A cautionary note about polling and propaganda. In 2009, an independent poll was carried out in an area supposedly known as a 'no go' area for white people, to probe . It found, among other things, that 98% of Muslims in the area would accept their son or daughter if they came out as gay. The point of the poll was to underline just how much tabloid polling on Muslim social and political attitudes was designed to produce a response that could be used to demonise Muslims - and how a different set of questions asked in a different way would produce a very different picture. A typical scaremongering poll appeared in The Sunday Times in 2008. It dealt with Muslim students, and it alleged a series of nasty attitudes on their part. Among other things, it said: "Homophobia was rife, with 25% saying they had little or no respect for gays." What it meant to say, of course, was that acceptance of gays was rife, with 75% of Muslim students having some or much respect for gays. There was also a famously distorted study for the right-wing Policy Exchange in 2007, which claimed that only 30% of British Muslims disagreed with the claim that homosexuality is morally wrong and should be illegal.

In general, whether using manipulated polls or anecdotes, there has been a concerted effort to depict Muslims as overwhelmingly homophobic. Yet whenever there have been initiatives to help combat homophobia among Muslims, or when Muslim groups and mosques denounce homophobia, the same reactionaries who claim to care about the issue can barely contain their sneers. For what it's worth, I consider such tactics similar to those deployed by the Right (and, as it happens, the FBI) to divide black and Jewish groups in the United States by putting it about that black people are antisemitic - in an attempt to break up an historic coalition between oppressed groups. I raise all this because the burden of a recent attack article on British Muslims by Johann Hari involves the suggestion that Muslims just don't accept gays, and are in fact engaging in an escalating wave of violence against them. He writes:

The most detailed opinion survey of British Muslims was carried out by Gallup, who correctly predicted the result of the last general election. In their extensive polling, they found literally no British Muslims who would say homosexuality is "morally acceptable." Every one of the Muslims they polled objected to it. Even more worryingly, younger Muslims had more stridently anti-gay views than older Muslims. These attitudes have consequences - and they are worst of all for gay Muslims, who have to live a sham half-life of lies, or be shunned by their families.

No, Muslims are not the only homophobes among us. But the gap between them and the rest is startling. It's zero percent of British Muslims vs. 58 percent of other Brits who say we are "acceptable."

Hari isn't stupid. He knows perfectly well that this isn't a credible figure, that no one actually believes it. It is quite obviously a statistical freak. The results of previous polls, the existence of British Muslims who are gay, and the existence of British Muslims who are vocally supportive of gay rights, simply make it impossible that 0% of Muslims consider gays to be acceptable. If even the reactionary anti-Muslim wind-ups find at least 30% of Muslims who accept gays, then we can assume that this poll is an outlier. But this really doesn't need to be demonstrated - it's just common sense. Just as it's a common sense inference that almost 100% of Islamophobes in Britain are white.

Hari went on to claim:

"East London has seen the highest increase in homophobic attacks anywhere in Britain. Everybody knows why, and nobody wants to say it. It is because East London has the highest Muslim population in Britain, and we have allowed a fanatically intolerant attitude towards gay people to incubate there, in the name of 'tolerance'".

Ava Vidal was pissed off with this, and wrote to explain that Met crime figures actually showed a reduction in anti-gay attacks in those areas with the highest Muslim populations. Hari snorted that she was "extremely unintelligent". But Vidal was just underlining a point that had already been made to Hari by Patrick Lilley of UK Black Pride, and which he had ignored. The exploitation of homophobia to demonise East End Muslims is becoming urgent as Islamophobes with the support of EDL members try to organise what they're calling an 'East End Gay Pride' event, though the organisers apparently have nothing whatever to do with the East End. This actually raises the possibility that EDL members, who didn't dare march in the East End previously, will now be able to get in there under the pretext of opposing homophobia. It would seem rather important, therefore, not to make injudicious, disproportionate, inflammatory or just bigoted comments scapegoating British Muslims for the very real homophobia that exists in Britain. Unfortunately, Hari - who does know better, so it must be a self-serving, calculated provocation - has acted in such a way as to set back the ongoing efforts to overcome divisions between Muslim and gay groups with this disingenuous diatribe.

And yes, this is 2011, and we're still having these ridiculous arguments, even after a spate of anti-gay beatings and killings that have had nothing to do with Muslims.

From the New York Times: "The nation’s workers may be struggling, but American companies just had their best quarter ever. American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or noninflation-adjusted terms ... Corporate profits have been doing extremely well for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history. As a share of gross domestic product, corporate profits also have been increasing, and they now represent 11.2 percent of total output. ... This breakneck pace can be partly attributed to strong productivity growth — which means companies have been able to make more with less — as well as the fact that some of the profits of American companies come from abroad."

