Jacqui Smith has shown she understands that talk of “Islamist terrorism” plays straight into the hands of violent extremists, argues Inayat Bunglawala.
Category Archives: Resisting Islamophobia
Ken’s Islam study
Ken’s Islam study
By Julian Petley
Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, 24 January 2008
ON 13 November, London mayor Ken Livingstone launched The Search for Common Ground, a study commissioned by him that looks at the portrayal of Muslims and Islam in the national media. Julian Petley, co-chair of the CPBF, reports…
The report recommends that news organisations employ more Muslims (along with other minorities) so their workforces are more representative of the society and the world on which they report; that news concerning Islam and Muslims should – like all news – be accurate; and that when reporting on sensitive and difficult subjects, such as those involving members of Britain’s minority communities, those working within news organisations should at least reflect on the possible consequences of their actions.
Not a great deal to ask, one might think.
But apparently it is. However, rather than engaging critically with the substance of the report its critics, such as Nick Cohen and John Ware, merely looked “behind” it and discovered (entirely erroneously) bogeyman-of-the-moment the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and, armed with this “fact”, dismissed the whole thing out of hand as irredeemably biased. Bizarrely, Inayat Bungawala of the MCB has been repeatedly fingered as the author of the chapter on the controversial John Ware 2005 Panorama episode “A Question of Leadership”, when, as is clearly acknowledged in a footnote, the author is in fact me.
Perhaps journalists feel that reading such “academic” features as footnotes is beneath them. But, whatever the case, it certainly helps to prove the report’s contention that when newspapers deal with stories concerning Muslims and Islam, normal journalistic standards of accuracy (never exactly high in the first place) are thrown out of the window.
Of course, it’s compulsory that those who have the temerity to suggest the media might try to report more accurately, or more sensitively, or, God forbid, more responsibly, must be presented as would-be commissars and censors. So, bang on cue, up pops the hardly disinterested John Ware in the Sunday Telegraph to claim that the report’s call for more community-sensitive reporting about multi-culturalism and British Muslim identities “suggests that the aim of the ‘experts’ is to put political Islam beyond the scope of media enquiry”.
Again, the heavy-handedly ironic use of inverted commas is absolutely de rigueur in self-serving and anti-intellectual nonsense such as this, but the piece does have the virtue of proving once again that Will Hutton was correct when he wrote: “Britain’s least accountable and self-critical institutions have become the media – and the way they operate is beginning to damage rather than protect the society of which they are a part.”
It also reminds us that when Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army proclaimed “they don’t like it up ’em” he was of course referring to journalists and not to Germans. However, freedom from censorship (is not the same thing as freedom from censure. But media freedom brings with it certain responsibilities; indeed, as I point out in the recently published Freedom of the Word, media freedom in modern societies is largely premised on the idea that the media play a key role in the democratic process.
Onora O’Neill said in a 2003 lecture to the Royal Irish Academy: “Democracy requires not merely that the media be free to express views, but that they actually and accurately inform citizens. If we are to have democracy, the media must not only express views and opinions but must aim to communicate and inform … Inadequate reporting, commentary and programming may marginalise important issues or voices, may circulate inaccurate or manipulated ‘information’, and may suppress or distort material that is relevant to its own assessment. It damages democracy by making it hard, even impossible, for citizens to judge for themselves.”
So, precisely to the extent that the media fail to perform their proper democratic role, the arguments for defending their freedom become proportionately weaker. Sadly, The Search for Common Ground shows all too clearly how, when it comes to representing Muslims and Islam, the media, and especially the press, frequently fail every one of O’Neill’s tests.
Inaccurate reporting, distortion, ill-informed commentary, the further marginalisation of already marginalised voices – these are all so common as to be routine across vast swathes of newsprint, and are now, as demonstrated by Ware’s Panorama episode, beginning to infect broadcasting as well. If an increasing number of people, and by no means simply Muslims, think (quite wrongly, in my view) that media freedom is no longer worth defending, the media should look to themselves for the reasons, and not make wild accusations about their critics, an increasingly numerous and well informed band.
Julian Petley is Professor of Film and Television at Brunel University, and co-chair of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom. Censoring the Moving Image, which he co-authored with Philip French, will shortly be published by Seagull Books/Index on Censorship
Iraq politician clarifies Blackburn mosques comments
The Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq has responded in a row over alleged extremism in Blackburn’s mosques.
An MP claimed Dr Barham Salih had told him what he saw when he visited Blackburn in 2005 would be illegal even in Iraq. But Dr Salih, in a statement which did not address exactly what he said to the MP, said his comments had been “taken out of context and misconstrued”. Dr Salih, who has lived and studied in the UK, said the “overwhelming majority” of British Muslims were law abiding and true to the tolerant spirit of Islam.
Describing his visit to Blackburn, Dr Salih, who used it to urge people not to vote against Mr Straw because of the war in Iraq, added: “I had the good fortune to visit a mosque in Blackburn three years ago and I am grateful for the gracious hospitality shown to me there. I was heartened to hear of the Imam preaching tolerance and inclusiveness.”
