Did Winston Churchill say this quote about Muslims and minority rights
Over the years, people have wrongly attributed this quote to the former British prime minister.
A derisive remark about Muslims is often attributed, usually online and in meme form, to former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The quote reads, “When Muslims are in the minority they are very concerned with minority rights, when they are in the majority there are no minority rights.”
Although such a statement might not have been out of character for Churchill, whose controversial musings on Islam revealed both a fascination and fear of the faith, no evidence documents his having said or written any such thing.
Richard Langworth, a senior fellow with the Hillsdale College Winston Churchill Project, included this putative Churchillian quote in a Nov. 16, 2018, addition to his running list of “All the ‘Quotes’ Winston Churchill Never Said.”
As best we can tell, this “quote” is an utterance commonly found in the comment sections of Islamophobic websites and was later attributed to Churchill with the use of image editing technology. For example, on May 11, 2015, a man commented on a blog named “The Muslim Issue” with the words allegedly uttered by Churchill:
And see, this is what the muslims do: when they are in the minority, it is all about “minority rights.” When they are in the majority, there are NO minority rights.
Similarly, a Dec. 5, 2015, Islamophobic message board post from someone named “Grampa Dave” used the same statement (without attribution to Churchill) as a sign-off. And a scantily worded and lightly proofread Jan. 26, 2017, letter to the editor written by a man named Don Searles and printed by the Journal Gazette & Times-Courier, an Illinois newspaper, used the same statement and followed up with a call for people to prove him wrong:
In every country where Muslims are in the minority, they are obsessed with the rule of law and minority rights. In every country where Muslims are the majority, there is no rule of law or minority rights.
I ask that anyone who is able to show where this is not true to please post you [sic] evidence in the comments section of the online version of this newspaper.
In conclusion, ‘No, Winston Churchill didn’t say this quote about Muslims and minority rights’
Not only were these words first attributed to Churchill in the 21st century, but they seemingly did not appear in print prior to about 2015— making it extremely unlikely they originated with a man who died in 1965.
We labeled ‘Misattributed.
