Category Archives: Analysis & comment

MP accused of using gay issues to win Muslim votes

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Galloway at Lebanon demoOver at Pink News we’re treated to another of Benjamin Cohen’s favourite “Muslim homophobia” scare stories, this one courtesy of Peter Tatchell, who attacks George Galloway for having included on his website a reference to the voting record of Labour MP Jim Fitzpatrick on gay equality.

“George appears to be appeasing homophobic sections of the Muslim community by attacking Jim Fitzpatrick over his support for gay rights,” Tatchell is quoted as saying. “He’s using homophobia to gain political advantage and he is betraying his own past appeal for gay equality…. His apparent volte face is a cynical attempt to win the votes of homophobic factions within the constituency. I’m saddened that he’s using gay rights as a stick to beat his political opponent.”

This statement is quoted from the 14 September issue of the Evening Standard, which to be fair also included the following in its report: “Galloway’s office denies he has changed his position on gay rights and says he doesn’t necessarily disagree with Fitzpatrick’s policies anyway. ‘I don’t think he is doing that’, says a spokesman. ‘He hasn’t changed his mind at all. George has always been in favour of gay rights. He has been entirely consistent and if the website gives a different impression we’ll have to have a look at it’.” Needless to say, this is omitted from the Pink News report.

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‘Scotland’s first home grown Islamic terrorist’

Posted on by Eddie Truman

After a 4 week trial and a 9 hour jury deliberation, Scotland has its first home grown Islamic terrorist plot and plotter.

But without the near impossible to defend charges under the amended Terrorism Act of 2000, it is unlikely that the prosecution would have been able to make a Breach of the Peace charge stick.

As the news of the Siddique verdict came in, the 24 hour news channels put the headline up on their news ticker; “guilty of Islamist terror offences” said both Sky and BBC News 24.

Real Radio news led with “Scotland has its first home grown Islamic terrorist”.

The day after the end of the case saw the Scottish press carry security service sourced stories that they believed Siddique had been intending to carry out a terrorist attack in Canada.

There was no evidence produced in court to back up this far more serious accusation.
Lawyer Aamer Anwar said Siddique was doing what millions of people did every day: “looking for answers on the internet”.

He added: “Atif Siddique states that he is not a terrorist and is innocent of the charges and it is not a crime to be a young Muslim angry at global injustice.”

And that’s the central point in this farce: Siddique was not a terrorist or even a terrorist plotter.

He was an angry young man, angry about the situation Muslims in Palestine and Iraq face.

It was anti-social of him to show people footage he had on his mobile phone and reasonable that he should face a charge of breach of the peace if those people gave evidence that it put them in a state of fear and distress.

But they didn’t give such evidence; they testified that although unpleasant, they didn’t feel threatened.

So without the ludicrous charges of possessing video footage which is to be found without trying very hard on the internet, it is unlikely that Siddique would have even been convicted of a breach of the peace.

But there’s a point that needs to be made here about the people of Glasgow’s previous relationship to and support for terrorism.

All through the Irish war, the “troubles” as they are known, every Friday and Saturday night teams of people would methodically move through the bars and clubs of Glasgow frequented by both Catholics and Protestants and collect money for organisations who were actively involved in acts of violence.

In an era before the internet, predominantly young men would obsessively collect information on the activities of both Protestant and Republican armed groups.

This was something that went on pretty much unhindered by the state and yet in 21st century Scotland to have video footage on a computer of insurgents in Iraq is to be guilty of supporting terrorism.

This verdict will do more to push young, disaffected Muslims into the arms of extremist groups than any number of Jihadist DVDs on sale on the internet.

While right wing extremist groups openly use the internet to threaten groups and individuals with violence, publishing home addresses for example, the police and security services are using the draconian powers available to them to target angry young Muslims with footage from Iraq on their computers.

What we don’t get to hear about are the many family, friends and relatives of such people who are also being arrested and held without charge for days on end under the Terrorism Act, people for whom their only crime is to be a Muslim.

