Yes, it’s true – we were really, really horrible to poor John Ware, the reporter who headed the Panorama witch-hunt of the Muslim Council of Britain (see here). Still, Ware has his admirers. Anthony “The Muslims are coming” Browne is a supporter, and so is Brett Lock of Outrage.
And Lock also finds himself in a bloc with Mad Mel. See Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 3 October 2005
Alliances with Islamophobic right-wingers are par for the course with Mr Lock. See, for example, here.
“They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace/ Her Majesty’s Law is replaced by Allah’s.” Mark Steyn takes issue with “the United Kingdom’s descent into dhimmitude”, which stems from “the progressive liberal’s urge to self-abase and Western Muslims’ ever greater boldness in flexing their political muscle”.
Posted in Analysis & comment, Right wing, UK
“Multiculturalism is a divisive political doctrine that creates enormous costs, foments racial hatred, and may even have been complicit in cultivating the homegrown suicide bombers of July 7, according to a new report from the independent think-tank Civitas.” National Secular Society news report, 3 October 2005 And what is this mild-sounding organisation Civitas that the NSS cites so approvingly? Well, actually, it’s a hard right anti-migrant outfit that numbers Anthony (“Islam really does want to conquer the world”) Browne among its leading contributors. Civitas explains that the message of the report, The Poverty of Multiculturalism by Patrick West, is that “hard” multiculturalism has led “some Western intellectuals, who regard themselves as progressive, into the perverse position of defending cultures that condone the killing of homosexuals and the virtual enslavement of women, whilst denigrating the culture of the free societies of the West, inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment”. Civitas provides the following quote from Mr West: “State-sponsored multiculturalism has led to cities such as Bradford, Burnley and Oldham fissuring along sectarian lines, and to heightening racial tensions between whites and Asians – with white people feeling ‘the other lot’ are getting favourable treatment from the local council…. The rise of the BNP in the north … is the result of white people seeing themselves discriminated against by local authorities.” The MCB complained after Panorama quoted one of its founders as saying the body was “in denial” about extreme views that prevail among its members. The group claimed editors “deliberately garbled” interviews with Muslims. But Panorama editor Mike Robinson has now said it was an “unwarranted and wildly inaccurate attack” on the show. “I have found there to be no truth in your claims that this programme was dishonestly presented, maliciously motivated or Islamophobic,” he wrote to the MCB. No doubt the programme’s reporter John Ware was equally innocent of bias when he headed an earlier Panorama Special in 2003, on asylum seekers, which the then home secretary David Blunkett denounced for “pursuing a Powellite anti-immigration agenda”. See here. Or to go back earlier still, in 1987 Panorama was responsible for a programme entitled “Brent Schools – Hard Left Rules”. As Julian Petley recounts, in the recently published book Culture Wars: “This was introduced by John Ware who once, perhaps significantly, worked for the Sun…. it’s worth noting that this particular edition of Panorama provoked an unusually large number of complaints.” Petley writes of Ware’s interview with Brent council leader Merle Amory that “quite clearly, the sole purpose behind Ware’s interviewing techniques was to get Amory to make an incriminating remark about Trotskyist penetration of Labour”. Amory and other councillors “were never allowed freely to put their own or the council’s point of view, unlike those critical of the council’s policies – their function in the programme was simply to stand at the receiving end of criticisms levelled by their opponents and reinforced not only by Ware himself but by the very manner in which they were actually interviewed.” I imagine Iqbal Sacranie knows exactly how they must have felt. Condemning the religious hatred bill, Mike McNair claims that “the chilling effect of the new act will be considerable. Behzti and Jerry Springer, the Opera would not be staged; Monty Python’s Life of Brian might be filmed in the US, since the first amendment is robust, but would not be shown by British cinemas, and a great deal of the television series would not be broadcast; Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses might well be de facto banned by English law”. Weekly Worker, 29 September 2005 This is not only hysterical nonsense, it’s also unbelievably ignorant. The staging of Behzti was already covered by the provisions in the 1986 Public Order Act dealing with incitement to racial hatred, as Sikhs are held (on the basis of case law) to be members of a mono-ethnic faith. The extension of those provisions to cover religious hatred, as is proposed in the present bill, would make zero difference to whether or not Behzti could be prosecuted for inciting hatred. The effect of the bill is simply to extend to other faiths (notably Muslims) the defence already available to Sikhs and Jews under existing law. In another article in the same issue Jack Conrad approvingly quotes Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews: “… there is a profound difference between hatred based on race, sex or age – all of which are thrust upon us; we have no choice – and on religion, which is not thrust upon us. Religion is a matter of choice.” This argument was demolished by Sadiq Khan MP in the same House of Commons debate: “The idea that one cannot choose one’s race but can choose one’s religion so that the former but not the latter should get protection is absurd. Some people talk about religion as a lifestyle choice, but what is being suggested – that Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims should convert to Christianity or become atheists?” “Muslims can’t stand the thought of Holocaust commemorations, because, with certain honorable exceptions, Islam’s attitudes toward the Jews frequently mirror those of the Nazi killers.” Don Feder offers his insights into the MCB’s proposal that Holocaust Memorial Day should be broadened out into a Genocide Day. Front Page Magazine, 27 September 2005 In fact, Holocaust Memorial Day is often observed as a more general commemoration of the victims of genocide. The event I attended this year included a gay men’s choir and a speaker on the mass killings in Rwanda as well as a Jewish survivor of the Nazi extermination camps. It’s also worth remembering that when the idea of a Holocaust Memorial Day was flagged up in the late 1990s, it proved controversial not only among Muslims but also within the Jewish community in Britain. Left-wing Jews criticised it on the basis that