An all-purpose witch-hunting article which takes in such varied organisations and individuals as Hizb ut-Tahrir, Islamic Awakening, Mohammad al-Masari and Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
Daily Telegraph, 29 August 2005
Well, they’re all Islamists aren’t they? What’s the difference?
Tony Blair’s reliance on faith-based groups in fighting extremism is a “very bad mistake”, Salman Rushdie has said.
The prime minister’s belief that “more religion is going to solve the problem” was “seriously out of step with the country”, the novelist told BBC News. He criticised support for faith-based schools and said UK Islamic groups were failing to represent most Muslims.
The Muslim Council of Britain said Mr Rushdie had “lost his faith” and was “enraged” that most UK Muslims had not. MCB spokesman Inayat Bunglawala told BBC News: “Salman Rushdie’s call amounts to an appeal to Muslims to apostasise from their faith. He has been doing so at regular intervals since The Satanic Verses was published and has miserably failed every time.”
Under the headline “suicide bombs are a duty, says Islamic scholar”, Anthony Barnett claims that Yusuf al-Qaradawi “has said it is a duty of Muslims in Iraq to become suicide bombers”.
The report is taken from the Middle East Media Research Institute, which is of course notorious for producing selective translations designed to discredit supporters of the Palestinian cause. If you watch the video on MEMRI TV #822 you’ll see that it’s been carefully edited to bring out the points that serve MEMRI’s political agenda.
However, even judging by MEMRI’s selected extracts, it is clear that Qaradawi was responding to an earlier speaker who had, he noted, “stressed the legitimacy of defense, saying it is a legitimate right in Palestine and Iraq. I think that saying it is a legitimate right is not enough, because a right is something that can be relinquished. This is a duty. All scholars say that defending an occupied homeland is an individual duty applying to every Muslim”. So Qaradawi was clearly referring to the general duty to resist an occupying power, not to suicide bombings as such.
Qaradawi also reiterated his frequently stated view that these bombings are not in fact suicide, because the bomber “does not want to commit suicide, but rather to cause great damage to the enemy, and this is the only method he can use to cause such damage. Since this method did not exist in the past, we cannot find rulings about it in the ancient jurisprudence”. But that is rather different from arguing that everyone resisting Israeli and US occupation forces has a duty to become a suicide bomber.
Anthony Barnett’s confusion is due to the fact that MEMRI’s version of Qaradawi’s speech consists of three separate sections spliced together. There is an obvious splice after the section that ends “I am amazed by what Dr. Muhammad Rafat ‘Othman said” and before the next one, beginning “This has nothing to do with suicide”. There is no indication of this in MEMRI’s transcript of Qaradawi’s speech, which does not use ellipses, thus obscuring the editing that has taken place.
The (presumably intentional) result of this is to suggest that when Q was referring to resistance he was equating this with suicide bombing. Hence the Observer‘s headline stating that Q claimed suicide bombing was a duty.
However, MEMRI is at least prepared to admit that Qaradawi’s speech was delivered at a conference of religious scholars called to oppose terrorism – which is more than the Observer is prepared to do. (For a report of the conference, see Islam Online, 23 August 2005.)
Brett Lock is dead chuffed that the liberal press has uncritically reproduced MEMRI’s propaganda: “Well, this is progress! Finally The Guardian [sic – wrong paper, Brett] is reporting that Dr Qaradawi is indeed a supporter of suicide bombers.” (See Lock & Load blog, 28 August 2005.) But this is par for the course for Brett and his chums in Outrage!, who adopt material provided by right-wing Isamophobic bigots without a moment’s hesitation. And why not? They have so much in common.
“No wonder Islamic leaders felt uncomfortable about Panorama. Presenter John Ware dared to challenge and confront them.” Andrew Anthony gives a thumbs up to Panorama’s witch-hunt of the MCB.
“What he overlooks, along with many others who use the term Islamo-fascism, is how little relevance these mass political movements and their capture of the state have to Islamist terrorism – let alone the enormous exaggeration required to liken the threat of a few hundred potential terrorists in the UK with a sustained world war in which hundreds of thousands of Britons died fighting a hugely powerful, highly organised nation state. The real beauty of the Nazi analogy is that it provides a valuable political opportunity to define yourself and ensure a damaging definition of your opponent. Positioning in an argument is key, and the Islamo-fascism analogy enables the appeasement slur to be used against any ‘who try to explain jihadist violence’, as Cameron put it.”
Madeline Bunting responds to would-be Tory leader David Cameron.
Staff at a respected Islamic bookshop in central London have been the victims of an intensive campaign of abusive phone calls and personal threats after it was pictured in an article accusing London bookshops of selling pamphlets urging Muslims to wage holy war.
The shop Dar Al Taqwa, near Baker Street, has been run as a family business for more than 20 years. It’s one of the oldest and biggest Islamic bookshops in London and sells books on the Qur’an, Arabic, travel and academic books on Islam. But it became the target of an intense hate campaign after the Evening Standard carried an article claiming a journalist had bought two pamphlets on jihad from the bookshop that sanctioned the killing of women, old men and children.
The same article showed pictures of three books and videos, which it alleged advocate terrorism, suggesting that they were also for sale from bookshops like Dar Al Taqwa. But Dar Al Taqwa has never sold any of this material.
Ammie El-Atar, whose father owns the bookshop, said: ‘We have never stocked [the books pictured]. These stories are a gross misrepresentation and simply not true. ‘We’ve had constant abuse and threats since the stories appeared with people threatening to kill us and firebomb the shop.’
The Londoner, September 2005
“… the central claims of The Observer and Panorama remain unchallenged: that the moderate credentials of the leaders of Britain’s most powerful Muslim lobby group are open to question; that the MCB grew out of sectarian Islamist politics of south Asia and that it fails to control its extremist affiliates”.
Martin Bright in the Observer, 28 August 2005
Salman Rushdie has described the leadership of the British Muslim community a joke and warned that Islam is backsliding into history. He added: “At the moment Islam is going backwards very fast. It is no good to say that Islam is a religion of peace, I am sure it is, but at the moment what we see is war.”
The Foreign Office’s top official warned Downing Street that the Iraq war was fuelling Muslim extremism in Britain a year before the 7 July bombings, The Observer has revealed. Despite repeated denials by Number 10 that the war made Britain a target for terrorists, a letter from Michael Jay, the Foreign Office permanent under-secretary, to the cabinet secretary, Sir Andrew Turnbull makes the connection clear. The letter, dated 18 May 2004, says British foreign policy was a “recurring theme” in the Muslim community, “especially in the context of the Middle East peace process and Iraq”.
“On Thursday July 28th, the Evening Standard published an article entitled ‘Terror and hatred for sale in the heart of capital’. In the article, Standard writer Robert Mendick told of how an Islamic bookshop called Dar Al Taqwa sold books and DVDs ‘advocating terrorism’ and ‘urging Muslims to wage a holy war by arming themselves with bombs and guns’. They printed a picture of the shop, the address of the shop and even the shop’s phone number. You can probably guess what happened next. The bookshop employees were immediately subject to a rigorous campaign of abusive phone calls and personal threats.
“Lawyers for the El-Atar family, backed by the Mayor of London, are working to clear the family’s name and are insisting on a public apology and an article of equal length setting the record straight from the Evening Standard. Their legal advisor said: ‘Everyone who works at Dar Al Taqwa is completely disgusted by and opposed to acts of terrorism, and having alleged the contrary in its article, the paper should have the decency and integrity to publicly admit that it has gone too far’.”