Category Archives: Analysis & comment

Tory MP urges Muslims to fly Union flag

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Philip DaviesA Yorkshire MP has called on Muslims in Britain to fly the Union Jack from mosques as a show of national unity.

Shipley’s Conservative MP Philip Davies submitted an early day motion which says that it would “show everyone that those in the Muslim community are very keen to integrate and positively contribute to good community relationships in the UK”.

However leading Muslim figures in Yorkshire accused Mr Davies of singling out their community, described his comments as offensive and likely to do more harm than good. Rashid Awan, president of the Pakistani Society of West Yorkshire said: “To identify Muslims as needing to do this will aggravate the situation.” Shahid Malik, the Muslim Labour MP for Dewsbury said: “What this country need is not more flags flying above mosques but less irresponsible politicians.”

Yorkshire Post, 29 March 2007

Davies, you may remember, figured in the entirely spurious Sun report about “Muslim yobs” wrecking the intended home of soldiers who had served in Afghanistan. He was quoted as saying: “This is outrageous. If there’s anybody who should fuck off it’s the Muslims who are doing this kind of thing.” Though the story was soon revealed to be false, Davies refused to issue a public apology for his provocative remarks. If we were looking for advice on how to improve community relations, Philip Davies MP is the last person we’d turn to.

Mind you, Davies does have his admirers.

Woolas calls for crackdown on ‘Islamic anti-semitism’ on campuses

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Phil WoolasRace hate laws should be used to crack down on extremist groups whose activities are prompting a rise in anti-Semitism at Britain’s universities, vice-chancellors are to be warned by ministers today.

Ministers are particularly concerned about the infiltration of campuses by Islamic extremist groups who have stirred up hatred against Israel. Vice-chancellors will be warned they must not ignore anti-Jewish activity on campuses and must prevent prejudiced lecturers, guest speakers and extremist political organisations stirring up hatred of Israel.

Phil Woolas, the communities minister, who will announce the Government’s measures, said the findings of the all-party parliamentary report on anti-Semitism were “very worrying”, adding: “Our response will be far tougher than anticipated. We are very worried about Islamic anti-Semitism on campuses. In this country we tend to see it as something of the past. It is not.”

The report by the all-party anti-Semitism group said that Jewish students felt “isolated and unsupported,” and that pro-Palestine debates were being used as a “vehicle for anti-Jewish language”.

Independent, 28 March 2007

Of course, cracking down on genuine racism is admirable, but defining anti-semitism according to criteria determined by the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism (pdf of their report here), who characterise MPACUK as an “extremist” group based on evidence provided by the likes of Lorna Fitzsimons and the Community Security Trust, is something else entirely.

And, if Woolas is really interested in combating racism, how about a crackdown on the appalling Islamophobia promoted by a section of the Jewish community? The sort of bigotry demonstrated by Melanie Phillips, for example, in mainstream publications like the Daily Mail and Jewish Chronicle has no parallel within the Muslim community outside of the tiniest and most sectarian Islamist groups.

For critical responses to the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry on this site, see here and here.

Ruth Kelly on tackling terrorism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ruth KellySecretary of state for communities Ruth Kelly has an article in the Observer justifying the government’s decision to shift resources away from the genuinely representative Muslim Council of Britain to organisations that will be less vocal in criticising the role British foreign policy in inciting terrorism.

Significantly, the Sufi Muslim Council – which Kelly was enthusiastically promoting only last year – doesn’t rate a mention, and now appears to have been rejected in favour of the British Muslim Forum (or the “Muslim British Forum”, as Kelly prefers to call it) as the government’s favoured partner in the Muslim community.

This procedure bears more than a passing resemblance to the practice of colonial governors within the British Empire, who would appoint their favoured individuals to represent the “natives”.

Why no media boost for Belgian racists, Diana West wants to know

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Vlaams Belang“Without attracting much attention, representatives of the Belgian political party Vlaams Belang recently visited Washington, D.C. Frank Vanhecke and Filip Dewinter hoped to meet members of Congress; but Congress was in recess. They hoped to engender some understanding of their program to reverse the Islamization of Belgium; but the media were strip-mining the tinsel life and tawdry times of Anna Nicole Smith.

“Maybe they should have known that Tabloid America doesn’t care about the likely transformation of Europe into an Islamic continent, let alone the fate of a French- and Dutch-speaking country of 10 million people.”

Diana West bemoans the failure of the US media to give favourable coverage to the far-right VB, a political party whose origins are to be found among Belgian fascist sympathisers who collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of 1941-44. In the course of that occupation 25,000 Jews (44% of Belgium’s Jewish community) were deported to concentration camps and killed. But, what the heck, the VB now direct their hatred against Muslims rather than Jews, so they’re alright with Diana West.

Washington Times, 16 March 2007

Why not invite the BNP to write for the Grauniad?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Picking up on an almost equally stupid piece by Sunny Hundal, David T asks why the Guardian doesn’t publish articles by fascists like BNP leader Nick Griffin: “It cannot be that the Guardian has an objection to far right sectarians, as it runs pieces by Muslim Brotherhood supporting Faisal Bodi, Anas Altikriti, Ismail Patel and Soumaya Ghannoushi.”

