Remember Anthony Browne? You know, the man who has written Islamophobic articles for the Spectator and the Times, is a great admirer of Panorama reporter John Ware and was recently exposed by the Newshog blog as having contributed to a right-wing anti-migrant US website, V-Dare. Well, it now turns out that at least one of Browne’s pieces was actually commissioned and paid for by V-Dare. Not so much “show me who you friends are”, more “let’s have a look at who your paymasters are”.
Category Archives: Right wing
Maududi: ‘the man behind the bombings’
“His followers were exhorted to extreme behaviour. ‘Your puritanic behaviour should become repugnant to your wives. You should become a stranger in your own country.’ Maududi is indeed winning his ideological war when Londoners read in their Evening Standard that it was the very families of the bombers who rang the bomb helpline to find out where their own sons were. Maududi’s thinking lives on in Britain in the minds of the young, through small study groups up and down the country. The Islamic Foundation was led, after its founding, by a man who had been the Vice President of the organization Maududi founded in Pakistan.”
Jenny Taylor in the Church of England Newspaper, 19 August 2005
Another attempt to implicate Britain’s mainstream Muslim organisations in the London bombings, this one on the basis of a supposed link through the ideas of Maulana Maududi.
Iqbal Sacranie and Inayat Bunglawala, ‘Jew-haters’ – Rod Liddle
“Sometimes things are altogether more simple than we wish them to be. Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the eminent chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain, recently refused to attend the Holocaust memorial day. When asked why this was so, he muttered something about how lots of people had been killed all over the place, not least the poor Palestinians and why shouldn’t we remember them, etc., etc. In the liberal press, extravagant excuses were made for Sacranie and his ludicrous chef de cabinet, Inayat Bunglawala. But I suspect that the simple answer, the one we didn’t want to hear, is the most accurate: Sacranie and Mr Bunglawala don’t like Jews. They are both unequivocal anti-Semites.”
Rod Liddle in the Spectator, 20 August 2005
So who wrote the following, then?
“The Nazi Holocaust was a truly evil and abhorrent crime and we stand together with our fellow British Jews in their sense of pain and anguish. None of us must ever forget how the Holocaust began. We must remember it began with a hatred that dehumanised an entire people, that fostered state brutality, made second class citizens of honest, innocent people because of their religion and ethnic identity. Those who were vilified and seen as a threat could be subjected to group punishment, dispossession and impoverishment while the rest of the world stood idly by, washing its hands of despair and suffering that kept getting worse.”
Yup, it was the “Jew-hating” MCB. See the MCB’s statement on this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day, 24 January 2005.
Tebbit attacks ‘unreformed’ Islam
Islam is so unreformed there have been no real advances in art, literature, science or technology in the Muslim world in 500 years, Lord Tebbit says.
Multiculturalism is in danger of undermining British society, the former Conservative Party chairman also tells the e-politix website.
In the 1980s he questioned the loyalty of immigrants who backed cricket teams from their countries of origin. Now he says if he had been heeded it might have stopped the London bombings.
“To reduce the terrorism problem to simply blaming multiculturalism is blinkered and indeed dangerous,” a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain said.
See also ePolitix.com, 18 August 2005
Jeff Jacoby and ‘the real Muslim moderates’
Anyone who thinks the witch-hunt against the Muslim Council of Britain is an isolated case should take a look at what’s happening over on the other side of the Atlantic, where the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has been subjected to a hostile right-wing campaign along almost identical lines.
The fact that CAIR has roundly denounced terrorist atrocities in the US and Britain is dismissed by its critics, who shift the argument onto the issue of the CAIR leaders’ position on the Palestinian resistance. They then go on to argue that the government should sideline a broad-based, mainstream, representative body like CAIR and concentrate instead on dialogue with “real moderates”, comprising individuals and groups who have hardly any influence at all within Muslim communities but have the “right” line on the Israel/Palestine question.
You have to ask – whose interests does this campaign against CAIR serve, those of American people or those of the Sharon government?
See, for example, Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe, 18 August 2005
CAIR’s fatwa: ‘a bogus gesture’
Steven Stalinisky – director of that well-known source of objective information, the Middle East Media Research Institute – offers his opinion on the fatwa against terrorism promoted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Surprise, surprise, Stalinsky finds himself in agreement with another equally reliable source, Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project.
By their friends ye shall know them
The website of the Worker Communist Party of Iran seems to be down at the moment. However, a report by WPI central committee member Homa Arjomand of a meeting in Toronto on 12 August can be consulted at Butterflies and Wheels. Sharing the platform with Homa Arjomand were Irshad Manji and right-wing Dutch MP, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Comrade Arjomand reports that the meeting featured a showing of the film “Submission”. But for some reason she omits to mention the name of the film’s director – the late Dutch racist Theo van Gogh. Obviously just an oversight.
