

[T]he authors kept others such as an Egyptian Muslim Koran exegete, and reform campaigner Tawfik Hamid, as well as right-leaning American Muslim Zuhdi Jasser.

Nawaz correctly points out that

Hope Not Hate cannot escape the fact that there are people in their list who are also listed by some of the world’s most determined terrorists, who want them dead for the very same reason — daring to criticize Islam. —

By being included on the same list as genuine anti-Muslim bigots, any Muslim, and any other intellectual for that matter, who wishes to hold a serious and genuine conversation about Islam and its place in today’s age, is smeared by association, and is intimidated from expressing themselves from fear of being labelled a racist or bigot.