A leading Muslim has accused Tony Blair of playing an “unhelpful blame game” by suggesting moderate Muslims are doing too little to challenge extreme views. Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, the Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, said Mr Blair’s remarks could hamper the good work being done. Moderate Muslims had promoted dialogue and peace in their communities since the 2001 attacks in the US, he said. And Mr Blair risked obscuring the real reasons for last year’s London attacks. Dr Bari said: “Blaming a community, especially those who have been working for the last five years to bringing sanity in the community, bringing peace and harmony in the community. This blaming is not helpful to us.”
Category Archives: Resisting Islamophobia
Tariq Ramadan on 7/7
“One year after the London bombings we have good reason to be concerned. The scars left by this atrocity and other terrorist attacks, and the ongoing ‘war against terror’, have combined to portray Islam as a threat to Western societies. Fear, and the emotions that accompany it, has become a part of the public mindset. In this climate, arguments that were previously the sole province of the extreme right have found space within mainstream political discourse. The past is reinterpreted so as to deny Islam any place in the creation of Western identity which is now frequently redefined as purely Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian.
“Meanwhile many politicians have opted for the dangerous rhetoric of defending ‘Western values’ and seek to impose strict limitations on ‘foreigners’, while at the same time putting in place a whole apparatus of new security laws to fight terrorism. Hardly a Western society has been spared its own debate on questions of ‘identity’ or ‘integration’, but the implicit terms of the debate are often reduced to a distinction between two entities: ‘We, Westerners’ and ‘They, the Muslims’.”
Tariq Ramadan in the Independent, 6 July 2006
The Independent still manages to headline this article “Muslims need to stop behaving like victims”.
Inayat Bunglawala on the Shehzad Tanweer video
“The release of today’s video statement from Shehzad Tanweer appears to confirm the widespread view that the four 7/7 bombers had indeed been radicalised by aspects of our country’s foreign policy and participation in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. One hopes that this will serve to lift the sense of denial in parts of the government about the link between the 7/7 bombings and its policies overseas. Just two months ago, the home secretary, John Reid, rejected suggestions that Mohammad Sidique Khan – believed to be the bombers’ ringleader – blamed his actions on the Iraq war. At the same time, one can only hope that the video also serves to answer those elements among British Muslims who continue to believe in various perverse 7/7 conspiracy theories, refusing to accept that Muslims could be capable of such murderous actions.”
Inayat Bunlawala at Comment is Free, 6 July 2006
Spinning the Populus survey
“A Populus poll published in the Times yesterday found that 13% of British Muslims in the survey regarded the London bombers as ‘martyrs’. While that in no way means that 13% of Muslims in Britain approve of the bombings, the more telling finding was that 87% neither sympathised with nor approved of the attacks. But this side of the story got buried – such spin leaves both Muslims and non-Muslim with virtually nowhere to go.”
Anas Altikriti in the Guardian, 5 July 2006
Update: Bob Churchill has emailed us pointing out that the Times-ITV-Populus survey “is deeply paranoid, and that coverage of it has been deeply flawed and misrepresents the answers given…. The media are widely misrepresenting the results, as if the figure of 13% who say the 7/7 bombers were ‘martyrs’ meant that 13% of Muslims agreed with the attacks, and that’s not only unwarranted but I believe other results in the survey stand firmly against such a conclusion.”
He makes the same point on his blog (see here).
Shahid Malik backs Blair, blames Muslim communities
In today’s Daily Mail, Labour MP Shahid Malik expresses his concerns about “those Muslim leaders, many of whom, I am sorry to say, have lost the stomach for the fight. I am fed up with their constant sniping about the Government’s failure to follow up on all the recommendations of the Task Force, set up in the aftermath of the bombing .. it is easier for organisations such as the Muslim Council of Britain to criticise the Government, the police or the media, rather than take a long hard look at our own communities. It is easier for them to encourage a victim culture that sees Islamophobia around every corner, rather than challenge within. But that is not leadership. It is abdication. That is why I almost wept when I saw the results of a poll showing that 13 per cent of British Muslims think that the July 7 terrorists should be regarded as ‘martyrs’. How sick and deluded can you get?”
Yes, thanks Shahid. That’s really helpful.
Update: See Osama Saeed’s comments at Rolled Up Trousers, 8 July 2006
Collective punishment in the UK
Britain is now importing the Israeli tactic of collective punishment for the families of terrorist suspects, Faisal Bodi writes.
The Times and Omar Deghayes
Correspondents in Brighton have sent us the following report on the Omar Deghayes case:
The Sunday Times on 18th June published an article attacking the brother of the British-resident Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes. The Save Omar campaign has widespread support in Sussex, where Omar lived for many years and where his family still live. He came to live near Brighton as a child refugee, after his father had been assassinated in Libya. The campaign to secure Omar’s release is backed by the Argus newspaper in Brighton and by all six of the Sussex MPs – Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative. The Sunday Times article seems to be deliberately aimed at undermining this broad support.
