A post-programme plug for Martin Bright’s Channel 4 “documentary” from the equally appalling Nick Cohen.
Sweep aside stereotypes and ask what really matters
“Islam. When you hear that word, what immediately comes to your mind? A masked terrorist? Osama bin Laden? Fanatical young men with explosives strapped round their waists? These are certainly the images that leap from the newspapers and the television screens. The notion that Islam had a high culture when Britain was living in dark times seems to be off our radar screens. Islam is a religion with great richness at its heart. Terrorists and suicide bombers have hogged the headlines, but they no more represent Islam than football ‘casuals’ represent the clubs they claim to support. Yet in today’s global media village, Islam is almost exclusively associated in the western public mind with lethal fanaticism.”
Ron Ferguson on the exhibition of Islamic art which has opened at the Royal Museum in Edinburgh.
Al Muhajiroun banned
Two UK-based Islamist groups are to become the first to be banned under laws outlawing the glorification of terrorism, the home secretary has said. John Reid said he was taking action against Al-Ghurabaa and the Saved Sect. Under an order put down in Parliament, it will be an offence to belong to the groups, encourage support for them or wear clothes suggesting support. Mr Reid said the move sent a signal that the UK would not tolerate people who supported terrorism. The groups are both thought to be offshoots of Al Muhajiroun, which was founded by controversial cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed.
Quite what will be accomplished by banning the few dozen idiots who make up the membership of these groups is difficult to see. And an offence of “wearing clothes suggesting support” sounds open to abuse to say the least. However, it looks as though press reports that Hizb ut-Tahrir would be illegalised were inaccurate – for now. Asked about Hizb, a Home Office spokesman said: “This does remain a group about which we have real concerns and we are keeping the situation under review.”
For Inayat Bunglawala’s comments, see Islam Online, 18 July 2006
‘Apocalyptic Muslim Jew-hatred’
“There are short-term reasons behind the attacks on Israel by Hezbollah and Hamas. But underlying all the geo-strategy is a solid foundation of fanatical Jew-hatred, dating back to the founding of Islam. There is literally nothing Israel or Jews can do to appease those who seek to annihilate them…. Ultimately, this chronic, annihilationist jihad being waged against Israel by both Hizbollah and Hamas, is driven by orthodox Islamic theology, and eschatology.”
No, not Melanie Phillips. It’s Andrew G. Bostom, in the American Thinker, 17 July 2006
Speccy backs Bright
“Governments come and go, but there still is such a thing as the British official mind. From our colonial days comes a Foreign Office belief that in any tricky situation, especially one involving religion and politics, one must make friends with the extremists and find, like needles in a haystack, the ‘moderates’ in their midst. This was the strategy that led us to encourage the Arab Higher Committee in pre-war Palestine, under the Mufti of Jerusalem, the Nazi-supporting Haj Amin al-Husseini, to ‘deliver’ Muslim opinion. The concept achieved apotheosis in the approach towards terrorism in Northern Ireland, which systematically broke all the genuine moderates Terence O’Neill, Brian Faulkner, David Trimble and the SDLP and advanced Sinn Fein on the grounds that it held ‘the key to peace’. Now the two biggest parties in Northern Ireland are Sinn Fein and the Paisleyites, so extremism is seen to pay off and the Province’s sectarian divisions are as a great as they have ever been.
“Sorry to praise the New Statesman in these pages, but its political editor, Martin Bright, has just produced an excellent pamphlet for Policy Exchange, the think-tank of which I am chairman, called ‘When progressives treat with reactionaries’. It is about how the British government has sought to deal with Muslims in this country (and abroad) by flirting with Islamists rather than helping empower the unfanatical. The pamphlet reprints a dozen leaked official documents which promote the oxymoron, expressed in one of them, of ‘moderate Islamist tendencies’. The Foreign Office has as its adviser a young man called Mockbul Ali, who wrote, after September 11, about how the ‘non-white world has been terrorised in the name of freedom’. He is revealed advising the Foreign Office to support the admission into this country of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the religious leader who supports Taleban ‘jihad’ against British troops, the execution of homosexuals and female genital mutilation. He also wanted Hossain Sayeedi, a Bangladeshi MP, let in. Sayeedi thinks our troops deserve to die for opposing the Taleban and has compared Hindus in his own country to excrement.”
