The Jihadist

(With apologies to Rupert Brooke)

If I should die, think only this of me

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is forever ISIS. There shall be

In oil-rich earth a thicker dust concealed

A dust whom England bore, taught, made aware

Gave, once, her music to hate, her ways bemoan,

A body of England's, breathing English air,

Bored by the telly, hooked on a mobile phone.

And think, this heart, all evil given sway

A holy warrior on beheading bent,

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given,

Of Western crimes, and Islam's coming day,

And hatred, learnt online, and discontent,

And doe-eyed houris waiting me in heaven

Read the rest of this article

George Galloway has a point

The highlight of today's Prime Minister's Questions was undoubtedly David Cameron's blistering response to George Galloway, the rarely-sighted (in the Commons chamber, at least) Respect MP for Bradford West.

Galloway had asked a characteristically orotund question, inviting the PM to "adumbrate" the differences between the "hand-chopping, throat-cutting jihadists" of Mali, currently being suppressed by French forces with alarmingly growing amounts of British support, and the superficially similar jihadists in Syria whom we are currently aiding in their struggle against the Assad regime. He wondered if Cameron had ever read Frankenstein.

Cameron's reply: "There is one thing that is certain: wherever there is a brutal Arab dictator in the world, he will have the support of the honourable gentlemen".

A fair enough point, though one can quibble that George can be equally keen on non-Arab dictators such as the current rulers of Iran. Tony Blair used to say much the same thing about Galloway's support of Saddam Hussein, usually just before he jetted off to Tripoli to have a cosy chat with his friend Muammar Gaddafi about which dissidents the colonel wanted the British secret service to help him round up that week.

But it would be wrong to accuse David Cameron of similar double standards. Not on the day he boards a plane to Algeria to hold talks with the famously human-rights friendly government there about the next steps to be taken against the "existential threat" posed by al-Qaeda linked militants in North Africa. Fundamentalist Islamic militants in Syria pose no similar threat to Western interests (keep up, George, you ought to know this) because they are Salafists, funded largely by our great ally Saudi Arabia. If they want to torch a few churches and stone a few adultresses as part of their purification of the country from the Assad family and its heretical Alawite hangers on, well, that's their business, not ours.

Congratulations to Asma Assad, by the way, on her happy news. I know it's unforgiveable, but Asma evokes in me sentiments similar to those produced in Edmund Burke by the sight of Marie Antoinette in the hands of the French revolutionaries. "Surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision", and all that. In any case, whatever you think of her husband (largely a prisoner of circumstance, I'd say, rather like the hapless Louis XVI, who inherited a circumscribed system that was beyond his power to reform) her children are obviously innocent. The thought of them falling into the hands of jihadi "revolutionaries" is not a nice one. But well, that's the Arab Spring for you. (See also Tahrir Square, home of the People's revolution, where any woman, however impenetrably veiled, now takes her life in her hands. "Muslim patrols" aren't just a feature of East London.)

Galloway has a point, of course. The Malian army, given the upper hand over the library-burning fundamentalists by the French on their post-colonial jolly, have indulged themselves in random killings and revenge massacres every bit as brutal as those perpetrated by Assad's bashi-bazouks, and far worse than anything laid at the door of the official Syrian Army, which has by all accounts remained fairly well-disciplined. As one woman of an ethnic group targeted by government forces put it, "we have stopped wearing our traditional clothes—we are being forced to abandon our culture, and to stay indoors." Well, "there's a risk" of that sort of thing taking place, said the French defence minister with a Gallic shrug. Stuff happens, after all, as the much-missed Donald Rumsfeld used to say.

It's not the realpolitik that offends me. It's not even the hypocrisy. It might be that a sober calculation of the national interest really did require propping up dictatorships against fundamentalist militants in one part of the Muslim world, and supporting Jihadist insurrections against dictatorships in another. It used to make sense to treat Mubarak (in no sense a Gaddafi) as an important and valued ally; just as it now incumbent upon our leaders to make clear that he was a rotter all along and deserves to be in a jail cell. In the case of Mali, Cameron seems to be driven by a combination of the usual Churchill-envy (or perhaps more immediately Blair-envy) and under-the-table commitment to an EU partner that may well be out of its depth. Or perhaps he just wanted to tick Mali off the list published last year of the 22 countries that Britain had never invaded. Whatever. The liberation of Timbuktu, although marred by the destruction wrought by departing Islamists, has been sufficiently exhilarating to produce a rush to the head similar to a lucky streak at a casino. Now is actually the time to get out, not to pile in. As Afghanistan shows as clearly as could be shown, what comes next will be a long drawn-out and infinitely frustrating. The rebels may have run away, but they'll be back.

But interfering in Mali, right now, is almost irresistible. The game's a familiar one. Choose your friends, overlook their atrocities (while playing up the atrocities committed by your enemies), dig out Orwell's dictionary of political clichés ("standing shoulder to shoulder", "freedom and democracy", "bloodstained tyrants": they were all present and correct in 1946) and make out that while the Western world is engaged in an "existential, decades-long struggle against" against this group of extremists, that group of similarly-motivated extremists are freedom fighters. Sometimes it's the exact same people, as when a "terrorist" handed over to Gaddafi for torture turns out to be a key figure in the emergent democratic regime. Oops.

Galloway is right about Frankenstein. The point isn't just that Al-Qaeda, or the Arab dictatorships that the West used to support (or in Algeria's case, still do) are to some extent our creatures, bound to turn against us in the end. The trouble with Victor Frankenstein was that, intoxicated with his own brilliance, he was unable to see that anything could possibly go wrong. Read the rest of this article

British Muslims and the politics of patriotism

This is a guest post by LibertyPhile.

The Daily Mail ran “Muslims 'are more patriotic than most British people'” The Sunday Times said “Muslim's prove to be Britain's greatest flag wavers”. And the Daily Star shouted “MUSLIMS TOP PRIDE CHARTS”.

All this sprung from survey results published in November by Demos, a think-tank that claims to be “focused on power and politics”.

If you visit the Demos website press release that was issued with the publication of the report, A Place for Pride, you will find the following:

One of the press releases …. made reference to the fact that 83 per cent of Muslims covered by the poll responded that they were 'proud to be a British citizen', comparing that figure to a baseline - drawn from the whole sample [of 2086 British people] - of 79 per cent. This aspect of the Demos report was widely reported in the press.

It should be noted, however, that the sample size for British Muslims was relatively small, just 48 people, and it is questionable whether confident statements can be made on that basis about one group being more proud of their British identity than another.

48 Muslims! Anyone with any knowledge of statistics or market research will cringe at this. Even people with a modicum of common sense might do the same.

Comparing 83% of 48 with 79% of 2086 is statistical nonsense. And statistics apart, there is the enormous difficulty of recruiting representative samples which Demos doesn’t mention. Exactly how representative of the British Muslim population might these 48 be!

Based on my personal experience of Muslims I am willing to believe that most of my Muslim fellow British citizens are as patriotic and as proud of their country as the next man.

There will be differences - different understandings of patriotism, and pride in one’s country, and people will come to it in different ways.

Various factors play a part. History is important for some; your country’s achievements, what earlier generations endured and came through, what individuals did. The character of its people and their social mores may be important. You can also be proud of your country because it is a decent place to live here and now.

And there is no reason why two citizens of equal patriotism, pride in their country, cannot still hold starkly different views on good and bad behaviour and what is best for their country.

The Demos report is all about patriotism and the role of personal and national pride and the “misreporting” concerning Muslims is a minor feature.

A more interesting result is 88 per cent of Anglicans (and Jews) agreed that they were “proud to be a British citizen” alongside 84 per cent of non-conformists (and the 83 per cent of Muslims already mentioned) compared with 79 per cent for the population as a whole (p39). One assumes there were more than 48 Anglicans. It is a fact that religious people are more likely that non-believers to be proud of their country.

It is a tedious read (a 90 page pamphlet!) but you can also hear one of the authors, Max Wind-Cowie, and Telegraph columnist Charles Moore discuss some of the issues here.

Amongst a range of findings which the report itself admits “your granny could have told you” and opinions, it criticises what it believes is the right wing attitude to patriotism.

…. the right’s pantheon of patriotism is largely determined by a narrow, historical and sometimes mythological set of beliefs about Britain, which are unbendable, unchanging and increasingly inaccessible. The royal family, spitfires, the Houses of Parliament and the Union Jack …. (p76)

Those on the right have insisted that people attach their pride to a set of institutions and persons that are less and less relevant to people’s experience of Britain or to the sources of their everyday pride. (p79)

This isn’t the result of dodgy sample analysis, it is the prejudice of the authors.

They should have specifically surveyed right wingers. They might have found that where symbols are concerned they symbolise something, more often than not what people have done, those spitfire pilots for example.

Indeed, the research for the report shows what people do is of paramount importance. Behaviours and actions make people feel proud of their community or country; volunteering, for example.

I didn’t know until I read this report that the British are among the most likely people in the world to give up our time to volunteer. We have significantly higher levels of social action – and a greater independent charitable sector – than most European countries.

They quote one respondent saying “When you ask about what’s best about being British I think of all the people that give up their time to help other people, or to do good things in the community. That’s what makes me proud of this country.”