At no time were campaign members consulted about any of the allegations made, so any reporting that the “revelation surprised supporters of the campaign” is untrue. They heard nothing of the allegations until the paper appeared, and they gradually realised that a man who introduced himself at a campaign meeting as a visitor to Brighton who had come to look after a sick relative for a fortnight, and asked if he could join the meeting, was in fact an undercover reporter.
The article presents a highly confused account of two separate issues: the history of the mosque, of which Abu Baker Deghayes is not the imam; and the campaign for justice for his brother, which is entirely separate from the mosque, and emerged from a local anti-war movement and Amnesty International. As a campaign for due process which grew out of concern for the preservation of civil liberties in the troubled waters of the war on terror, we support the family of Omar Deghayes and their quest for justice. Omar has been detained without charge or trial for four years. Nothing is known of his guilt or innocence, because he has been denied due process. Omar is in the legal vacuum created by the war on terror.
The campaigners point out that an hour of clandestine note-taking is not enough to come to anything like a real understanding of the long and painful history of the Deghayes family, and the making of allegations as to the character of Abu Baker Deghayes is shabby and tendentious.
Daniel Pipes and ‘Islamist Watch’
“If Daniel Pipes is not diverting attention from Israeli murder of Palestinian schoolchildren, is not attacking Arabs and Muslims, or is not intimidating university professors in Middle Eastern studies, one would find him exercising his racism and extremism in his most recent project, Islamist Watch. The Middle East Forum website has been carrying a job announcement – the director for the forum’s new ‘Islamist Watch’ project. This project will add new weapons to Pipes’ long campaign against Islam and Islamists…. Given the years of campaigning against Islamists by Pipes, this suggests that Muslims in the US and the West are in for more hate campaigns and targeting. It is a recipe for increased paranoia, which may be what Pipes wants.”
Jihad Khazen in Dar Al-Hayat, 1 July 2006
‘Islamophobia’ fears cited in Canada
Smashed mosque windows and workers losing their jobs because of their ethnic background, are among signs that anti-Arab sentiment is on the rise in Ontario, the Ontario Human Rights Commission said yesterday.
Chief commissioner Barbara Hall expressed dismay at an increase in “Islamophobia” in Ontario, as she released the commission’s annual report at a news conference at the Ontario legislature. “We continue to hear … from Arab and Muslim communities on increasing incidents of discrimination,” Hall said. Chief among her concerns was an attack on a Toronto mosque just two days after police arrested 17 people earlier this month, who were allegedly planning to stage terrorist attacks in southern Ontario.
Hall also cited a group of cases in which complainants with dual citizenship from countries other than the United States, claimed they were discriminated against by employees at a company that makes defence equipment for several countries, including the U.S. The employees were reassigned and even fired in some cases, possibly because they were seen as a potential threat to the company’s security, Hall suggested.
“The allegations remind us that society must balance security measures in a manner that does not compromise human rights protections.”
The agency did not provide precise statistics, but Hall said there was “an enormous increase” in Ontario – even if people who are affected are at times hesitant to speak out publicly. Incidents of “Islamophobia” were among the 2,399 new complaints filed with the Ontario Human Rights Commission during the past year, the report found.
London Free Press, 30 June 2006
See also the Muslim News, 30 June 2006
Michael Gove on the dangers of Tariq Ramadan
“The British State does not have the courage to face down the advocates of political Islam”, Tory MP Michael Gove tells us in an extract from his forthcoming book Celcius 7/7.
Gove is appalled by the fact that the Home Office is prepared to consult the MCB, the most representative Muslim organisation in the UK, along with people like “Professor Tariq Ramadan, grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Professor Ramadan is not, of course, obliged to follow in the footsteps of his forebears. But he gives it a good try. Professor Ramadan has been characterised as a moderate because he has said that he ‘agrees with integration’ of Muslims in the West. But he has also insisted that ‘we [Muslims] are the ones who are going to decide the content’. Bernard Kouchner, the French Socialist and former health minister, has described Ramadan as ‘absolutely a kook with no historical memory’ and ‘a dangerous man’.”
Gove complains: “A rising generation has been encouraged by those Muslims most prominent in public life to put their Islamic identity ahead of their British citizenship. That generation will have heard the Muslims most fêted by government pay tribute to terrorist leaders and fundamentalist ideologues as figures worthy of respect. That generation will also have had its sense of grievance nurtured even as its sense of separateness has been reinforced. For Islamists and their allies, it has been a golden prospect.”
For Osama Saeed’s comments see Rolled Up Trousers, 26 June 2006