Category Archives: Analysis & comment

Jeff Jacoby and ‘the real Muslim moderates’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Anyone who thinks the witch-hunt against the Muslim Council of Britain is an isolated case should take a look at what’s happening over on the other side of the Atlantic, where the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has been subjected to a hostile right-wing campaign along almost identical lines.

The fact that CAIR has roundly denounced terrorist atrocities in the US and Britain is dismissed by its critics, who shift the argument onto the issue of the CAIR leaders’ position on the Palestinian resistance. They then go on to argue that the government should sideline a broad-based, mainstream, representative body like CAIR and concentrate instead on dialogue with “real moderates”, comprising individuals and groups who have hardly any influence at all within Muslim communities but have the “right” line on the Israel/Palestine question.

You have to ask – whose interests does this campaign against CAIR serve, those of American people or those of the Sharon government?

See, for example, Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe, 18 August 2005

‘Extremist sect’ exposed

Posted on by Bob Pitt

As part of his stitch-up of the Muslim Council of Britain in Sunday’s Observer, Martin Bright made much of the fact that among the MCB’s 400 affiliates is the Birmingham-based Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadith, described by Bright as “an extremist sect”. If you look up this organisation’s website you’ll find that it prominently features a statement on the London bombings. You’d have to say, if this is the best Bright can come up with as an example of the MCB’s “extremist” connections, the MCB has little to worry about.

William Shawcross and Islamofascism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Is it because of western racism that al-Qaida has included the United Nations among its principal targets?” William Shawcross demands to know, in a letter in the Guardian. “Is it because of western racism that in August 2003 an al-Qaida suicide bomber murdered more than 20 people in the UN headquarters in Baghdad, including the secretary general’s special representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello? … Al-Qaida exulted in the murder of this ‘heretic’ sent to Iraq by Kofi Annan, ‘the criminal and slave of America’. Al-Qaida is inspired by Islamofascism, which cannot be appeased. No one is helped by pretending otherwise.”

Rather, no one is helped by pretending that the atrocities carried out by the likes of Al-Qaida do not have a basis in a quite rational hatred of the West’s own atrocities. Bin Laden repeatedly condemned the deaths of innocent Iraqis resulting from UN sanctions imposed at the behest of the USA. As for western racism, would the killing of hundreds of thousands of children have been regarded as a price worth paying – to quote Madeleine Albright’s notorious remark – if those children had been white Americans or Europeans?

The BBC Panorama Special – some background

Posted on by Bob Pitt

John WareThe BBC Panorama Special that provided the hook for the Observer‘s witch-hunt of the Muslim Council of Britain was originally scheduled to be broadcast on 14 August but has been postponed for a week. It will now be shown next Sunday at 10.15pm.

The BBC has announced that its intrepid reporter John Ware “spent the weeks since the London bombs traveling to Britain’s Muslim communities, to discover whether their leaders can tackle the growth of extremism in their midst”. (See here.)

It was in fact Ware’s hostile questioning of Iqbal Sacranie during the making of the programme that was the immediate cause of the MCB’s complaint to the BBC. The MCB have claimed that Ware devoted the interview almost exclusively to questions concerning the attitude of the MCB and its affiliates towards the Palestine-Israel conflict. (See here – pdf.)

This is not the first contentious Panorama programme that Ware has been centrally involved in. In July 2003 he was the writer and presenter of another Panorama Special, in this case dealing with alleged abuse of the asylum system. On the day of the broadcast, Ware published an article in the Daily Mail (23 July 2003) based on and publicising his programme. It was headlined: “For years the Mail has been attacked for its refusal to be silent on the asylum crisis. Tonight’s Panorama says we were utterly justified.”

Hailing the programme for supposedly having broken “a 35-year taboo on discussing the topic of immigration” that had followed Enoch Powell’s 1968 rivers of blood speech, Ware wrote: “If you, as a taxpayer, have been waiting in a queue for a house, a hospital appointment or a place for your child at a school, and someone from another country who has paid no taxes jumps ahead, you would have to be saintly not to feel resentful.” Particularly so, “if the queue-jumper had fooled the immigration authorities into believing he had been persecuted, when he hadn’t, and when his real purpose was to get here for a better life”.

The BBC was condemned by the then home secretary, David Blunkett, for “pursuing a Powellite anti-immigration agenda”. To quote the Guardian report, Blunkett “singled out for criticism the BBC1 Panorama special, the Asylum Game, and its writer and presenter, John Ware, for producing a ‘poorly researched and overspun documentary’ which repeated unchallenged the claims of ‘the rightwing anti-immigration pressure group, Migration Watch’.” (See here and here.)