Also on the positive side the report makes some useful recommendations highlighting the importance of oral history, what older people have to tell children about their experiences of events. Though one’s enthusiasm for what Demos have in mind is somewhat blunted by the examples they give.

My grandson, he doesn’t know anything really about my life. The Miner’s Strike, the Winter of Discontent, even the referendum on Europe – he’s never been taught about any of it. Ask him about the Victorians and he could tell you though. (p56)

The research work for the pamphlet, the poll of 2080 citizens and an (unspecified) number of focus groups, produced several findings which Demos have not publicised, though in the body of the text they say “This is a worrying set of results”.

They concern integration and the poll result that “Only two in five people believe ‘immigration contributes to Britain’s culture’.

…. they too [the focus groups] highlighted genuinely held concern that local and national pride are being damaged by mass immigration and, particularly, by a perceived failure of arrivals to fully integrate into British life and the communities to which they move. (p30)

British people associate their pride heavily with actions and behaviours rather than with esoteric concepts …. social action, common manners and customs are vital to British people understanding and celebrating their communities and national sense of self: the perceived lack of integration among migrant communities therefore is a real threat to collective pride: (p32)

In a report summary Demos say “…. patriotism does not, and should not, come from either top-down narratives about Queen and country nor from so-called ‘progressive’ notions based on values.” Demos seem to have mixed feelings about values.

But, values do come in to it. The report reveals “82 per cent of respondents agreed that the naturalisation process should include a ‘values test’. Our qualitative research reinforced this. …. Far more important, they argued, was that the [citizen] test should ensure a person shared British values and was involved in British society. (p53/54)

Regarding integration and values we can return to those headlines at the beginning. The Gallup Coexist 2009 survey is quoted by some sources some sources as confirming them. The Gallup survey is based on a sample of 500 British Muslims, not an enormous number but a big improvement on Demos. Gallup also interviewed 1000 non-Muslims. It did similar Muslim non-Muslim surveys in France and Germany

The Gallup survey claims 80% of British Muslims are loyal. It doesn’t define or explain what is meant by loyalty. Patriotism, pride in one’s country, may or may not have been a factor. It comes up with other, quite specific, results too, that show there are serious differences between many British Muslims and their fellow citizens.

Even though hiding your face in public is considered rude unless you are ill, in mourning or it’s very cold, British Muslims don’t care. See here. Only 12% think not wearing the veil is a necessary condition of integration. For French and German Muslims, 32% and 29% see it as necessary.

British Muslims show less respect for other religions than Muslims in France and Germany. See here. Almost 80% of German Muslims strongly agree that they respect other religions but only 50% of British Muslims feel the same.

There is a striking difference between British Muslims and the British public over freedom of speech. See here. Only 9% of British Muslims agree that integration means accepting public comments they perceive as offensive about their faith.

British Muslims are the least integrated in Europe. See here. Using a battery of related questions Gallup determined that only 10% of British Muslims are “integrated”. Gallup give a definition of integration. In France and Germany Gallup found 46% and 35% of Muslims respectively are integrated.

Who’s proud of this?!

Read the rest of this article

Women driving means immorality, say Saudis. Could they be right?

The latest piece of nonsense from the parallel universe that is Saudi Arabia concerns a report - prepared for the government by a leading academic - on the possible effects of rescinding the country's iconic ban on women drivers. The news was not good. Allowing women behind the wheel, thought Professor Kamal Subhi would "provoke a surge in prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce". It would also mean that, within ten years, there would be "no more virgins" in Saudi Arabia. Since Saudi is a country that smiles upon the forced marriage of nine year old girls, that prediction may be even more alarming than it at first appears.

Subhi's report comes with the authority of the kingdom's highest religious council, so the king would be mad, mad I tell you, not to treat its conclusions with deadly seriousness. And Subhi certainly did his research thoroughly. He described sitting in a coffee shop in another Arab state - one of the decadent ones, obviously - where "all the women were looking at me". "One made a gesture that made it clear that she was available," he said. "This is what happens when women are allowed to drive."

Indeed. One minute they're sitting at home, fully veiled, waiting for their husband to give them permission to have a cup of tea. The next they're eyeing up strange academics in coffee shops. I'm reminded of Bishop Richard Williamson, who once blamed Europe's moral decline on the perverse desire of women to wear trousers.

Subhi's message is a fairly simple one, it seems. Women need to be very fully repressed indeed, because once you allow them even the tiniest little bit of freedom society becomes awash with decadence and immorality. The minxes can't help themselves. It's in their nature.

Now let's conceed he may have a point, or at least examine the possibility that there might be a link between women having cars and the general decline of moral standards in society. After all, look at the West, where women have been allowed to drive ever since there were such things as motor cars.

In the beginning, a woman driver was quite a rare sight, since cars were expensive and manly things. Almost as rare as a female high court judge or member of Parliament. In those much-lamented days when men were men and women were housewives there was very little immorality. No hardcore porn on the internet, no "objectified" late-teenage slappers falling drunkenly out of nightclubs, few if any teenage mothers. Divorce was legal, but led to social death in most circles. There may have been prostitutes (when were they not) but they didn't write bestselling memoirs that became the subject of racy television adaptations. And of course (Subhi will be delighted at this one) there were no homosexuals. Or if they were, they lived in justified terror of being banged up in Wormwood Scrubs, and quite right too.

So the correlation works. Women having the freedom to drive is positively correlated with many of the things that Professor Kamal Subhi disapproves of. Coincidentally, most of these evils resemble things that feminists of the Gail Dines persuasion campaign against, everything from hardcore porn on the internet to Lady Gaga's costume preferences. Dines recently wrote (Guardian, obviously) that "hypersexualism" - which she blames on corporate culture, rather than women having driving licences - undermined "women's rights to sexual autonomy, physical safety and economic and social equality."

Her argument, being "politically progressive", should never be confused with "rightwing attempts to police sexual behaviour." Yet it's an easy confusion to make, because leftwing feminist anti-sexualisation campaigners and rightwing religious anti-sexualisation campaigners are by-and-large talking about the same thing, and it's much the same thing that Subhi fears will happen in Saudi Arabia if women are allowed to drive. To wit, an epidemic of overt public sexuality.

Why is it that when women become emancipated, so many of them use their new freedom to remove their clothes? Can it all be explained by corporate culture perpetuating the malign reign of the patriarchy, as Gail Dines would have you believe, or is it perhaps that Eve wasn't framed after all, that women's rampant and destructive sexuality will loose itself at the earliest opportunity unless kept under the firm control of men and religion? I wouldn't presume to know. But the correlation, if not the causation, is clear. A free society is a sexualised society. Where women are forced to cover their bodies their choices in other aspects of their lives will be equally circumscribed. In extreme cases, they might not even be allowed to drive.

Put it the other way, allowing women to drive would signal (and also in contribute to) a wider liberalisation of manners and morals that could lead eventually to Western-style decadence. The one may not lead directly to the other, although undoubtedly having a car makes it easier for both men and women to conduct illicit sexual relationships (and I don't just mean on the back seat). But why take the risk?

When it came to his shocking tale of being brazenly looked at by some hussy in a coffee shop, I don't know if Professor Subhi was referring to Egypt, where women are still (for the time being) allowed to drive. But a recent article by Yahia Lababidi, regarding the creeping Islamisation of Egyptian society, may offer alternative perspective on the sexually-charged atmosphere that made him feel so uncomfortable. She describes the remarkable transformation of the once "open-minded and cosmopolitan" Egypt of a few decades ago - where women could be found "happily prancing around in minis and bikinis" - to one in which "sexual repression is absurdly rampant", segregation and veiling has reached almost Saudi proportions and, in consequence, "seemingly innocuous everday activities acquire sexual connotations, such as: the slapping of slippers on a woman’s feet, the smacking of chewing gum, or smoking of a cigarette."

Lababidi argues that Islamisation is producing an unhealthy atmosphere of rampant innuendo, where soldiers ogle prepubescent girls, women wearing full veils shop in department stores for erotic lingerie "that in other countries you’d only find in sex shops" and people are unable to conceive of "a mixed crowd spending an innocent weekend at the beach or a night out dancing, without an eruption of dark depraved desire colouring everything." In such an environment, even a man like Kamal Subhi might find himself the unwitting object of a frustrated woman's transitory longing.

There was, though, something a little counter-intuitive about one of Professor Subhi's fears. How, precisely, might women driving lead to an increase in homosexuality? Has he been out and about in newly-repressive Egypt, perhaps, where as Lababidi observed:

With female flesh under wraps, and no promise of release in the near future, sensuality spills into unexpected spaces. In Cairo, the human need for physical contact often manifests in intense same-sex intimacy. It’s not the least bit unusual to encounter men holding hands, pinkies interlocked, hugging and kissing, while calling each other unusually sweet names: sokkar (sugar), a’assall (honey) or rohe albi (my heart’s soul). Equally common to witness men affectionately wrestling like scrapping puppies, or playfully grabbing each other like testosterone-maddened teens, well into middle age.

Nothing like that would ever happen in Jeddah. Read the rest of this article

Guest post: Spray-painted burkas and religious freedom

Preaching is the best antidote to violent jihadism, says Rev. Julian Mann

Liberal intellectuals are unwise to scoff at Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn. His journalism on Jihadist activity in East London is of the highest quality.

