As part of his stitch-up of the Muslim Council of Britain in Sunday’s Observer, Martin Bright made much of the fact that among the MCB’s 400 affiliates is the Birmingham-based Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadith, described by Bright as “an extremist sect”. If you look up this organisation’s website you’ll find that it prominently features a statement on the London bombings. You’d have to say, if this is the best Bright can come up with as an example of the MCB’s “extremist” connections, the MCB has little to worry about.
UK terror fight adds to Arab fears
The planned deportations and a raft of other proposed measures to curb militant Islamist activity in the wake of the July bombs in London, are bashing a fresh dent in Britain’s reputation in the wider Arab world. Dia Rashwan, an expert in Islamism at the Cairo-based Al Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, argues they could be counter-productive by playing to the perception that in the war on terror, the rights of all Muslims are under attack.
Many exiled radicals in London have been under close surveillance, he argues, and there is no proven legal case yet that they have contributed to radicalising British-born Muslims who carried out the bombings. Yassir al-Sirri, a London-based Egyptian condemned to death in absentia in Egypt, goes further, suggesting the government’s measures, if adopted, would hand a victory to extremists. He was among a small group of Islamist exiles in London who urged the British government yesterday not to betray Muslims “by deporting them to countries from which they fled”.
Anti-terror legislation condemned
Muslim groups have condemned proposed anti-terrorism legislation saying it could lead to the “demonisation” of legitimate Islamic values and beliefs. An Islamic Human Rights Commission statement has 38 signatories, including the Muslim Association of Britain.
See BBC News, 16 August 2005 and Guardian, 16 August 2005
See also IHRC press release, 16 August 2005 and Islam Online, 16 August 2005
Robert Spencer is appalled: “What about wanting to establish the caliphate in the West, replacing Britain’s political system with Islamic law? Is that legitimate political expression?”
Well, I can’t see why not. Mind you, given that Muslims here number around 1.6 million out of a total population of almost 60 million, the establishment of the caliphate in the UK would appear to be a rather distant prospect.
Latest from Lenin’s Tomb
A couple of relevant posts over at Lenin’s Tomb during the past couple of days. In “Clowns for jihad” (15 August) Meaders expresses scepticism that the absurd Omar Bakri ever represented a serious terrorist threat (“I could be wrong, but one of the things you would not do, if you really fancied restaging 9/11 in London, would be to organise a widely publicised conference in celebration of this fact”). And in “They shall not parse” (16 August) China Miéville takes up Outrage’s false report that Yusuf al-Qaradawi called for the Crown Prince of Qatar to be stoned to death. But remember, folks, you read it here first.
William Shawcross and Islamofascism
“Is it because of western racism that al-Qaida has included the United Nations among its principal targets?” William Shawcross demands to know, in a letter in the Guardian. “Is it because of western racism that in August 2003 an al-Qaida suicide bomber murdered more than 20 people in the UN headquarters in Baghdad, including the secretary general’s special representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello? … Al-Qaida exulted in the murder of this ‘heretic’ sent to Iraq by Kofi Annan, ‘the criminal and slave of America’. Al-Qaida is inspired by Islamofascism, which cannot be appeased. No one is helped by pretending otherwise.”
Rather, no one is helped by pretending that the atrocities carried out by the likes of Al-Qaida do not have a basis in a quite rational hatred of the West’s own atrocities. Bin Laden repeatedly condemned the deaths of innocent Iraqis resulting from UN sanctions imposed at the behest of the USA. As for western racism, would the killing of hundreds of thousands of children have been regarded as a price worth paying – to quote Madeleine Albright’s notorious remark – if those children had been white Americans or Europeans?
London Mayor rejects attacks on MCB
“The MCB has been unwavering in urging Muslims to help the police find anyone associated with terrorist attacks. In the past its leadership went to Iraq to try to help free British hostages. Those conducting what I consider a witch-hunt against the MCB are doing great harm to the fight against terrorism. They must ask themselves in what way they are helping the fight against terrorism by waging a campaign of demonisation and spin against this representative body of British Muslim organisations.”
UK anti-terror panel says Iraq war fans extremism
A British government anti-terror working group concluded that the Iraq war is “undeniably a factor” in fanning extremism, and proposed forming a media unit to challenge the stereotyped media portrayal of Muslims, reported a leading British daily Friday, September 16. “British foreign policy in the world cannot be left unconsidered as a factor in the motivations of extremists,” the group said in a confidential report leaked to The Independent.
The Working Together to Prevent Extremism: Tackling Extremism and Radicalization report was drawn up after meetings between leading Muslims and government officials, said the daily. The 13-member taskforce, chosen by the Home Office, includes prominent Muslim figures such as famed Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan, Inayat Bunglawala, the media officer of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and MP Shahid Malik.