The ‘left’ that hates Livingstone
“It’s as if the last 25 years had never happened. For the past week we’ve been back in the days of Margaret Thatcher’s war on Red Ken and the Greater London Council. Every morning, the media have brought new revelations of the horrors at City Hall and Ken Livingstone’s manifest unfitness to be re-elected mayor of London. Just as in the time of the GLC, Livingstone is denounced for consorting with dangerous leftists and terrorist apologists. Only the details have changed: for lesbian workers’ cooperatives, read the Arab women’s network, and for Sinn Féin and the Irish community, substitute Islamist groups and London’s Muslims….
“The trigger for this retro onslaught was Tuesday’s almost comically slanted Channel 4 Dispatches programme on Livingstone, presented by the New Statesman‘s Martin Bright, who wrote that he felt it his ‘duty to warn the London electorate that a vote for Livingstone is a vote for a bully and a coward who is not worthy to lead this great city of ours’….
“What has given this latest assault on Livingstone a special edge is that the people driving it trade as being on the left: Bright as a representative of Britain’s main centre-left political weekly and Nick Cohen, who has more openly lined up behind Johnson, as an Observer columnist. In reality, both writers share a broadly neoconservative agenda on Islamism and the ‘war on terror’ … and that is the central issue that has turned them and their allies against Livingstone. Bright wrote a pamphlet for the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange attacking government dialogue with Islamists, warmly praised by the leading US neocon Richard Perle. Cohen famously declared after meeting Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz for drinks at the Mayfair nightclub Annabel’s: ‘I was in the presence of a politician committed to extending human freedom’.”
Seumas Milne in the Guardian, 24 January 2008
For another comment on the Bright-Cohen campaign against Ken, see here.
Florida Attorney General requires employees to watch anti-Muslim propoganda
The Muslim Public Affairs Council today sent a letter to Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, who serves as a campaign adviser to Rudy Giuliani, calling on him to cease subjecting his employees to blatantly anti-Muslim propaganda.
Last week, MPAC learned that McCollum sent an email to his employees requiring them to attend one of three screenings of a controversial video called “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” in the State Senate Building. In the email, McCollum says the screening is intended to help employees “better understand the threat that we face as a nation and society”.
McCollum is a former member of Congress (1981-2001) who served on the Republican Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare for the US Congress. The Task Force was first in issuing papers on the clash of civilization and promoting an anti-Muslim agenda in the US Congress.
“Obsession”, a 60-minute tirade of cherry picked inflammatory statements from foreign individuals interspersed with “analysis” from controversial American figures including self-proclaimed terrorism expert Steve Emerson, has been widely discredited since its release in 2006.
As Attorney General, McCollum is tasked with ensuring the rule of law in the State of Florida. It is concerning, then, that the very office that victims of hate crimes would turn to for legal aid and justice, is leading its employees to make decisions based upon bias and fear.
Bright’s fright night
Bright’s fright night
Martin Bright’s feeble TV hatchet job on London Mayor Ken Livingstone may have missed its target, but it speaks volumes for the pro-war ‘left’, writes ANDREW MURRAY.
Morning Star, 23 January 2008
THE most remarkable moment in this week’s partisan hatchet job on London Mayor Ken Livingstone on Channel 4 was not in fact about the mayor at all.
It was the moment when reporter Martin Bright, in the course of a segment about Venezuela, dismissed the Chavez regime in terms straight from the Bush State Department handbook – allied to Iran, associated with cocaine-smuggling guerillas and accused of human rights abuses.
With that passing phrase, Bright managed to align himself with the global neocon agenda on the Middle East and Latin America as well as the matter ostensibly in hand.
For make no mistake, the travesty of journalism that was the Dispatches programme reveals two things above all. First, getting Livingstone out of office is now priority number one for the warmongering, Muslim-bashing neocon “left.” Second, they are now prepared to openly embrace even the reactionary Toryism of Boris Johnson in order to further this end.
One of only two people can be elected mayor this year – Livingstone or Johnson. And Bright, seconded by his soulmate Nick Cohen in The Observer, has effectively come out for a Johnson victory, so great is his venom against anything even approximating to an authentic socialist left.
That was made abundantly clear in the Evening Standard, in which Bright hyperventilated on his personal mission to see the mayor driven out of office.
“I feel it is my duty,” he intoned with a pomposity worthy of a higher office than political reporter on a small-circulation weekly, “to warn the London electorate that a vote for Livingstone is a vote for a bully and a coward who is not worthy to lead this great city of ours.”
Bright himself has form working to the agenda of the global right. He teamed up with the Policy Exchange, which is run by charter neocon and former Daily Telegraph chief leader-writer Dean Godson, to produce a pamphlet telling Britain’s Muslims how they should behave.
This venture earned him a public commendation from Richard Perle, the leading imperial strategist for the Reagan and Bush administrations and one of the chief boosters of the Iraq war in Washington. The Policy Exchange has since been accused of fraudulent research in a subsequent Muslim-baiting television programme.
