“Socialists have to deal with groups to the right of them all the time, and Islamists are no exception. The irrational demonisation of Political Islam is not a result of class analysis, or revolutionary realpolitik, but of liberal blackmail.”
Richard Seymour on the Left and political Islam at Lenin’s Tomb, 20 October 2007
Tony Blair has accused Iran of backing and financing terrorist attacks, and warned that the threat of militant Islam is similar to that posed by fascism in the early 20th century.
In his first major speech since leaving office, Mr Blair said that Iran was prepared to destabilise peaceful countries in support of the “deadly ideology” driving Muslim extremism.
Speaking at a charity event in New York, Mr Blair said that the US, Britain and their allies risked being “forced into retreat” if they do not show “even greater determination and belief” in their common values. Mr Blair, who is now an envoy for the Middle East Quartet, said: “Analogies with the past are never properly accurate and analogies especially with the rising fascism can be easily misleading, but in pure chronology I sometimes wonder if we’re not in the 1920s or 1930s again.”
He said: “This ideology now has a state, Iran, that is prepared to back and finance terror in the pursuit of destabilising countries whose people wish to live in peace.”
See comments by David Cox and Inayat Bunglawala at Comment is Free, 19 October 2007
Well, that’s the line the Daily Telegraph is taking anyway, and Conservative Home is joining in. What’s got them so worked up is the document submitted by the Conservative Muslim Forum in response to An Unquiet World, the report of the Tories’ National and International Security Policy Group chaired by Dame Pauline Neville-Jones.
The CMF’s response hits some nails on the head. It has a good line on Israel and Iran, which particularly outrages the Telegraph and Conservative Home (though the Torygraph is no less appalled by the CMF’s proposal that the history curriculum in schools should give “full recognition to the massive contribution that Islam has made to the development of Western civilisation”).
Conservative Home for its part is dismayed by the CMF’s defence of the Muslim Council of Britain, who were grossly misrepresented by Neville-Jones’ policy group, providing the basis for an ignorant attack on the MCB by David Cameron. The CMF asks:
“What is the evidence for the statement ‘the MCB does not have as one of its aims, the integration of members of Muslim communities into the wider society of the UK’? … it should be noted that one of the formal aims of the MCB is ‘to foster better community relations and work for the good of society as a whole’, which is what integration is about. The Policy Group did not specify what MCB activities they consider to be incompatible with integration. The Conservative Party should recognise that the MCB is well-respected by many Muslims and non-Muslims.”
Also by implication the Conservative Muslim Forum opposes Cameron’s call for a ban on Hizb ut-Tahrir: “… it is the mark of a mature and liberal democracy that it accepts people’s freedom to disagree. If a political party wishes to campaign, constitutionally, for the abolition of democracy in the UK and its replacement by a totalitarian system, why should it not be free to do so?”
Neville-Jones’ An Unquiet World report contains a ludicrously inaccurate attack on Dr al-Qaradawi. To which the CMF replies: “While we may disagree with many of the views of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, it is inaccurate for the Policy Group to question his status as a leading Islamic scholar…. Yusuf al-Qaradawi is considered a leading scholar by many Muslims, including other Muslim scholars.”
Conservative Home complains: “It is deeply troubling to learn of a group within the Conservative Party giving comfort to this extremist.”
An Unquiet Word: A Response can be downloaded from the Conservative Muslim Forum website.
For earlier criticisms of Neville-Jones’ report by Conservative Muslims, see here.
“We are used to attacks on freedom of speech these days. At present Martin Amis is coming under heavy attack from radical Muslims for his trenchant criticisms of the violence that is inseparable from extreme Islamism….
“In so doing, he has attracted the ire of Professor Terry Eagleton – a mediocre but always modish literary critic. Having, in my view, distorted Amis’s words, Eagleton claimed that the author was ‘hounding and humiliating’ Muslims – and the usual suspects have followed in his wake with shrieks of ‘Islamophobe’ and ‘racist’.
“Amis is neither. For while Islam is one of the world’s great religions, he is surely correct when he says that Islamic extremists are ‘anti-Semites, psychotic misogynists and homophobes’. He has every right to say our society is more evolved than repressive and brutal Muslim states like Saudi Arabia, which is being permitted through political inertia to fund Europe-wide centres peddling the pernicious doctrine of Wahhabism (which promotes global Jihad) to impressionable young men.”
Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Daily Mail, 19 October 2007
For an alternative view, read Soumaya Ghannoushi at Comment is Free, 18 October 2007
The author Martin Amis has claimed he feels “morally superior” to Muslim states which are not as “evolved” as the Western world.
Responding to long-running accusations that he is Islamophobic, Amis launched a fresh invective against the Muslim faith and many of its followers. The 58-year-old defended a proposal he made last year that Muslims be deported and strip-searched in a crackdown on terrorism. His latest comments came in a TV news interview last night and during the Cheltenham Literature Festival last week.
In an interview with Jon Snow on Channel Four News, Amis declared: “I feel morally superior to Islamists, by some distance. There are great problems with Islam. The Koran recommends the beating of women. The anti-Semites, the psychotic misogynists and the homophobes are the Islamists.”
Days earlier, Amis shocked festivalgoers in Cheltenham with claims that Muslim states are less “civilised” than Western society. “Some societies are just more evolved than others,” he said. “These societies are arming themselves with weapons like the AK47 and blowing people up on buses and Tubes.”