His commentary today on the case of two young Muslims convicted for painting a burka on a bus shelter poster of Kelly Brook shows why anybody committed to liberty as it has developed in Britain should be concerned about the threat to it from radical Islam.

It would be easy to dismiss the individuals responsible for the bus shelter incident, Mohammed Hasnath and Muhammed Tahir, as ‘harmless eccentrics’, he writes, but ‘their actions come against a backdrop of growing militancy among young Muslim men and attempts to impose Sharia law on whole areas of Britain. The most serious incident of religious intolerance in Tower Hamlets came back in April. I brought you the story of a 31-year-old Asian shop assistant in fear of her life because she refused to hear a headscarf’.

Mr Littlejohn argues that Messrs Hasnath and Tahir should have been convicted for ‘religiously aggravated’ damage (the offence they were originally charged with) rather than ‘common or garden criminal damage’ (what they pleaded guilty to).

‘But their actions were religiously motivated,’ he writes. ‘The same philosophy underpins both painting a burka on Kelly Brook and issuing death threats against a woman shop assistant who refuses to wear a headscarf.’

That is true, but the law should only come into play in the criminal damage part of the equation. Prosecuting people for ‘religiously aggravated’ offences not only makes martyrs of extremists but threatens the very liberty the extremists want to undermine.

The same politically-correct culture that produced ‘religiously-aggravated’ offences has also given birth to attempts to impose hate speech legislation where the Attorney-General is left to decide the verbal parameters in which one is allowed to criticise another person's religion.

That is ironic because what is needed to counter the growth of Islamic extremism in the UK is not less free speech for fear of upsetting people but more of it.

The answer to the bad preaching of the Jihadists is good preaching not no preaching.

As a Christian, I would like to see more preaching of Christianity, including the separation of church and state that allows both religious toleration and persuasion to flourish. But a committed secular ideology with a basis for countering Jihadism is better than nothing.

The Jihadists win in a postmodern philosophical culture where ‘tolerance’ spells ‘whatever’. Whatever religion you want to believe, that’s OK - I won’t criticise it because I might upset you.

But religious ideas matter because they lead to actions, so bad religion needs to be argued against.

Jesus Christ argued and he upset people.

A culture that allows his kind of preaching is the surely best defence against violent Jihadism.

Julian Mann is vicar of the Parish Church of the Ascension, Oughtibridge, South Yorkshire - www.oughtibridgechurch.org.uk
Read the rest of this article

Does "extreme" ideology lead to terrorism?

Events in Norway have inevitably raised the question of the extent to which Anders Behring Breivik's murderous rampage was the product (predictable or not) of a warped ideology.

His ideology, as set out at tedious length in his "Manifesto" (which is largely a compilation of other people's writings, including Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski) has no agreed name, though it's quite familiar. It is not Neo-Nazi, or conventially nationalist, or (as some sources claimed) "Christian fundamentalist". Its principal targets are multiculturalism, immigration and "Islamification", the European Union and left-wing politically correct "cultural Marxists". It is culturally conservative (suspicious of feminism, pro-"family values", etc), vaguely libertarian (though libertarians might object to this characterisation), suspicious of conventional politics, generally a bit Daily Mailish.

There are many people who espouse all or some of these opinions on the Internet, and some high-profile writers and politicians who do likewise. Some (including our own Melanie Phillips) are quoted extensively and approvingly in Breivik's document. It is not their fault that a narcissistic murderer has taken inspiration from their ideas, any more than it was the Beatles' fault that Charles Manson was a fan of Helter Skelter. Any more than producers of video games should be held responsible for "copycat killings".

Does this not equally apply, though, to the "preachers of hate" whose hardline interpretation of Islam inspired the 9/11 and 7/7 suicide attacks?

The easy answer is that there's a clear distinction between actively inciting acts of terrorism and merely nurturing a sense of anger and grievance. No-one on Breivik's reading list, to my knowledge, has ever advocated murder or even violent resistance. There's no anti-multiculturalist Al Qaeda, no network of sleeper cells (unless Breivik's revived Knights Templar really exist). The English Defence League, an ugly organisation whose members have largely repellent views, do not blow things up and have never set light to anything larger than a Koran.

But then not all those characterised as Islamic extremists by the British security services incite violence, either. And they are often seen as a problem.

The latest version of the government's Prevent strategy aims to target the ideology behind Islamic terror. Those who commit terrorist acts in the name of Islam generally adhere to a strict and highly political form of their religion ("Islamism") that is shared by many Muslims who are not terrorists, or even terrorist sympathisers. It combines highly conservative views on such matters as women's dress or the alleged decadence of western society with a narrative of victimhood that sees Muslims as victims of Western foreign policy. They tend to be obsessed with Israel, a political passion that often slides into a more general hatred of Jews. Some dream of establishing a new Caliphate embracing all the world's Muslim societies, or of converting Europe to their faith. A proportion of them (a not inconsiderable proportion) entertain conspiracy theories about what really happened on 9/11.


Are these ideas "extreme", and do they lead to terrorism? Here's Tony Blair:

I believe we need a revolution in our thinking. I do not think it is possible to defeat the extremism without defeating the narrative that nurtures it. And there’s the rub. The practitioners of extremism are small in number. The adherents of the narrative stretch far broader into parts of mainstream thinking.

....It is a narrative that now has vast numbers of assembled websites, blogs and organisations. Of course many of those that agree with it abhor the terrorism. But as the support across the Middle East for the Muslim Brotherhood shows, far too many buy into far too much of the analysis of the extremists, if not their methodology.

This is the train of thought that underpins the Prevent strategy as well. The Home Office website tells us that from now on, "Prevent will tackle non-violent extremism where it creates an environment conducive to terrorism and popularises ideas that are espoused by terrorist groups." The previous version of Prevent was rather different: it involved channelling money to groups representing non-violent Islamists (sometimes described as "non-violent extremists", although "moderate extremists" would perhaps have captured the paradox more accurately) in the belief that they could better reach those young people who were "vulnerable" to radicalisation. As Douglas Murray complained, it became "a cash cow which any enterprising Muslim group could tap into."

Both versions of Prevent shared a similar analysis of the perceived problem: that there was a conveyor belt linking Islamist thinking with terrorism. At one end of the spectrum one found Muslims with strong views about the Israel/Palestine peace process; at the other, mass murderers. Opinions - both religious and political opinions - were potentially dangerous, because while most of those with such opinions would just grumble into their beards a deranged few would actually try to blow things up. It was the government's job, therefore, to interfere in Muslim religious and political discourse so as to promote "moderate" views and discourage "extreme" ones.

One of the many paradoxes in the previous government's response to the Jihadist threat was that the very groups which it promoted as representing mainstream Muslim opinion (for example, the Muslim Council of Britain) tended to be imbued with Islamist thinking. This was perhaps inevitable. The most politically self-conscious strands of "Muslim" opinion are Islamist almost by definition. Non-Islamists tend to identify politically as Labour, Conservative or Lib Dem, rather than as Muslim. Islamists also have control of many mosques: they tend to be more devout and religiously committed than the "average" Muslim. Finally, there's a notable overlap between the Islamist analysis of Western policy and that shared by many on the Left, which has often made Islamists welcome allies for political progressives prepared to overlook their reactionary views about the role of women or homosexuality.

The new Prevent strategy is less friendly to Islamists but every bit as concerned with moulding ideology. The present government, like the last, enjoys banning so-called "preachers of hate", the most recent of whom caused embarrassment when he entered Britain despite being on the official blacklist. He delivered speeches in London and Leicester and had been due to address Parliament - at the invitation of Labour MPs - when he was arrested. His views have been deemed terrorist-friendly, but in his time here he doesn't appear to have said anything particularly outrageous.

I've never supported such bans. The way to deal with uncongenial opinions is to argue against them, not to try to suppress them. Banning ideas only lends weight to the feelings of resentment, self-pity and powerlessness that do, in a few cases, lead people to acts of murderous violence. Even sympathising with an act of terrorism is very different from actually carrying one out.

To some extent, Melanie Phillips and the others are now getting a taste of their own medicine. They have been far too quick in the past to elide the distinction between Islamist opinions and violence, and also between Muslims in general and Islamists in particular. The spread of hardline Islam is largely a phenomenon within Muslim communities, and poses the greatest problem to other Muslims (female Muslims, gay Muslims, Ahmadi Muslims...). If "Islamophobic" writers are now being tarred with the same brush as the appalling Breivik... well, perhaps it will give them pause for thought.
Read the rest of this article

Why David Cameron is wrong about "state multiculturalism"

David Cameron's denunciation of "state multiculturalism" has been lauded in some quarters, damned in others. Both by predictable voices. In his Munich speech he criticised the "muddled thinking" that has led some parts of the Muslim community to become dangerously isolated from the rest of British society. But, judging by the text of his speech in Munich yesterday, he would appear to have very little idea - or be unwilling to admit - what "state multiculturalism" actually is. This is what he said:

Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream. We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.

But state multiculturalism is not a "doctrine". Multiculturalism is: broadly speaking, it is the contention that no-one culture is superior to any other, and that the idea of a "host community" whose values, practices and norms should take precedence over those of minority groups is to be rejected. It is that view of multiculturalism that Cameron was attacking. He was right to do so. But he is wrong to suggest that such a doctrine has been propounded by the state as an act of deliberate policy.

