“Livingstone is a genuinely popular figure in London, including among the capital’s 700,000+ Muslims. The mayor of London has a long and proud record of opposing racism and prejudice against minorities. And frankly, who can blame them for being a bit wary of a Tory opponent like Boris Johnson with his public references to black people as ‘piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’?”
Inayat Bunglawala replies to Martin Bright and Shiraz Maher.
In his New Statesman blog Martin Bright offers his justifications for presenting an anti-Livingstone “documentary” for Channel 4 which can only aid Tory candidate Boris Johnson’s campaign to replace Ken as London mayor.
Regular readers of Islamophobia Watch will be aware of Bright’s politics. He accuses a section of the Left of forming an alliance with “fascism” ( i.e. with representative Muslims organisations like the MCB or the British Muslim Initiative) and to combat this he advocates an alternative alliance between the “real Left” (i.e. people like himself and Nick Cohen) and the Islamophobic hard Right. So a de facto bloc with Boris Johnson is much what you would expect from Bright.
However, it’s only towards the end of Bright’s blog post that we get to the meat of his argument against the current mayor. Bright writes:
“Livingstone was widely criticised when he invited the Egyptian radical scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi to London in 2004. Peter Tatchell, the veteran human rights activist, was one of those who objected to the visit. His words should be food for thought for everyone considering voting for Livingstone this year: ‘I’ve been a very strong supporter of Ken Livingstone for nearly 30 years … I think overall he has been a good mayor for London but I do think there are a number of issues where he’s made some monumental misjudgements. When I questioned the rationale and the ethics of inviting Yusuf al-Qaradawi to London, the relationship with Ken Livingstone suddenly changed … Ken took the view that because I didn’t agree with him inviting to London someone who is anti-Semitic, homophobic, misogynistic and who justifies terrorist suicide bombings, because I opposed that, I was an Islamophobe’.”
Bright tells us piously that “I could think of nothing worse than to support Johnson”. However, in an election where the only possible alternative to Livingstone is Johnson, people intending to vote for Livingstone should reconsider doing so, according to Bright, on the grounds that Ken welcomed a leading scholar of Islam to City Hall.
Unlike Bright, his co-thinker Nick Cohen at least has the honesty to present that argument clearly and openly.
Update: See “Martin Bright’s mythical dragons”, Salaam Blogs, 18 January 2008
WASHINGTON – A high school track star has been disqualified from a meet because officials said the custom-made outfit she wears to conform to her Muslim faith violated competition rules.
Juashaunna Kelly, a senior at the District of Columbia’s Theodore Roosevelt High School, has the fastest mile and 2-mile times of any girl runner in the city this winter. She was disqualified from Saturday’s Montgomery Invitational indoor track and field meet.
Kelly was wearing the same uniform she has worn for three seasons while running for Theodore Roosevelt’s cross-country and track teams. The custom-made, one-piece blue and orange unitard covers her head, arms, torso and legs. Over the unitard, she wears the same orange and blue T-shirt and shorts as her teammates. The outfit allows her to compete while adhering to her Muslim faith, which forbids displaying any skin other than her face and hands. “It’s not special,” Kelly said. “It doesn’t make me perform better.”
But meet director Tom Rogers said Kelly’s uniform violated rules of the National Federation of State High School Associations, which sanctioned the event.
Earlier this month, Newsday columnist and Fox News contributor James Pinkerton joined former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign as a “senior adviser” who “will work at the intersection of policy and strategic messaging”. Pinkerton, who worked in the White House under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, says he “felt called” to join Huckabee’s campaign.
Three months before Pinkerton joined the campaign, he recorded an episode of Bloggingheads.tv with Mother Jones editor David Corn. During their conversation, Pinkerton declared that he would handle “American Muslims” by putting “a cop in front of every mosque” in America.
PINKERTON: You asked me what I would do about American Muslims. Answer is I’d put a cop in front of every mosque until I was completely satisfied nothing was going on there.
CORN: You’d put a cop in front of every mosque?
PINKERTON: That’s what I said. […]
CORN: I mean, do you have any proof that every mosque deserves a cop in front of it?
PINKERTON: I said, I would put one in there just for safe keeping all the way around.
