Category Archives: Left Wing

Don’t vote for Ken says Bright

Posted on by Bob Pitt

martin_brightMartin (“I could think of nothing worse than to support Boris Johnson”) Bright has now come off the fence. A mere four days ago he was suggesting that voters should do no more than reconsider voting for Ken Livingstone in the London Mayoral election in May. Yet in today’s issue of the Tory rag the Evening Standard (or the Evening Boris, as it has recently become known) Bright tells his readers:

“I now believe Ken Livingstone is a disgrace to his office and not fit to be Mayor of London. Any Londoner with a progressive bone in his or her body should not consider voting for him in the forthcoming mayoral elections.”

At least this has the merit of consistency. And it’s entirely in line with Bright’s argument that the “left” (a term he laughably applies to himself and the likes of Nick Cohen) should form an alliance with the anti-Muslim right – hence his association with the right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange.

Give it another four days and no doubt we’ll see Bright officially signed up to Boris Johnson’s election campaign.

Postscript:  The exposure of Livingstone’s leftist allies at City Hall is a bit old hat, by the way, having been accomplished successfully several years ago.

Reconsider voting for Ken says Bright

Posted on by Bob Pitt

martin_brightIn his New Statesman blog Martin Bright offers his justifications for presenting an anti-Livingstone “documentary” for Channel 4 which can only aid Tory candidate Boris Johnson’s campaign to replace Ken as London mayor.

Regular readers of Islamophobia Watch will be aware of Bright’s politics. He accuses a section of the Left of forming an alliance with “fascism” ( i.e. with representative Muslims organisations like the MCB or the British Muslim Initiative) and to combat this he advocates an alternative alliance between the “real Left” (i.e. people like himself and Nick Cohen) and the Islamophobic hard Right. So a de facto bloc with Boris Johnson is much what you would expect from Bright.

However, it’s only towards the end of Bright’s blog post that we get to the meat of his argument against the current mayor. Bright writes:

“Livingstone was widely criticised when he invited the Egyptian radical scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi to London in 2004. Peter Tatchell, the veteran human rights activist, was one of those who objected to the visit. His words should be food for thought for everyone considering voting for Livingstone this year: ‘I’ve been a very strong supporter of Ken Livingstone for nearly 30 years … I think overall he has been a good mayor for London but I do think there are a number of issues where he’s made some monumental misjudgements. When I questioned the rationale and the ethics of inviting Yusuf al-Qaradawi to London, the relationship with Ken Livingstone suddenly changed … Ken took the view that because I didn’t agree with him inviting to London someone who is anti-Semitic, homophobic, misogynistic and who justifies terrorist suicide bombings, because I opposed that, I was an Islamophobe’.”

Bright tells us piously that “I could think of nothing worse than to support Johnson”. However, in an election where the only possible alternative to Livingstone is Johnson, people intending to vote for Livingstone should reconsider doing so, according to Bright, on the grounds that Ken welcomed a leading scholar of Islam to City Hall.

Unlike Bright, his co-thinker Nick Cohen at least has the honesty to present that argument clearly and openly.

Update:  See “Martin Bright’s mythical dragons”, Salaam Blogs, 18 January 2008

Pasquill explains himself

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Derek Pasquill“It would be fair to say that when I started working in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office unit dealing with engagement with the Islamic world at the beginning of 2005, I did not have a great deal of knowledge about British Muslim politics. I had no particular reason to question the office’s process of engagement with Muslim groups….

“It is impossible to overstate the effect of the London bombings. I was really shaken by the events of 7 July and they played a huge role in informing my thinking. I took a holiday in August and devoted it to reading up on political Islam and, in particular, the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s main Islamist group. The dominant view at the FCO was that it was a moderate organisation with which the UK could do business. My reading suggested otherwise, and I gradually became convinced of the totalitarian nature of its ideology.”

Derek Pasquill explains his decision to provide Martin Bright with the internal FCO documents which formed the basis for Bright’s pamphlet When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries, published by the right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange.

New Statesman, 17 January 2008

Who and what is the Policy Exchange think tank?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Policy Exchange (1)“The welcome failed prosecution of Foreign Office civil servant Derek Pasquill under the Official Secrets Act has inadvertently shed light once again on the Policy Exchange think tank.

“Pasquill had leaked government documents to the Observer newspaper concerning links between the Foreign Office and various Islamic groups. Journalist Martin Bright, who moved from the Observer to the New Statesman magazine, had used these documents in his pamphlet, ‘When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries: The British State’s flirtation with radical Islamism’, published by Policy Exchange.

“Bright applauded ‘the Tory progressives at Policy Exchange’ for publishing his work, which was billed as a denunciation of the government’s alliances with ‘a reactionary, authoritarian brand of Islam’, in favour of looking to ‘real grassroots moderates as allies’.

“In fact, the modus operandi of Policy Exchange follows a well-trod path. Ever since the 9/11 attacks, sections of the British political establishment and the media (like their counterparts in the US) have followed a sustained, and at times virulent, Islamophobic campaign that has demonised Muslims. Conducted under the banner of opposing Islamic extremism, its political objective has been to defend the neo-colonialist policy of pre-emptive war and occupation embarked upon by the American and British ruling elite.”

World Socialist Web Site, 16 January 2008

Select committee chair says there is a particular problem with Muslim schools

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Commons children, schools and families select committee will grill the schools secretary, Ed Balls, at a meeting on January 9 about the government’s plans to allow local authorities to open as many faith schools as they want. Members are concerned the plans will damage social cohesion and widen existing divisions.