Economist misreports ‘mega-mosque’ controversy

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The current issue of the Economist carries a report on the controversy over the proposed Islamic Centre at Abbey Mills in East London. It would be difficult to fit more inaccuracies and distortions into a single article.

The estimate of the size of the proposed development is evidently based on the old design by Mangera Yvars, which has of course been scrapped. The new architects have yet to produce their replacement design, so the claim that the mosque will be “Britain’s largest religious building and almost five times the size of St Paul’s” lacks any basis in fact.

The article doesn’t mention that the 10 Downing Street e-petition against the Abbey Mills development was posted by a BNP supporter. It refers to the earlier Sunni Friends of Newham/Minhaj-ul-Quran petition against the mosque but omits to mention that they have since suspended their campaign.

It says that Christian Peoples Alliance councillor Alan Craig, who has headed the local agitation against the mosque, “plays down fears of terrorism” – whereas in reality this has been a central plank in his scaremongering campaign.

It concedes that Tablighi Jamaat is not a political movement but concludes: “There is endless panic about political Islam. Is apolitical Islam much better?”

‘Neither Washington nor mosque’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Thus the title to a blog post by Labour Party member and longtime leftist Dave Osler marking the anniversary of 9/11. What he means is that the Left should back neither US imperialism nor Al-Qaida terrorism. The word “mosque” is used as a synonym for the latter, thereby identifying all practising Muslims with the atrocities carried out by a minuscule minority – a theme more usually associated with the racist Right.

Outlining his proposals for combating the threat of further terrorist attacks, Osler writes that “Islamist networks can and must be infiltrated and smashed” – which would mean infiltrating and smashing Hizb ut-Tahrir, presumably. Since when did socialists support the right of the state to infiltrate and smash legal and non-violent political organisations? In fact, on the generally accepted definition of “Islamism” as a politicised version of the faith, organisations like the British Muslim Initiative would also fall victim to Osler’s “anti-terrorism” strategy.

Osler even charges the left with “regarding al Qa’eda as somehow allies of convenience in an imagined common anti-imperialist struggle”. As a contributor to the comments section of his blog points out, this echoes the right-wing idiocy peddled by the likes of Martin Amis who claims that “given the choice between George Bush and Osama bin Laden, the liberal relativist, it seems, is obliged to plump for the Saudi”.

What significant tendency on the left adopts the position of treating the 9/11 terrorists as anti-imperialist allies? None, so far as I know. Where can we find left-wing publications putting forward that argument? Nowhere.

See Dave’s Part, 11 September 2007

Muslim group behind ‘mega-mosque’ seeks to convert all Britain

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“A Muslim group that wants to open a giant £100 million mosque in London has set its sights on ‘winning the whole of Britain to Islam’. Tablighi Jamaat aims to build an Islamic complex near to the site of the 2012 Olympic stadium, with a mosque for 12,000 people, by far the largest religious building in Britain.

“The organisation, which has millions of followers worldwide, insists that it is a peaceful, apolitical revivalist movement that promotes Islamic consciousness among individual Muslims. However, intelligence agencies have cautioned that the group’s ability to fire young men with a zeal for Islam acts as a staging post, for some, along a path that leads to jihadist terrorism.

“Kafeel Ahmed, the Indian doctor who died from burns last month after trying to set off a car bomb at Glasgow Airport, is the latest in a line of terrorists for whose initial radicalisation Tablighi Jamaat has been blamed. The group (literally, the preaching party) belongs to the ultra-conservative Deobandi school of thought within Sunni Islam, whose adherents run more than 600 of Britain’s 1,350 mosques.

“In recent days The Times has exposed the virulently anti-Western creed of some British Deobandis who preach that non-Muslims are an evil and corrupting influence. Their defensive, isolationist approach to life in Britain is shared by many British supporters of Tablighi Jamaat.”