When one member of his audience suggested not all Muslims were terrorists he retorted: “No one else is doing it. Here in the West we have the most evolved society in the world and we are not blowing people up.”
Condemning his comments, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain said: “Amis clearly seems to believe many Muslim communities are primitive. But just because some extremists have committed terrorist acts does not give him licence to denigrate an entire faith community. He should be ashamed of himself.”
Watch the Channel 4 interview with Amis here.
Black and Muslim solicitors have accused Britain’s legal watchdog of racial discrimination and want to break away to establish their own watchdog body.
The Association of Muslim Lawyers (AML) and the Society of Black Lawyers have obtained figures that show that the Law Society’s regulatory arm is more than twice as likely to investigate misconduct allegations against ethnic minority solicitors than it is against white lawyers. They claim that the disproportionate attention is fuelled by discrimination, rather than by suspect practices.
Figures published by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) in 2006 showed that 62 per cent of investigations related to nonwhite lawyers.
Peter Herbert, the chairman of the Society of Black Lawyers, said: “These figures are a prima facie case of racial discrimation. Clearly this form of regulation is not working and we are looking at establishing a separate, independent watchdog for ethnic minorities.”
Mahmud al-Rashid, a spokesman for the AML, said: “The figures show there must be discrimination at the SRA. We are demanding an immediate investigation.”
“For all our achievements in and emancipating women and slaves, in giving social freedoms and human rights to the individual; for all that is remarkable and beautiful in our art, literature and science, our continuing tradition of arrogantly asserting this perceived superiority has led to all that is most shameful and self-defeating in western history.
“The complaints change – a hundred years ago our Victorian ancestors accused the Islamic world of being sensuous and decadent, with an overdeveloped penchant for sodomy; now Martin Amis attacks it for what he believes is its mass sexual frustration and homophobia. Only the sense of superiority remains the same. If the East does not share our particular sensibility at any given moment of history it is invariably told that it is wrong and we are right….
“Last week, the Islamic world showed us the sort of gesture that is needed at this time. In a letter addressed to Pope Benedict and other Christian leaders, 138 prominent Muslim scholars from every sect of Islam urged Christian leaders ‘to come together with us on the common essentials of our two religions’. It will be interesting to see if any western leaders now reciprocate.
“We have much to be proud of in the West; but it is in the arrogant and forceful assertion of the superiority of western values that we have consistently undermined not only all that is most precious in our civilisation, but also our own foreign policies and standing in the world. Another value, much admired in both East and West, might be a simple solution here: a little old-fashioned humility.”
William Dalrymple in the Sunday Times, 14 October 2007
Read the open letter itself (pdf) here.
See also Christian Science Monitor, 15 October 2007
For an alternative view of the Muslim scholars’ letter – “Masquerading as the promotion of peace through emphasising characteristics that these religions apparently share, it instead effectively puts a scimitar to the neck of the Christian church and says: ‘Peace on our terms'” – see Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 12 October 2007
The media’s coverage of Islam is superficial and unbalanced, compounding misunderstanding and confusion about the Muslim world, argues Soumaya Ghannoushi.
Here are some sounds from the playing fields of Europe on an average Sunday: “Bin Laden! You know where he is!” “Have you got a first-aid kit or is that a suicide bomb?” No, it’s not what Italy’s Marco Materazzi told France’s Zinedine Zidane in the World Cup final. It’s what a Muslim football team in Luton, England hears all the time.
Yet Islamophobia is generally ignored. Nobody ever gets punished for it. After Newcastle supporters repeatedly chanted “Mido’s got a bomb” at Middlesbrough’s Egyptian striker in August, only one person was disciplined: Mido himself. He got a yellow card for running to the jeering fans with his finger to his lips after scoring.
Contrast this laxity with the multi-year ban on Blackburn fans caught abusing a black player, or with the anger in Britain when Chelsea manager Avram Grant experienced anti-Semitism, or when black England players were abused abroad. Piara Powar, head of the anti-racism group Kick It Out, believes people are more likely to “shrug” when Muslim players are abused than when blacks are. Powar says some think, “maybe they brought it on themselves”.
In all of Britain’s professional football, there are just a handful of British Muslims. Even Muslim spectators are so rare that when some north Africans and Iraqi Kurds bought tickets to watch Manchester United in 2004, it was assumed they wanted to blow up the stadium. Hundreds of police officers arrested the fans in dawn raids before the misunderstanding was cleared up.
Muslims are more common in amateur football, and so is Islamophobia. A study in west Yorkshire several years ago found that every Asian or black amateur interviewed had experienced racism. Just in case any religious Muslim women might want to play, Fifa recently banned them from doing so in hijab, supposedly for safety reasons, though so far no footballers have been killed by flying veils.
In a letter in today’s Guardian Martin Amis expresses indignation that Terry Eagleton should take exception to his remarks about Muslims.
(Just to remind you what these were: “There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”)
As Mart explains: “I was not ‘advocating’ anything. I was conversationally describing an urge….” And in a letter to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Independent he offers a similar defence against Eagleton’s criticisms: “The anti-Muslim measures he says I ‘advocated’ I merely adumbrated….”
So that’s all right then.
For Osama Saeed’s comments, see Rolled Up Trousers, 12 October 2007