Category Archives: Analysis & comment

Carole Malone – the voice of reason

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“In my gym last week, a young white woman was watching coverage of the London bombing on TV. She suddenly turned to me, ashen faced and angry, and said: ‘They’re talking as if this just affects Muslims. Why are we concentrating on placating and reassuring them when we should be concentrating on the dead and injured?’

“And she’s right. In the past week there has been less time spent talking about the victims of London’s 9/11 and more on what this atrocity means to British Muslims. To make matters worse the head of the Muslim Council, Iqbal Sacranie, has been screaming about how we keep referring to the terrorists who killed 54 people and injured 700 more as Muslim extremists: ‘Why not just call them criminals?’ he demanded. And that’s precisely the kind of idiocy that gives root to the political correctness that has allowed this country to become the world headquarters for Islamic terrorism.”

Another thoughtful piece by Carole Malone.

Sunday Mirror, 17 July 2005

But what should we do, Carol? “We can start getting things done by forbidding Tariq Ramadan to come to this country on July 24 on a lecture tour funded by the Met Police to tell us why suicide bombings in Iraq are justified. We can round up every member of Al-Muhajiroun in this country – the organisation which celebrated the death of the victims of September 11 – and chuck ’em out.”

Well, yeah, except that Tariq Ramadan opposes suicide bombings and attacks on innocent civilians, Al-Muhajiroun formally dissolved itself some months ago and therefore doesn’t have any members, and in so far as Omar Bakri still has any organised followers, most of them are British citizens, so where would they be deported to?

Public ‘split over new hate laws’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Public opinion is divided over controversial plans to ban incitement to religious hatred, according to an ICM poll for the BBC News website. The poll, taken in the days following the London bombings, found 51% in favour of such a move but 44% against….

“In January an ICM poll for The Guardian newspaper suggested stronger public support for incitement to religious hatred laws. The poll found 57% agreeing a ban was ‘needed to stop those who want to stir up hatred against people who want to stir up hatred against people of particular religious faiths’. It found 36% said the new law was ‘wrong because people should be allowed to express their opinions freely, however hateful’.”

BBC News, 17 July 2005

The reason for this change, however, is that BBC got ICM to ask a different question. Respondents were asked: “Which comes close to your view? 1. I support laws preventing abuse or inciting hatred on faith grounds 2. Banning criticism of of those with different religious beliefs is a curb on free speech.”

The issue of religious hatred is thus expanded to include the more general category of “abuse” (which the current bill does not deal with) and it is suggested that the new law would amount to “banning criticism of of those with different religious beliefs” – which of course it doesn’t propose to do.

Usually volatile mayor wins praise for low-key presence

Posted on by Bob Pitt

London United“Ken Livingstone, London’s famously loose-lipped mayor, boarded a subway train here as cameras flashed, demonstrating this city’s resolve not to be cowed by the terrorist attacks that struck three subways and a bus last week. ‘We are going to work, we carry on our lives,’ Livingstone told reporters on Monday morning before resuming his usual commute to work. ‘We don’t let a small group of terrorists change the way we live.’ And that was all.

“Livingstone, 60, has emerged as a sort of anti-Rudolph Giuliani in the wake of the terrorist attacks, the worst the city has ever seen. He has made two solemn statements worthy of Winston Churchill, but has otherwise kept a remarkably low profile for a man whose quarter-century in politics has been marked by bold initiatives and maverick debates. There has been nothing of the post-Sept. 11 take-charge behavior that briefly catapulted Giuliani, as mayor of New York, to the national political stage.

“At last, some people are saying, ‘Red Ken,’ as he is known because of his outspoken liberal views, has hit the right note of humility and outrage and quiet resolve without getting anyone upset. But there may also be something else at play: Livingstone was lambasted last year for inviting an Egyptian-born, Qatari-based conservative cleric, Sheik Yousef al-Qaradawi, to London in what Livingstone’s defenders say was an attempt to demonstrate to the city’s disaffected, radical Muslim youth the mayor’s willingness to engage in dialogue.”