it ignored or at least downplayed the existence of non-Jewish victims of genocide. Right-wingers opposed it because they claimed that the history of Jewish suffering under the Nazis was being harnessed to Labour’s “equalities agenda”. And ultra-orthodox Jews rejected it because they argued that the Holocaust was divine retribution on the Jewish people for their sins and that condemning it was to question God’s judgement. Leo McKinstry in the Express usefully summarises all the lies and distortions promoted by opponents of the religious hatred bill. “It is a scandal that centuries of the right to free expression can be overthrown because of the craven wish to appease Islamic extremism.” You know the sort of thing. McKinstry claims: “Our laws already provide ample protection against genuine hate crimes. In 2003, for instance, Mark Norwood, a British National party activist in Shropshire, was prosecuted under the Public Order Act for displaying a poster which read: ‘Islam out of Britain’.” In fact, the successful prosecution of Norwood was not for inciting hatred – he was convicted (in 2002) on the relatively minor charge of causing religiously aggravated “harassment, alarm or distress”. An attempt to convict another BNP member, Dick Warrington, under racial hatred legislation for displaying a poster with the same “Islam Out of Britain” slogan failed because Islam is not a mono-ethnic religion and therefore it is held that Muslims cannot be victims of racial hatred. It is nonsense to claim, as McKinstry does, that only Muslim organisations back the proposed new law. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Church of England, the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, the Hindu Council and the Network of Sikh Organisations are among those who support the Bill. And so on, and so forth. “Islamic fundamentalists have used Dundee University as a recruiting ground for terrorists, a new study will warn this week. Shamsul Bahri Hussein, a suspect in the Bali bombing, was recruited at the institution, which is one of 30 universities that have been targeted by terror groups, it is claimed. “Professor Anthony Glees, author of the study, is convinced that Hussein was recruited by militants while studying applied mechanics at Dundee in the 1980s. He is one of eight suspects wanted in connection with the 2002 bombing, which claimed 200 lives. “‘What is clear is that Shamsul Bahri Hussein was a student at Dundee University’, said Glees, whose study, When Students Turn to Terror, coincides with a planned crackdown on radical student organisations by the government.” Sunday Times, 18 September 2005 Yes, and that is about the only thing that is clear. Glees’s report states that Hussein “read applied mechanics at Dundee” … and that’s all! The report contains not a shred of evidence that even a single student was recruited to a terrorist group at Dundee University. “When Islam appears on the agenda, the goalposts are moved: the normal rational thought processes are not applied. Suddenly those Left-liberal shibboleths are not very important: they can be forgotten. Append the description ‘Muslim’ to anyone and all bets are off; he or she can get away with pretty much anything, be it the execution of homosexuals or the idea that Jews and Freemasons are running the government. This springs from the misconception, widespread on the Left, that being anti-Islam is in some way ‘racist’. It is not. It has nothing to do with race.” Another anti-Muslim rant by Rod Liddle in the Spectator, 17 September 2005 “Nothing to do with race”? Well, apart from the fact that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are non-white, of course. But then, Liddle claims that his hardline anti-immigration stance has nothing to do with race either. He identifies racism narrowly with prejudice against people on the basis of their skin colour. This of course ignores the fact that racist propaganda these days more often takes the form of diatribes against the supposed undermining of “British” values by “alien” cultures. From which standpoint Liddle is clearly categorisable as a racist. “Hardline Egyptian cleric … Yusuf Qaradawi’s outlook is suffused with dogmatism, revenge and oppression … Yusuf Qaradawi’s bloodthirsty views … a group of Iraqi, Jordanian and Tunisian writers last year described him as one of the ‘sheikhs of death’ … Qaradawi has openly stated that the punishment for homosexuality should be death”. The usual sort of rubbish, familiar from the productions of MEMRI and Outrage. Daily Telegraph, 15 September 2005 Yet, less than two months ago, the same paper published the following characterisation of Qaradawi, by Hugh Miles: “Although much of what the sheikh says may be hard to stomach by western standards, by regional standards he is a moderate. He condemned the London bombings, just as he quickly condemned the September 11 attacks. He has consistently said that Muslims need to think for themselves, which means they need be free of government control. This is not a message that goes down well with Arab governments. “Al-Qaradawi has written at least 50 books attempting to reconcile Islam with democracy and human rights and he is one of the most important proponents of women’s rights in contemporary Islam. All this is utterly at odds with the teachings of fundamentalist imams, who see democracy and women’s rights as alien concepts imported from the infidel West. He practises what he preaches: his three daughters are highly educated. Each one holds a doctoral degree in the natural sciences, drives and works.” So what explains the discrepancy? Well, maybe that Miles – author of an informative study of the Arab TV station Al-Jazeera – actually knows what he is talking about, whereas McKinstry is just an ignorant right-wing bigot. Mind you, McKinstry has his admirers – Brett Lock of Outrage, for example, gives his wholehearted endorsement to this reactionary hack. See Lock & Load, 15 September 2005 Over a year ago year, US radical Yoshie Furuhashi pointed out that Outrage’s attitude towards Muslims was not so far removed from that of the late Dutch racist Pim Fortuyn, and she expressed anxiety that Tatchell and his co-thinkers might go the whole hog and embrace the racist Right. I think we can now say that this process has largely been completed.‘Multiculturalism costs lives’
Panorama rejects MCB complaint over Panorama programme
The editor of BBC current affairs show Panorama has rejected complaints from the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) who said a programme was “deeply unfair”.
Religious hatred bill: ‘censorship by stealth’
Muslims = Nazis, Front Page Magazine claims
‘Don’t sacrifice free speech to appease the Muslim fanatics’ says McKinstry
‘Dundee students recruited by terrorist groups’
Islamophobia is not racism – Rod Liddle
The Telegraph and Qaradawi
Another rant against Qaradawi – this time by Leo McKinstry.