Category Archives: UK

Faith invaders

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“As Britain’s culture wars grow in intensity, and abortion and artistic freedom become hot issues, Cristina Odone reveals that Saudi and US funds are behind the devout religious groups that lead the offensive.”

New Statesman, 18 April 2005

The gist of Cristina Odone’s article is that “foreign spiritual empires are moving in on Britain. Increasingly, foreign-inspired and foreign-financed religious conservatives are influencing the UK political agenda, forming what amounts to a spiritual fifth column”. It is notable that the Roman Catholic church escapes her strictures. Opus Dei doesn’t rate a mention.

Odone draws a parallel between US-backed right-wing Protestant evangelism and Islam. Unsurprisingly, she cites Peter Tatchell’s claim that “an insidious alliance has sprung up between ultra-orthodox Christians and Muslims”.

She warns that “the poorly educated imams of Bradford and Tower Hamlets, ministering to believers who are barely a generation away from the village Islam of south Asia, lack the financial, theological and intellectual firepower to stand up to the missionaries for Saudi-style Islam”. Condescending, or what?

Odone makes much of the fact that some Muslim institutions receive Saudi funding. She sees this as an attempt to introduce Wahhabism into Britain, and blames Saudi influence for the fact that some young British Muslims “lap up a rigid, censorious form of Islam, which includes the strict observance of prayer times, learning the Koran by rote, and a wholesale rejection of the habits, attitudes and values of mainstream society”.

This strikes me as largely fantasy. The Saudis certainly stepped up their financial aid to Muslim organisations worldwide after 1979, in order to counter the appeal of radical Shia Islam inspired by the Iranian revolution. However, while their funding is directed to conservative rather than to liberal Muslims, the Saudis don’t have a record of exporting pure Wahhabism.

In any case, I rather doubt that the scale of funding they provide to Islam in Britain is capable of exerting the influence Odone claims. If some young Muslims are drawn towards fundamentalist varieties of their faith, this is surely to be explained by social factors – not by what the Saudi monarchy does with its oil revenues.

Though you might suspect the article is a conscious attempt by the author to whip up Islamophobia while covering her tracks by criticising Protestant fundamentalism as well, I don’t think that’s actually her intention. However, in the present circumstances – with Islam and Muslims (unlike Christian evangelicals) being consistently portrayed as a threat to liberal values, the gains of the Enlightenment and western civilisation in general – that is in fact the practical impact of her arguments.

Mail on Sunday continues in its demonisation of British Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The Mail on Sunday has once again proved that old habits die hard. As if it were not enough to witch hunt asylum seekers, or tarnish the reputation of many Muslim leaders, the Mail has again surpassed itself by bizarrely claiming that FOSIS and the Mayor’s office ‘plotted to nail Euan’s girlfriend’.”

FOSIS press release, 18 April 2005

For a response by FOSIS to allegations of anti-semitism in the NUS see FOSIS press release, 13 April 2005

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Ricin: the plot that never was

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A deadly poison said to be at the heart of a terrorist conspiracy against Britain led to a dire warning of another al-Qa’ida attack in the West. The Government was swift to act on the fear that such a find generated. But far from being a major threat, the real danger existed only in the mind of a misguided individual living in a dingy north London bedsit.

Independent on Sunday, 17 April 2005

Met chief issues fresh terror warning

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Britain’s most senior policeman has issued a new warning about the threat of al Qaeda terrorists targeting the UK. Sir Ian Blair is calling for new laws to tackle terrorist conspiracies and has asked for the introduction of ID cards to be given further consideration. His comments came in an interview broadcast on the Breakfast with Frost programme. And they follow the jailing of Kamel Bourgass for murdering a policeman and conspiring to cause a public nuisance after police unravelled an al Qaeda ricin poison plot.”

Sky News, 17 April 2005

Ian Blair did go on to say that Bourgass is “one individual, not the whole Muslim community” and that “99.9% of Muslims … are law-abiding people and we’ve got to support them in that and understand the difference”. He raised the question: “What is it that drives a tiny number of young men and women into extreme violence?”

This talk of extremists comprising a tiny minority of Muslims is the sort of wishy-washy liberalism that really irritates Robert Spencer: “99.9%? What was it, then, that made Al-Muhajiroun, a group that openly supported Al-Qaeda and spoke freely of wanting to see ‘the black flag of Islam’, that is, the flag of jihad, ‘flying over #10 Downing Street’, Britain’s largest Muslim group?”

Jihad Watch, 17 April 2005

Anyone who’s loopy enough to believe that the minuscule and marginal Al-Muhajiroun sect (which formally dissolved itself last year) is “Britain’s largest Muslim group” isn’t going to be taken too seriously, though. A bigger threat comes from those who make reference to Islamist extremists being a tiny minority and then use an almost certainly non-existent terrorist plot in order to call for repressive legislation that will impact on all Muslims.