What the New York Times doesn't explain is that the struggles of the "nation's workers" bear a direct relationship to high corporate profits. Strong productivity growth here basically means an increase in the rate of exploitation. As the Daily Finance explains: "That productivity boost came as workers spent more hours working, and getting paid less to do it. Specifically, between the third quarter of 2009 and the same period on 2010, productivity was up 2.5% as output rose 4.1%, hours worked increased 1.6%, and unit labor costs fell 1.9%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The profits of U.S. corporations are growing much faster than their revenues. S&P's Howard Silverblatt estimated that corporate profits in 2010's third quarter would rise 18% from 2009, while sales would be up a mere 5.5%. "

Since domestic demand remains relatively weak in the US, despite some boost from the stimulus and despite some weak wages recovery, corporate investors are also using the cheap money made available by quantitative easing to invest in their overseas operations. And as the NYT acknowledges, much of the increase in profits is coming from abroad. Thus, US capital has used two key advantages to revive profitability. First, it has used its overwhelming strength - political, economic, institutional - over workers to extract more labour from a smaller workforce. The flip-side of high profits are more gruelling work, tighter work discipline, more people unemployed, lower wages, longer lines at the soup kitchens, and so on. Second, it has used its overwhelming international dominance, which we might call imperialism, to extract more value from emerging markets, which remain dependent on and subordinate to the US. The obverse of this increased yield is, of course, violent territorial struggle in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as violent subversion in Honduras and Haiti.

These, aspects of an increasingly brutal, exploitative and repressive capitalist system, are among the reasons why Obamamania has bitten the dust. Obama's electoral coalition was built around the promise of amelioration, a better deal for workers and peace abroad, and neither has been delivered. Obama has been far more completely Wall Street's president than anyone expected. This also helps explain why the corporate media has felt it necessary to act as a mouthpiece and booster for a layer of corporate-funded middle class Poujadists. It is to pre-emptively colonise a political space that might otherwise be filled by the millions of working class Americans who are angry over wages, unemployment, the banks, repossessions, and the endless war. It is to drown out the rational concerns of more popular political constituencies with pageantry, noise and fury, irrational howling, and home-made bigotry. It is to stage the fight that capital wants to see - between ostensibly liberal, cosmopolitan, internationally-oriented, capital-intensive industry, and a parochial, nationalist, bigoted populace, often small business owners working in labour-intensive industries. And the viewer's role is to pick a side, and forget that neither represents their interests.

Don't waste your time going to visit the Daily Mail website to read that Moir article. You can see the whole thing here. (Then, if you are moved by Charlie Brooker's column, you can complain here). As you'll have gathered by now, Mail columnist Jan Moir decided to use the death of singer Stephen Gately to suggest that something terribly sinister is afoot when gay men have relations. Gately died of natural causes, and the coroner's report confirmed this. Moir, though, smells a rat, and for once it isn't a co-worker. She induces that the cause of Gately's death must have actually been 'unnatural', in some sense related to his 'lifestyle'. (Can I just ask, in passing, whether my banal sexual and sumptuary habits amount to a lifestyle? Just curious.) Somehow, quite mischievously apparently, this was construed as homophobic. For, as Moir explains:

"The point of my column -which, I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read - was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, his death raises many unanswered questions. That was all."

Yes. Unanswered questions. About the viability of gay relationships, particularly of 'civil partnerships', in light of the "ooze" of some supposedly "dangerous lifestyle" disclosed in the death not only of Gately, but also of Matt Lucas' partner, Kevin McGee. Those kinds of unanswered questions. Only a sick, politically correct, fascist bastard would construe that as evidence of homophobia. In fact, it's just common sense:

It seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately’s death - out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger - did not have a bearing on his death.

Coroner reports are all very well, but they can hardly be expected to deter the unflabble and infallible inquisitive instincts of the Daily Mail glitterati. And anyway, Moir clarifies that civil partnership stuff:

In writing that ‘it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships’ I was suggesting that civil partnerships - the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting - have proved just to be as problematic as marriages.

Pause for a second and think about this. Moir is "on record" as supporting civil partnerships. That makes her practically a gay rights activist, for fuck's sake. Can you be so intolerant as to deprive a committed Stonewaller of the right to just ask some questions just because it might be a little bit inconvenient to your worn out ideology? Oh, sure. Some of you might have noticed the part of the article where Moir specifically contests the idea that civil partnerships are "just the same as heterosexual marriages", citing two recent celebrity deaths and the "dangerous lifestyles" they supposedly resulted from as evidence of her thesis. You might have even noticed that she appears to take exception to gays "always calling for tolerance and understanding". And, no doubt, in yet another affront to taste and manners, you are already forming your ignorant, ill-conceived opinions about her supposedly contradicting herself in a flatfooted attempt to evade responsibility for having written something vile. You might even be calling her a lying piece of shit at this point. But that's just because you are part of the conspiracy:

In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.

Quite. This is an orchestrated hate campaign, mounted by you-know-who against a tolerant, inclusive, committed supporter of the gay community. She's not a homophobe, she's just asking questions. Incidentally, something odd happened earlier in the week. A perfectly healthy gay man died, painfully and horribly, in the middle of Trafalgar Square. His lifestyle was definitely related to the cause of his death. I hope Moir will not be put off by this spiteful campaign, and will take the time to examine this case and its implications for those tolerance-begging, understanding-seeking types in our midst. More power to her typing finger.