The report by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, The British Media and Muslim Representation: The Ideology of Demonisation, is now available to download.
IHRC press release, 16 February 2007
See also Mathaba, 16 February 2007
This scapegoating is rolling back the gains of anti-racism
Anti-terror stunts and a barrage of propaganda are demonising Muslims and making Islamophobia the acceptable face of racism, argues Martin Jacques.
‘The race is on’ – to demonise mainstream Muslim organisations
Dean Godson of the Tory think-tank Policy Exchange (see here) applauds the government’s sidelining of the MCB and urges the Tory leadership to reject such “Islamist front groups ” and embrace “the more progressive elements in British Islam”.
Godson doesn’t give details as to who exactly qualifies for inclusion in the latter category – although, predictably, he does refer to “the genuinely moderate Sufi Muslim Council”. He must be the only person left who still attaches any credibility to the SMC. Judging by Shahid Malik’s recent Times article – “the lack of any grassroots structure and its sudden emergence has left many within the Muslim community deeply suspicious” – even the government has now woken up to the fact that Haras Rafiq’s fraudulent organisation is basically a waste of space.
Godson writes: “By endorsing Dame Pauline Neville-Jones’s authoritative Conservative Party report on national cohesion, Mr Cameron has made clear what he thinks of the Islamist establishment. It does not reflect the first instincts of the MCB-friendly faction led by Dominic Grieve, the Shadow Attorney General, or the party vice-chairman, Sayeeda Warsi….
“Perhaps the boldest aspect of the report is its rejection of ‘victim culture’ – blaming Britain and the West for the ills of the Muslim community. Thus, Dame Pauline states that the ‘inferior status’ of Muslim women is at least as much of a stumbling block to upward mobility as ‘Islamophobia’. Even after making this contentious claim, the roof hasn’t fallen in on her head.
“There is a vast opportunity here for Mr Cameron to speak up on behalf of the more progressive elements in British Islam and to marginalise the loudmouths. If he does so, he will be pushing at an open door. Gordon Brown’s people know it as well. The race is on.”
New attack on civil liberties
New attack on civil liberties: Lord Chancellor calls for more rights to go in the name of “fighting terror”
By Louise Nousratpour
Morning Star, 15 February 2007
LEFT MPs condemned fresh government attacks on civil liberties on Wednesday after Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer called for allowing criminal suspects to be questioned even after charges have been brought against them.
Critics warned that ministers were looking for a “fail-safe” plan in case fresh attempts to increase the period under which suspects can be held to 90 days failed again in Parliament.
Lord Falconer backed measures to allow police to question suspects after they have been formally charged as a “very sensible thing to do.” And he suggested that it should not be limited to terror suspects alone.
At present, police officers are not allowed to continue asking suspects about a case once charges have been made.
Speaking after a keynote speech at a Royal United Services Institute conference on politics and terrorism, Lord Falconer hinted that forthcoming terror laws will include further encroachments on civil liberties.
Campaigners and MPs warned that the proposal was designed to ensure that, if Home Secretary John Reid’s renewed attempt to extend the maximum detention period is defeated, there will be other measures to keep suspects locked up.
An attempt to increase the maximum period from 14 to 90 days led to new Labour’s defeat in the Commons in November 2005 and resulted in a 28-days compromise being reached.
Left MP Jeremy Corbyn called the proposal “a fail-safe policy in the event of Parliament rejecting the 90-day detention without trial to ensure that the government has some other draconian measure to fall back on.”
He accused the government and Lord Falconer of “trying to deny basic natural justice and to use the unfortunate development of anti-terror legislation to make them part of normal English law.
“This flies in the face of natural law and the European convention on human rights,” warned Mr Corbyn.
Dutch far right party tries to block appointment of Muslims to Cabinet
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands: A far-right Dutch political party objected Thursday to the appointment of two Muslims to the Cabinet because they have dual nationalities.
Ahmed Aboutaleb and Nebahat Albayrak were named to become the junior ministers for social affairs and integration respectively in the new centrist Cabinet being formed by Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende. They would be the first Dutch Cabinet members who are Muslim.
An opposition member of parliament for the nationalist Freedom Party said the two should be barred because they have second nationalities – Aboutaleb also holds Moroccan citizenship, and Albayrak Turkish. They “remain the servant of two different countries and that can lead to conflicting interests, and that’s why it’s necessary to oppose this,” Sietse Fritsma said.
His remarks were interrupted by an uproar of protest from lawmakers across the political spectrum until he was cut off by the gavel of the parliamentary chairwoman, Gerdi Verbeet.
Verbeet adjourned the session, and when it reconvened she said Fritsma had withdrawn his motion to block their appointment because it conflicted with the Dutch Constitution prohibiting discrimination, which he had sworn to uphold.
Geert Wilders, the leader of the Freedom Party, told NOS television later that Verbeet, a Labor Party member, was misusing her position to support the two designated Cabinet members, who belong to the same party. “It’s unworthy, not objective and very dangerous,” he said.
