UNISON LGBT Group banner on Saturday’s United East End/UAF demo
I had originally decided to ignore Peter Tatchell’s predictably divisive and disruptive intervention in Tower Hamlets on Saturday (see here and here), on the grounds that giving prominent coverage to an individual publicity stunt by an attention-seeking narcissist would be a distraction from the impressive show of mass unity against the EDL. However, this made me change my mind:
Anti-EDL demonstrators in Tower Hamlets on Saturday
By any standards, the English Defence League’s attempt to hold an intimidatory protest against the Muslim community of Tower Hamlets on Saturday was a failure.
The state ban on the EDL’s march, which reduced them to holding a static demonstration instead, not only dissuaded some of their supporters from attending the protest (a number of divisions complained that they had been unable to fill the coaches they had hired) but also created considerable logistical problems for the EDL leadership. The RMT’s threat to close down Liverpool Street station if the EDL gathered there, and the announcement by pubs in Camden that they would refuse to host the EDL, left Stephen Lennon and Kevin Carroll scrabbling around for a place to assemble their troops before entering the East End for the planned rally.
As it turned out, the EDL didn’t even get into Tower Hamlets anyway. The police penned them in at Aldgate, in the City of London, just short of the borough border. With the local community and its supporters having mobilised en masse against the EDL, the police no doubt reasoned that an attempt to hold an EDL rally in Tower Hamlets itself would have resulted in serious public disorder.
Here is an exchange that appeared on the English Defence League’s Facebook page yesterday.
As demanded by Gower, who is head of the EDL’s admin team, David Marshall’s threatening comment was eventually removed. Note, however, that Gower has no objection in principle to EDL supporters promoting such views. She merely argues that “it doesn’t look good pre-tower hamlets” if EDL supporters post their threats on the EDL’s own Facebook page and tells Marshall that his comment would be “more suitable for you[r] wall with your personal views”.
Four years ago an Al-Muhajiroun supporter, Umran Javed, received a six-year prison sentence after being convicted of soliciting murder because he chanted “Bomb, bomb Denmark, bomb, bomb USA” at a protest against the Danish anti-Islam cartoons. The Crown Prosecution Service justified the decision to charge Javed on the grounds that “when we examined the content of Mr Javed’s speech it was explicit that there was direct encouragement to those present and those watching via the media to commit acts of murder against the Danish and Americans”.
Will the police and CPS try and track down David Marshall and ensure that he is charged with the same offence? Don’t hold your breath.
Last month another extremist, Bilal Ahmad, was jailed for 12 years after being convicted of soliciting murder over messages he posted on the Revolution Muslim website calling for attacks on British MPs who voted in favour of the Iraq war. The CPS stated that Ahmad had committed a “serious offence which strikes at the heart of our democratic society” and that the sentence sent “a warning to people who would seek to encourage violent extremism or to stir up hatred on the internet”.
A couple of days before Ahmad was sentenced, George Galloway complained to the police about an explicit appeal to “Kill George Galloway“, posted on the Facebook page of former prominent EDL member Daryl Hobson. Hobson was the source of press reports that the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik had been linked to the EDL and was one of the contacts to whom Breivik sent his manifesto. It will be interesting to see whether the CPS decides to charge Hobson with soliciting murder. Again, don’t get your hopes up.
The EDL regularly complains about a “two-tier legal system” in the UK, which supposedly discriminates in favour of Muslims and against the EDL’s supporters. It would appear that there is indeed a two-tier system in operation, though the double standards are the exact opposite of what the EDL claims. While the police and CPS enthusiastically pursue Muslim extremists who advocate violence, and applaud the imposition of heavy prison sentences, they show significantly less enthusiasm for prosecutions when the threats of violence come from the anti-Muslim extremists of the EDL.
This week Maryam Namazie of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran announced the publication of a new book, Enemies Not Allies: The Far-Right. Co-authored by Namazie and Adam Barnett, it is issued under the imprint of One Law For All, an organisation launched by the WPI and its friends to campaign against the supposed threat posed by Sharia law in the UK.
