Salma Yaqoob poses the question.
My answer, for what it’s worth, is – almost certainly not, Cameron was just making a pitch for Muslims’ votes. After all, this is a man who has attacked multiculturalism on a number of occasions. A 2006 speech by Cameron, which repeated the familiar Cantle-inspired cliche about multiculturalism resulting in communities leading “parallel lives”, was reported under the headline “Ban Muslim ghettos”.
By Bob Pitt
The list of nominees for the National Secular Society’s “Secularist of the Year 2011” prize, due to be awarded at a £45-a-head dinner in London next month, is headed by Islamophobic “comedian” and UKIP supporter Pat Condell.
Though he failed to win it, Condell was nominated for the same prize last year, on the grounds that he had “for several years now risked his life by answering back to the rule of political correctness, the thoughtlessness of religion generally and the increasing threat of Islam in our society”.
Well, that the headline to an article by Martin Bright in the Jewish Chronicle, reporting on recent developments in the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia.
What actually happened was that two of the APPG’s officers – Chris Hopkins and Greville Janner – resigned their posts because they failed to get support for their attempt to remove ENGAGE from its position as the group’s secretariat. That attempt was reported by the JC in December under the headline “Anti-Islamophobia parliamentary group drop ‘Islamist’ secretariat”, with Bright informing his readers that the APPG had been “forced to end its partnership” with ENGAGE.
It’s also worth noting that Bright’s December report referred to ENGAGE as an “Islamist” organisation in quotes. In his latest report they have become “an Islamist group that backs Hamas”.
Bright and the JC evidently have a serious problem with accurate reporting when it comes to Muslim organisations.
The following exchange took place in the House of Commons earlier today:
Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con): Will the Leader of the House find time for an urgent statement on iEngage, the secretariat of the newly formed all-party parliamentary group on Islamophobia? iEngage has a track record of being aggressively anti-Semitic and homophobic, and has extensive links with terrorism in Tunisia and the middle east. In its capacity as the secretariat, it now has access to the parliamentary estate. Will the Leader of the House raise the issue with the Serjeant at Arms as soon as possible?
Sir George Young: The Serjeant at Arms will have heard what my hon. Friend has said. As he knows, I announced a few moments ago that there would be debate on all-party parliamentary groups on Monday evening, and it will provide an appropriate forum for him to develop his case.
ENGAGE “has a track record of being aggressively anti-Semitic and homophobic, and has extensive links with terrorism in Tunisia and the middle east”? Has Halfon been taking hallucinogenic drugs? Even Andrew Gilligan would balk at making ludicrous accusations like that. (He prefers weaselly insinuations instead.)
ENGAGE’s admirably restrained response to Halfon can be read here.
ENGAGE have written to the Sunday Telegraph in response to the contemptible article by Andrew Gilligan in last week’s edition of the paper. Read their letter here.
Meanwhile Gilligan has announced that he is going away for three weeks – “to hot foreign parts, on a most secret mission”.
Gosh. I wonder where that might be. Perhaps Gilligan is off to Egypt to help Mubarak to hang on to power by smearing the Muslim Brotherhood?
More likely, I think, to Bangladesh, to dig up some material on Jamaat-e-Islami to fuel his campaign against the East London Mosque. (Last week Gilligan did an interview with Bangladeshi prime minister and Awami League leader Hasina Wazed during her visit to London, which for some reason hasn’t yet appeared in the Telegraph.)
And you thought this was an hysterical overreaction to the prospect of eating meat from an animal that had received an Islamic blessing before it was slaughtered?
You should check out this report over at WorldNetDaily, which asks: “When you bite into a delicious pizza, succulent sandwich or luscious lamb chops, are you possibly eating food that has been sacrificed to idols?”
Pastor Mark Biltz of El Shaddai Ministries in Bonney Lake, Washington, has alerted his congregation to the threat of “backdoor Shariah”. In a recent sermon that he posted online, Biltz explained that “Muslims can only eat food that is halal, that has been sacrificed to their idol, Allah … and with Allah’s name prayed over it. You could be eating beef, chicken, etc., offered up to Allah and not even know it…. It could be on your pizza without you knowing it, or at your favorite restaurant. People don’t realize they could be eating meat sacrificed to idols!”
Still, not to worry, it will all be sorted in a few years anyway, as Biltz has predicted the second coming of Christ for 2015.
Andrew Gilligan has a piece in the Sunday Telegraph continuing his campaign against ENGAGE.
