The rise of the democratic police state

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Iqra Learning Centre“On 15 July, Blair’s Britain of the future was glimpsed when the police raided the Iqra Learning Centre and bookshop near Leeds. The Iqra Trust is a well-known charity that promotes Islam worldwide as ‘a peaceful religion which covers every walk of life’. The police smashed down the door, wrecked the shop and took away anti-war literature which they described as ‘anti-western’.

“Among this was, reportedly, a DVD of George Galloway addressing the US Senate and a New Statesman article of mine illustrated by a much-published photograph of a Palestinian man in Gaza attempting to shield his son from Israeli bullets before the boy was shot to death. The photograph was said to be ‘working people up’, meaning Muslim people.”

John Pilger in the New Statesman, 22 August 2005

Harry’s Place defends Enlightenment values

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Over at Harry’s Place, they’re discussing Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s non-existent call for the Crown Prince of Qatar to be stoned to death for attending a gay nightclub. Given that Harry’s Place was one of the first to take up this story, you might have thought they’d feel obliged to ask whether it was accurate. But apparently not. Of course, we live in hope, but so far not a single one of the numerous contributors to the discussion has addressed this question.

Harry’s Place, 19 August 2005

Ah, the wonders of “Enlightenment values”! It’s reassuring to know that the triumph of reason over irrational prejudice, a commitment to the serious study of empirical evidence, and other such gains of Western modernity are in safe hands among Harry and his friends.

‘A witch-hunt against British Muslims’: MCB replies to

Posted on by Bob Pitt

John Ware’s Panorama programme – A witch-hunt against British Muslims

John Ware’s Panorama programme ‘A Question Of Leadership’ is due to be aired on BBC1 on Sunday 21st August 2005.

The Panorama programme takes a look at several British Muslim organisations, in particular the Muslim Council of Britain and several of its affiliates, including the Islamic Foundation, the Muslim Association of Britain, the Markazi Jamiat Ahl-i-Hadith and the Leeds Grand Mosque.

The MCB has issued a full and detailed response to the Panorama programme which can be read at this link:

http://www.mcb.org.uk/Panorama_response.doc

In summary, we believe John Ware’s team have made a deeply unfair programme using deliberately garbled quotes in an attempt to malign the Muslim Council of Britain and with the barely concealed goal of drawing British Muslims away from being inspired in their political beliefs and actions by the faith of Islam. It is unfortunate that just when Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims are beginning to make progress in terms of their political participation in the mainstream, there are those who are purposefully trying to sabotage that process,’said Sir Iqbal Sacranie, Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain.

It seems that to qualify as so-called ‘moderates’ Muslims are required to remain silent about Israeli crimes in Palestine, otherwise they are automatically labelled as ‘extremists’.

The MCB urges British Muslims to remain calm and vigilant in the face of recent concerted attempts being made by known hostile elements to divide them.

MCB press release, 20 August 2005

Browne was paid for V-Dare article

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Remember Anthony Browne? You know, the man who has written Islamophobic articles for the Spectator and the Times, is a great admirer of Panorama reporter John Ware and was recently exposed by the Newshog blog as having contributed to a right-wing anti-migrant US website, V-Dare. Well, it now turns out that at least one of Browne’s pieces was actually commissioned and paid for by V-Dare. Not so much “show me who you friends are”, more “let’s have a look at who your paymasters are”.

Maududi: ‘the man behind the bombings’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mawlana Mawdudi“His followers were exhorted to extreme behaviour. ‘Your puritanic behaviour should become repugnant to your wives. You should become a stranger in your own country.’ Maududi is indeed winning his ideological war when Londoners read in their Evening Standard that it was the very families of the bombers who rang the bomb helpline to find out where their own sons were. Maududi’s thinking lives on in Britain in the minds of the young, through small study groups up and down the country. The Islamic Foundation was led, after its founding, by a man who had been the Vice President of the organization Maududi founded in Pakistan.”

Jenny Taylor in the Church of England Newspaper, 19 August 2005

Another attempt to implicate Britain’s mainstream Muslim organisations in the London bombings, this one on the basis of a supposed link through the ideas of Maulana Maududi.

Islamists = Nazis (according to Searchlight)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In the latest issue of Searchlight, Nick Lowles and Steve Silver offer us another example of the increasingly prevalent Islamism = fascism line.

