“The BBC and Channel 4 News regularly present the leaders of the Muslim Council of Britain, Muslim Association of Britain and Muslim Public Affairs Committee as the unelected spokesmen for the Muslim community without any mention of their politics, but would never dream of presenting Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, as a spokesman for the white community.”
Nick Cohen in the Evening Standard.
Dr Shaaz Mahboob of British Muslims for Secular Democracy writes to the London Evening Standard:
“The alleged Birmingham plot to behead a British Muslim soldier shows that the terrorist threat is greater than ever and that the terrorists, having failed to break the British public’s resolve on 7/7, are prepared to stoop to the lowest levels to impose their ideology upon us.
“Defeating such criminal elements will require the combined strength of the Government and the participation of Muslim communities across Britain. David Cameron’s analogy between far Right organisations and Muslim fundamentalists should have been at the centre of the debate long ago.
“Muslim leaders now need to acknowledge that their short-sightedness, as shown by the complacency of the Muslim Council of Britain over the Dispatches investigation into fundamentalist preaching, has aided extremism, which now seems to be targeting law-abiding Muslims.”
Evening Standard, 1 February 2007
Muslims for Secular Democracy is applauded in the recent much-publicised Policy Exchange publication Living Apart Together as one of the “secular Muslim organisations which seek to find points of connection with the non-Muslim majority”. It is easy to see why a Tory think-tank would look favourably on Dr Mahboob and his group.
One day after the nine terror arrests in the Birmingham area, the local communities have been assessing the impact of the police operation. Some claim the arrests and the vast amount of media coverage are likely to cause lasting damage to community relations.
See also Independent, 1 February 2007
And see also the piece by former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg, who points out that the sensationalist reporting of an alleged terror plot in Birmingham plays on popular prejudice – and puts any possibility of justice at risk.
Immigrants wishing to live in the small Canadian town of Herouxville, Quebec, must not stone women to death in public, burn them alive or throw acid on them, according to an extraordinary set of rules released by the local council.
The declaration, published on the town’s Web site, has deepened tensions in the predominantly French-speaking province over how tolerant Quebecers should be toward the customs and traditions of immigrants.
“We wish to inform these new arrivals that the way of life which they abandoned when they left their countries of origin cannot be recreated here,” said the declaration. “Therefore we consider it completely outside these norms to … kill women by stoning them in public, burning them alive, burning them with acid, circumcising them etc.”
Salam Elmenyawi, president of the Muslim Council of Montreal, said the declaration had “set the clock back for decades” as far as race relations were concerned. “I was shocked and insulted to see these kinds of false stereotypes and ignorance about Islam and our religion … in a public document written by people in authority who discriminate openly,” he told Reuters.
See also BBC News, 31 January 2007
Anti-fascist campaigners have criticised David Cameron’s attack on the Muslim community organisations, which he compared to the BNP. Weyman Bennett, Joint Secretary of UAF said:
“The BNP represent the real threat to community cohesion, with their racist, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic and homophobic politics. The BNP whips up racist hatred and division for electoral gain, leading to attacks on all minority communities in areas they target.
“It is deeply offensive to liken the BNP to minority community organisations, particularly to Muslim groups who are the prime target of the BNP’s racism. Muslim communities experience racism and discrimination at all levels of society. They are being vilified and targeted daily.
“Mainstream parties have a responsibility not to provide succour to fascists: today, the BNP welcomes David Cameron’s comments on its website as a ‘propaganda victory’ for them and takes the opportunity to spread further Islamophobic bile against Muslim communities. Attacking multiculturalism is pandering to the BNP.”
David Cameron yesterday endorsed a new Conservative report which condemned the “hardline” views of the Muslim Council of Britain and other Islamic groups. The Conservative leader argued that the Government must not bow to the “loudest voices” in the Muslim community when he attended the launch of the report by his national and international security policy group.
The report, Uniting the Country, singled out the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), widely seen as the mainstream voice of Muslims in the UK, for allowing “hardline members… to dominate policy and crowd out more moderate voices.”
The Tory policy group, chaired by Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, the former head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, also challenged the MCB’s approval of extremist clerics like Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who supports the death penalty for gays, as well as its failure to participate in Holocaust Memorial Day.
Mr Cameron said: “Policy makers should stop assuming that the loudest voices and the most organised elements within the Muslim community necessarily represent the Muslim population as a whole. There’s a danger that groups with agendas aimed at separation rather than integration are deferred to when they should be challenged.”
Daily Telegraph, 31 January 2007
In an accompanying editorial, the Telegraph applauds Cameron and the Tories for “laying bare the perils of multiculturalism”.
For a response by the MCB, see the Guardian, 31 January 2007
See also MCB news release, 30 January 2007
As for the fascists of the British National Party, they criticise Cameron’s attack on multiculturalism and Muslim organisations on the grounds that it falls short of “dismantling the structures of the multicultural State and restoring our lost ancestral rights and freedoms”. BNP news article, 30 January 2007
The BMI is deeply concerned with Conservative party’s and its leader David Cameron’s renewed attack on Muslim organisations and on Multiculturalism. It is their attack on Multiculturalism and freedom of religion that will divide Britain and weaken national cohesion. In stating that those who call for considering the religious duties of Muslims, as others, within the law are trying to divide the community, Mr Cameron is being both obtuse, ignorant and over simplifying the issue.