State multiculturalism is something different. Fundamentally, it is a job creation scheme. Its purpose is to provide work for quangos, bureaucrats, consultancies, administrators, target-setters, framers of legislation, enforcers, propagandists, advertising agencies, poster-designers and a high proportion of staff at the Guardian and the BBC. It provides work for Trevor Phillips. It also provides work for Melanie Phillips (for where would she be without multiculturalism to denounce?) State multiculturalism is premised, not on denying the idea of a national culture, but on using the laudable concept of non-discrimination to justify interference in ever-more areas of public, corporate and even private life, not because it wants to build a better society (although many of its practitioners have that belief) but because it provides its practitioners with a livelihood. Basically, it is a parasite. Like most successful parasites, it can thrive only at the expense of its host. And it will never be possible to persuade multiculturalists that they are wrong, for not only their personal philosophy but their homes and incomes depend upon keeping the show on the road.

Until he grasps this basic point, David Cameron's attempt to undo the effects of twenty years of state-sponsored multiculturalism - whose ill-effects his accurately describes - will be doomed to failure. Read the rest of this article

I agree with Inayat

Who writes:

The Guardian today has a very hard-hitting editorial about the assassination of the Pakistani governor of the Punjab, Salmaan Taseer, and the continuing demands from many (not just some religious extremist groups) who want a Christian lady, Asia Bibi, to be killed for alleged blasphemy. The Guardian quotes Pakistan’s second largest Urdu newspaper as actively endorsing the killing of Asia Bibi.

Pakistan’s blasphemy laws must rank amongst the most unjust laws in the world. They are notoriously prone to abuse by all manner of unscrupulous people with grudges to settle, particularly against members of vulnerable minority groups.

The very visible and sad moral collapse of Pakistan that we are witnessing – the seemingly endless suicide bombers, tit-for-tat sectarian killings, corruption levels rivalling Nigeria etc, should be a huge cause of concern to all Muslims. At the very least, Pakistan has buried the idea that an ‘Islamic State’ can be a workable solution in today’s world. The truth is that Muslims in power are every bit as prone to abusing that power as non-Muslims. Only, most ‘Islamic states’ or ‘Islamic republics’ do not have anywhere near the same legal safeguards and restrictions on power that most modern secular states do.

The irony here is that Inayat Bunglawala has devoted most of his life to raising the political consciousness of Muslims, as Muslims; to placing a private religious identity firmly in the public sphere in Britain; to championing (what he has described as the Muslim Council of Britain's most signficant achievement) "a greater sense of faith identity among British Muslims in place of the outdated and mostly irrelevant ‘ethnic’ based categories of yesteryear." What we are seeing in Pakistan - established under Jinnah as a secular country, but one explicitly for Muslims - is precisely what happens when you let religion (above all this particular religion) form the basis of political organisation. Read the rest of this article

Qatar's FIFA success proves we are winning the war on terror

The award of the 2022 World Cup to tiny, gas-drenched Qatar has been greeted with an odd mixture of bemusement and outrage. Attention quickly focused on the inappropriateness of the choice. Qatar - the consensus seems to be - is too small, too hot, too undemocratic and too Muslim to play host to the quadrennial secular Haj (for it is written, is it not, that any true football fan must at some point in his life make the pilgrimmage to watch his country lose to Brazil or, in our case, Germany?) And of course they bought it. It's the only explanation. The only thing no-one is suggesting is that Qatar cannot afford to host the championship. So it lacks the infrastructure and the stadiums? No problem. They will just build some. It's small change, really.

Though it is discussed sotto voce, the Muslim dimension is the most troubling to many doubters. The idea seems to be that male supporters will be unable to drink themselves silly and that female supporters (if they are even let in) will be forced to walk around in burqas. And what is the point of a World Cup, we're meant to think, without booze and half-naked women? There's the football, of course. But the World Cup is about more than just twenty-two men kicking a ball around. It's the great global party, a collective carnival, the time when even those who normally can't stand football develop a temporary interest. What the Olympics were to ancient Greece the FIFA World Cup is to our global civilisation (apart from the Americans, of course, which is odd but also strangely telling). The modern Olympics, by contrast, are a yawn, an expensive waste of time. That's why, unlike the World Cup, the Olympic Games almost invariably lose money.

So: a Muslim country wants to get in on the act, wants to subsidise the decadent West's most decadent festival, will allegedly even pay bribes to get it. And people are outraged? We should be delighted. It shows, apart from anything else, that we are winning the global kulturkampf hands down. It is yet another indication of the strength, the universal attractiveness, of Western culture. And it will be a major triumph in the ongoing war against terror.

Qatar may not be a model democracy, and may have the usual anti-gay legislation, but compared with most of its neighbours it's a haven of liberalism. The woman in the picture was celebrating yesterday's news in Doha. Not exactly Saudi Arabia, then. Qatar's ruler is less corrupt, less beholden to fundamentalists, is more pro-Western and has a more visible wife than is normal for the region. Since he's sitting on the world's most substantial gas-lake, that's a cause for celebration in itself. But there's more. By hosting the World Cup, at vast cost, the Qataris are giving not just football but global secular culture the greatest possible plug. They are encouraging not just their own people, but all the inhabitants of that tumultuous region - Iraqis, Iranians, Saudis, Syrians - to plough their restless energy into a harmless game. And away from terrorism, fundamentalism and dreams of global jihad.

Football, to its fans, is a religion, or more than a religion. International sporting competition is also what civilised nations do instead of war. At one level, it was absurd to watch our prime minister and our future king abasing themselves before the decrepit and corrupt oligarchs who run FIFA. But at another, it was hugely reassuring. For they rightly recognised the galvanizing effect that hosting the World Cup would have had in England, just as it had in South Africa, just as it will have in Qater. But in truth, England doesn't need the World Cup. We have the Premiership and the Champions League for nine months every year. Some would say we have too much football as it is, and a World Cup would just be overkill. In the Middle East, on the other hand, soccer must compete with radical Islamism for the attentions of the young.

Football and the Jihad have a surprising amount in common, after all. Both have their pin-ups, their romantic warrior-heroes, their narrative of victimhood (the whole Israel-Palestine question boils down to little more than a prodigious case of "We woz robbed"), their irrational closed-minded team-loyalties, their hooliganism. Both are powerful vehicles for male bonding. The more football there is, then, the less terrorism there is likely to be.

The Qataris have done us all a huge favour. The emirate's most famous resident, Ken Livingstone's old mate Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi, may be crowing that the decision marks the Muslim world's victory over the United States, but it really marks football's victory over theology, something he won't like one bit. Read the rest of this article

Tony Blair and the narrative of terror

I'm not Tony Blair's biggest fan, not by a long way, but he's not always wrong. Even when he's right, however, he invariably manages to draw the wrong conclusions.

His latest speech, delivered to a Washington foreign affairs think-tank that had just given him a prize as a "scholar-statesman" (like Gladstone, presumably, or the emperor Marcus Aurelius), concerned his favourite subject of what to do about the Terrorist Menace and the extreme Islamist politic-religious world-view which inspires many (but not all) of the terrorists. In some ways it was an impressive oration. He made some good points. Unfortunately, his fixation on "faith" as the answer to everything let him down yet again.

My solution to all this has always been to concentrate on foiling actual plots and let the ideology take care of itself. The fact that many Muslim-majority countries, and Muslim communities in the West, have become infected with paranoid, self-pitying and reactionary ideas based on a particular view of Islam and of history is inconvenient, but it is not really any of our business. Provided that they're not actually planning to blow anything up, if people want to think that "the West" has it in for Islam and that everything they don't like, from corrupt governments to female emancipation, is Our Fault - well, let them. It's a bizarre way of thinking, but then so is Scientology.

Blair, however, has long been convinced that arguing against this ideology - whether held by terrorists, proto-terrorists, terrorist sympathisers or "non-violent Islamists" - is the best and only way of defeating terrorism. "I do not think it is possible to defeat the extremism without defeating the narrative that nurtures it," he says. In making this case, he does put a finger on what is wrong with the rival view (associated with people such as the ex-spy Alastair Crooke and many in the British foreign office) that the strategy towards "non-violent extremism" should be one of appeasement, accommodation, even tacit support. He says:

The irony is that the many Muslims who believe passionately in co-existence and tolerance, are not empowered but frequently disempowered by our refusal to confront the narrative. We think if we sympathise with the narrative – that essentially this extremism has arisen as a result, partly, of our actions, we meet it half way, we help the modernisers to be more persuasive. We don’t. We indulge it and we weaken them. Worse, a reaction springs up amongst our people that we are pandering to this narrative and they start to resent Muslims as a whole. This is because implicit in this indulgence is an acceptance of the argument that Islam and, for want of a better term, ‘The West’ are in conflict.

This is, of course, true. The problem, though, is not merely that Blair's own actions - invading Iraq, most notably - have done more to reinforce "the narrative" than any number of anti-imperialist pamphlets by self-hating Western intellectuals could ever do. It's that his own solution - "confronting the narrative head on, forming an alliance across the faiths and across the divides of culture and civilisation" - tends to end up looking remarkably like the strategy of appeasement he claims to disapprove.

