Yusuf Smith replies to Melanie Phillips.
Category Archives: Right wing
TV debate axed over Salma terror claims
Central TV pulled the plug on a programme about local Muslims this week after a contributor accused city councillor Salma Yaqoob of supporting terrorism.
Douglas Murray of the Social Affairs Unit, a right-wing think tank, made the allegation in a pre-recorded discussion for the Extra Tonight programme due to be shown on Tuesday night.
Central replaced the scheduled item with a documentary comparing education in Sweden and Britain.
Coun Yaqoob said that she was shocked by Murray’s smear: “He made all sorts of wild claims about me. He said that I was a supporter of terrorism, that I didn’t care about Muslims in Iraq and that I’d taken part in an anti-war riot. It was all such libellous nonsense I thought they would just halt the recording there and then, but they carried on.”
Yaqoob raised the issue with the show’s producers after filming finished on Monday night, but was told they planned to go ahead with the broadcast. It was only cancelled at the 11th hour on Tuesday when Central’s lawyers apparently became concerned the company might get sued.
“I’m glad about it,” Yaqoob said. “I’m willing to have a serious discussion with anybody, but people like Murray don’t want a proper debate, they just want to throw a load of mud and hope some of sticks. That kind of behaviour just clouds the real issues.”
Murray told The Stirrer he stands by his claims and said that Yaqoob’s Respect Party “is as vile as the BNP”.
In books, a clash of Europe and Islam
Award nominations are generally occasions for exaggerated compliments and air kisses, so it was something of a surprise when Eliot Weinberger, a previous finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, announced the newest nominees for the criticism category two weeks ago and said one of the authors, Bruce Bawer, had engaged in “racism as criticism.”
The resulting stir within the usually well-mannered book world spiked this week when the president of the Circle’s board, John Freeman, wrote on the organization’s blog (bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com): “I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept,” he wrote. “Its hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia.”
The fusillade of e-mail messages on the subject circulating among the Circle’s 24 board members mirrors a larger debate over a string of recently published books that ominously warn of a catastrophic culture clash between Europeans with traditional Western values and fundamentalist Muslims – books including Londonistan by Melanie Phillips, The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion by Robert Spencer, and America Alone by Mark Steyn.
Contempt for our culture
“Muslims are set to be the focus of political polarisation for years to come: every time under a new title, from terrorism, to integration, to faith schools, to the veil. This politically lucrative subject is favoured by politicians from the BNP to Blairites. Latest to join is the Conservative leader, David Cameron. Bar the warm words, his speech last week could have been delivered by a Howard or a Duncan Smith, betraying the same rigid notion of national identity, contempt for cultural pluralism and hostility to immigration.”
Soumaya Ghannoushi in the Guardian, 7 February 2007
Answering Michael Gove
Continuing the witch-hunt of Dr Mohammad Naseem, the chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque, Michael Gove demands to know “What kind of moderate is he?”
Answer: This kind of moderate.
Gove also poses the question: “What does it say about Birmingham Central Mosque that this man is the chairman?”
To which we might reply: What does it say about the Conservative Party that a paranoid anti-Muslim bigot like Michael Gove is a Tory MP?
‘Violence is inherent in Islam – it is a cult of death’
Thus the headline to an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali by David Cohen in today’s London Evening Standard. The strap reads: “Human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali issues a stark warning about the growing threat of Muslim extremism in Britain”. Bullet points under the headline are:
• Islamic faith schools must close • Sharia law could happen here • Multiculturalism has failed • Islam is the new fascism
Cohen tells us: “Having grown up within Islam, Hirsi Ali believes she is uniquely placed to warn the British public that they are living under a ‘great deception’ about the true nature of Islam. ‘They have deceived themselves that the men arrested in the beheading plot last week and the 7/7 bombers are a fringe group of radical Muslims who’ve hijacked Islam and that the majority of Muslims are moderate. But they’re not. The plot to murder Muslim soldiers in the British Army is consistent with the purest teachings of Islam’.”
Sarkozy defends Muhammad cartoons
French interior minister and presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has defended a weekly sued for printing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Two French Muslim groups are suing Charlie Hebdo magazine for defamation over the cartoons, printed a year ago. Mr Sarkozy noted he was often a target of the magazine but said he would prefer “too many caricatures to an absence of caricature”.
Mr Sarkozy’s letter drew concern from one of the Muslim groups behind the legal action. “He should remain neutral,” Abdullah Zekri of the Paris Grand Mosque was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency. The official French Council of Muslim Faith (CFCM) voiced anger at what it said was government interference and convened an emergency meeting.
Editor Philippe Val told the court the cartoons critiqued “ideas, not men”. Speaking at the opening of the hearing, Mr Val asked: “If we no longer have the right to laugh at terrorists, what arms are citizens left with? How is making fun of those who commit terrorist acts throwing oil on the fire?”
The illustrations originally appeared in the best-selling Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on 30 September 2005 to accompany an editorial criticising self-censorship in the Danish media. One image shows the Prophet Muhammad carrying a lit bomb in the shape of a turban on his head decorated with the Islamic creed.
Muslim groups said Charlie Hebdo‘s decision to publish the cartoons “was part of a considered plan of provocation aimed against the Islamic community in its most intimate faith”. It was “born out of a simplistic Islamophobia as well as purely commercial interests”.
“This is an attack on Muslims,” UOIF President Lhaj Thami Breze told the court according to Reuters. “It is as if the Prophet taught terrorism to Muslims, and so all Muslims are terrorists.”
Cameron clashes with mosque chairman
The Times reports on a clash between the Tory leader and Dr Mohammad Naseem, chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque. “Asked whether many Muslims would vote for Mr Cameron, he [Dr Naseem] told The Times: ‘I doubt it very much. How will Muslims vote for a party which dubs the MCB extremist?'”
Flawed methodology behind Policy Research report
In a letter to the Guardian, Tariq Modood and Ziauddin Sardar question the methodology behind the recent, much-publicised Policy Research report Living Apart Together. They point out:
“The Cabinet Office’s Equality, Diversity and Prejudice Survey 2006, produced by Professors Dominic Abrams and Diane Houston, confirms that out of all social groups Muslims are at a higher risk of stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination on all relevant markers. In this light, we would urge the media to act more responsibly in its dissemination of research on Muslims and Islam.”
The complete version of the Populus poll on which the Policy Exchange report was based is now available online, by the way.
Muslims not the ‘new Jews’ says Norman Lebrecht
“The MCB complains that the Government refuses to take into account Muslim grievances on foreign policy (Iraq and Palestine) and domestic order (the arrest of terrorist suspects). In fact, it is the Muslims who refuse to listen…. Engagement is a two-way process and the Muslims in Britain, while effective at presenting demands, have done little thus far to show that they hear what the rest of the country wants.
“Instead, they have condoned or encouraged the kind of radicalisation which, according to the latest poll, suggests that 31 per cent of young Muslims want Sharia law imposed in Britain.
“If the Muslims are to be the new Jews – secure in their identity but living at peace with society around them – they must learn to engage, to debate, to yield a few sacred cows in exchange for a sense of pride and belonging. It may take another generation, but if multicultural Britain is going to prosper, it would be no bad thing if Muslims decided to become more like Jews.”
Norman Lebrecht in the Evening Standard, 6 February 2007
Does Lebrecht really think this sort of ignorant and condescending crap makes any kind of positive contribution to relations between the Jewish and Muslim communities in London?