Jewish leaders are condemning e-mails attacking Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama for secretly being a radical Muslim who attended a Wahhabi madrassa, false allegations that have been circulated on many Jewish and other list-serves.
Referring to “hateful e-mails that use falsehood and innuendo to mischaracterize Senator Barack Obama ‘s religious beliefs and who he is as a person,” officials from nine national Jewish organizations sent an open letter to the Jewish community Tuesday “reject[ing] these efforts to manipulate members of our community into supporting or opposing candidates.”
The non-partisan, multi-denominational coalition of leaders noted that they were not endorsing any candidate, but felt that “attempts of this sort to mislead and inflame voters should not be part of our political discourse and should be rebuffed by all who believe in our democracy.”
Obama, whose middle name is Hussein and who spent some of his childhood in Islamic Indonesia, has faced a whispering campaign about his background since before he even announced his candidacy for president. But the volume and vitriol of the attacks have intensified following his victory in the Iowa caucuses earlier this month, which has propelled him in the polls.
Several Jewish organizational leaders noticed an increase in the number of e-mails they were receiving post-Iowa and in the run-up to February 5, when 22 states will be voting in the Democratic primary. They include some of the nation’s largest by population and by Jewish community (New York, California, Illinois) and could well determine who becomes the presidential nominee for both parties.
“Jews have suffered smear campaigns in the past and we should be sensitive and responsive to these kinds of attacks,” said Nathan Diament, director of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. Diament was joined by Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, and several heads of nonsectarian organizations in signing the letter.
Obama himself refuted the Internet accusations, as well as the suggestion that he took the oath of office with a Koran, during a Democratic candidates’ debate in held Tuesday night in Nevada, which will on Saturday host the next Democratic primary.
In response to a question for an MSNBC moderator alluding to the e-mails in circulation, Obama said, “Let’s make clear what the facts are: I am a Christian. I have been sworn in with a Bible.” His campaign has also posted a fact sheet stating that, “Barack Obama is not and has never been a Muslim. Obama never prayed in a mosque. He has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ.”
It also explains that Obama’s father, a Kenyan immigrant whom his mother divorced when he was two, was raised as Muslim but was “a confirmed atheist” by the time he came to America, and that his stepfather practiced a “brand of Islam” that also accommodated beliefs such as animism and Hinduism. While he occasionally visited an Islamic center as a child in Indonesia, the suggestion that he was educated at a Wahhabist madrassa has been utterly discredited.
Though the Internet chatter about Obama’s Muslim ties might be false, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t hurt him in a campaign.
“We could be in for a really ugly campaign from the far right,” said someone in the Jewish community involved in the drafting of the letter, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I fear it’s going to be a problem for him in the future. It’s no reason for anybody not to vote for him now or in the future, but everyone’s got vulnerabilities.” He said that the Obama campaign asked for the letter to be drafted, an assertion confirmed by other Jewish leaders but not immediately by the campaign itself.
“It would be fair to say that when I started working in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office unit dealing with engagement with the Islamic world at the beginning of 2005, I did not have a great deal of knowledge about British Muslim politics. I had no particular reason to question the office’s process of engagement with Muslim groups….
“It is impossible to overstate the effect of the London bombings. I was really shaken by the events of 7 July and they played a huge role in informing my thinking. I took a holiday in August and devoted it to reading up on political Islam and, in particular, the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s main Islamist group. The dominant view at the FCO was that it was a moderate organisation with which the UK could do business. My reading suggested otherwise, and I gradually became convinced of the totalitarian nature of its ideology.”
Derek Pasquill explains his decision to provide Martin Bright with the internal FCO documents which formed the basis for Bright’s pamphlet When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries, published by the right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange.
Blimey. There’s a post on Harry’s Place we can agree with – this one by Rupa Huq, who lays into the Bishop of Rochester. And also into the likes of Shiraz Maher. Taking up a Times article in which Maher stated that “Nazir-Ali’s observations are not only valid, but don’t go far enough”, Rupa writes: “Articles with headlines like ‘Muslim Britain [sic] is becoming one big no-go area’ will be music to the ears of the far right but white liberals scared to offend insist on calling them ‘brave’.”