The authors claim that the far right have “attempted to hijack legitimate criticism of Islamism” and the stated aim of their book is to establish the differences between the position of OLFA and that of “racist campaigns and organisations”. So we are given a summary of the ideology and political practice of the British National Party and the English Defence League, and of Stop Islamisation of Europe and its US franchise headed by Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, all of whom the authors roundly denounce.
Now it is certainly true that the WPI have major differences with the BNP, the EDL, SIOE and SIOA. Obviously Maryam Namazie and her comrades do not have a long history of activity on the neo-Nazi right like Nick Griffin, they do not head a violent anti-Muslim street movement like the leaders of the EDL, nor are they rabid ultra-Zionists like Pamela Geller. However, when it comes to Islam, the common ground that exists between the WPI and sections of the Islamophobic right, including some of its most extreme elements, is quite clear. And that is something Enemies Not Allies completely ignores.
Over at the American Thinker the one-time Jihad Watch collaborator Andrew Bostom (he and Robert Spencer have since fallen out) takes issue with Abe Foxman’s recent JTA op ed condemning the spread of Sharia hysteria in the US. According to Bostom:
“Abraham Foxman’s latest uninformed rant, ‘Shout down the Sharia myth makers’, re-affirms his nonpareil status as the most blindly agenda-driven organizational Jewish ‘leader’. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL)’s Foxman sprays defamatory charges – rooted in willful ignorance – against all those legitimately concerned with the ceaseless efforts of mainstream institutional American Islam to insinuate Sharia mores and jurisdiction into US society.”
Bostom’s conclusion? Foxman and his views “pose an unacceptable danger to the fabric of US society”.
Kevin Carroll addresses the rather thin ranks of the UK’s ‘biggest street movement’
The EDL protest in Telford yesterday passed off relatively peacefully. During the rally itself there were only around half a dozen arrests for offences including possession of offensive weapons, and later three people were arrested for assaulting police officers. Police estimates put the attendance at 300-350 but other accounts suggest that the real figure was much lower.
The Irish Independent reports: “immigration officials have been concerned about him for some time and have blocked his entry to Ireland for the past three years. A visa application made by Mr Al-Qaradawi in June 2008 was refused. Since then he has been ‘red flagged’. This means he would be arrested and immediately deported if he turned up at an Irish port of entry. The decision is believed to have been made after consultation with other governments who imposed similar bans. No official reason was given for the red flagging and it is unclear if other religious figures have been the subject of similar bans.”
Update: Over at Harry’s Place the inimitable Edmund Standing predictably applauds the decision to exclude Qaradawi, under the headline “Ireland refuses entry to notorious fascist activist”. In support of the assertion that Qaradawi is a fascist, Standing provides a link to a 2004 article from Arab News and claims that “2,500 Muslim intellectuals from 23 countries” signed a petition attacking Qaradawi as a promoter of terrorism and asking the United Nations to take action against him.
What was the background to this petition? As HP’s favourite website MEMRI reported: “The idea to petition the U.N. with this request was raised by the Jordanian writer and researcher Dr. Shaker Al-Nabulsi in early September 2004, in response to the fatwa issued by Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi … which called for the abduction and killing of U.S. citizens in Iraq.”
But Qaradawi didn’t call for the abduction and killing of US civilians in Iraq – on the contrary, he vigorously opposed it. Qaradawi himself immediately denied that he had made the statement attributed to him, and this was confirmed by the leading Egyptian journalist Fahmi Huwaydi, who acquired a tape of the meeting where Qaradawi was supposed to have issued the call. After arguing that the people of Iraq were obliged to resist the US occupation by force of arms, Qaradawi continued: “the constitution of war in Islam is a constitution of ethics, and by those rules we must not kill except those who kill us, and therefore all of those who do not carry weapons it is not upon us to kill”.
Huwaydi condemned “the distortion which these words have received, and the clamour which it aroused in world capitals”. He pointed out that Qaradawi had held a press conference to refute the misrepresentation of his views “which was attended by some members of the American and French embassies at the side of a large number of journalists and media, where he said ‘Islam does not permit kidnapping of civilians or their killing’ … but his corrections have been completely ignored, and everyone continues to deal with the first position attributed to him rather than the truth”.