William Shawcross and Islamofascism
“Is it because of western racism that al-Qaida has included the United Nations among its principal targets?” William Shawcross demands to know, in a letter in the Guardian. “Is it because of western racism that in August 2003 an al-Qaida suicide bomber murdered more than 20 people in the UN headquarters in Baghdad, including the secretary general’s special representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello? … Al-Qaida exulted in the murder of this ‘heretic’ sent to Iraq by Kofi Annan, ‘the criminal and slave of America’. Al-Qaida is inspired by Islamofascism, which cannot be appeased. No one is helped by pretending otherwise.”
Rather, no one is helped by pretending that the atrocities carried out by the likes of Al-Qaida do not have a basis in a quite rational hatred of the West’s own atrocities. Bin Laden repeatedly condemned the deaths of innocent Iraqis resulting from UN sanctions imposed at the behest of the USA. As for western racism, would the killing of hundreds of thousands of children have been regarded as a price worth paying – to quote Madeleine Albright’s notorious remark – if those children had been white Americans or Europeans?
The BBC Panorama Special – some background
The BBC Panorama Special that provided the hook for the Observer‘s witch-hunt of the Muslim Council of Britain was originally scheduled to be broadcast on 14 August but has been postponed for a week. It will now be shown next Sunday at 10.15pm.
The BBC has announced that its intrepid reporter John Ware “spent the weeks since the London bombs traveling to Britain’s Muslim communities, to discover whether their leaders can tackle the growth of extremism in their midst”. (See here.)
It was in fact Ware’s hostile questioning of Iqbal Sacranie during the making of the programme that was the immediate cause of the MCB’s complaint to the BBC. The MCB have claimed that Ware devoted the interview almost exclusively to questions concerning the attitude of the MCB and its affiliates towards the Palestine-Israel conflict. (See here – pdf.)
This is not the first contentious Panorama programme that Ware has been centrally involved in. In July 2003 he was the writer and presenter of another Panorama Special, in this case dealing with alleged abuse of the asylum system. On the day of the broadcast, Ware published an article in the Daily Mail (23 July 2003) based on and publicising his programme. It was headlined: “For years the Mail has been attacked for its refusal to be silent on the asylum crisis. Tonight’s Panorama says we were utterly justified.”
Hailing the programme for supposedly having broken “a 35-year taboo on discussing the topic of immigration” that had followed Enoch Powell’s 1968 rivers of blood speech, Ware wrote: “If you, as a taxpayer, have been waiting in a queue for a house, a hospital appointment or a place for your child at a school, and someone from another country who has paid no taxes jumps ahead, you would have to be saintly not to feel resentful.” Particularly so, “if the queue-jumper had fooled the immigration authorities into believing he had been persecuted, when he hadn’t, and when his real purpose was to get here for a better life”.
The BBC was condemned by the then home secretary, David Blunkett, for “pursuing a Powellite anti-immigration agenda”. To quote the Guardian report, Blunkett “singled out for criticism the BBC1 Panorama special, the Asylum Game, and its writer and presenter, John Ware, for producing a ‘poorly researched and overspun documentary’ which repeated unchallenged the claims of ‘the rightwing anti-immigration pressure group, Migration Watch’.” (See here and here.)
However, both the programme and Ware’s article were applauded by Anthony Browne in the Spectator. (See here.)
It seems that Ware is much admired by Browne, who has achieved notoriety for his own provocative attacks on migrants in general and Muslims in particular – just recently, during the furore over his Times article accusing MAB and Yusuf al-Qaradawi of being “Islamic fascists”, Browne was exposed as having contributed to a racist US website. (See here and here.)
In the Times article Browne portrayed the Panorama reporter as a victim of political correctness, complaining that “John Ware, one of the BBC’s most-respected reporters, spent years trying to make a programme on Islamic fundamentalism in Britain, but was repeatedly blocked by senior editors who feared it was too sensitive”. (See here.)
It would now appear that Ware has got his way, and that he has made a documentary exposing Islamic “fundamentalism” in the form of an attack on Britain’s most mainstream Muslim organisation, the MCB.
Of course, we can’t say for sure till we’ve seen the programme. However, Ware did give us a foretaste of his approach when he persuaded Radio 4’s Today programme to broadcast an item on the MCB last month. This gave only a passing mention to the organisation’s role in combating extremism in Britain and instead concentrated on attacking the MCB over its attitude towards suicide bombings in Israel. (See here.)
So, when the MCB complains that “nearly all the questions that were put to Sir Iqbal Sacranie by the Panorama team were directly or indirectly about Israel. These included questions to do with the Holocaust Memorial Day, Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Shaykh Ahmad Yasin”, judging by the Today broadcast we can only conclude that their accusation is entirely accurate.
‘Can infidels be innocents?’ Daniel Pipes asks
Daniel Pipes explains that fatwas issued by mainstream Muslim organisations condemning terrorists for taking the lives of innocent people are meaningless … because some extremists reject the view that non-Muslims are innocent.
So when the British Muslim Forum stated in July that “Islam strictly, strongly and severely condemns the use of violence and the destruction of innocent lives”, according to Pipes this did not necessarily include “those traveling on the Underground and bus lines in London earlier in the month”.