For a response by civil rights organisation Liberty see BBC News, 17 April 2005

SWP: A pro-fascist party (say Jim Denham and David T)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

David T at Harry’s Place has discovered (with the assistance of Jim Denham of the AWL) that “the SWP has become a pro-fascist party” – on the grounds that it “has chosen to ally itself with bigots with slightly brown skins”. (No doubt these bigots also cook strange foods and fail to observe Germanic standards of hygiene.) David T explains: “allying itself with organisations – like the MAB – which are essentially theoconservative, if not theocratic, is pro-fascism”.

Bear in mind that Harry’s Place recently featured in a Tribune list of left-wing blogs. And I suppose in a sense that’s an accurate categorisation, because the views expressed there do represent a section of what passes for the left. Just as the pressure of the Cold War stampeded some socialists into a bloc with right-wing anti-communists, the present rise in anti-Muslim hysteria has resulted in certain self-styled leftists losing their bearings and embracing the ideas and arguments of the Islamophobic right.

Harry’s Place, 15 April 2005

Muslim backlash over war ruffles Blair’s Labour Party in election

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Britain’s Muslim vote and the backlash against the war in Iraq threaten to topple some Labour Party lawmakers, including the foreign secretary, in the May 5 national election. Inayat Bunglawala, the MCB’s media secretary, said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with the controversy swirling around the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, have angered and energized Britain’s 1.8 million Muslims.

Muslim News, 14 April 2005

See also “Livingstone urges British Muslims to vote Labour”, Islam Online, 14 April 2005

And “First hijab-wearing Muslim MP contesting election in Briton”, Kashnar News, 4 April 2004

Posted in UK

Incitement to religious hatred legislation to be reintroduced

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In the Labour Manifesto document to be launched this morning, it will say that the Labour government would reintroduce legislation to outlaw incitement to religious hatred, which was dropped last week from the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill, after opposition from the Conservative and Liberal Democrats, The Muslim News has learnt exclusively.

“This inclusion by the Labour Party is to placate the bitter disappointment of the Muslim community by the Government’s second failure to enact the legislation in the last Parliament, ” said Editor of The Muslim New, Ahmed J Versi.

The Prime Minister had assured the Muslim community in an exclusive interview with Editor of The Muslim New, Ahmed J Versi, last month, that he would not drop the incitement to religious part of the Bill as the Government had done in December 2001, when they dropped incitement section (which was part of the anti-terror legislation) after opposition from the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

However, the Government has put the blame squarely on the Conservatives and Lib Dems. In a letter to mosques yesterday, Home Secretary, Charle Clarke, said, “The reason we cannot pass this legislation is because both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives have blocked the legislation in Parliament. The Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives made it clear that they were not willing to see this measure become law. They bear full responsibility for blocking this part of the Bill.

Muslim News, 13 April 2005

The myth of Islamic tolerance

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Islam is a totalitarian ideology that aims to control the religious, social and political life of mankind in all its aspects; the life of its followers without qualification; and the life of those who follow the so-called tolerated religions to a degree that prevents their activities from getting in the way of Islam in any way. And I mean Islam, I do not accept some spurious distinction between Islam and ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ or ‘Islamic terrorism’.”

Alyssa A. Lappen reviews Robert Spencer’s book The Myth of Islamic Tolerance.

Front Page Magazine, 11 April 2005

Robert Spencer (you remember him – he’s the man who welcomes reformist Islam) is dead chuffed.

Jihad Watch, 11 April 2005

Reformation and Enlightenment

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Over at Harry’s Place, David T has discovered a Muslim he’s prepared to do business with. It’s Abdel Nour Brado, Secretary of the Islamic Commission of Spain, who wants to open a discussion among Muslims about the possibility of recognising same-sex marriages. Brado and his co-thinkers are the sort of “religious political progressives within Islam” to whom the left can relate, David T argues.

Unfortunately, by this definition progressives probably amount to somewhat less that 1% of the Muslim world. The remaining 99% who would reject same-sex marriages are all categorised by David T as “religious and political conservatives”, and no distinctions are made between them.

Thus the reformist moderate Yusuf al-Qaradawi is described by David T as a “Qutbist”, i.e. a supporter of the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb who was executed by Nasser in 1966. Qutb’s denunciation of the entire Muslim world as “jahiliyya” (pagan ignorance and barbarism), his call for armed struggle against every existing regime in the Islamic world and his condemnation of all those Muslims who decline to participate in this struggle as apostates have nothing in common with Qaradawi’s views whatsoever. Indeed, Qaradawi has accused Qutb of promoting an extremist ideology “which justified the takfir (excommunication) of (whole) societies … and the announcement of a destructive jihad against the whole of mankind”. Some Qutbist!

But this is the method adopted by “left” Islamophobes like those at Harry’s Place. They issue a formal declaration that Islam is not a monolithic bloc and proclaim their support for liberal, progressive Muslims – but they define this category so narrowly that only a minuscule minority of actually existing Muslims qualify, and they then dismiss the remainder as one reactionary, undifferentiated mass.