New York Times, 12 July 2005

Or perhaps, duh, it might be because the Mayor of London has significantly fewer powers than the Mayor of New York. Or hadn’t the NYT noticed that? Plus, of course, two days after this article was published the mayor addressed a 50,000-strong vigil in Trafalgar Square to commemorate the victims of the bombings – and two days after that organised the massive London United concert to celebrate the capital’s diversity and protest against those who sought to destroy it.

Britain’s biggest Muslim group were Al-Qaida admirers – Robert Spencer

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Robert Spencer has words of advice for Tony Blair: “I’m sure many Muslims in Britain are indeed decent and law-abiding. But I see no indication that Blair has considered the implications of the New York Times’ January 2005 assertion that the now-disbanded jihadist group Al-Muhajiroun was Britain’s largest Muslim group.”

Perhaps that is because Blair’s advisers, unlike this self-styled expert on jihad and Islamic terrorism, are not so gobsmackingly ignorant as to believe that Omar Bakri’s tiny band of Al-Qaida admirers was ever anything of the sort.

Dhimmi Watch, 13 July 2005

Update:  For Spencer’s reply, see here.

‘Leaked No 10 dossier reveals Al-Qaeda’s British recruits’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Leaked No 10 dossier reveals Al-Qaeda’s British recruits,” the Sunday Times announces. Yeah, the same dossier the leaking of which was a hot news item in the Sunday Times … over a year ago. The same dossier which is used by the Sunday Times to suggest that thousands of British Muslims are potential supporters of terrorist attacks on the West because they attended a conference organised by Hizb ut-Tahrir – an organisation that unequivocally rejects terrorist attacks on the West.

Indeed, the leaked document concedes that Hizb ut-Tahrir “does not advocate violence”, that “membership or sympathy with such an organisation does not in any way pre-suppose a move towards terrorism”, and that at most “what it may indicate is the possibility of a few of its members being open to gradual consideration of far more extremist doctrine” …  while offering no evidence that any of them in fact have been.

Over at Jihad Watch, Rebecca Bynum posts the article as if it were some new revelation about the extent of Islamic terrorist organisation within the UK. But what can you expect from a site that repeatedly told its readers that Al-Muhajiroun was the largest Muslim organisation in Britain, and continued repeating this nonsense long after that tiny, marginal, extremist group had disbanded itself? You really wonder how much jihad watching the folks at Jihad Watch actually do.

WPI blames ‘the Islamic movement’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Such attacks are part of the wretched and cruel track record of the Islamic movement against innocent people, which places bombs in public places, carries out assassinations, killings, torture, execution and repression.” Thus the Worker Communist Party of Iran on the London bombings.

Note the use of the term “the Islamic movement” – which conveniently blurs the distinctions between Islam, political Islamism in all its shades, and Islamist terrorist groups.

WPI press release, 8 July 2005

For an alternative assessment, which analyses the terrorist acts of violent jihadist groups in terms of the contradictions and conflicts within Islam and Islamism, read Marc Lynch. He argues that the London attacks arise in part from an attempt at reassertion by the terrorist tendency within Islamism, who had been increasingly marginalised by reformists such as Qaradawi and Huwaydi:

“The London attack can be seen as an attempt by al-Qaeda to impose itself on this internal argument among Islamists and Muslims in the way it knows best: a spectacular, violent attack. A throw of the dice – an attempt to turn the debate back to clashes of civilizations, of an inevitable conflict between the West and Islam, of war and mistrust and fear. To shut down any rapprochement between the West and moderate Islamism – the kind of rapprochement which threatens al-Qaeda and the radicals where it counts, among the Muslim umma.”

Abu Aardvark blog, 7 July 2005

Mad Mel mauls Met

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Now There’s a Surprise Department. Melanie Phillips joins the attack on Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair for his stand against Islamophobia:

“… this case had nothing to do with understanding or respecting diversity. It reflected instead the neurotic hypersensitivity which inflates minor error into the hanging offence of racial insult – our modern witch-hunt, in which the slightest deviation from permitted speech is regarded as a heresy to be punished by excommunication and banishment.”