Research was not an issue for “BoJo” Bright. When the shadow secretary of state for business and enterprise Alan Duncan popped up in the programme in the guise of a “former oil trader” to bear expert witness on Venezuela, we knew that we were not really in the realm of Woodward and Bernstein but in the party political broadcast zone.
A similar incidence of “research-light” was the risible interview with Marc Wadsworth, a former anti-racist activist who sensationally announced that some of Livingstone’s advisers were affiliated to the “Communist Fourth International based in Moscow.” Did no-one bother poor “Bright” with the news that the Communist International and the Fourth International were two entirely different and bitterly opposed bodies and that the latter has never ever been based in Moscow, a famously inhospitable location for Trotskyists?
As for the attack on “Socialist Action,” surely John Ross, Redmond O’Neill and the rest can, after eight years, be judged on their contribution to the running of London rather than their membership of any particular political group. This is simply McCarthyism at a puerile Daily Express level, an attempt to scare the Tories of Orpington and High Barnet into getting to the polls in May before the Soviet comes to town.
Joan Wallach Scott in London
Public Lecture
FRENCH GENDER EQUALITY AND THE ISLAMIC HEADSCARF
with Professor Joan Scott
Date: Thursday 24th January 2008
Time: 6.30 pm – 8.00 pm
Venue: New Theatre, East Building, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE
Professor Scott takes a critical look at one aspect of the ban on Islamic headscarves enacted in 2005 in France. She will examine ‘a clash of gender systems’ as a way of trying to understand some of the force of the reaction to Islam there. Joan Wallach Scott is a Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Politics and History at Princeton, NJ. She is author of Gender and the Politics of History and, most recently, The Politics of the Veil. The event will be chaired by Professor Anne Phillips. Free admission and open to all. Entry is on a first come, first served basis.
For more information please contact:
Tel: 020 7955 6043
E-mail: events@lse.ac.uk
Islam-bashing fails to boost support for Austria’s rightists
City council elections in the south-eastern Austrian city of Graz on Sunday failed to result in significant support for a local candidate for the far-right Freedom Party (FP) who had lashed out against Islam in a highly controversial campaign.
The top-seeded FP candidate Susanne Winter scored only moderate wins for the party just days after she called the Muslim prophet Mohammed a “child molester” and called for Islam to be pushed “back where it belonged, beyond the Mediterranean Sea”.
Voters in Graz, however, seemed only moderately impressed by Winter’s Islam-bashing. Official results showed the FP gained 3.1 per cent, but remained below expectations with 11.1 per cent. Various polls had showed the party would score between 10 and 13 per cent.
Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache said the FP had reached their goal of getting into the double digits. Winter pursued her campaign “in the face of strong antagonism, defamation and scandalous threats of violence against her,” he was quoted as saying by the Austrian press agency.
Winter’s remarks were followed by a public outcry and triggered an intensive debate about Islamophobia in Austria. According to political analysts, the FP’s anti-Muslim campaign was a calculated gambit to appeal both to a radically xenophobe fringe among Austria’s electorate as well as those alienated by immigration.
The Islam-bashing turned out a “non-starter” for the rightists, with the conservative People’s Party and the Greens benefiting instead, analyst Wolfgang Bachmayer told the public broadcaster ORF.
Islamofascism’s ill political wind
“The unfolding presidential elections are laying bare what the real dangers are in the new American condition…. Religious intolerance marks one candidate debate after another – a sweeping denigration of Islam. And it is going to backfire.
“The code word ‘Islamofascism’ has become a staple of rhetoric. It braces the talk not only of pundits, but of all the major Republican candidates – from the tough guy at one end, Rudy Giuliani, who lambastes Democrats for not using the word or its equivalent, to the ‘nice’ candidate at the other end, Mike Huckabee, who defines Islamofascism as ‘the greatest threat this country [has] ever faced’.
“The pairing of ‘Islam’ and ‘fascism’ has no parallel in characterizations of extremisms tied to other religions, although the defining movements of fascism were linked to Catholicism – indirectly under Benito Mussolini in Italy, explicitly under Francisco Franco in Spain.
“… there is a broad conviction, especially among many conservative American Christians, that the inner logic of Islam and fascism go together. Political candidates appeal to those Christians by defining the ambition of Islamofascists in language that makes prior threats from, say, Hitler or Stalin seem benign. The point is that there is a deep religious prejudice at work, and when politicians adopt its code, they make it worse.”
James Carroll in the Boston Globe, 21 January 2008
Would a world without Islam be peaceful?
Abdus Sattar Ghazali summarises Graham Fuller’s article “A World Without Islam” published in the January 2008 edition of the Foreign Policy journal. He writes:
“Fuller has done a great job in spelling out the real root of the contemporary problems which lie in imperialism/colonialism, more than religion, although certainly religion is a part. His paradigm repudiates biased pundits and neoconservatives who condemn Islam as the root of all conflict.”