Writing in today’s Times, Andrew Norfolk takes up where he left off with his anti-Deobandi scaremongering on Friday.

It appears to have escaped Norfolk’s attention that all religions have the ultimate objective of converting everyone to their faith. You might as well oppose the building of a Catholic cathedral on the basis that the “sect” behind it seeks to convert all of Britain to Roman Catholicism. And, of course, one of the distinguishing features of Tablighi is that, far from proselytising among adherents of other faiths, it restricts itself to persuading existing believers to be better Muslims.

Norfolk’s piece get the thumbs up from Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch, 10 September 2007

For Yusuf Smith’s comments, see Indigo Jo Blogs, 10 September 2007

Islam, Christianity and ‘double standards’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In the US earlier this week a controversy broke out over the decision by the Washington Post not to publish (at least in its printed edition) Sunday’s instalment of the cartoon strip “Opus,” in which a character appears in a headscarf and explains to her boyfriend that she wants to become a radical Islamist. (Fox News report here, link to the actual cartoon here.)

Reports have pointed out that a recent episode of the same cartoon strip ridiculed the late right-wing Christian fundamentalist Jerry Falwell, yet no attempt was made to ban it. Predictably, the right-wing blogosphere has leapt on this issue, accusing the media of applying double standards and discriminating in favour of Muslims (“Christians are fair game, Muslims aren’t“).

Whether the Washington Post was correct to spike the cartoon is a matter of debate (see for example Sheila Musaji’s comments at The American Muslim). But what should be rejected outright is the stupid notion that reinforcing stereotypes about a minority ethno-religious community which is already the object of a poisonous right-wing propaganda campaign is the same as taking the piss out of a white Christian evangelist like Jerry Falwell.

Far from being a beleaguered minority, the Christian Right in the US is politically close to the Republican Party and a leading figure like Falwell was even in a position to place demands on would-be presidential candidates in exchange for electoral support (see, for example, here). If there’s one thing Jerry Falwell emphatically wasn’t, it was oppressed. In fact, he was prominent among the ranks of the oppressors – so notorious was he for his Islamophobic views that the Anti-Defamation League publicly dissociated themselves from his more egregious anti-Muslim remarks.

That right-wing US commentators should be unable to make a distinction between the position of Muslims and Christians in western society is hardly surprising, but the same sort of argument is regularly trotted out by people who in other respects hold broadly progressive views and should be expected to know better.

For example, we’ve already covered Maryam Namazie’s Islamophobic rant at the International Day Against Homophobia, as reported in the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association’s magazine Gay Humanist Quarterly, in which she accused the Muslim Council of Britain of wanting to hang gay men in Trafalgar Square. But we have not dealt with the contribution from another platform speaker at the IDAHO reception – Darren Johnson, who is one of the Green Party’s two members on the London Assembly. In the same issue of GHQ George Broadhead of GALHA reported:

Darren Johnson outside City Hall“In his speech, Darren Johnson cited those on the political left who were reluctant to criticise Islamic homophobia. ‘Many on the left are perfectly comfortable denouncing homophobia if it comes from the lips of right-wing Christian fundamentalists’, he said, ‘but get strangely queasy if it is espoused by Muslim fundamentalists.”

Christianity, it seems to have escaped Johnson’s attention, is the religion of the white majority in the West, whereas Islam is the religion of non-white minorities. Attacks on the belief system of Muslims therefore can and very often do serve as a cover for racist propaganda. Why else do right-wing newspapers like the Express and the Mail, and far-right groups like the BNP, devote themselves to obsessively attacking the Muslim community?

The point is – you can’t just ignore social context. This is usually pretty obvious when it comes to the Jewish community, who are of course another minority ethno-religious group with a long history of racial and religious oppression. Denouncing Judaism and Jews is not all the same thing as denouncing Christianity and Christians. Even the most rigid of secular rationalists can usually see that.