However, both the programme and Ware’s article were applauded by Anthony Browne in the Spectator. (See here.)

It seems that Ware is much admired by Browne, who has achieved notoriety for his own provocative attacks on migrants in general and Muslims in particular – just recently, during the furore over his Times article accusing MAB and Yusuf al-Qaradawi of being “Islamic fascists”, Browne was exposed as having contributed to a racist US website. (See here and here.)

In the Times article Browne portrayed the Panorama reporter as a victim of political correctness, complaining that “John Ware, one of the BBC’s most-respected reporters, spent years trying to make a programme on Islamic fundamentalism in Britain, but was repeatedly blocked by senior editors who feared it was too sensitive”. (See here.)

It would now appear that Ware has got his way, and that he has made a documentary exposing Islamic “fundamentalism” in the form of an attack on Britain’s most mainstream Muslim organisation, the MCB.

Of course, we can’t say for sure till we’ve seen the programme. However, Ware did give us a foretaste of his approach when he persuaded Radio 4’s Today programme to broadcast an item on the MCB last month. This gave only a passing mention to the organisation’s role in combating extremism in Britain and instead concentrated on attacking the MCB over its attitude towards suicide bombings in Israel. (See here.)

So, when the MCB complains that “nearly all the questions that were put to Sir Iqbal Sacranie by the Panorama team were directly or indirectly about Israel. These included questions to do with the Holocaust Memorial Day, Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Shaykh Ahmad Yasin”, judging by the Today broadcast we can only conclude that their accusation is entirely accurate.

Observer witch-hunts MCB

Posted on by Bob Pitt

MCB logoUnder the headline “Radical links of UK’s ‘moderate’ Muslim group” (note the use of ironic quotation marks around “moderate”), the Observer tries to paint the Muslim Council of Britain as some sort of extremist organisation.

Predictably, the author Martin Bright quotes a comment from Salman Rushdie’s recent, much-reprinted article (see here) on the need for Islamic reform: “If Sir Iqbal Sacranie is the best Mr Blair can offer in the way of a good Muslim, we have a problem.”

A BBC Panorama documentary due to be screened next Sunday will apparently continue the campaign against the MCB, and it is the MCB’s protest about the content of that programme – see (pdf) here – that provides the hook for the Observer piece. See here.

The level of argument in the article is illustrated by this piece of “analysis” by Bright:

“The strain of Islamic ideology favoured by the MCB leadership and many of its affiliate organisations is inspired by Maulana Maududi, a 20th-century Islamic scholar little known in the West but hugely significant as a thinker across the Muslim world. His writings, which call for a global Islamic revival, influenced Sayyid Qutb, usually credited as the founding father of modern Islamic radicalism and one of the inspirations for al-Qaeda.”

So, by means of this amalgam, the MCB is associated with Osama bin Laden. The fact that Jamaat-i-Islami, the Pakistani party founded by Maududi, is a pragmatic, reformist, constitutionalist organisation that is part of mainstream politics in Pakistan and has participated in coalition governments – and whose methods are thus a million miles removed from the small-group terrorism of Al-Qaida – is carefully obscured. Instead, Bright tells us that Jamaat-i-Islami is “a radical party committed to the establishment of an Islamic state in Pakistan ruled by sharia law”.

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Irshad Manji attacks multiculturalism, calls for less tolerance

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Irshad Manji Trouble With Islam“As Westerners bow down before multiculturalism, we anesthetize ourselves into believing that anything goes. We see our readiness to accommodate as a strength…. Radical Muslims, on the other hand, see our inclusive instincts as a form of corruption that makes us soft and rudderless. They believe the weak deserve to be vanquished. Paradoxically, then, the more we accommodate to placate, the more their contempt for our ‘weakness’ grows. An ultimate paradox may be that in order to defend our diversity, we’ll need to be less tolerant.”

Irshad Manji in the New York Times, 9 August 2005

Characteristic of Manji’s method is her reference to the play “Corpus Christi” by Terrence McNally, in which Jesus was depicted as a gay man. She tells us how in 1999 “Christians protested the show and picketed its European debut in Edinburgh, a reasonable exercise in free expression. But Omar Bakri Muhammad, a Muslim preacher and a judge on the self-appointed Sharia Court of the United Kingdom, went further: he signed a fatwa calling for Mr. McNally to be killed….”