Partly, that is because the very process of engaging constructively with another point of view entails accepting the validity of at least some of its analysis. Blair speaks warmly of Barack Obama's speech in Cairo, which he calls a "brilliant template" for the dialogue he supports. But the president's platitude-laden speech was in many ways ill-judged, indeed dangerous. In an effort to stroke his audience's collective ego, he made a number of bizarre historical claims (for example, that Muslims invented printing and discovered the magnetic compass) and, more seriously, betrayed the very principles he claims to represent. He boasted about the right of women in the United States to wear the hijab while saying nothing about the forced veiling of women in Iran, Saudi Arabia or (under Western noses) Afghanistan and southern Iraq. He confused (as Blair often does) the religion of Islam with the totality of life in Muslim countries and among Muslim communities - something much to the liking of conservative (and even "moderate") Sharia scholars, no doubt, but also patronising and damaging to the lives and aspirations of millions of people who, while Muslim, are not obsessed with their religion. We have long since ceased talking of Europe and America as "the Christian world"; while to describe China, Japan and Korea as "the Confucian world" would be just plain silly. So why not forget about "the Muslim world" as well?

Worst of all, Obama was unable to follow up his warm words with any radical change in US foreign policy (how could he?) with the result that many who applauded him in 2009 are now feeling short-changed. The speech achieved a rare double effect, confirming many at home in their suspicion of him as an appeaser while reinforcing the "narrative" that Western leaders (even the initially different-looking Obama) are hypocritical and speak with forked tongue. The president might as well have punched himself in both eyes.

But that's what inevitably happens when Western politicians blunder into the mental landscape of Islamists, whose nuances - and even basic principles - necessarily elude them. Blair himself yesterday mentioned the recent example of Pastor Jones and his (abandoned) Koran-burning stunt. He wondered why

condemnation was necessary (and, by the way, it was necessary). Suppose an Imam, with thirty followers, in Karachi was to burn a bible. I can barely imagine a murmur of protest. It wouldn’t be necessary for the President of Pakistan to condemn it because no one here would remotely consider he supported it.

The point Blair misses, of course, is that official condemnation of Pastor Jones and his aborted bonfire, far from being necessary, merely drew attention to the Florida fundamentalist and turned what would probably have gone ignored into a global media event, a trial of strength between one man and the government of the world's only superpower - not to mention a demonstration of Western "tolerance" in action. Once General Petraeus and the White House had alerted the world to the supposed danger of mass protests, it became necessary to stop the event. Several Korans were burnt publicly on September 11th this year, in fact - including one in England. Yet these incidents were overlooked, by governments, by the media - and, most significantly perhaps, by the violent protesters who did not materialise.

For Tony Blair, confronting extremist ideology has usually entailed lecturing Muslims (and others) about "the true nature of Islam", a hazy, rosy-tinted vision based on a reading of the Koran as selective as that of any Islamist ideologue and on cultivating the company of "moderate" scholars whose worldview (like the worldview of any religious leaders or, for that matter, of Tony Blair) is premised on an absurdly inflated view of the importance of religion. Ultimately, these questions are political, not religious and will not be resolved by politicians doing God. Once upon a time, Blair seemed to understand this - or, at any rate, Alastair Campbell did.

He's on a hiding to nothing here, as he must at some level realise. He admits, for example, that while "the practitioners of extremism are small in number, [t]he adherents of the narrative stretch far broader into parts of mainstream thinking." He says:

It is a narrative that now has vast numbers of assembled websites, blogs and organisations. Of course many of those that agree with it abhor the terrorism. But as the support across the Middle East for the Muslim Brotherhood shows, far too many buy into far too much of the analysis of the extremists, if not their methodology.

But if only a small number support terrorism (and an even smaller number actually become terrorists) while the vast majority of those who accept the "analysis" of the extremists (presumably he's thinking of people like Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Ken Livingstone's old friend) are content just to think badly of the West - well, why is this Tony Blair's problem? Or ours? The problem of rare, religiously motivated murders of abortionists is not to be answered by tackling head-on the "analysis" of the religious organisation to which Tony Blair belongs. An ideology or religious belief should be discussed, dismissed or argued with on its own terms, not on the basis of what a few isolated nutters then do with it. Terrorists may share the analysis of more mainstream Muslim haters of the West, but that is not what makes them terrorists. If it were, then there would be many millions of suicide bombers, and Al Qaeda spectaculars such as 9/11 would be of daily occurrence. I would go further. If Blair is right about the importance of ideology, we should perhaps be asking what it is about Islamist extremism that discourages its adherents from strapping bombs to themselves. I'd say that was the real mystery.

In any case, in his self-chosen battle against Islamism, Tony Blair has a serious problem. He knows what it is, but can only bring himself to hint at the source of the trouble. Here's what he said:

Finally, we should wake up to the absurdity of our surprise at the prevalence of this extremism. Look at the funds it receives. Examine the education systems that succour it. And then measure, over the years, the paucity of our counter-attack in the name of peaceful co-existence. We have been outspent, outmanoeuvred and out-strategised.

By whom have we been "outspent, outmanoeuvred and out-strategised"? Where does most of the money he speaks of come from? Saudi Arabia, perhaps? He doesn't say. I wonder why not.

[On that last point, see also this first-rate analysis by Richard Wilson] Read the rest of this article

Not at Ground Zero, Not a Mosque, just a really bad idea

I haven't commented so far on the "Ground Zero Mosque" - or multi-function Muslim venue within walking distance of Ground Zero if we're being strictly accurate - largely because I've found it genuinely difficult to work out who is most wrong. Almost everyone is at least partly wrong. Robert Spencer of JihadWatch, for whom it is an "Islamic Supremacist Mega-mosque" planned by radical Islamists intent on destroying American democracy, manages to torpedo any valid criticisms he might have had about the insensitivity of the proposal with his absurd, rabid conspiracy-mongering. But Barack Obama was just as wrong to imply that it was purely a question of religious liberty and planning law. Those who claim - with the venue's planners and their liberal cheerleaders - that the building is merely a positive contribution to interfaith dialogue and a celebration of tolerance are either naive or dishonest. And as for those who think that it's all a fuss about nothing, they obviously have no understanding of how symbols often count for more than reality.

Today, Butterflies and Wheels draws attention to two excellent pieces which ask rather more searching questions about the whole proposal (whose provisional name is Park 51). On Slate, Christopher Hitchens takes a look at the background and past pronouncements of the famously liberal and moderate imam behind the scheme, Feisal Abdul Rauf. Rauf has said some dodgy things over the years, for example singing the praises of the brutal theocratic government of Iran. He also condemned the Danish cartoons in vociferous terms (not much sign of tolerance there) and implied that the US was partly to blame for 9/11.

No-one motivated by anything other than malice would suggest that Rauf is a friend of terrorists or a purveyor of an extremist version of Islam. That, though, may be the problem: what is moderate or liberal from an Islamic point of view does not equate to moderate or liberal from the point of view of secular democracy. And this is especially true when it comes to those who claim to speak public for Islam or to represent Muslims. Hitchens:

We are wrong to talk as if the only subject was that of terrorism. As Western Europe has already found to its cost, local Muslim leaders have a habit, once they feel strong enough, of making demands of the most intolerant kind. Sometimes it will be calls for censorship of anything "offensive" to Islam. Sometimes it will be demands for sexual segregation in schools and swimming pools. The script is becoming a very familiar one. And those who make such demands are of course usually quite careful to avoid any association with violence. They merely hint that, if their demands are not taken seriously, there just might be a teeny smidgeon of violence from some other unnamed quarter …

The term "radical", in Islamic terms, invariably signifies a bearded loon convinced that the whole world will bend the knee to a Taliban-style universal caliphate - someone, in other words, who is profoundly reactionary in religious terms. It would be great to hear from a genuinely radical Muslim for a change. The only one I can think of, off hand, is Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble with Islam. Happily, she too has been writing about the GZM affair. She begins by wondering about the politics of offence, which she describes as a "nefarious force". "Too many Americans are mistaking feeling for thinking," she complains. It's telling, indeed, that the technique - perfected by Islamists - of claiming offence as a way of closing down debate has been adopted wholesale by the anti-mosque campaigners, their tone most succinctly caught by Sarah Palin's notorious Tweet that the scheme "stabs hearts." But Manji pushes it further, noting that the mosque's liberal supporters are now using the same emotive language - declaring, for example, that the campaign against the building offends their sense of American values.

Manji then takes a different, and much more interesting, tack. She asks what kind of "tolerance" the GZM might be expected to embody, given the intolerant nature of the kind of mainstream, moderate Islam associated with its proponents. It's not just that no-one associated with the proposal has "publicly acknowledged that the feelings of these 'appalled' Americans parallel how moderate Muslims such as Imam Rauf felt during the cartoon debacle." It's also things like this:

Will the swimming pool at Park51 be segregated between men and women at any time of the day or night?

May women lead congregational prayers any day of the week?

Will Jews and Christians, fellow People of the Book, be able to use the prayer sanctuary for their services just as Muslims share prayer space with Christians and Jews in the Pentagon?

What will be taught about homosexuals? About agnostics? About atheists? About apostasy?