Harry’s Place, 14 March 2007

Comment is Free recently posted an interesting piece by Marc Lynch (of Abu Aardvark fame), reporting sympathetically on Muslim Brotherhood bloggers. Is Lynch a “far right sectarian” too, then? Nah, in David T’s hall of mirrors he’s probably categorised as a fascist fellow-traveller.

Johann Hari reviews Mark Steyn

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In the current issue of the New Statesman Johann Hari reviews Mark Steyn’s Islamophobic fantasy America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. Hari writes: “… if Steyn’s ‘warnings’ have a historical precedent, it is the hysteria among even liberal Americans such as Jack London in the early 20th century that anticipated Chinese immigrants would outbreed white Americans and take over the US. London’s solution was extermination; what is Steyn’s?” A fair point, except that Steyn’s book does in fact provide a clear indication of where he stands on this issue.

Hari’s review repeats the basic error of an earlier article in the Independent – namely that, while he’s excellent at demolishing the paranoid delusions of anti-Muslim racists like Steyn and Bat Ye’or, he has swallowed quite a bit of Islamophobic mythology himself, specifically over the issue of Islamism.

In the Independent piece, Hari wrote that Islamists fall into two categories: “the people who will lash and stone gays after winning at the ballot box and the people who will lash and stone gays after seizing power in a coup”. In the Steyn review, Hari describes Islamism as “a fascistic menace”. This is a wilfully ignorant attitude that does Hari no credit. He doesn’t even attempt to define Islamism. However, if you accept Graham Fuller’s definition of an Islamist – “one who believes that Islam as a body of faith has something important to say about how politics and society should be ordered … and who seeks to implement this idea in some fashion” – it can be seen that the term covers a wide variety of political views.

For example, according to Fuller’s definition, Tariq Ramadan is an Islamist. Does Hari categorise Professor Ramdan as a fascistic menace? Some people do. But it is difficult to see how this differs in any respect from the ravings of Mark Steyn.

As Soumaya Ghannoushi has pointed out: “Islamism, like socialism, is not a uniform entity. It is a colourful sociopolitical phenomenon with many strategies and discourses. This enormously diverse movement ranges from liberal to conservative, from modern to traditional, from moderate to radical, from democratic to theocratic, and from peaceful to violent. What these trends have in common is that they derive their source of legitimacy from Islam.”

Politically engaged Christians encompass a similar range of tendencies, from representatives of the evangelical Right such as Pat Robertson to anti-war activists like Bruce Kent. As Tariq Ramadan has observed, in the case of Christianity people are prepared to recognise these political distinctions. However: “In the case of Islam, engaging in the defence of the poor or carrying the most reactionary ideas does not make any difference. Judgement here falls like a chopper: ‘fundamentalists’.”

Tatchell, OutRage! and the Grand Mufti

Posted on by Bob Pitt

MoscowPride06Last month the notoriously homophobic mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, attended a mayoral summit meeting in London hosted by London’s mayor Ken Livingstone, prompting a protest by Peter Tatchell and the gay rights organisation OutRage! The website Gay.com reported:

“The Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, has denounced same-sex relationships and gay pride events as ‘satanic’, ‘unnatural’, ‘deviations’, ‘blasphemy’ and ‘deadly moral poison’. In February 2006, Grand Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin was quoted as saying about Moscow gay pride marchers, ‘If they come out on to the streets anyway they should be flogged. Any normal person would do that – Muslims and Orthodox Christians alike.’ For these reasons Outrage are co-ordinating a protest at London’s City Hall.”

Although the criticism of Luzhkov was right on the button, the reference to the Grand Mufti appeared, on the face of it, inexplicable. It is a well-established fact that, as Gay.com itself reported at the time, the attack on Moscow Pride in May 2006 was carried out by “skinheads and militant Orthodox Christians”. Yet the idea that the leader of Russia’s Muslims was the main instigator of the violent suppression of Moscow Pride has now apparently entered folklore among a section of the LGBT community in the UK.

The mayor of London had his own view on where this myth originated. In a statement issued by his press office in response to the controversy over Luzhkov’s visit, Livingstone condemned attacks on LGBT rights in Russia and Eastern Europe and the role of politicians in legitimising homophobia. But he continued: “The attempt of Mr Tatchell to focus attention on the role of the grand Mufti in Moscow, in the face of numerous attacks on gay rights in Eastern Europe which overwhelmingly come from right wing Christian and secular currents, is a clear example of an Islamaphobic campaign.”

Tatchell and his supporters responded with predictable indignation. Pink News quoted Tatchell as stating: “A year ago we once criticised the grand Mufti after he urged his followers to violently attack gay people in the streets. But the main focus of our criticism during that campaign was on the homophobia of the Chief Rabbi, the Russian Orthodox Church, neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists. To suggest that this was an Islamophobic campaign was nonsense, despicable and brings the Mayor’s office into disrepute.”