Except that, if Bakri had indeed called for McNally to be killed, he would certainly have been prosecuted. In fact, what Bakri did was issue a fatwa “authorising” McNally’s execution by the Islamic state, while making it clear that individuals had no right to carry out the sentence. In other words, short of the establishment of Bakri’s version of the caliphate, which is not exactly an imminent threat, McNally was in no danger at all.

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More on Outrage! and Qaradawi

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Further to Outrage’s widely circulated, but entirely false, accusation that Yusuf al-Qaradawi called for the Crown Prince of Qatar to be stoned to death, anyone who wants an illustration of the sort of racist bigotry provoked by Outrage’s Islamophobic propaganda should take a look at the discussion of the Outrage press release at Gay.com.

A thread entitled “More Muslim savagery” contains this exchange of views:

“Is it just me or is anyone else sick to death of islam and it being constantly on our news and current affairs progs??? The murderers who placed those bombs on the London tubes and buses have certainly achieved one thing : to barrage us with endless islamic bullshit.”

“I totally agree with you. All the late night chat shows are now propoganda about how peaceful and tolerant Islam is!? If you believe that you’ll believe anything! Like that programme fronted by terry Christian on C4 in the week, ‘Sharia TV’, where we have to sit and listen to a load of Islamic (so called) moderates telling us how wonderful Islam is!? It makes me sick. Now this is a Christian country (at the moment) why not some late night programmes about Christianity or Judaism for a change instead of all this Islamic rubbish??????”

Another thread features the following exchange:

“Why don’t we set up a stoning of our own. Grab as many Moslems as you can find, take them to Trafalgar Square and announce that they will be publicly stoned for some trumped up charge, say adultary, then go down to Brighton and collect a few bucket load of stones and invite the audience to chuck a stone for Allah!… I firmly believe that Moslems clearly have an execution fetish and need help for it. Hangings, stonings, beheadings, whippings all sounds kinky to me!!!! Why the hell don’t these advocates of execution and torture get themselves off to the nearest rent boy who will fulfill their fetish, get a bloody good whipping and leave the rest of us alone! in peace?”

“Robert, dear, what self-respecting rent boy would want to provide Muslims a service? Anyway, goats are more up their street.”

MEMRI stitches up Azzam Tamimi

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Azzam Tamimi“In an August 29, 2005 article in the London Arabic-language daily Al-Quds Al-‘Arabi, titled ‘The London Bombing: Harm Is Brought Upon the Muslims Only by Their Own’, British Islamist Dr. ‘Azzam Al-Tamimi argues that Muslim critics are Islam’s worst enemies….

“Al-Tamimi is referring primarily to liberal Arab and Muslim writers who, following the London bombings, criticized the previous long-standing British policy of tolerance towards Islamist preachers of hatred and violence. He calls these liberal writers traitors….

“Al-Tamimi’s argument echoes a similar accusation by Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, termed ‘the notorious fundamentalist’ by the London Arabic-language daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat. Following the London bombings, Bakri, the head of the Islamist Al-Muhajiroon movement in Britain, fled to a Lebanon hideout from his London base of activity of many years.”

MEMRI, 7 September 2005

Front Page Magazine reports the MEMRI piece under the heading: “British Islamist calls moderate Muslims ‘traitors’.”

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Outrage! make prats of themselves over Qaradawi again

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Hijab Conference“The Crown Prince of Qatar should be stoned to death for being gay, according to Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim fundamentalist scholar who is based in Qatar. These allegations appear in the Middle East news magazine Aljazeera….

“Aljazeera quotes Dr Qaradawi as saying: ‘The scholars of Islam, such as Malik, Ash-Shafi’i, Ahmad and Ishaaq said that (the person guilty of this crime) should be stoned, whether he is married or unmarried’.”

Outrage! press release, 5 August 2005

As Islamophobia Watch has pointed out, the quotation is not from Dr al-Qaradawi at all, but from a Saudi Wahhabist named Mohammed Salih Al-Munajjid.

See here and here.

As for Qaradawi’s supposed fatwa “Homosexuality and Lesbianism: Sexual Perversions”, the link provided by Outrage! shows that this was not a fatwa issued by Qaradawi but by a “Group of Muftis”. Their fatwa did include a quotation from Qaradawi in which he summarised the opinions of various scholars on the punishment for homosexuality, but did not state his own view. Moreover, the quote was taken from his book The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam, which was published … in 1960!

If Dr al-Qaradawi does indeed called for the execution of gay men, then you would have thought that Outrage! would have been able to find some statement to that effect from his numerous writings and broadcasts over the subsequent forty-five years. They have been unable to find a single one.