Shaker Al-Nabulsi was part of a tendency calling themselves “neo-liberals” who, in Nabulsi’s own words, advocated “freedom, democracy, and free markets” in the Middle East and, “in light of the inability of the domestic elite and the fragile political parties” to achieve these objectives, saw “no harm in asking for assistance from outside forces”.
Al-Jazeera journalist Faysal al-Qassem criticised Nabulsi and his co-thinkers as follows: “Are they not closer to the neo-conservative Americans who are destroying the world, than to the real liberals…? … Why do they lean blindly toward anything Western? … Why do they depict America as a benevolent angel who has come to save us from our evils? … How is it that the neo-liberal Arabs call for tolerance while taking the lead in accusing [others] of heresy? Doesn’t liberalism advocate acceptance of others and interaction with all factions? Why are they antagonistic to anyone who opposes them? Is this Liberalism or a repulsive Fundamentalism? Are they anything more than a fifth column?”
As Raymond Baker demonstrated in his book Islam Without Fear, Qaradawi is part of a reformist Islamist tendency which urges political change but, in contrast to the “neo-liberals”, rejects Western hegemony and seeks to promote an indigenous democratisation movement. Islam Online reported Qaradawi as saying in August 2004 that, whereas Washington “seeks a kind of change serving its own interests” in the Middle East, the reform that Muslims want is one “which is emanating from inside, and that serves their own interests and visions”.
This approach, which has of course borne fruit in the Arab Spring, brought Qaradawi into conflict with the pro-US perspectives of Nabulsi and the “neo-liberals”. After Qaradawi gave a talk in June 2004 stressing that “democracy is the essence of Islam”, rather than welcome this as a contribution to the struggle for democratisation Nabulsi instead launched a bitter attack on Qaradawi, declaring that “the term ‘democracy’ does not exist at all in Islam”.
The petition to the UN organised by Nabulsi was an integral part of this campaign to discredit Qaradawi and reformist currents within Islamism, by portraying them as no different from the supporters of Al-Qaeda. Thus the leading moderates Qaradawi, his fellow Egyptian “New Islamist” Mohammed al-Ghazali and the Tunisian democrat Rachid al-Ghannouchi were lumped together with two Saudi Wahhabists who were quoted as supporting the 9/11 attacks. All were categorised by the authors of the petition as “psychotic members of dogmatic Muslim groups encouraging the commission of terrorist acts in the name of and under the banner of Islam”.
(It is also worth mentioning that another of the individuals behind the petition against Qaradawi was Nabulsi’s friend Jawad Hashim, who was convicted in absentia in the United Arab Emirates of embezzlement from the Arab Monetary Fund. In a further court case in Britain he was ordered to repay over $130 million to the AMF. Before that, Hashim was Saddam Hussein’s minister of planning.)
As for Standing’s assertion that “2,500 Muslim intellectuals from 23 countries” signed the petition, by the end of 2004 the number of signatories reportedly came to 4,000. But these were just random individuals who had visited the website of the online journal Middle East Transparent which carried the petition. Since the publisher was claiming “2,000 to 3,000 visitors per day” to the site at the time, we would have to conclude that only a tiny minority of them actually supported the petition.
So the Arab News report that Standing quotes against Qaradawi is basically a load of nonsense. Standing knows nothing about the issues, hasn’t bothered to check his sources and just repeats slanders in an attempt to discredit a leading supporter of the Palestinian cause in order to promote HP’s Zionist agenda.
But what can you expect from Edmund Standing, other than ignorant idiocy? After all this is a man who has seriously argued that the BNP don’t really hate Muslims and recently presented a joke by Shahid Malik as evidence that the former Labour MP was plotting the Islamification of parliament.
Telford & Wrekin Council has called for the planned English Defence League march in Wellington on Saturday to be cancelled.
Council leader Kuldip Sahota said: “The overwhelming voice from the community in Telford – and in particular in Wellington – is that people do not want this march in our town. The council believes the march should not go ahead. We are in an environment now where there has been widespread violence elsewhere and we simply feel they should cancel the march.
