John Walsh on America’s leading Islamophobe, in Counterpunch 9 March 2006
Whether it is accurate to describe Pipes as a neocon in questionable, though, in the sense of advocating an aggressive US foreign policy aimed at removing hostile regimes under cover of imposing democracy. He has always been sceptical that “brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene” are ready for democracy.
As we’ve repeatedly pointed out on this site, Islamophobia is the issue over which a whole section of the Left has lost its political bearings and adopted positions barely distinguishable from the racist Right.
Nick Cohen is of course a prime example. In his latest Evening Standard column, he denounces liberals for opposing the imprisonment without trial of the Tipton Three at Guantánamo Bay (“the Americans had reasonable grounds for picking them up”) and for attacking the intended illegalisation under the government’s proposed new anti-terror law of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an organisation that has repeatedly stated its opposition to terrorist attacks such as the London bombings. As for 7/7 itself, Cohen lectures us that it had nothing whatsoever to do with the crimes of western imperialism but was solely motivated by the “psychotic ideology” of Islamism.
A very similar argument is presented by Mad Mel, with whom Cohen increasingly finds common ground, in today’s entry in Melanie Phillips’s Diary.
The Daily Telegraph tries to counter the impact of Moazzam Begg’s new book Enemy Combatant by quoting from a “confession” that he signed under torture while held by the US in Afghanistan.
The Telegraph tells us that “US officials insist [the confession] was not obtained under duress”. Moazzam Begg has described his treatment as follows:
“… they interrogated me severely for almost the whole month and kept me in separate solitary confinement. They tied me up with my hands behind my back to my legs, kicked me in the head, kicked me in the back, threatened to take me to Egypt to be tortured, to be raped, to be electrocuted. They had a woman screaming in the next room whom I believed at that time was my wife. They bought pictures of my children and told me I would never see them again. All sorts of things like that.”
“Yesterday’s municipal elections in the Netherlands were won by the Left. The Labour Party (PvdA) gained more than 500 town hall seats, an increase of 50 per cent compared with 2002, while the far-left Socialist Party (SP) doubled its number of seats. The Christian-Democrat CDA of Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende and his government coalition partner, the free-market Liberal VVD, suffered heavy losses…. Today the center-left newspaper De Volkskrant writes that the immigrant vote has tipped the balance in favour of the Left. This should not come as a surprise. All across Europe, immigrants tend to vote for the Left.”
Paul Belien berates Muslims for exercising their democratic rights and voting against parties of the anti-migrant Right.
He adds: “The center-right VVD, the party of famous Dutch policians such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali … received only 1% of the immigrant vote.”
Juan Cole writes: “The constant drumbeat of hatred toward Muslims and Arabs on the American Right, on television and radio and in the press, has gradually had its effect. This according to a Washington Post poll. Even in the year after September 11, a majority of Americans respected Islam and Muslims, but powerful forces in US society are determined to change that, and are gradually succeeding. As they win, Bin Laden also wins, since his whole enterprise was to ‘sharpen the contradictions’ and provoke a clash of civilizations. Some 25% of Americans now say they personally are prejudiced against Muslims. And 33% think that Islam as a religion helps incite violence against non-Muslims, up from 14% after September 11. The Bush administration policy is to continually insinuate that the Muslim world is the new Soviet Union and full of sinister forces that require the US to go to war against them.”
Informed Comment, 9 March 2006
See also “Negative perception of Islam increasing”, Washington Post, 9 March 2006
Right-wingers tried to fan the flames of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab hate at the University of California-Irvine (UCI) on February 28, sponsoring a meeting titled “Unveiling the Cartoons”. Following the lead of a few college newspapers that reprinted cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad as a terrorist, the UCI College Republicans sponsored the public meeting to display the offensive caricatures.
But Arabs, Muslims and their supporters didn’t take this provocation sitting down. As many 1,000 people turned out to counter the racists’ message, outnumbering the Republicans’ audience. “We are standing up against racism and hatred. We are not going to let it happen, not here,” said Quanita of the Muslim Student Union (MSU). Students at the protest wore armbands to express their solidarity and held banners saying “Stop Islamophobia!”
Robert Spencer offers a characteristically restrained critique of John L. Esposito, who is generally agreed to be the leading western academic expert on Islam:
“The dhimmi Saudi shill John Esposito, whose word still reigns supreme in the White House, and who has praised the suicide-terror-endorsing Sheikh Qaradawi as a ‘reformist’, has now fallen so low as to echo paranoid conspiracy theories about Daniel Pipes being behind the printing of the Danish cartoons. He also recommends that Muslims promote themselves more aggressively in the West. And I’m sure that he will be ready to help with that promotion.”
The British government has accused its Danish counterparts of making “a serious mistake” in the way it handled relations with Muslim countries after the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. The home secretary, Charles Clarke, criticised the decision by the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, to snub a request from 11 Muslim countries for a meeting after the cartoons were published in the Jyllands Posten newspaper in September. Mr Clarke told a public meeting in Willesden that Mr Rasmussen had not even responded to the request.
And why hasn’t this appeared on Dhimmi Watch? Is Robert Spencer prepared to sit idly by while British politicians sell out western civilisation to the Muslim hordes?
Postscript: This was quite unfair on Robert. Shortly after our comment was posted, he laid into Clarke: “Britain’s Home Secretary criticizes Denmark’s Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen for not throwing freedom of speech overboard and rushing into dhimmitude.”
Even the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty baulks at some of the alliances formed by their friends in the Worker Communist Party of Iran.
In an open letter to Maryam Namazie, Martin Thomas of the AWL writes: “The organisers of the ‘March For Free Expression’ (against political Islam) planned for 25 March are advertising you as a prominent supporter – alongside the Freedom Association, an extreme right-wing movement best known for its strike-breaking efforts during the Grunwick strike of 1977.”
Martin also takes issue with Namazie’s decision to sign the anti-Islamism manifesto first published in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten: “The manifesto’s twelve initial signatories include several right-wing figures – not, to be sure, as right-wing as the Freedom Association, but clearly alien to the labour movement.”
For details of the “march for free expression”, see here.
For our comments on the anti-Islamism manifesto, see here.
The Social Affairs Unit has reproduced the speech given by Douglas Murray, author of Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, at the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference on Europe and Islam in the Netherlands last month. It includes gems such as the following:
Why is it that time and again the liberal West is crumpling before the violence, intimidation and thuggery of Islam? … It is late in the day, but Europe still has time to turn around the demographic time-bomb which will soon see a number of our largest cities fall to Muslim majorities. It has to. All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop…. Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board: Europe must look like a less attractive proposition. We in Europe owe – after all – no special dues to Islam. We owe them no religious holidays, special rights or privileges. From long before we were first attacked it should have been made plain that people who come into Europe are here under our rules and not theirs. There is not an inch of ground to give on this one.
Social Affairs Unit, 3 March 2006
Mad Mel is impressed: “You have to look hard to find such moral clarity within today’s British Conservative party – or indeed most of the British establishment.”