In a post on the neocon website Harry’s Place (to which he is a regular contributor) Brett Lock of OutRage! denounced Livingstone as “a shameless liar” and “a man without principles or integrity”. Lock insisted that “Tatchell didn’t say Russian Muslims were the leading force attacking gay rights”. He also accused the mayor of hypocrisy, on the grounds that in May 2006 Livingstone himself had condemned “support given by the Russian Orthodox Church, the Grand Mufti, and the Chief Rabbi” to the ban on Moscow Pride.

Somewhat contradictorily, George Broadhead of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA) – a group closely associated with OutRage! – weighed in with a further attack on the mayor, accusing him of refusing to criticise Muslim homophobia. “Mr Livingstone is clearly determined to treat Islam with kid gloves no matter how stridently homophobic its adherents are,” Broadhead declared. “The slightest criticism of Islam is immediately branded Islamaphobic.”

What was the actual practice of Tatchell, OutRage! et al during the run-up to Moscow Pride 2006? Is Lock correct in claiming that Tatchell “didn’t say Russian Muslims were the leading force attacking gay rights” in Moscow? Is there any truth to Tatchell’s assertion that they condemned the Grand Mufti only “once”, and that “the main focus of our criticism during that campaign was on the homophobia of the Chief Rabbi, the Russian Orthodox Church, neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists”? Let us examine the record.

Continue reading →

GALHA continues to incite anti-Muslim bigotry

Posted on by Bob Pitt

GHQ-Winter0607-web.cdr“The word ‘appeasement’ is rarely used except in the context of Neville Chamberlain’s deal with Hitler in 1938, but what about the present appeasement of Muslims in Britain? … We are told that Islam itself cannot be blamed for the terrorist attacks on New York, Madrid, and London, followed by widespread carnage in retaliation for the publication of a few innocuous drawings. That is like saying that the horrors of the Inquisition had nothing to do with Christianity….

“Islam has failed to moderate its cruel practices to the extent that mainstream Christianity has done in the past couple of centuries. The Taliban, Al-Qa’eda, and the Badr Corps are certainly extremist, but they are orthodox, deriving logically from the Koran, which denigrates women and tells believers to wage jihad against heretics and infidels.”

Barbara Smoker, the former long-time president of the National Secular Society, writes in the latest issue of (pdf) Gay Humanist Quarterly.

GHQ is edited by Brett Lock of OutRage! by the way.

Readers of Islamophobia Watch will no doubt also be aware that the publishers of GHQ, the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, underwent an acrimonious split in 2005 over the publication of racist anti-Muslim material in their then magazine Gay and Lesbian Humanist. (See here, here, here, here, here and here.) GHQ is published by the faction within GALHA who supposedly rejected Islamophobic bigotry! Perhaps the two sides should consider getting back together.

It might be noted that in addition to Barbara Smoker GALHA’s vice-presidents include Labour MEP Michael Cashman, Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris and London Assembly member Darren Johnson of the Green Party. It might be an idea to draw their attention to the contents of GALHA’s current magazine.

Update:  For Yusuf Smith’s comments, see Indigo Jo Blogs, 7 March 2007

On the absolute right to satire

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Over at the Guardian‘s Comment is Free, Sue Blackmore defends the publication of Islamophobic material in the Clare College student magazine Clareification on the grounds that “it’s offensive, and funny, and that’s what satire is all about”.

Comment is Free, 5 March 2007

In the interests of defending the absolute right to engage in satire, and in order to provide some historical background to this principle, perhaps Sue Blackmore could do a follow-up post defending the right of Der Stürmer to publish anti-semitic caricatures. She could entitle it: “Julius Streicher – what a laugh”.

There should be no covering-up in court

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Barbara Hewson argues that allowing Muslim women to wear the veil in courtrooms is an affront to open justice and (you can hear this coming can’t you?) Enlightenment values:

“A critic of multiculturalism in the UK, Elie Barnavi, argues in the recent best-selling essay Les Religions Meurtrieres (Murderous Religions) that Europe needs to recall its own bitter experiences of religious extremism and religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in order to counter Islamic fundamentalism effectively today. Europe’s current separation of state and church reflects the triumph of Enlightenment values over religious rule, but it needs to defend those values against political religion vigorously, and not lapse into post-colonial guilt. This is important, if democracies are not to morph back into theocracies again.”

“Post-colonial guilt”, “Islamic fundamentalism” threatening to turn civilised European societies into “theocracies” – what is this, the Telegraph perhaps, or the Daily Mail? Nah, it’s from Spiked, the online journal run by the tendency which used to be the Revolutionary Communist Party but has since morphed into a bunch of right-wing libertarian individualists whose obvious natural home now is the Tory party.

In another Spiked article, Josie Appleton attacks the evil collectivist mayor of London Ken Livingstone, who is intent on suppressing the priceless individual freedom to drive round the capital in one’s 4×4 and destroy the environment in any way one sees fit. Appleton’s proposal that voters should consider removing Livingstone at the next mayoral election does, however, suffer from the small flaw that when they turn up at the polling booth “in two years’ time”, as she recommends, the election will have taken place ten months earlier.