Polly Curtis on Tariq Ramadan: “… in July, days after the attacks on London, the Sun newspaper ran a front page story about him that read: ‘Banned in the US for links with terrorists. Banned in France for links with terrorists. Welcomed to Britain days after the al-Qaida attacks’…. Ramadan says there is a political campaign against him. ‘What is said about me today is exactly what was said about the Jews in the 30s and 40s. About double loyalty, saying I am not loyal to either side’.”
New protest against Iran executions & torture
“Little Britain star Matt Lucas, actor Simon Callow and singer Boy George are supporting the axm and OutRage! ‘Homophobia Kills’ protest against the recent homophobic executions in Iran…. Endorsing the protest, Matt Lucas said: ‘Recently in Iran two teenagers were executed for being gay’.”
Fascists and Ramadan
“It is that time of year again when public bodies trip over themselves in a mad dash to be as Islam-friendly as possible in ways which push consideration of the indigenous population to one side.” The British National Party greets the beginning of Ramadan.
‘Multiculturalism costs lives’
“Multiculturalism is a divisive political doctrine that creates enormous costs, foments racial hatred, and may even have been complicit in cultivating the homegrown suicide bombers of July 7, according to a new report from the independent think-tank Civitas.”
National Secular Society news report, 3 October 2005
And what is this mild-sounding organisation Civitas that the NSS cites so approvingly? Well, actually, it’s a hard right anti-migrant outfit that numbers Anthony (“Islam really does want to conquer the world”) Browne among its leading contributors.
Civitas explains that the message of the report, The Poverty of Multiculturalism by Patrick West, is that “hard” multiculturalism has led “some Western intellectuals, who regard themselves as progressive, into the perverse position of defending cultures that condone the killing of homosexuals and the virtual enslavement of women, whilst denigrating the culture of the free societies of the West, inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment”.
Civitas provides the following quote from Mr West: “State-sponsored multiculturalism has led to cities such as Bradford, Burnley and Oldham fissuring along sectarian lines, and to heightening racial tensions between whites and Asians – with white people feeling ‘the other lot’ are getting favourable treatment from the local council…. The rise of the BNP in the north … is the result of white people seeing themselves discriminated against by local authorities.”
Where does terrorism start?
“It is interesting that while medieval Europe strove to dissociate the great achievements of the flourishing Islamic civilisation from the religion of Islam, today’s West insists on referring all Muslims’ ills, from democratic failure to economic decadence, to the Islam religion.
“The terrorist plague is no exception. Its agents, we are told, are the product of an ‘evil ideology which must be uprooted’. Even so, this is only half of the truth. The questions we can not avoid are: why are would-be bombers driven towards this evil theology and not any other, after all it is hardly the only one on offer within the intensely diverse intellectual and political Islamic map? What propels them to deviate from the mainstream body of Muslims and embrace a perverse interpretation that justifies the slaughter of innocent civilians? What triggers this radical ideology’s shift from the abstract realm of ideas to the concrete scenes of explosives, severed limbs and charred bodies?
“If we were Hegelians we would accept Blair and Bush’s explanations of historical phenomena by reference to ideology. I, however, prefer to do as Marx did and turn history from its head back on its feet. History is the generator of ideology not vice versa. Rather than explain, ideology is itself in need of explaining.”
Soumaya Ghannoushi writes: Aljazeera, 25 September 2005
From Private Eye’s ‘Street of Shame’ column
The détente following the July bombings between the office of the Mayor of London and his arch enemy, the Evening Standard, was bound to be shortlived.
After the Standard wrongly accused a Muslim bookshop-owner of peddling hatred, Ken’s team used the September issue of The Londoner freesheet to take the Standard to ask, demanding an apology and an article to set the matter straight.
Staff at the Dar Al Taqwa bookshop, near Baker Street, have received threatening and abusive phone calls ever since the Standard published its address and phone number in its “Terror and hatred for sale in central London” article on 28 July.
Dar Al Taqwa, owned by Samir El-Attar, has sold books on the Qur’an, Arabic and travel to Londoners for more than 20 years, but none of the extremist books or videos pictured next to a photo of the shop has ever been sold on the premises. Mr El-Attar even points out that one of the items pictured was actually a DVD of an anti-terrorism lecture by Dr Zakir Naik.
The Standard has so far refused to run an apology, but it did print a clarification that “the videos and books pictured with the article” had never been on sale at Dar Al Taqwa.
Private Eye, 30 September 2005
(For earlier coverage see here, here and here.)
Recent attacks on Ahmad Thomson in the Tory press (see for example here) are perhaps not unconnected with the fact that he has represented Dar Al Taqwa in its dispute with the Standard (see here).
New MCB complaint over Panorama
The Muslim Council of Britain says it is to write to the BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit about an edition of the current affairs programme Panorama. The announcement came after the editor of Panorama rejected an MCB objection that the programme was “deeply unfair”.
Panorama had quoted one of its founders as saying the body was “in denial” about extreme views among its members. The MCB said it was at the “forefront” of criticising extremism and it was “not satisfied” with the response. In its original complaint, the MCB claimed editors “deliberately garbled” interviews with Muslims in the programme.
Panorama rejects MCB complaint over Panorama programme
The editor of BBC current affairs show Panorama has rejected complaints from the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) who said a programme was “deeply unfair”.
The MCB complained after Panorama quoted one of its founders as saying the body was “in denial” about extreme views that prevail among its members. The group claimed editors “deliberately garbled” interviews with Muslims.
But Panorama editor Mike Robinson has now said it was an “unwarranted and wildly inaccurate attack” on the show. “I have found there to be no truth in your claims that this programme was dishonestly presented, maliciously motivated or Islamophobic,” he wrote to the MCB.
No doubt the programme’s reporter John Ware was equally innocent of bias when he headed an earlier Panorama Special in 2003, on asylum seekers, which the then home secretary David Blunkett denounced for “pursuing a Powellite anti-immigration agenda”. See here.
Or to go back earlier still, in 1987 Panorama was responsible for a programme entitled “Brent Schools – Hard Left Rules”. As Julian Petley recounts, in the recently published book Culture Wars: “This was introduced by John Ware who once, perhaps significantly, worked for the Sun…. it’s worth noting that this particular edition of Panorama provoked an unusually large number of complaints.”
Petley writes of Ware’s interview with Brent council leader Merle Amory that “quite clearly, the sole purpose behind Ware’s interviewing techniques was to get Amory to make an incriminating remark about Trotskyist penetration of Labour”. Amory and other councillors “were never allowed freely to put their own or the council’s point of view, unlike those critical of the council’s policies – their function in the programme was simply to stand at the receiving end of criticisms levelled by their opponents and reinforced not only by Ware himself but by the very manner in which they were actually interviewed.”
I imagine Iqbal Sacranie knows exactly how they must have felt.
Keith Shilson reinstated
Good news – following a disciplinary hearing this morning, Middlesex University authorities have reportedly lifted the suspension of students union president Keith Shilson, imposed as a result of his invitation to Hizb ut-Tahrir to participate in a “Question Time” on campus. The authorities are, however, insisting on upholding their ban on HT.
See Polly Curtis in the Guardian, 30 September 2005
Remaking multiculturalism after 7/7
Tariq Modood, author of Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain, defends multiculturalism.