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The media and Islam – another ‘balanced’ discussion

Posted on by Bob Pitt

On Radio 4’s “The Message” last Friday there was yet another example of the media’s incapacity to provide a balanced discussion of their own unbalanced depiction of Islam.

More4  News editor David Mapstone and media commentator Stephen Glover were brought in as media experts. And who did the BBC settle on to represent a Muslim viewpoint? Yes, you guessed it, they chose Islamism’s answer to Whittaker Chambers, Ed Hussain, who asserted that the “bandying around of this terminology of Islamophobia” is used to “shut down debate”. Husain assured listeners that the British media “bended over backwards to ensure that it doesn’t really offend most Muslims”.

Stephen Glover, for his part, took up the case of the discredited Channel 4 documentary “Undercover Mosque”. Did he raise this issue in order to express concern about media distortion of Islam? Don’t be silly, of course he didn’t. According to Glover, “what is worrying about this story is that having looked into it the police and the Crown Prosecution Service have referred the programme to OfCom on the basis that it manipulated the facts … so we have the media going out to find what is happening in some mosques, it does so, and it is criticised – unjustly I believe – for what it does”.

Let us recall that CPS lawyer Bethan David, who examined 56 hours of footage of which only short extracts were used in the programme, stated unequivocally that: “The splicing together of extracts from longer speeches appears to have completely distorted what the speakers were saying.”

Media “expert” Stephen Glover thus joins the likes of the Sun, Leo McKinstry, Dean Godson, Carol Gould, Adrian Morgan and the British National Party in rejecting the findings of the CPS. None of them, of course, has actually seen the footage on which the CPS based its criticism of “Undercover Mosque”. But never let facts get in the way of anti-Muslim prejudice, eh?

Even David Mapstone – who was prepared to concede that the media give disproportionate coverage to isolated extremists like Omar Brooks, and that organisations like the Muslim Council of Britain do have “representational legitimacy” – asserted that “good, high quality” television documentaries about Islam have been broadcast … featuring notorious Islamophobes like John Ware, Martin Bright and Richard Littlejohn.

MCB wants to hang gay men in Trafalgar Square (it says here)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

GHQ coverThe new Gay Humanist Quarterly is just out. It includes a characteristically hysterical rant by Maryam Namazie of the Worker Communist Party of Iran, delivered at the International Day Against Homophobia in London in May. Namazie told her audience:

“We mustn’t accept any excuses or apologies for the Islamic regime in Iran and its like – whether in Saudi Arabia or right here in the UK. They all belong to the same movement and want the same thing.”

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PCSO wears headscarf – shock revelation in Daily Mail

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Nadia Naeem“A Muslim teenager has been named as one of the ‘babies on the beat’ as police community support officers. The Daily Mail revealed on Monday how Thames Valley police were employing two 16-year-old school-leavers as PCSOs. Yesterday it emerged that the force also recruited three 17-year-olds, including Nadia Naeem, now 18, who wears the hijab. All now have the power to detain and question suspects.”

Daily Mail, 16 August 2007

Quite how wearing a headscarf is relevant to a PCSO’s ability to detain and question suspects is not explained.

‘How I escaped Islamism’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yet another article by an ex-Islamist, this one by Shiraz Maher, a former member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, in the Sunday Times.

These articles follow the same formula. A connection is drawn between HT and acts of terrorism, and HT is presented as typical of “political Islam”. There appears to be an endless demand from the media for such “exposés”. Strangely enough, there is no equivalent market for articles pointing out that HT is a non-violent organisation which rejects terrorism and that its abstentionist position towards mainstream politics in the UK is rejected in favour of active engagement by most of those individuals and organisations whose political commitment is inspired by Islam.

Meanwhile, over at BBC News, a report on a Hizb ut-Tahrir conference in Jakarta states regarding HT: “Many experts see it as ideologically close to jihadist groups, and suspect its commitment to peaceful means is purely tactical.”