Some of their analysis is unexceptional. When they write that “Omar Bakri Mohammed and his ilk are recruiting sergeants for the BNP”, who could disagree? Indeed, three years ago Inayat Buglawala of the MCB made exactly the same point about Bakri and Abu Hamza:

“Every time these two figures open their mouths it seems they are determined to help the cause of the racist British National Party in their goal of portraying Muslims as being disloyal and potential ‘fifth-columnists’. I doubt whether the BNP have two better recruiting sergeants than Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza.”

But Lowles and Silver go further than this. Take the following excerpt:

“The BNP and Islamist groups also have a symbiotic relationship, their activities fuelling each other. Racism from organisations such as the BNP, high votes for fascists and racist attacks all create a climate in which some young Asians in particular feel that they are victims of, and in conflict with, wider society. In turn, Islamist groups preach that Muslims not only face racism in Britain, but are oppressed across the world, particularly in Palestine and Iraq.”

Er … but isn’t it the case that Muslims are oppressed in Palestine and Iraq? Not necessarily so, according to Lowles and Silver. They refer blandly to “the Iraq war and other perceived [sic] injustices across the world”.

Worse still, according to their formulation, opposition to Zionist oppression of the Palestinians and to the imperialist conquest of Iraq is equated with the BNP’s racist hatred of minority ethnic groups.

And, as with Islamophobic right-wingers like Anthony Browne, the term “Islamism” is used without distinguishing between its reformist and violent extremist tendencies. The existence of bodies which are Islamist, in the sense of organising Muslims to engage in social and political activism, but which pursue their objectives through peaceful methods, is obliterated

Thus all forms of Islamism are reduced to a variant of fascism.

As Inayat Bunglawala wrote in criticism of Anthony Browne’s Times article that attacked MAB and Qaradawi as fascists: “it simply will not do to glibly compare ‘Islamists’ with Nazis. This type of incendiary rhetoric only adds to the prejudice which British Muslims have to face daily.”

All religious texts face both ways

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The bombings (or attempts) of 7 and 21 July seem to have thrown commentators and politicians back yet again to endless ponderings on what it means to be British. Into this steaming pot are thrown various statements about religion, culture, nationhood and patriotism. And since these particular terrorists happen to be Muslims, at first glance it would seem completely appropriate to examine the Koran for any possible link to what happened.

“But there are problems with this. We can quite reasonably ask the question of why Islam should be probed for its links to terrorism, when Christianity isn’t probed for its links to IRA bombings and Judaism isn’t probed for its links to the Zionist terror of 1946-48 in Palestine? It rather looks as if something selective is going on here.”

Michael Rosen in Socialist Worker, 20 August 2005

Iqbal Sacranie and Inayat Bunglawala, ‘Jew-haters’ – Rod Liddle

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Inayat_Bunglawala“Sometimes things are altogether more simple than we wish them to be. Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the eminent chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain, recently refused to attend the Holocaust memorial day. When asked why this was so, he muttered something about how lots of people had been killed all over the place, not least the poor Palestinians and why shouldn’t we remember them, etc., etc. In the liberal press, extravagant excuses were made for Sacranie and his ludicrous chef de cabinet, Inayat Bunglawala. But I suspect that the simple answer, the one we didn’t want to hear, is the most accurate: Sacranie and Mr Bunglawala don’t like Jews. They are both unequivocal anti-Semites.”

Rod Liddle in the Spectator, 20 August 2005

So who wrote the following, then?

“The Nazi Holocaust was a truly evil and abhorrent crime and we stand together with our fellow British Jews in their sense of pain and anguish. None of us must ever forget how the Holocaust began. We must remember it began with a hatred that dehumanised an entire people, that fostered state brutality, made second class citizens of honest, innocent people because of their religion and ethnic identity. Those who were vilified and seen as a threat could be subjected to group punishment, dispossession and impoverishment while the rest of the world stood idly by, washing its hands of despair and suffering that kept getting worse.”

Yup, it was the “Jew-hating” MCB. See the MCB’s statement on this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day, 24 January 2005.

Tebbit attacks ‘unreformed’ Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Semi house trained polecatIslam is so unreformed there have been no real advances in art, literature, science or technology in the Muslim world in 500 years, Lord Tebbit says.

Multiculturalism is in danger of undermining British society, the former Conservative Party chairman also tells the e-politix website.

In the 1980s he questioned the loyalty of immigrants who backed cricket teams from their countries of origin. Now he says if he had been heeded it might have stopped the London bombings.

“To reduce the terrorism problem to simply blaming multiculturalism is blinkered and indeed dangerous,” a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain said.

BBC News, 18 August 2005

See also ePolitix.com, 18 August 2005