Where does one sign up for advance tickets to Salman Rushdie's lecture at Park51?

Manji argues that the intense scrutiny that the GZM will inevitably face if it goes ahead could lead to the construction of a facility that would genuinely embody the spirit of pluralism and equality and so "make the colorful neighborhood around Ground Zero host to the most transparent, most democratic, most modern Islam ever." Which is very optimistic of her. Much as I share her dream, it's too late for that. The battle-lines have been drawn. In any case, a mosque-complex based on the ultra-liberal version of Islam Manji espouses would be deeply controversial within Islam. It would surely be disowned by Muslim leaders around the world as evidence of a sinister Western plot to undermine and re-design their religion. It would be an open invitation to terrorists.

"Park 51" is not part of a plot by Islamists to take over the world, a celebration of the destruction of the Twin Towers or an attempt to rub the noses of 9/11 families in their grief. Of course not. It is, however, a really bad idea. Even if you regard it as a positive thing in principle, it should by now by obvious that has not worked out like that, and indeed was never likely to. The row has now become terminally poisonous. Either its construction or its abandonment will be something to crow over or denounce for the winning and losing side. It can't end well. The real question is why anyone ever thought it could.

Whatever the positive intentions of the facility's backers, this was always a high-profile, elaborate and thus divisive scheme. Spencer and his evil twin Pamela Geller may have cynically whipped up a storm on their blogs, but that does not mean that there was not something inherently offensive about the proposal. It is not simply a question of giving local Muslims somewhere to pray or meet. There is already a makeshift mosque in the vicinity of Ground Zero, that has been operating for some time with little or no comment. It is the size and ambition of Park 51, more than its incorporation of a mosque, that smacks of insensitivity or even triumphalism. It was intended as a grand gesture, which is why the location matters to its proponents (who have rejected an alternative site) as much as to its opponents. Ground Zero - or its vicinity - is no place for an Islamic PR stunt, which is basically what this complex always was. Read the rest of this article

Send for the Grammar Police

Serious concerns were raised today about standards of literacy in the British police, after a document submitted to a Parliamentary Committee by the National Association of Muslim Police was revealed by the Daily Telegraph.

The document, which set out NAMP's opposition to the government's Counter-extremism "Prevent" strategy, was found to be littered with grammatical errors, spelling mistakes and stylistic peculiarities. One of the Heresiarch's correspondents likened it to pidgin English. "You'd never guess it was written by coppers", he added.

Oh, I don't know.

Politically, it was almost as controversial. NAMP complained that the concept of "Islamist terrorism" unfairly singled out Muslims. It also denounced the British government for not allowing its foreign policy to be decided by Islamic representatives such as NAMP or the Muslim Council of Britain. Instead, it complained, "established pressure groups" - thought to be a reference to the notoriously influential Jewish lobby - and pseudo-Muslim groups such as the Quilliam Foundation monopolised the government's attention.

As a result of this and other failures in government policy, NAMP declared, "hatred towards Muslims has grown to a level that defies all logic and is an affront to British values." For evidence, NAMP pointed to an episode of Panorama one of its members had watched.

The political content of the document - which dates from November - led the Telegraph to suggest that its revelations would prove embarrassing to the government. Gordon Brown, it noted, has previously "said the association was crucial to bridge the historic divide between Muslims and the police." The well-known blog Harry's Place, for its part, has unearthed close links between NAMP and an Iranian-backed group calling itself the Islamic Human Rights Commission. The IHRC, the article noted, generally displayed little interest in the human rights of Iranians - unless it be in the human right of Basiji militiamen to beat pro-democracy protesters to within an inch of their lives on the streets of Tehran.

Telegraph blogger Nile Gardiner thought that NAMP - a body whose professed aims include "raising Islamic awareness - was "clearly in a state of denial regarding the motivation and inspiration behind the vast majority of terrorists in the UK."

It certainly seems to be in denial about the rules of English.

Whoever wrote the submission is clearly unaware of how compound nouns work, for one thing. It refers to "stereo types", "under lying concerns", "anti terror actions" "so called Islamist terrorism" and "non trust worthy" Muslims, among many similar constructions. Nor does he (or just possibly, though I doubt it, she) have much familiarity with the proper use of the apostrophe. Thus we find: "strategic term's" (pl); "there may need to be caution of the danger's of this being too politicised"; and "anecdotal evidence show's".

The difference between "effect" and "affect" causes the author some problems, too, as in "It is debatable whether we are reaching the really hard to reach individuals who may be effected by this thought process." There's a depressing tendency to use a comma where "and" or a semicolon is called for, as well as an occasional (but inconsistent) preference for American spellings. There are oddities like "stigitimatising" - used twice, which suggests it cannot simply be a slip. And there are many grammatically defective sentences such as this: "The net result may have caused some serious damage to Community Cohesion."

But the document's grammatical problems go beyond a few easily-correctible solecisms - of interest, perhaps, mainly to those of us who are pedantically-inclined - and strike at the root of its comprehensibility. What, for example, are we to make of this?

It appears that the whole of the Muslim Communities some 2 million plus is being stigitimsed and mapped from start to end, There has never been in any case in history to such effective mapping apart from the Martian era in America pre the second world war.

Or this?

Arguable the programme has been restricted in effectiveness although this cannot be truly gauged due to a lack of an effective transparent review of the strategy.

Or indeed this?

Whilst the projects such as Chanel from Prevent appear to be showing success in terms of referrals and recent take on of some right wing extremism. There is question again about the targeting of the real needy. It is debatable whether we are reaching the really hard to reach individuals who may be effected by this thought process.

It would be invidious to single out any more examples of syntactical confusion. To do so would risk lengthening this post beyond bearable limits. Instead, I will note that, stylistically, the document tends towards the rhetorical, even the baroque. Here's one of a number of purple passages:

Never before has a community been mapped in a manner and nor will it be, it is frustrating to see this in a country that is a real pillar and example of freedom of expression and choice. Our British system is a model for the world to follow, yet we have embarked on a journey that has put this very core of British values under real threat. This has been echoed from all areas of the globe, the UN in New York to Liberty based in the UK.

The hatred towards Muslims has grown to a level that defies all logic and is an affront to British values. The climate is such that Muslim are subject to daily abuse in a manner that would be ridiculed by Britain, were this to occur any where else. An example of this was the recent BBC programme titled "hate at your door step". This programme gave us an insight at level of abuse faced by many Muslims in Britain on a daily basis.

As might be imagined, this sustained assault on the English language by a supposedly representative body of police officers has the potential to cause NAMP severe embarrassment. And that is to say nothing of the document's claims of institutional Islamophobia or its scepticism about the notion of Islamist extremism. Happily, today NAMP has issued a press release (pdf) to clarify these matters.

Claiming that they wrote "in confidence" to the committee, NAMP stresses that they were "deeply disappointed that this has been made public". Apparently they weren't aware that such submissions are published as a matter of course on the Parliamentary website. It's striking, though, that an organisation of police officers should think that it has the right to slag off government policy - and in the most outspoken terms - and do so in private. Ah well.

They now claim, "in clarification" that

"We fully support the Government CONTEST strategy and have been working tirelessly withthe Police service and with the communities to ensure that the strategy serves its purpose."

Right.

So sentences like:

The strategies of PREVENT were historically focused on so called Islamist extremism.

This has subjected the biggest Black and Minority Ethnic community and second biggest faith group in an unprecedented manner ,stigitimatising them in the process. It has also arguably isolated them and visibly made them the focus of all our anti Terror actions for a substantial period. The net result may have caused some serious damage to Community Cohesion.

Amount to fully supporting government policy. I can't think what opposition would look like.

The new statement also says that "the Police Service needs to gather and coordinate intelligence on far right organisations more affectively."

There goes the spelling again. Or perhaps they really want to say that the police ought to use emotion rather than logic or evidence when it comes to countering the far right.

Finally, we are extremely pleased to say that since the submission of our memorandum to the Home Affairs select committee, progress has been made on many of the areas highlighted in the memorandum and we continue to support the work of the Police Service and the Home Office on Contest Strategy.

I think this means that, since they wrote to the Committee, the government has started being nice again to NAMP's allies at the MCB. How reassuring.

NAMP is only one of many groupings of police officers. There's also a Christian Police Association, a Gay Police Association, even an Association of Pagan Police. There doesn't, sadly, seem to be an Association of Grammatical Police Officers. It would be considerably more helpful than NAMP.
Read the rest of this article

Friends Reunited

Last week it was reported that American intelligence believed London to be the centre of Al Qaeda influence in the Western world. The "growing strength" of support for radical Islamists was "a major concern" for US agencies, especially in the wake of the failed Detroit bomb attack. There was talk of "tensions" between American officials and their British equivalents.

None of this will come as much surprise to anyone. Those British Muslims believed to be actively plotting terrorism may be few in number - both absolutely and as a proportion of the total size of the community. About one in a thousand. But there are perhaps hundreds of thousands who share their ideology and many of their assumptions: a belief in Sharia law; the notion that the Ummah or global community of Muslims ought to be unified (whether or not under a revived Caliphate); a belief that Western foreign policy is deliberately anti-Muslim; an obsessive dislike of Israel; qualified support of or at least empathy with suicide bombings (at least where the targets are Israeli or Western interests in Muslim countries). Up to a third of British Muslims, in some polls, support a version of "Islamism" - politicised Islam.