Beaten for being Muslim
Muslims have called for greater police protection following a wave of Islamophobic hate in Scotland after the 7/7 bombings.
In one of the worst incidents, Mohammed Shezad, 31, and another family member were viciously attacked by a gang outside their business in the Dennistoun area of Glasgow.
The attack left Shezad in intensive care fighting for his life. He suffered multiple stab wounds to his chest, arm, face and skull.
The BBC Panorama Special – some background
The BBC Panorama Special that provided the hook for the Observer‘s witch-hunt of the Muslim Council of Britain was originally scheduled to be broadcast on 14 August but has been postponed for a week. It will now be shown next Sunday at 10.15pm.
The BBC has announced that its intrepid reporter John Ware “spent the weeks since the London bombs traveling to Britain’s Muslim communities, to discover whether their leaders can tackle the growth of extremism in their midst”. (See here.)
It was in fact Ware’s hostile questioning of Iqbal Sacranie during the making of the programme that was the immediate cause of the MCB’s complaint to the BBC. The MCB have claimed that Ware devoted the interview almost exclusively to questions concerning the attitude of the MCB and its affiliates towards the Palestine-Israel conflict. (See here – pdf.)
This is not the first contentious Panorama programme that Ware has been centrally involved in. In July 2003 he was the writer and presenter of another Panorama Special, in this case dealing with alleged abuse of the asylum system. On the day of the broadcast, Ware published an article in the Daily Mail (23 July 2003) based on and publicising his programme. It was headlined: “For years the Mail has been attacked for its refusal to be silent on the asylum crisis. Tonight’s Panorama says we were utterly justified.”
Hailing the programme for supposedly having broken “a 35-year taboo on discussing the topic of immigration” that had followed Enoch Powell’s 1968 rivers of blood speech, Ware wrote: “If you, as a taxpayer, have been waiting in a queue for a house, a hospital appointment or a place for your child at a school, and someone from another country who has paid no taxes jumps ahead, you would have to be saintly not to feel resentful.” Particularly so, “if the queue-jumper had fooled the immigration authorities into believing he had been persecuted, when he hadn’t, and when his real purpose was to get here for a better life”.
The BBC was condemned by the then home secretary, David Blunkett, for “pursuing a Powellite anti-immigration agenda”. To quote the Guardian report, Blunkett “singled out for criticism the BBC1 Panorama special, the Asylum Game, and its writer and presenter, John Ware, for producing a ‘poorly researched and overspun documentary’ which repeated unchallenged the claims of ‘the rightwing anti-immigration pressure group, Migration Watch’.” (See here and here.)
However, both the programme and Ware’s article were applauded by Anthony Browne in the Spectator. (See here.)
It seems that Ware is much admired by Browne, who has achieved notoriety for his own provocative attacks on migrants in general and Muslims in particular – just recently, during the furore over his Times article accusing MAB and Yusuf al-Qaradawi of being “Islamic fascists”, Browne was exposed as having contributed to a racist US website. (See here and here.)
In the Times article Browne portrayed the Panorama reporter as a victim of political correctness, complaining that “John Ware, one of the BBC’s most-respected reporters, spent years trying to make a programme on Islamic fundamentalism in Britain, but was repeatedly blocked by senior editors who feared it was too sensitive”. (See here.)
It would now appear that Ware has got his way, and that he has made a documentary exposing Islamic “fundamentalism” in the form of an attack on Britain’s most mainstream Muslim organisation, the MCB.
Of course, we can’t say for sure till we’ve seen the programme. However, Ware did give us a foretaste of his approach when he persuaded Radio 4’s Today programme to broadcast an item on the MCB last month. This gave only a passing mention to the organisation’s role in combating extremism in Britain and instead concentrated on attacking the MCB over its attitude towards suicide bombings in Israel. (See here.)
So, when the MCB complains that “nearly all the questions that were put to Sir Iqbal Sacranie by the Panorama team were directly or indirectly about Israel. These included questions to do with the Holocaust Memorial Day, Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Shaykh Ahmad Yasin”, judging by the Today broadcast we can only conclude that their accusation is entirely accurate.
‘Can infidels be innocents?’ Daniel Pipes asks
Daniel Pipes explains that fatwas issued by mainstream Muslim organisations condemning terrorists for taking the lives of innocent people are meaningless … because some extremists reject the view that non-Muslims are innocent.
So when the British Muslim Forum stated in July that “Islam strictly, strongly and severely condemns the use of violence and the destruction of innocent lives”, according to Pipes this did not necessarily include “those traveling on the Underground and bus lines in London earlier in the month”.