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 5 July 2005

You can just imagine what Phillips’s response would be if the officers concerned had made anti-semitic remarks. Muslims, however, are apparently fair game when it comes to backward jibes against minority communities.

Attack on Ian Blair continues

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A letter in the Sun (4 July 2005) reads: “Arrogant Sir Ian Blair is unrepentant about the racism case, saying the Met can’t expect to win the confidence of the Muslim community if they ignored issues like this. Doesn’t he care about losing the confidence of the white community if he is blatantly pro-Muslim and anti-white?”

In a letter to the Guardian, Glen Smyth of the Metropolitan Police Federation complains that: “The commissioner continues to assert that the comments of one of the officers involved in the recent high-profile employment-tribunal race-discrimination case taken against the service by three white officers were ‘Islamophobic’: ‘That language was gratuitous, offensive and deliberate’.”

Which of course is exactly what it was. Smyth’s claim that he and his colleagues in the Police Federation “understand and endorse the need to understand and respect all of London’s communities” rings a little hollow.

More nonsense about the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

Posted on by Bob Pitt

behzti“Picture this scenario. A new play opens in London that centres around taboo issues relating to religion. For argument’s sake, a rape in a Sikh Gurdwara. Protests follow, ‘community leaders’ demand it be shut down and some threaten legal action. Six months ago, when the Behzti play controversy blew up, those threats of legal action amounted to hot air.

“However if the government’s bill to outlaw religious hatred passes through its third reading next week, those empty threats would suddenly become very real. In essence Labour aims to reward the MCB (Muslim Council of Britain) with a piece of legislation in return for the Muslim vote during the election.”

So Sunny Hundal claims: Asians in Media, 4 July 2005

The level of ignorance displayed by opponents of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill never ceases to amaze. It seems to have escaped Sunny’s attention that Sikhs, as members of a mono-ethnic faith, are already covered by the ban on incitement to racial hatred in the 1986 Public Order Act. If it could be reasonably argued that “Behzti” incited hatred against Sikhs, then a prosecution could have been brought under Section 20(1) of that Act, which states:

“If a public performance of a play is given which involves the use of threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, any person who presents or directs the performance is guilty of an offence if –
(a) he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or
(b) having regard to all the circumstances (and, in particular, taking the performance as a whole) racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby.”

The Racial and Religious Hatred Bill merely seeks to amend that section of the 1986 Act by substituting “racial or religious hatred” for “racial hatred”. This would have the effect of extending its provisions to cover members of multi-ethnic faiths, such as Muslims or Hindus. If the Bill becomes law, the opportunities for Sikhs to persuade the Attorney-General to prosecute a play like “Behzti” will be … precisely the same as they are at present.

Hamza and hatred

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri has appeared in court at the start of his trial on terrorism charges. The 47-year-old, who denies any involvement in terrorism, has been held at Belmarsh prison since May 2004…. He faces 10 charges alleging he solicited people at meetings to murder non-Muslims, including Jews. A further four charges allege he used ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with the intention of stirring up racial hatred’.”

BBC News, 5 July 2005

Though the question of Abu Hamza’s guilt remains open, of course, it might be noted that the latter four charges are under Section 18(1) of the 1986 Public Order Act, which states:

“A person who uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting, is guilty of an offence if –
(a) he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or
(b) having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred by thereby.”

The current Racial and Religious Hatred Bill proposes to amend this so that “racial hatred” becomes “racial or religious hatred”. At the risk of repetition, the purpose is to extend to Muslims and Hindus the right to protection from hatred presently enjoyed by Jews and Sikhs under the Act.

If, as its critics allege, the Bill represents a terrible attack on the right to free speech, it is difficult to see how they can in all consistency refuse to condemn the suppression of free speech under the existing racial hatred sections of the 1986 Act.

We look forward to Nick Cohen, Melanie Phillips, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Harry’s Place et al publishing indignant articles defending Abu Hamza’s democratic right to incite hatred against Jews without action being taken against him under the Public Order Act.