Coincidentally, Shiraz Maher has a piece in the current New Statesman, presumably commissioned by the magazine’s political editor Martin Bright, which attacks the Muslims who signed a letter endorsing Ken Livingstone’s mayoral campaign.
In all seriousness, Maher attaches significance to the “finding” by the right-wing and woefully misnamed Centre for Social Cohesion that a large number of signatories were associated with the Muslim Council of Britain – a situation possibly not unconnected with the fact that the MCB is the largest umbrella group for Muslim organisations in the UK, with over 400 affiliates. Maher accuses the mayor of “pandering to the Arab-centric agendas of pressure groups” – when in fact far more of the MCB’s affiliated groups have connections with South Asia than with the Middle East.
“The welcome failed prosecution of Foreign Office civil servant Derek Pasquill under the Official Secrets Act has inadvertently shed light once again on the Policy Exchange think tank.
“Pasquill had leaked government documents to the Observer newspaper concerning links between the Foreign Office and various Islamic groups. Journalist Martin Bright, who moved from the Observer to the New Statesman magazine, had used these documents in his pamphlet, ‘When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries: The British State’s flirtation with radical Islamism’, published by Policy Exchange.
“Bright applauded ‘the Tory progressives at Policy Exchange’ for publishing his work, which was billed as a denunciation of the government’s alliances with ‘a reactionary, authoritarian brand of Islam’, in favour of looking to ‘real grassroots moderates as allies’.
“In fact, the modus operandi of Policy Exchange follows a well-trod path. Ever since the 9/11 attacks, sections of the British political establishment and the media (like their counterparts in the US) have followed a sustained, and at times virulent, Islamophobic campaign that has demonised Muslims. Conducted under the banner of opposing Islamic extremism, its political objective has been to defend the neo-colonialist policy of pre-emptive war and occupation embarked upon by the American and British ruling elite.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called on Rep. Paul C. Broun (R-GA) to add a balancing perspective to an upcoming congressional briefing on Islamic finance that features a presentation by the head of a racist anti-Muslim group.
Broun recently circulated a “Dear Colleague” letter inviting fellow representatives and their staff to attend the briefing, titled “The Truth Behind Sharia/Islamic Finance,” on Thursday in the Rayburn House Office Building.
Rep. Broun’s invitation letter claims Islamic finance “violates U.S. laws” and “has supported Islamist extremists and sponsors of terrorism.” The afternoon briefing features two individuals known for their hostility to Islam and Muslims.
One of the presenters, David Yerushalmi, is the president and founder of the Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), a group that has advocated imposing prison terms for “adherence to Islam” and questions whether women and African-Americans should be allowed to vote.
In February of last year, Yerushalmi’s group offered a policy proposal that stated in part:
“Whereas, adherence to Islam as a Muslim is prima facie evidence of an act in support of the overthrow of the U.S. Government through the abrogation, destruction, or violation of the U.S. Constitution and the imposition of Shari’a on the American People…It shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.” (The final reference to “adherence to Islam” has since been changed to “adherence to Shari’a” in the text.)
Philip Hensher on the campaign against Oxford Central Mosque’s proposal to broadcast an amplified call to prayer:
“Of course, Oxford has quite a lot of calls to prayer already in the form of church bells, but this suggestion has raised the ire of local residents. Some claimed it was a matter of ‘community cohesion’ – rather a dubious notion if it leads to recommendations that minorities keep quiet, all in all.
“An academic told the paper ‘What an utter cheek to inflict this on a non-Muslim area of Oxford. Christian churches ring bells, but they are just a signal. The Muslim call is a theological statement.’ (In Arabic, I feel I should point out, so it’s not all that likely that the non-Muslim area of Oxford will be roused to technical disagreement with the muezzin.)
“Though I can’t claim any enthusiasm for the forces of organised religion, and don’t care for anything which increases the general noisiness of modern life, one does wonder why people are objecting so virulently. I very much doubt that the Oxford central mosque is a hotbed of anti-western hatred, and they themselves sound genuinely puzzled why such objection to one of their central traditions is so violent. Personally, not caring about or indeed understanding what the muezzin is saying, I find the sound one of the most romantic and wonderful in the world.”