Sucking up to Islam will never appease the zealots, Wheen warns

Francis WheenSucking up to Islam will never appease the zealots

By Francis Wheen

Evening Standard, 21 February 2006

I toddled down to Trafalgar Square last Saturday to observe the latest mass rally against Danish cartoonists.

The protesters were on their best behaviour, unlike the demagogues who addressed them. Certain placards – “Don’t they teach you manners in Denmark?”, “Learn to apologise properly” – suggested this whole crisis could have been avoided had the Danes studied Lady Troubridge’s Book of Etiquette more attentively.

The most common placard, however, was a simple equation: “War on terror = War on Islam”. What could be more moderate and well-mannered than that? It’s an article of faith for many secular British liberals, too.

The reasoning behind it is that Britain set out to topple Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim. Yet the victims of Saddam’s regime – Kurds and Shias – were themselves Muslims. Did anyone at the rally claim that Saddam also made war on Islam? Of course not.

Nor would they make the accusation against Iran – even though Iranian police arrested 1,200 Sufi Muslims in Qom last week and destroyed their prayer hall. This was an act of straightforward religious persecution, but only Amnesty International has made the slightest fuss.

If Tony Blair really is waging war on Islam, it must be the first struggle in history in which the belligerent continually prostrates himself before the foe he is supposedly attacking. Only last month the Government tried to push through a law criminalising people who criticise religion, a measure introduced purely to placate leading Muslims.

Now we learn from the New Statesman that the Foreign Office wants to establish “working-level contacts” with supporters of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, an extreme Islamist group. In a leaked memo to ministers, an FO official explains that “interacting with ‘political Islam’ is an important element of our Engaging With the Islamic World strategy”.

Our ambassador in Cairo seems unconvinced. In another memo leaked to the New Statesman, he complains of “a tendency for us to be drawn towards engagement for its own sake” and a reluctance to notice “the very real downsides for us in terms of the Islamists’ likely foreign and social policies”.

Just so. Since 9/11 earnest progressives have argued that we must work with militant Islam rather than challenge it. Hence the grotesque pantomime horse known as the Respect Coalition.

Meanwhile Tony Blair has been engaging away like billy-o with the famous “Muslim moderates”, awarding them knighthoods and seats on quangos. He insists religion is the solution rather than the problem, since “Jews, Muslims and Christians are all children of Abraham” – overlooking the fact that Abraham’s example was cited by one of the 9/11 hijackers as his chief inspiration.

So far, however, this ardent wooing seems to be unreciprocated. An ICM poll has found that 40 per cent of British Muslims want sharia law in parts of the country, and one in five sympathises with the “feelings and motives” of bombers who killed 52 people in London last July. Alarming news: but will it prompt a demo in Trafalgar Square? No chance.

Danish paper slams ‘special treatment’ for Muslims

The editor-in-chief of the Danish daily embroiled in the cartoons row claimed on Wednesday, February 15, that the press was giving Muslims a special treatment, as his cultural editor defended the decision to commission the lampooning drawings of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him).

“It turned out that the freedom of the press crumbled much more quickly than I thought,” Jyllands-Posten Editor-in-Chief Carsten Juste told the Danish Christian daily Kristelig Dagbladet, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP). “It seems to me that the freedom of the press the world over is being limited as Muslims are being given special treatment.”

Islam Online, 16 February 2006

The BNP is riding the wave of racism

The BNP is riding the wave of racism

By Sabby Dhalu

Morning Star, 16 February 2006

The events of the last few weeks have clarified the serious threat that the growing climate of racism in Britain and the rest of Europe poses to us all.

The BNP has announced its intention to make the forthcoming local elections a “referendum on Islam,” riding on a wave of Islamophobia and rising racism.

BNP leader Nick Griffin and party activist Mark Collett were acquitted recently on half of the charges for incitement to racial hatred. The publication and republication of the so-called Danish cartoons have led to protests across the world.

Racism towards Muslims is being presented under the banner of “freedom of speech.”