It's not just that these disaffected British Muslims are the recruiting pool for Al Qaeda. As I often write here, the threat of actual terrorism is greatly exaggerated. The real problem is one of community relationships and civic harmony. Despite the efforts of progressive groups like British Muslims for Secular Democracy, there has been over the past twenty years a pronounced turning away from integration, with more Muslims seeking refuge in religious conservatism and a form of voluntary apartheid. The spread of the hijab - however sincerely its wearers believe it to be a religious requirement - is the visible sign of this widening social fracture.

Voices claiming to represent British Muslims - and I'm not talking about Anjem Choudary so much as the likes of Inayat Bunglawala or Sir Iqbal Sacranie - seem fixated by the same few issues - religious observance, foreign policy and events supposedly indicative of Islamophobia, like the Danish cartoons. The upshot is that everyone - Muslim and non-Muslim, government and the press, the religious and the secular - perceives Islam to be a "problem" in urgent need of resolution. In particular, it powers the government's belief that the people best place to tackle the problem are the very people who most embody it.

Last week, amid great publicity, the government banned Islam4UK, the latest vehicle for Anjem Choudary's hilariously extreme views. I say "hilariously" because, although he may in the past have had links with violent extremism, these days he and his tiny band of supporters exist largely to supply the media with a convenient bogeyman. He was simply too public to be a real threat. Hizb'ut Tahrir, a group with which he was once associated and which proclaims virtually identical views, is still entirely lawful - and, indeed, remains active on university campuses. One of its senior members has been found teaching at the LSE. Hizb'ut Tahrir, however, has a subtlety Choudary lacks. Its members do not take to the streets holding aloft placards proclaiming what they really think - except, perhaps, when they are demonstrating against Israel, when they can be take advantage of the protection afforded by respectable left-wingers.

Meanwhile, even as it banned Choudary, the government has quietly been mending fences with the Muslim Council of Britain, an organisation that claims to represent mainstream Muslim opinion in the UK but which has been dominated by Islamists ever since its foundation. It may even be that the banning of the largely irrelevant Islam4UK - apparently in reaction to its proposed Wootton Bassett march - was a smokescreen designed to distract attention from this striking reversal of policy.

After courting the MCB for many years, the government - and especially the former Communities secretaries Ruth Kelly and Hazel Blears - seemed to have got wise to its close links with Islamists, and its failure to represent those millions of British Muslims who are not imams, self-styled "community leaders" or religious/political activists. Islamist influence at the organisation went right to the top. John Ware wrote in Prospect magazine in 2006 of its former general secretary:

Sacranie was knighted despite being listed as a trustee of a global alliance of Islamic charities called the Union of Good, chaired by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has said of the Israel-Palestine conflict: “We must plant the love of death in the Islamic nation.” Like al-Qaradawi, several of Sacranie’s fellow trustees are members or supporters of Hamas and have extolled the theological virtues of suicide bombing directed at civilians in the Israel-Palestine conflict. According to Muslim Weekly, the new deputy MCB secretary-general, Daud Abdullah, referred to Hamas as “we” at a recent Trafalgar Square rally. And Abdullah was behind the MCB’s boycott of Holocaust Memorial day, successfully resisting the efforts of a sizeable minority of MCB members who want it lifted to repair relations between British Muslims and Jews.

"While preaching moderation, the MCB is also good at keeping young Muslims angry" he noted.

Ware was writing in the wake of an important announcement by Ruth Kelly of a shift in government support towards less confrontational representatives. Kelly told "a stunned audience" that there would be "a fundamental rebalancing of our relationship with Muslim organisations from now on." The "special relationship" with the MCB was over, claimed Ware. What led to a complete breakdown of the relationship, however, was Abdullah's decision to sign the pro-Hamas Istanbul Declaration in 2009. That document, which was couched in blatantly anti-Semitic language, referred to "the religious obligation of Jihad" and contained veiled threats to Western (including British) forces, has never been repudiated either by Abdullah or by the MCB as a whole. Abdullah remains the MCB general secretary. As James Forsyth puts it, the government has "caved in".

It's worth remembering what Blears wrote at the time:

The government would be shirking its duty if it fails to investigate any potential threat to the security of our troops and communities. We must take this extremely seriously.

That is why we have been asking the MCB to find out whether their deputy secretary general, Dr Abdullah, attended the conference and signed the statement. The MCB has now confirmed he did attend and did sign the declaration. A declaration that supports violence against foreign forces – which could include British naval personnel – as the prime minister has offered British naval support to stop the smuggling of weapons to Gaza; and advocating attacks on Jewish communities all around the world.

...I would urge the MCB to accept the serious nature of this issue and work with us to resolve it so that we can continue in partnership to build the safe, strong, cohesive communities in which we all want to live.

They didn't.

Hazel Blears was an irritating politician in many ways - it's hard to forget the manner in which she tried to brazen out her expenses claim and, when finally forced to hand back the money, waved the cheque around. But her approach to the MCB was the right one. Since her departure, the DCLG under John Denham has reverted to the old policy of propping up non-violent Islamists as its preferred Muslim interlocutors.

Last November, Nick Cohen reported that "the fix is in and Islamists are all over Whitehall again." Denham, he wrote, "is forcing out of his department Azhar Ali" - an opponent of Islamism who had recommended freezing out the MCB - and was about to cut the funding of moderate groups like the Sufi Council. Instead, it was "entertaining" Inayat Bunglawala, sucking up to representatives of Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood, and even considering giving Sacranie a peerage. That hasn't happened yet, fortunately. But we learn today that with the full knowledge of Ed Balls' education department children attending Islamic madrassas are being subjected to corporal punishment. Despite the vociferous objections of progressive Muslims and a report last year which stated that children "had been slapped, punched and had their ears twisted" in such informal institutions, Balls' department claims that there is "no evidence the law is being abused."

Eyebrows were raised recently at the presence of Wakkas Khan, who as a student leader at the time of the 7/7 tube bombings viewed with equanimity the growth of Hizb'ut Tahrir at British universities, on Denham's list of "inter-faith advisers". Evidently, his appointment is part of a pattern. Now an unrepentant MCB leadership rejoins New Labour's charmed circle of Faith. Some people speculate these unwelcome developments have something to do with the presence of substantial numbers of Muslims in some marginal Labour seats. Perhaps so. There's also a long-standing belief in sections of the police and the security services that the best way to neutralise extremism is to give money and credibility to people who are only slightly less extreme. Either way, it's a dangerous road they're going down. Read the rest of this article

Banning Choudary

It turns out that Anjem Choudary's publicity stunt was a little too clever. By threatening to march with his dozen or so supporters through the hallowed streets of Wootton Bassett in tribute (he claimed) to the thousands of unremarked Muslim casualties of Afghanistan and Iraq, he achieved far more attention than he did even when his group shouted abuse as returning soldiers in Luton last year. That in itself is a sufficiently remarkable fact. Choudary's public remarks on the subject of his proposed march were, for him, unusually moderate. The overwhelming condemnation of what was, by his own admission, a publicity stunt, shows that the nerve he was touching was rawer than even he realised.

And thus did he overstep the invisible line that defines the limits of tolerance. In response to the furore, the Home Secretary is going to add both Al Muhajiroun (the group led by the exiled Omar Bakri Mohammed which was Choudary's original operation) and Islam4UK itself to the list of banned terrorist and terror-supporting groups. Henceforth, it will be an offence punishable by ten years imprisonment to be associated in any way with either network.

Why? Under the Terrorism Act of 2000, groups can be outlawed if they "unlawfully glorify the commission or preparation of acts of terrorism". Choudary has certainly come close to that on a number of occasions: for example, he described the 9/11 terrorists as "magnificent martyrs". Yet it's hard to escape the conclusion that, were it not for the extraordinary furore surrounding his proposed Wootton Bassett march, Islam4UK would not now be facing proscription. It is being banned for embarrassing the government, for upsetting various politicians, and for causing newspaper columns to be written denouncing the group's insensitivity and lack of patriotic respect. It is being banned because it is the public (and ridiculous) face of Islamic extremism in the UK, and because banning it allows the government to be seen to be "doing something" about someone who has proved wildly successful at winding people up. It is being banned for abusing our patience.

Alan Johnson claimed that "proscription is a tough but necessary power to tackle terrorism and is not a course we take lightly." Yet - unless you believe in a remarkable coincidence of timing - this ban is a PR move that has little or nothing to do with actual terrorist activity. Choudary was not proposing to do anything illegal. The march, moreover, could have been banned in advance if there were grounds for supposing it would have been illegal or that marchers were likely to incite violence or hatred, or even that the presence of Choudary's supporters - along with counter-demonstrators from the English Defence League - was likely to lead to trouble.

However dubious his associates - including the "hate preacher" Bakri himself - Choudary is, these days at least, essentially a propagandist. Islam4UK, and its previous incarnations, have, we can imagine, been under surveillance and monitoring since their inception. There is no evidence that they have actually inspired anyone to commit acts of terror, and Choudary himself has always been careful to stay within the law. Where incitement has occurred, his supporters have been taken to court. Just yesterday a group of them who had yelled abuse at soldiers in Luton were found guilty of a public order offence. But that does not make them terrorists, merely obnoxious, and it should not be a crime to be obnoxious.