Alas for Gilligan, it seems that the campaign isn’t going well. Kris Hopkins and Greville Janner, who buckled in the face of a witch-hunt initiated by Gilligan (“Islamists establish a bridgehead in Parliament”) and taken up by Paul Goodman and Martin Bright, and announced that they would recommend that the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia should remove ENGAGE from its position as the group’s secretariat, finally got round to consulting other members of the APPG. They found that their proposal to remove ENGAGE has no support. Gilligan reports:
Kris Hopkins, Tory MP for Keighley, and the Labour peer Lord Janner, quit the new All-Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia after failing to persuade their colleagues to sack a body called iEngage as the group’s secretariat.
iEngage, also known as Engage, is an organisation of Islamist sympathisers which has repeatedly defended extremists. Last year, it called on the Government to revoke a ban on a hardline foreign preacher who has said that “every Muslim should be a terrorist”.
The pass allows Mrs Bunglawala to enter Parliament without having to go through security checks and mix freely with ministers and MPs. It gives her the right to invite guests and to use Commons facilities. There is no suggestion that Mrs Bunglawala has been involved in any act of terrorism.
No, there’s just the weasel-worded accusation from Gilligan that ENGAGE supports extremists who advocate terrorism and that Shenaz Bunglawala represents some sort of security threat.
Gilligan isn’t meeting with much success in his self-appointed role as witchfinder general of Islamists, is he? Last year, you may recall, he intervened in the Tower Hamlets mayoral election to launch an attack on Lutfur Rahman, portraying him as a pawn of “Islamic fundamentalists” at the East London Mosque. The result was that Lutfur was elected as an independent candidate with a huge majority.
The moral for Muslims seems to be that if you want to win broad support, your best bet is to have Gilligan launch a campaign of baseless slander against you.
Does Labour measure up?
By Bob Pitt
Labour Briefing, February 2011
“The Islamophobia Myth” – that was the title of an influential article by Kenan Malik published in the February 2005 issue of Prospect magazine. It argued that violence, hatred and discrimination against Muslims were at a very low level and that the threat of Islamophobia had been invented or at least greatly exaggerated, mainly by religious leaders hoping to suppress legitimate criticisms of their beliefs and to enhance their own status as community representatives. Malik’s thesis was welcomed in some quarters at the time, including among sections of the left.
Six years on, far fewer people would buy that argument. Hostility towards Muslims and their faith has reached such a pitch that to deny this represents a major threat is simply untenable. When the racist hooligans of the English Defence League take to the streets in towns and cities across the UK brandishing placards with slogans such as “We will never submit to Islam”, chanting “Burn a mosque down” and on occasion breaking through police lines to rampage through Muslim areas smashing shop windows and assaulting passers-by, who could seriously claim that Islamophobia is a myth?
On 26 January the Worker-Communist Party of Iran’s front organisation, One Law for All, held a seminar at Conway Hall in London under the title “Enemies not Allies”, the purported aim of which was to repudiate both far-right organisations who use opposition to Islam to promote hatred of Muslims and also left-wingers who have worked with Islamists to resist racism and imperialist war. As the publicity for the seminar put it: “Bigots and neo-Nazis feigning to campaign for rights… ‘anti-racist’ groups promoting fascism… ‘anti-war’ rallies run by supporters of terrorism and dictatorship… Enough!”
The rejection of “bigots and neo-Nazis feigning to campaign for rights” didn’t go down too well with one of the platform speakers, however. Douglas Murray, Director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, couldn’t see why it was wrong for more mainstream right-wing Islamophobes such as himself to express solidarity with the likes of the EDL. As Murray put it:
“The English Defence League when they started protesting had banners saying things like ‘Sharia law discriminates against women’, ‘Sharia law is anti-gay’. Well I’m good with both of those sentiments, I’m sure most people in this room are. If you’re ever going to have a grassroots response from non-Muslims to Islamism that would be how you’d want it, surely.”
Thus the headline to a report in the Metro of an alleged attack on the house of Kevin Carroll, joint leader of the gang of racist hooligans known as the English Defence League.
You might have thought that the paper would have shown a bit more scepticism about the allegation, given that the only witness to the “shotgun-wielding attacker” was Carroll himself and that his account has been exploited by the EDL in order to whip up outrage among its sympathisers and mobilise support for its planned anti-Muslim protest in Luton on 5 February.
Yet the Metro happily gives credence to the claim by EDL members that the supposed attack “may have been an attempt to disrupt the Luton demonstration” and quotes EDL co-leader Stephen Lennon as declaring: “They won’t stop us, we will continue. We will defend ourselves. Luton demo would still go ahead… even if one of us was killed! As always, no surrender, not now not ever.”
See Nick Lowles’ comments at Hope not Hate.