All these events indicate a legitimisation and deepening climate of racism.

The use of cartoons to create or strengthen grotesque racist stereotypes of entire peoples is nothing new.

In 1930s Germany, the nazis systematically used such so-called cartoons depicting Jewish people in the most dehumanising manner for the sole purpose of creating caricatures that justified their programme of mass extermination of the Jewish people.

Black people have also been subject to such caricatures and depiction by racists and white supremacists in many parts of Europe and north America.

If published, any such images today rightly receive widespread condemnation.

It is incumbent on all anti-racists and anti-fascists to condemn unreservedly the publication of these racist images, for exactly the same reasons as the cartoons in the 1930s needed to condemned.

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The anger at racist cartoons continues

Trafalgar Square rally (3)From London’s Trafalgar Square to Ramallah in Palestine, from Lebanon to Austria, the caricatures of the prophet Mohammed, first printed in a Danish paper, have sparked rage.

Some 20,000 protesters filled Trafalgar Square in London on Saturday of last week for a rally against Islamophobia and incitement. The event was called at short notice by the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) and others in the wake of the cartoons row.

The protest was also supported by the Stop the War Coalition and CND. Lindsey German, convenor of Stop the War, was warmly received by the crowd when she spoke at the rally. She noted that it wasn’t only Muslims who find the cartoons offensive: “They offend me because they offend my politics – they are racist provocations from a racist newspaper.”

Socialist Worker, 18 February 2006

See also the editorial comment, “Cartoon row: standing firmly united“, in the same paper.

Muslims and the West: a culture war?

John EspositoJohn Esposito writes on the cartoons controversy:

“One of the first questions I have been asked about this conflict by media from Europe, the US, and Latin America has been ‘Is Islam incompatible with Western values?’ Are we seeing a culture war?

“Before jumping to that conclusion, we should ask, whose Western democratic and secular values are we talking about? Is it a Western secularism that privileges no religion in order to provide space for all religions and to protect belief and unbelief alike? Or is it a Western ‘secular fundamentalism’ that is anti-religious and increasingly, post 9/11, anti-Islam?

“What we are witnessing today has little to do with Western democratic values and everything to do with a European media that reflects and plays to an increasingly xenophobic and Islamaphobic society.”

Islam Online, 14 February 2006

Freedom of speech is not absolute – Sivanandan

The Institute of Race Relations has reprinted an interesting interview with A. Sivanandan from Race & Class, conducted by the Norwegian Maoist daily Klassekampen.

In connection with the cartoons crisis, Sivanandan points out that “in our time – after Hitler and the Holocaust, in an era of ethnic cleansing and genocide and Islamophobia – the freedom to life comes before the freedom of speech. You cannot use freedom of speech to endanger other people’s lives by incitement to racial, ethnic or religious hatred”.

He also explains Islamophobia as the ideology of western imperialism:

“Racial superiority is back on the agenda – in the guise this time not of a super-race but a super-civilisation on a mission to take the ideals of freedom and democracy, by force if necessary, to the benighted people of the Third World, especially to those who have got oil in their backyards. ( ‘Post-modern imperialism’ Robert Cooper, one-time adviser to Blair and the EU, calls it.) Conversely, western civilisation and its values should be jealously guarded against the pagan hordes now circulating in Europe’s midst.”

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Freedom to hate?

Freedom to hate?

By Jamil Hussein

Morning Star, 14 February 2006

The right-wing Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten sanctioned the inflammatory cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed to stir up controversy. The intention was to offend.

It is peculiar that, having succeeded in offending Muslims, the Danish paper and its right-wing counterparts in Europe were angered by the “expected” response and decided to reprint the same images – causing more offence.

In Britain, the issue escalated when a small number of ill-informed Muslims hijacked a march in London with abusive slogans, with the mainstream media depicting them as the voice of Muslims all over – something like assuming that Nick Griffin and his motley crew are representative of all white people.

Even though most Muslims warned beforehand that the reprinting of the pictures would be fodder for the trouble makers, the onus fell on Muslims to explain the backlash and condemn the “extremists.”