The committee’s chairman, Barry Sheerman, said: “I am getting reports from people in local government who find it difficult to know what is going on in some faith schools – particularly Muslim schools.”

But Chris Keates, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, warned that the debate over Muslim faith schools risked fuelling Islamophobia. “They need to be very careful how they handle this sensitive issue,” she said.

Guardian, 2 January 2008

See also “MPs’ fears on cash for Muslim schools” in the Daily Express, 2 January 2008.

In defence of Herouxville

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Herouxville (1)In January this year the small Quebec town of Herouxville hit the headlines when it published a code of conduct for migrants which among other things advised them that it was unacceptable to “kill women by stoning them in public, burning them alive, burning them with acid, circumcising them etc.”

In the National Post Jonathan Kay defended the citizens of Herouxville against the charge that their bigoted and stereotyped views about migrants (and Muslims in particular) represented an attack on multiculturalism from the right. He claims that such views have been “liberated from the odour of racism” and are now commonplace in what passes for the left:

“… in the culture wars, feminists, gay activists and other progressives are no longer willing to risk their winnings by pledging multicultural solidarity with traditional Muslims, Hasidic Jews and other socially conservative immigrant groups … muscular monoculturalism is no longer the purview of the right … it’s becoming a mainstream ideology, even a fashionable one, on the left.”

Update:  See also Yusuf Smith’s comments at Indigo Jo Blogs

Quebec union leaders call for hijab ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Claudette CarbonneauMONTREAL — No public servant – including Muslim teachers and judges – should be allowed to wear anything at work that shows what religion they belong to, leaders of Quebec’s two biggest trade union federations and a civil-servants’ union told the Bouchard-Taylor commission Monday.

“We think that teachers shouldn’t wear any religious symbols – same thing for a judge in court, or a minister in the National Assembly, or a policeman – certainly not,” said Rene Roy, secretary-general of the 500,000-member Quebec Federation of Labour. “The wearing of any religious symbol should be forbidden in the workplace of the civil service … in order to ensure the secular character of the state,” said Lucie Grandmont, vice-president of the 40,000-member Quebec union of public employees.

Dress codes that ban religious expression should be part of a new “charter of secularism” that the Quebec government should adopt, said Claudette Carbonneau [pictured], president of the Confederation of National Trade Unions. Such a charter is needed “to avoid anarchy,” Carbonneau said Monday, presenting a brief on behalf of the federation’s 300,000 members at the commission’s hearing on the integration of immigrants in Montreal. That’s the same point of view as the 150,000-member Centrale des syndicats du Quebec, which includes 100,000 who work in the school system, the commission heard.

The unions’ anti-religious attitude – especially the idea to ban hijabs on teachers – got a cold reception from groups as disparate as a Muslim women’s aid organization and the nationalist St.-Jean-Baptiste Society of Montreal. “What that would do is close the door to Muslim women who want to teach,” said Samaa Elibyari, a Montreal community radio host who spoke for the Canadian Council of Muslim Women. “It goes against religious freedoms that are guaranteed in the (Quebec) Charter of Rights.”

Elibyari said Muslim women routinely face discrimination in the workplace. They don’t need unions on their back, too, she said. “When a young teacher calls a school to see if she can do an internship, and is asked on the phone straight out: ‘Do you wear the veil?’; when a cashier at a supermarket is fired and her boss tells her ‘The customers don’t want to see that,’ referring to the veil; when a secretary gets passed over for promotion even if she succeeds in all her French exams, and is told ‘take off that tablecloth’ – is that not discrimination?” Elibyari asked.

Canada.com, 10 December 2007

‘Muslim apostates threatened over Christianity’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Sunday Telegraph interviews a young woman who was shamefully treated by her family after she converted from Islam to Christianity. With the assistance of such “experts” as Maryam Namazie and Patrick Sookhdeo – of, respectively, the ultra-left sectarian Worker Communist Party of Iran and the right-wing evangelical Barnabus Fund – the case is used to illustrate the supposedly barbaric culture that prevails within Muslim communities in the UK.

Namazie offers her opinion that “many of the deaths classified as ‘honour killings’ are actually murders of people who have renounced Islam”. Needless to say, the Torygraph doesn’t ask her to provide any evidence for this claim. Nor is there any attempt to demonstrate that hostility towards those who change their religion is any more prevalent among Muslims than in other faith communities.

No, the predictable line is that violent hatred of apostates is rooted in Islam. And Sookhdeo is on hand to provide the appropriate quote: “Most Muslim scholars say that Muslim religious law – sharia – requires the death penalty for apostasy.” The Torygraph concludes: “Given the acceptance by some that Muslim religious law does indeed require that apostates be killed, it is hardly surprising that many ordinary Muslims think that it is their religious duty to carry out that punishment – or at least to threaten it.”

Vote Boris rather than Ken says Nick Cohen

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Bizarrely, since the world has talked of little else since 9/11, most people here don’t understand Islamic politics, so the sight of Livingstone embracing supporters of Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t shock them as it should. Let me put it bluntly: it is no different from the Mayor embracing the BNP as the authentic voice of white Londoners. Go Lib Dem, Green or Tory if you must. But don’t vote for this wretched man. He has betrayed the honour of the British left.”

Nick Cohen contributes to the “Can Ken still cut it?” debate in Time Out, 5-11 December 2007