Charles Moore in the Spectator, 15 July 2006
Florida: pastor denounces mosque plan
Plans to build a mosque in a predominantly black neighborhood in Pompano Beach, Fla., have led to angry protests from some local ministers. Islam is a “dangerous, evil” religion “that preaches hatred and killing,” said the Rev. O’Neal Dozier, pastor of the 2,400-member Worldwide Christian Center, which is leading the opposition. “We live in a post-9/11 world, and the people who blew up our buildings that day were Muslims.”
Although Mr. Dozier said he has received “hundreds of phone calls, e-mails and faxes” from people all over the country who share his concerns, he does not have the support of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. William L. Lawson III, president of the North Broward NAACP, told city commissioners last week: “We cannot allow religious intolerance.”
Government to carry out threat to ban Hizb?
A number of radical Muslim groups are to be proscribed despite concern that this will drive them underground where they cannot be monitored. As part of the Prime Minister’s 12-point plan to tackle terrorism, announced after the London bombings on 7 July last year, the government is to unveil a list of organisations it wants to ban under the Terrorism Act 2006. The list is expected to include Hizb ut-Tahrir.
Shortly after the 7/7 bombings, Tony Blair signalled his intention to proscribe this group. But such a move will prove highly controversial. Hizb ut-Tahrir claims to oppose violence and it has condemned the 7/7 bombings, as well as the atrocities in Madrid and Bali. The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) has questioned the merits of banning the group, as have human rights lawyers. “The Prime Minister correctly said fighting terrorism is an ideological battle,” said Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty. “How are we to fight the war of ideas if non-violent political groups are driven underground?”
Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, said: “We have major differences with Hizb ut-Tahrir, in particular its non-participation in the democratic process. Having said that, we think banning it is entirely wrong. It is non-violent.”
‘I am no Islamophobe’ claims Bright
Martin Bright complains: “It seems I have been labelled an Islamophobe by the Muslim Council of Britain. This stock response to any criticism of MCB leadership is becoming as tiresome as Zionist cries of anti-Semitism when the state of Israel is put under any kind of scrutiny.”
As we have already pointed out, Bright told a FOSIS conference last year that he had no problem describing himself as an Islamophobe. Now he gets all indignant when the MCB applies that term to him.
For right-wing support for Bright’s programme, see the Daily Ablution and Jihad Watch.
The Foreign Office and radical Islam
Sunny Hundal gives another boost to Martin Bright’s Channel 4 programme.
Pickled Politics, 14 July 2006
For the MCB’s reply to to Bright – “Martin Bright is part of a circle of pernicious Islamophobic commentators that includes Nick Cohen, Michael Gove, John Ware and Melanie Phillips, among others, who have tried to use the 7/7 atrocities as an opportunity to advance their anti-Muslim agenda” – see here.
The Islamization of Europe’s cities
“We have seen videos on TV of Muslim Jihadis beheading infidel hostages. Less attention has been paid to the fact that Muslims are beheading entire nation states. Although this is happening in slow motion, it is no less dramatic. Historically, the major cities have constituted a country’s ‘head’, the seat of most of its political institutions and the largest concentration of its cultural brainpower. What happens when this ‘head’ is cut off from the rest of the body?
“In many countries across Western Europe, Muslim immigrants tend to settle in major cities, with the native population retreating to minor cities or into the countryside. Previously, Europeans or non-Europeans could travel between countries and visit new cities, each with its own, distinctive character and peculiarities. Soon, you will travel from London to Paris, Amsterdam or Stockholm and find that you have left one city dominated by burkas and sharia to find… yet another city dominated by burkas and sharia.”