There have been subsequent “peaceful” marches, including a 10,000-strong demo on Saturday, but the mainstream press continue to concentrate on the few from the week before.

Having shown restraint in not publishing the caricatures, certain sections of the UK media have seized the opportunity to attack Muslims by focusing solely on the demonstrators and ignoring the initial “cause” of the demonstrations.

So what was the cause? Setting aside Islamic tradition, which bans any images of the Prophet to prevent idolatry, the caricatures themselves were offensive, insulting and provocative.

One of the pictures shows the Prophet with a bomb inside his turban with the Khalimah (the Islamic creed) on his forehead.

The Khalimah is one of the major pillars of Islam, a declaration of faith uttered by all Muslims. “There is no god except Allah and Mohammed is the messenger of Allah.” We Muslims live our religion on a daily basis and try to emulate the prophet, who we believe to be the model human being, in everything that we do.

So the message in the caricature was simple – all Muslims are terrorists, since the founder of the faith was one.

It was not a constructive critique of Islam. Muslims would encourage that kind of discourse.

It was instead pure hate propaganda akin to the caricatures published by the nazis’ Der Sturmer, which evoked the myth that all Jews practised ritual religious murder.

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London rally voices anger on Danish cartoons

A rally of over 20,000 packed Trafalgar Square on Saturday 11th February – a further rally is planned for next Saturday by the British Muslim Forum.

The well-organised rally of 11th February was supported by the Muslim Council of Britain with three leading national affliates, Islamic Forum Europe, Muslim Association of Britain and Da’watul Islam – drawing on its UK networks to mobilize the community.

The mood of the rally was angry but dignified. Dr Abdul Bari, Deputy Secretary General of the MCB in his address said that “this peace rally is about solidarity against incitement, against Islamophobia and against the vilification of Prophet Muhammad, peace be on him”.

Dawatul Islam President, Sheikh Mahmudul Hasan Khan, noted,”at this critical juncture in world history, the current controversy presents us with enormous challenges in our efforts to build a global society, which values diversity, and upholds human honour and dignity, regardless of faith or race”.

There was a moving address by the Rev’d Peter Sulston of Churches Together, pledging “we care as Christians about the name of Islam and will work with all our energy to dispel the stereotypes”. Solidarity was also conveyed by Kate Hudson of the CND and Lindsey German, Convenor of Stop the War Coalition.

The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone was represented by Lee Jasper, who made a brief but impassioned statement – “we will stand together in this great city”.

Other speakers included Anas Al-Tikriti (MAB), Dr Daud Abullah (MCB), Ismail Patel (Friends of Al-Aqsa), Maulana Shahid Raza (British Muslim Forum), Asghar Bukhari (MPAC), Ismail Satti (Islamic Revival), Yusra Gennoushi (MAB Youth) and Sulaiman Mulla (FOSIS). Dr Kamal Helbawi and Azzam Tamimi also delivered speeches.

MCB press release, 13 February 2006

Mohammad cartoon protests aren’t unique to Islam

The violence linked to cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad is not unique to Islam, experts say, and the protests reflect political and cultural passions more than the faith’s core values.

Looking for distinct features that would make Islam liable for the cartoon-related violence around the world does little to explain it, said the Rev. Patrick Gaffney, an anthropologist and expert on Islam at the University of Notre Dame.

“There are parallel behaviors in every tradition,” he said. “Buddhism has a violent strain despite its pacifism … You think about Hinduism and nonviolence but (Mohandas) Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu.”

Other examples of religious violence involving various faiths abound in recent and past history. But attention has focused on Muslims this year as at least 11 people have been killed in protests in the Middle East, Asia and Africa after the publication of cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammad in newspapers in Denmark and elsewhere.

“You can’t say Islam has a gene for violence,” Gaffney said. “It has to do with the dynamics, political and economic, that are at play right now,” especially in Europe where there has been a long history of anti-Islamic prejudice that represents “an underlying kind of powder keg.”

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