“Muslims, as is the case with their religious groups and minorities, have certain religious practices that should be upheld in the interests of respecting freedom of religion. These practises are not against the law. Mr Cameron failed, for example, to criticise the Jewish organisations over its imposition of Judaic laws and practices within their communities, while denying the exact same rights to Muslims by suggesting they divide Britain ,” stated Ihtisham Hibatullah of the BMI.
Mr Cameron has failed to correctly identify those individuals who preach hatred, violence and divisions within all communities while instead has chosen to attack mainstream Muslim organisations. His speech and announced polices have only one meaning: he is not keen to deal with the core issues or to build bridges with all communities, that is why he is not trustworthy not only by British Muslims but by all.
British Muslim Initiative press release, 30 January 2007
The point about Judaic laws and practices is well made. The Tory Party report Uniting the Country (pdf here), which Cameron launched, refers to the alleged danger posed by reformist Islamists who are “prepared to use democratic freedoms” in order to establish “a parallel system … of religiously derived law”. They are condemned for pursuing “goals which are destructive of a tolerant and liberal democracy”. Yet I don’t recall the Tory Party denouncing the Jewish community as a threat to western liberal values when the United Synagogue successfully lobbied for an Eruv in Golders Green. If they had, they would have been accused, quite rightly, of pandering to anti-semitism.
“The alliance of Islamists and Leninists that makes up the Respect coalition is not a dalliance born of opportunism. It reflects an extraordinary process in which part of the left has ended up arguing for what by any objective standards are reactionary positions: promotion of religious obscurantism in place of secularism; segregation of the sexes at public events; abridgement of free speech in deference to the sensibilities of those who claim themselves victims of the phantasm of ‘Islamophobia’….”
Oliver Kamm enthusiastically endorses Nick Cohen’s thesis.
The Conservatives will today accuse Islamic groups including the high-profile, mainstream Muslim Council of Britain of promoting separation and ignoring the wishes of the people they represent.
A report by the party’s policy group on national and international security will tear into the MCB as part of a generalised attack on the concept of multiculturalism, which it says has divided people rather than simply respecting their differences. The report will underline comments made by the party’s leader, David Cameron, who warned yesterday that separatist Muslims who promote sharia law and demand special treatment for their faith are the “mirror image” of the British National party.
In an attack on the MCB – which was until recently feted by government ministers – the report says: “Its hardline members tend to dominate policy and crowd out more moderate and varied voices. As a result the MCB’s claim to ‘foster good community relations and work for the good of society as a whole’ is hard to reconcile with some of the positions it has taken.”
Last night Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, the former diplomat who chairs the policy commission, said multiculturalism “has tended on the whole to emphasise differences between us rather than actually creating a framework in which difference flourishes”.
While stressing that the group was not singling out Muslims, she did criticise the MCB’s approach. “We would like it to say that they actually stand specifically and explicitly for integration,” she told BBC2’s Newsnight. But it “does not in our view take a sufficiently strong stand against that kind of view”. She attacked the MCB’s supportive references to the conservative Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
But on the same programme, Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary of the MCB, said Mr Qaradawi had spoken out against extremism. “In the report, in all its mentions of the Muslim Council of Britain, there’s no mention of any of the positive work we’ve done,” he said. “The MCB is proud to stand for integration. We want British Muslims to play their full role in all aspects of British society, we want obstacles to be removed.”
For the MCB’s defence of multiculturalism see (pdf) here.
Islam could soon be the dominant force in a Europe which, in the name of political correctness, has abdicated the battle for cultural and religious control, Prof. Bernard Lewis, the world-renowned Middle Eastern and Islamic scholar, said on Sunday.
The Muslims “seem to be about to take over Europe,” Lewis said at a special briefing with the editorial staff of The Jerusalem Post. Asked what this meant for the continent’s Jews, he responded, “The outlook for the Jewish communities of Europe is dim.”
Soon, he warned, the only pertinent question regarding Europe’s future would be, “Will it be an Islamized Europe or Europeanized Islam?” The growing sway of Islam in Europe was of particular concern given the rising support within the Islamic world for extremist and terrorist movements, said Lewis.
Lewis, whose numerous books include the recent What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, would set no timetable for this drastic shift in Europe, instead focusing on the process, which he said would be assisted by “immigration and democracy.” Instead of fighting the threat, he elaborated, Europeans had given up.
“Europeans are losing their own loyalties and their own self-confidence,” he said. “They have no respect for their own culture.” Europeans had “surrendered” on every issue with regard to Islam in a mood of “self-abasement,” “political correctness” and “multi-culturalism,” said Lewis, who was born in London to middle-class Jewish parents but has long lived in the United States.
Jerusalem Post, 29 January 2007
Over at Jihad Watch, raving Islamophobe Robert Spencer observes that the Jerusalem Post report shows that “my areas of agreement with Lewis are much larger than any areas of disagreement I may have with him”.