Neither Islam4UK nor Al Muhajiroun are serious groups. They are far less significant, for example, than Hizb ut Tahrir, which has the same professed aims - a world ruled by Islam - yet remains legal. Choudary is a clown. His views are cartoonish: with his visions of the flag of Islam flying over Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square turned into a popular venue for Saudi-style beheadings, he offers a reductio ad absurdum of radical Islamism. The only proper response - certainly, the proper British response - is to laugh. As a country, we laughed at Hitler, as we laughed at his British wannabe Oswald Mosley. And Choudary is closer to Roderick Spode than he is to Mosley. Another figure he resembles is the Rev Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, who shares his belief in the efficacy of hate-filled placards. Phelps and his group were, you may remember, banned from Britain by the lovely Jacqui Smith after they proposed (without really intending to) bringing their "God hates Fags" campaign to the streets of Basingstoke.

The freedom to be obnoxious is not just an unfortunate side-effect of free speech: it is free speech. We seem to have lost sight of that. When people express support for free speech, they often appear to mean that people should be allowed to agree with them. Religious bigots want the freedom to condemn homosexuality but get upset when the BBC broadcasts something that offends their faith. Secular liberals support bans on homophobic speech. The government, at best, believes that freedom of expression should be balanced against other, more fashionable notions like respect and preserving social cohesion. This is dangerous. Banning views does not make them disappear: it merely gives those who hold them the status of martyrs.

When the Thatcher government banned Sinn Fein from the airwaves it boosted it credibility, won it widespread sympathy and deflected attention from the murderous IRA campaign in which its leading members were profoundly implicated. And Sinn Fein, unlike Islam4UK, was undoubtedly a mouthpiece for terrorists. By banning Al Muhajiroun and its offshoots, the Home Office appears to be taking Anjem Choudary at his own estimation as a person of substance and influence in the Muslim community. And few doubt that his group will be back in some other guise.

I agree with Peter Tatchell, who said in response to yesterday's convictions:

Just as I defended the right to free speech of the Christian homophobe Harry Hammond, and opposed his conviction in 2002 for insulting the gay community, so I also defend the right of these objectionable Muslim extremists to make their views heard. The best way to respond to these fanatics is expose and refute their hateful, bigoted opinions. Rational argument is more effective and ethical than using an authoritarian law to censor and suppress them.

The quintessential Choudary placard was the one that read "Freedom go to Hell", his group's response to the Danish cartoons and, indeed, to all instances where non-Muslims had exercised their rights to free expression in ways that were uncongenial to his brand of Islam. There would certainly not be much free speech in the Islamic republic he dreams that Britain will one day become. He is not, therefore, in much position to complain that the government wants to stifle his own freedom, though that is precisely what he has been doing all day as he toured the major TV studios. The fact that he is a hypocrite, however, does not mean that he is not correct in pointing out the hypocrisy of those who want to ban him. Read the rest of this article

Why am I giving this man further publicity?

Oh look, it's Anjem Choudary, again. Britain's best-known (because only) public campaigner for Islamic domination. The beard, the glasses, the smirk are all instantly recognisable even on the radio, where he turned up this morning, defending his latest wheeze. As you probably know by now, he wants to parade down the street of Wootton Bassett with (he claims) 500 of his supporters.

If the event goes ahead, his bearded clones - who are more likely to number about twenty, if past form is anything to go by - will presumably get out their placards (you know, the ones that read "Islam will dominate the world", "freedom go to hell", "death to those who insult Islam"; it's always the same placards) and predict the inevitable fall of Western civilisation to their own particular brand of crankiness. And then go home again, job done.

On the other hand, they might well be banned, in which case Choudary will be able to blame a repressive anti-Muslim establishment. No doubt he will be invited to appear on several major news outlets to do so.

Choudary is a comedy Islamist who learned his trade at the feet of the now-exiled Omar Bakri Mohammed (remember the fun when his daughter turned out to be a pole dancer?) and who now leads, embodies, or perhaps simply is a group called this week Islam4UK. (It used to be Al-Muhajiroun, and has also gone by other names, including the unpronounceable Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah.) With his booming voice, irrepressible personality and, above all, unvarying willingness to play up to the stereotype of a radical Muslim extremist, he is a gift to the media; and he, and they, know it.

Inayat Bunglawala, who these days likes to present himself as a moderate, last year expressed his frustration after being bounced off GMTV to make way for Choudary. Television and the press were, he complained, "very much complicit in promoting the divisive agenda of al-Muhajiroun" even as they condemned it. But what did he expect? A group of Muslims not demonstrating against the presence of British soldiers in Afghanistan or calling for the death of a cartoonist simply isn't news. And, while Choudary can usually count on only a tiny number of people to come to his demos, opinion polls repeatedly show that the views he articulates (pro-Sharia, pro-Caliphate, above all anti-West) do appeal to a significant minority of British Muslims.

According to the Sun (which has rewarded his latest scheme with a full-scale interview), Choudary lives "on benefits provided by the British taxpayer". He used to be a solicitor; apparently his name was removed in 2002, though I'm not sure why. One thing's clear, though: unlike others with fairly similar views but without his flair for public utterance, he isn't in receipt of any money from the government's Prevent strategy for tackling radicalisation. He probably costs the taxpayer far less than some "community leaders" who are as firm believers in the superiority of Sharia law as he is.

And unlike them, he has entertainment value. If there was a game called Mad Mullah Bingo, today's Sun would give its readers a full house. All the usual words and phrases are present and correct: "hate preacher", "outrage", "fanatic", "rant", "fallen heroes". The paper reminds us of some of Choudary's past hits: how he hailed the 9/11 bombers as martyrs, or his suggestion that in his Islamic Republic of Britain Peter Mandelson would be stoned to death (almost tempting...).

I'd like to see him on Have I Got News For You?



In truth, Choudary and his friends are fairly harmless. Not all radicalised Muslims are harmless, of course. Some are extremely dangerous. But they will be the ones under the radar. Choudary is just too public to be a real threat. And it's never a member of Choudary's gang who gets arrested trying to blow up a plane or working out how to cause mayhem in a shopping centre. Occasionally a couple of them get bundled off by the police for saying something outrageous or getting involved in a scuffle; and that, for them, is an end in itself. It means publicity. It means more TV interviews for Anjem, in which he can wind up distinguished-looking politicians or senior cultural commentators and annoy the "silent majority" of ordinary Muslims who hate the perception that Choudary is somehow representative of their community. He loves it. It's what he's in it for, even more than for the ultimate triumph of Islam, which I suspect is of less pressing importance to him than the instant fix of getting his beard on the telly. Again.

Today, he has gained the ultimate accolade of being condemned by Gordon Brown. He must be so proud.

You've got to give Choudary a little grudging admiration, I think. He knows precisely what to say and how to say it, in order to get himself and his tiny handful of supporters maximum publicity for minimum expense. He doesn't even need to make new placards - unlike Islam 4 UK's only true rivals in the religious aggravation stakes, the Westboro Baptist Church, who seem, when not proclaiming God's hatred of America, to have an unceasing placard production line. No, the same old favourites will do for Anjem and his boys.

Even by Choudary's standards, this latest wheeze is a classic. For one thing, he does have some sort of point: that while our dead soldiers are accorded full honours, however briefly, the far greater numbers of local civilians killed in Afghanistan and Iraq (mostly, of course, not by us) have no such memorial. But what is really inspired is his choice of venue. Wootton Bassett is the town that in the absence of any clear explanation of what we are doing in Afghanistan, has become not merely the scene of tribute but, in an odd way, the mission's whole justification. What began as the quiet and spontaneous reaction of locals has now become strangely ritualised and increasingly official. The town now seems both the focus and the locus of that attenuated thing we're supposed to call Britishness, where the military covenant, elsewhere a hollow joke, becomes almost sacral.

Anjem Choudary wants to claim it for Islam. Of course he does. Not because Wootton Bassett wants Islam, but because he knows how much it will enrage the Daily Mail. Wootton Bassett's MP, James Gray, predicted that the "quiet, pragmatic" people of the town would stay at home. Let's hope so. The best response to the march, if it takes place, would be to ignore it. Send no cameras. Film none of Choudary's predictable and boring rants. Waste no newsprint on placards we've seen too many times before. Don't launch anti-Choudary groups on Facebook. Stop presenting this clown as some kind of existential threat, even if that is how he sees himself.

That is, of course, asking too much. It's not that the media want to give Choudary publicity, nor that they have an exaggerated view of his importance. It's more that he serves their ends. He gives them an opportunity to pose as fearless defenders of our culture from those who would sweep it away, not to mention to underline their respect for our brave troops. As an added bonus, they can even complain about the political correctness that allows the demonstration to take place. And they can do so as outspokenly as they like because they know full well that Choudary and his friends are harmless attention-seekers. Condemning Islam 4 UK's proposed march requires much less courage than, say, reprinting the Danish cartoons - something that, given the recent attempted murder of the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, would be a welcome gesture of solidarity. It also takes rather less effort than looking too closely into the backgrounds and views of leading members of more mainstream - and far more influential - organisations such as the Muslim Council of Britain.
Read the rest of this article