The US House of Representatives has adopted a resolution commemorating Ramadan, which “recognizes the Islamic faith as one of the great religions of the world” and “expresses its deepest respect to Muslims in the United States and throughout the world on this significant occasion”.
The British National Party cannot restrain its indignation: “With ‘allies’ like those in the US Congress, who needs a fifth column of jihadists preparing for a fundamentalist take-over of Europe?”
Back in the early 1980s when she was researching the Crusades, it was the prejudice of friends and colleagues towards Islam which first alerted Armstrong to an old history:
“The Crusades was the beginning of Europe finding its soul. Islam and Judaism became the shadow side, the foil against which we [Christian Europe] measured ourselves. A righteous contempt of Islam was entwined with our anti-semitism. Ever since, our rhetoric about Muslims reflects a blind anxiety about our own behaviour – anxieties about our own capacity for violence are projected onto Muslims, similarly our attitudes towards women.”
Finding these long historical roots to current attitudes towards Islam has given Armstrong a passionate sense of her own personal crusade: “Even before 9/11 I was gripped by a sense of dread: our lack of criticism about what we were doing in the Middle East – the slagging off of a whole religious tradition. It is part of a habit of prejudice that made the death camps possible. It’s as if we hadn’t learnt anything from the 1930s.”
The right-wing evangelical organisation Christian Voice – the same group that threatened to prosecute Islamic bookshops under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act for selling the Qur’an – has announced that it is holding a prayer meeting this morning at the site of the proposed Islamic centre at Newham in East London. They explain:
“With the threat of a planning application for the megamosque any day now, the need for prayer at the site, which is less than a mile from the 2012 Olympic village, is urgent. Certainly, one can pray in church or at home, but the act of going to the site has a spiritual dimension. It focuses our prayer and the effort of going shows God our prayer is serious, an important matter when we are praying for miracles.
“And we believe our prayer is having results. It is being felt in the existing mosque, a collection of old industrial buildings, and our prayers for confusion have, we believe, already disrupted the megamosque plans. We have also prayed in support of local councillor Alan Craig, whom the Lord has placed in Newham’s council chamber for just such a time as this.”
But don’t get the idea that Christian Voice is moved by hostility towards adherents of another religion. Not at all: “Love for God and for our neighbour is what motivates us, so while we shall pray against Islam, we shall also pray for salvation for Muslims and for them to be brought into the kingdom of God by faith in the incarnate Son of God, the crucified, risen, ascended Lord Jesus Christ.”
Thus the title to another anti-Islam article by Geoffrey Alderman, who claims that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are motivated by a hatred of non-Muslims that is inspired by the Qur’an. “Of course, these views do not reflect the totality of Islamic thought on infidels, Jews and the West”, writes Alderman. “But they appear to mirror an important part of that thinking, enthusiastically embraced by Muslims the world over.”
If Martin Amis, who has just taken up a teaching post at the University of Manchester, should happen to bump into the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton on campus, it could be an uncomfortable meeting. In the new introduction to the 2007 edition of his classic book, Ideology: An Introduction, Eagleton launches an impassioned attack on the views of “Amis and his ilk” who argue that the West needs to clamp down on Islam.
The spur for Eagleton’s criticism is Amis’s assertion that, as the Islamic population swells, “the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order“. Amis has suggested “strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan”, preventing Muslims from travelling, and further down the road, deportation. “Not the ramblings of a British National Party thug,” writes Eagleton, “but the reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world.”
Hizb ut-Tahrir replies to last night’s Panorama programme How I Became a Muslim Extremist.
Among the talking heads featured on the programme was Douglas Murray’s mate James Brandon from the misnamed Centre for Social Cohesion, which the programme omitted to mention is a hardline right-wing think tank. And Andrew Green – who assured viewers that HT represents a “gateway” to terrorism – was introduced as a former Foreign Office expert, with no reference to the fact that he is now chairman of the right-wing anti-immigration campaign Migration Watch.
For Yusuf Smith’s comments, see Indigo Jo Blogs, 2 October 2007
How liberals lost their anti-racism
Liberal arguments that the West needs to defend “Enlightenment values” lead to a culture of bigotry, writes Arun Kundnani
Socialist Worker, 2 October 2007
A new sentiment has gripped mainstream liberal thinking in Britain over the last few years – one which regards Muslims as uniquely problematic and in need of forceful integration into ‘superior’ Western values.
For this new breed of liberal, previously cherished values of multiculturalism should be discarded, and the fight for racial and religious equality is irrelevant.
The recent publication of Nick Cohen’s book What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way and Andrew Anthony’s more sharply argued The Fall-Out: How A Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence provide the clearest statements yet of what this new liberalism stands for.
Their argument is straightforward – the major problem facing the West is a failure to stand up for its Enlightenment values.
Liberalism has been infected by guilt, they say, which prevents it from defending itself against the threat of Islamism – which is held responsible not only for terrorist violence, but also for ‘Muslim separatism’ in our cities.
The fascists applaud an article by Julie Bindel in the Sunday Times (or the “Times on Sunday” as they prefer to describe it):
“The story concerns the sex grooming of young British girls largely by Muslim men – something that up until relatively recently has been decried as a figment of the BNP imagination by the political establishment. Now, of course, following a number of convictions of such people in our courts that particular cat is well and truly out of the bag – much to the embarrassment of the political class that has continuously turned a blind eye to it in the name of ‘good community relations’!”
BNP Regional Voices, 1 October 2007
See also Home of the Green Arrow, 1 October 2007
Cf. the Guardian, 23 March 2006
Osama Saeed notes the double standards applied in connection with “terrorist” offenses, depending on whether the accused are Muslims or not.
An advertising campaign promoting British Muslims as integrated citizens who reject extremism has been launched. Islam is Peace – formed after the bombings in London in July 2005 – has initially placed adverts on the capital’s buses and Underground trains. They show a range of Muslims – including a policewoman, a Scout group and the chef Michael Barry – with the slogan “Proud to be a British Muslim”.
Organisers say research shows many Britons associate Islam with terrorism. The group insists that the religion demands that its followers live in peace with their neighbours within non-Muslim societies. But it says it recognises that Muslims have a duty to show that the vast majority of them wish to do so. After the initial London campaign, Islam Is Peace intends to launch a nationwide tour.
Ifhat Shaheen-Smith, one of the campaign organisers, said: “In the current atmosphere of suspicion and fear about Islam and British Muslims, truth is often confused with fabrications and stereotypes. Prejudice has become entrenched and sensationalistic media reporting is creating a climate of paranoia. There is a desperate need for openness, mutual understanding and a mature debate.”