“We do understand and appreciate the very difficult position that the police are in but as community leaders we have a duty to listen to our residents and protect their properties and businesses. It is therefore our belief that the march should be cancelled.”
Assistant Chief Constable Simon Chesterman, of West Mercia Police, said:
“The police overall strategic intention is ‘To work with Telford & Wrekin Council, other agencies, protest organisers and communities to ensure public safety including the safety of those people attending any protest and the football match’. The police have a duty to protect life and property and facilitate peaceful protest.
“Legal powers to seek a banning order are set out in the Public Order Act and any application for a ban would have to be within the confines of the legislation. There are insufficient grounds upon which to seek a banning order at this time.”
A number of business in Wellington are set to close at lunchtime on Saturday before the start of the march. Several have also taken the decision to board up their shop fronts. Frozen food retailer Iceland said their Wellington store would stop selling alcohol on Friday until after the march.
Shropshire Live, 10 August 2011
West Mercia Police have stated that they will impose restrictions on the EDL march under Section 12 of the Public Order Act. But Section 13 allows for the police to apply for a complete ban if “the powers under section 12 will not be sufficient to prevent the holding of public processions … resulting in serious public disorder”.
Presumably the police are arguing that there is no threat of serious public disorder. Yet the fact that shops are boarding up their windows and closing down in advance of the EDL march is surely a good indication that it does pose such a threat.
According to Nick Lowles of Searchlight, the police are even unwilling to apply for a ban on the EDL march in Tower Hamlets on 3 September.
The Mail on Sunday has published an attack on Joel Hayward, dean of the Royal Air Force College at Cranwell (“Ayatollah of the RAF: Academic ‘university’ head is Muslim convert who claims Nazi gas chambers were British propaganda and criticises Libya air strikes”). The story has since been taken up by the Daily Star, under the bizarre headline “RAF pilot converts to Islam”.
The main source for the Mail‘s witch-hunt is a letter headed “The Air Force Ayatollah”, which was sent to the paper by anonymous RAF officers who would obviously rather have Robert Spencer running the college. Apparently students at Cranwell “are in fear” of expressing anti-Muslim sentiments in front of Hayward. Worst of all: “Anyone who fails to follow the line that Islam is a peace-loving religion is hauled into his office for re-education”.
The Mail concurs in finding it sinister that Hayward “has frequently challenged claims of Islamic aggressiveness”. In fact, his views on that subject are so off-the-wall that one of his articles, “The Qur’an and war: Observations on Islamic just war”, was published in the RAF’s own academic journal, Air Power Review.
Yes, it’s yet another report on the dangers of “Sharia courts” – this one (“Sharia: a law unto itself?”) in the Sunday Telegraph by Jonathan Wynne-Jones, the paper’s religious affairs correspondent.
Wynne-Jones was given the opportunity to observe the workings of a Sharia council at Birmingham Central Mosque and he interviewed a woman member of the council, Amra Bone. In addition, Sheikh Faiz Siddiqi spoke to Wynne-Jones on the role of Islamic arbitration tribunals in settling commercial disputes. Which you might think would provide the basis for an objective report that would counter the usual anti-Sharia scaremongering. You would of course be wrong. The informed views of two individuals who can provide an insight into the actual operation of “Sharia courts” are predictably outweighed by those of a bunch of ignorant Islamophobes.
So, along with the obligatory reference to the “Sharia controlled zones” publicity stunt by Anjem Choudary’s idiot micro-sect, we are treated to a succession of quotes on the Sharia threat from Michael “no go areas” Nazir-Ali (who opines that the existence of Sharia councils “threatens the fundamental values that underpin our society”); from Geert Wilders fan Baroness Cox (who declares that her objective is to “stop parallel legal, or quasi-legal, systems taking root in our nation”); from right-wing Christian fundamentalist Alan Craig (who complains that “I can no longer walk to my local shops and find anywhere to buy conventional, non-halal meat … The pavements are crowded with women wearing not just the face-veil, but black gloves to hide their hands”); and from that well-known expert on Sharia law, Jim Fitzpatrick MP (who is concerned that Sharia councils “are creating a cultural stranglehold over their communities and leading to the Islamification of our society”).