Press Association, 15 February 2007
See also Expatica, 15 February 2007
Tory twits attack Qaradawi
Yes, it’s another denunciation of the Mayor of London for engaging with leading Muslim scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi. This one is featured in an “attack ad” on the 18 Doughty Street website (watch it here). Although the site is funded by Jeffrey Archer’s former mayoral campaign manager and almost exclusively involves a group of former or present Conservative Party candidates and employees, they pretend that they’re anti-establishment rebels who will “will endeavour to always take the working man’s side and see the Nation through his eyes” (for details see here). To that end, this bunch of upper-class Tory twits have hired some actor with a mockney accent to do an embarrassing voice-over to their ad. So much for their much-hyped path-breaking contribution to political campaigning in the UK. Back to the drawing board chaps, I would suggest.
As for 18 Doughty Street’s repetition of the discredited story, which derives from the equally discredited Middle East Media Research Institute, that Qaradawi “has described suicide bombings as a duty”, see here and here.
BBC Leicester gives platform to fascist
The fascist British National Party boasts: “BNP Head of Publicity and co-defendant in the famous Free Speech Trial, Mark Collett was last week invited to participate in a studio debate at BBC Radio Leicester about multiculturalism in the city. Mark was born and went to school in Leicester so is well acquainted with life there. The most striking aspect of the debate was that Muslims, and opposition MPs sat in the same studio with Mark giving a lie to the ‘No Platform for the BNP’ stance.”
BNP news article, 13 February 2007
It is of course absolute disgrace that Collett should be given a platform by a publicly funded radio station. This is the man who called asylum seekers “cockroaches” and urged cheering BNP supporters to “show ethnics the door in 2004”. A couple of years earlier he stated his admiration for Nazi Germany:
“National Socialism was the best solution for German people in the 1930s…. When people say ‘Do you take any inspiration from that?’, I mean, I honestly can’t understand how a man who’s seen the inner city hell of Britain today can’t look back on that era with a certain nostalgia and think, yeah, those people marching through the streets and all those happy people out in the streets, you know, saluting and everything, was a bad thing … would you prefer your kid growing up in Oldham and Burnley or 1930s Germany?”
The BBC’s own report illustrates how the racist propaganda of the fascists is given legitimacy by the anti-Muslim comments of mainstream politicians, with Collett echoing Jack Straw’s comments on the niqab and David Cameron’s warnings about the threat of Sharia law: “The BNP’s Mark Collett condemned the wearing of the veil by some islamic women, and said that wearing a full veil was ‘a powerful statement against integration’. He also claimed a high proportion of young Muslims want Sharia law in the UK.”
UAF conference this Saturday
Unite Against Fascism National Conference
17 February 2007 9.30am-5pm
TUC Conference Centre, Great Russell Street, London WC1
Nearest tube: Tottenham Court Road
The British National Party (BNP) is receiving the highest levels of support for a fascist party in British history. In recent years its vote has increased in a context of rising racism, Islamophobia and attacks on multiculturalism. At the 2006 local elections it polled over 238,000 votes compared to 3,000 votes in 2000, and now has a record 49 local councillors.
The BNP is a fascist organisation. As history shows, fascism stands for the total annihilation of whole communities, freedoms and democratic rights.
In 2007 the BNP will be targeting the local elections in England and Wales and elections to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly.
Active campaigning can stop the BNP. In the 1930s the Jewish and Irish communities, trade unions and others defeated the fascist Blackshirts at Cable Street, and in the 1970s the National Front was defeated by mass anti-Nazi campaigns. More recently the BNP was defeated in Millwall and Oldham. Learning lessons from these campaigns is crucial.
Unite Against Fascism is organising this national conference to look at the impact of increasing BNP support, to discuss strategies that have been successful in stopping the BNP and to bring together the broad opposition that is needed to halt the rise of fascism including from trade unions, Muslim, Jewish and other faith communities, black, Asian, lesbian, gay and disabled communities and students.
Further details on UAF website.
Clareification controversy
We’ve been remiss in not posting on the Clare College controversy, involving the publication of anti-religious caricatures – including one of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons – in the student magazine Clareification.
In a typically stupid open letter to Clare College, Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society argues that anti-Muslim caricatures can’t be racist because, don’t you see, Muslims are not a race: “We would like to remind all concerned that satirising religion – even if that religion is Islam – is not racism, as this episode has been dubbed. Religion and race have very different characteristics.”
So, according to Sanderson’s warped reasoning, the most vicious Islamophobic propaganda produced by the BNP can’t possibly be racist because it is directed against adherents of a religion – which is, of course, precisely the argument that the fascists themselves use.
See local press coverage here and national coverage here. A correspondent points out that the editor of the magazine is “in hiding without a single threat having being made”.
For a comment on the Clareification controversy, which concedes that the magazine contained “the most vile and unambiguous Islamophobia”, see Constitutional Lore, 13 February 2007
Bedworth by-election result
The BNP came second in a council by-election in Bedworth, Warwickshire, last week. This disturbing result demonstrates how the climate of racism and anti-Muslim hysteria is playing into the hands of the Nazis.
Labour held on to its seat in Bede ward on Thursday of last week, polling 658 votes, but the BNP’s Alwyn Deacon, a pub landlord from Nuneaton, took 546 votes. The Tory vote fell to 301, less than two fifths of its previous vote in the ward.
In recent council elections voters in Bede have been faced with a choice of just Labour or Tory candidates. The by-election saw a wider field of candidates, with the Liberal Democrats standing and winning 119 votes.
The efforts of anti-fascists to hold back the BNP were not helped by a leaflet put out locally by the Searchlight organisation. These echoed Tory leader David Cameron’s recent remarks, equating the BNP to “Islamic extremism”.