Category Archives: Left Wing

Labour ministers should oppose niqab, says Tribune columnist

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Joan Smith“Labour must be more principled at a time when the whole notion of equal rights for men and women is under attack from religious extremists.

“Since Jack Straw became the first mainstream politician to question the practice of wearing the niqab last autumn, it’s become clear that a small but vocal minority in this country no longer accepts the premise that women have exactly the same right to the enjoyment of public space as men.

“If women have to cover their faces with a mask (which is what niqab means in Arabic) whenever they leave the house, they are signalling their acceptance of conditional access to public space – and a Taliban theory of gender relations in which women are responsible for avoiding men’s accidental arousal.

“Neither of these propositions is compatible with a notion of universal human rights, and Labour ministers shouldn’t be afraid of saying so.”

Joan Smith in Tribune, 16 March 2007

From the standpoint of this sort of secularist fundamentalism, of course, the concept of human rights doesn’t include the right of Muslim women to dress as they choose, without being bullied by white male non-Muslim politicians.

Tatchell complains he has been ‘smeared as anti-Muslim’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Outrage“Allegations of ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘racism’ are increasingly manufactured and manipulated to stop debate, silence critics and discredit opponents. I have been on the receiving end of this mud-slinging by the Mayor of London and his Socialist Action apparatchiks, the National Assembly Against Racism, the Muslim Council of Britain and the notorious Islamophobia Watch website.

“The unprincipled, sectarian ‘left’ colludes with right-wing Islamists, such as the sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic fundamentalist cleric, Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi. When I, and others, dared condemn Qaradawi’s support for suicide bombing and female genital mutilation, we were denounced as ‘Islamophobes.’ The idea was to marginalise our critique by smearing us as anti-Muslim. These dirty tricks are the copy-book tactics of the far right. They have nothing in common with humanitarian or socialist values.”

Poor picked-on Peter Tatchell has a whinge in Democratiya, Spring 2007

For a recent critique of Tatchell on the notorious Islamophobia Watch website, see here.

For an example of the support Tatchell has attracted in the right-wing blogoshere see here.

Johann Hari reviews Mark Steyn

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In the current issue of the New Statesman Johann Hari reviews Mark Steyn’s Islamophobic fantasy America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. Hari writes: “… if Steyn’s ‘warnings’ have a historical precedent, it is the hysteria among even liberal Americans such as Jack London in the early 20th century that anticipated Chinese immigrants would outbreed white Americans and take over the US. London’s solution was extermination; what is Steyn’s?” A fair point, except that Steyn’s book does in fact provide a clear indication of where he stands on this issue.

Hari’s review repeats the basic error of an earlier article in the Independent – namely that, while he’s excellent at demolishing the paranoid delusions of anti-Muslim racists like Steyn and Bat Ye’or, he has swallowed quite a bit of Islamophobic mythology himself, specifically over the issue of Islamism.

In the Independent piece, Hari wrote that Islamists fall into two categories: “the people who will lash and stone gays after winning at the ballot box and the people who will lash and stone gays after seizing power in a coup”. In the Steyn review, Hari describes Islamism as “a fascistic menace”. This is a wilfully ignorant attitude that does Hari no credit. He doesn’t even attempt to define Islamism. However, if you accept Graham Fuller’s definition of an Islamist – “one who believes that Islam as a body of faith has something important to say about how politics and society should be ordered … and who seeks to implement this idea in some fashion” – it can be seen that the term covers a wide variety of political views.

For example, according to Fuller’s definition, Tariq Ramadan is an Islamist. Does Hari categorise Professor Ramdan as a fascistic menace? Some people do. But it is difficult to see how this differs in any respect from the ravings of Mark Steyn.

As Soumaya Ghannoushi has pointed out: “Islamism, like socialism, is not a uniform entity. It is a colourful sociopolitical phenomenon with many strategies and discourses. This enormously diverse movement ranges from liberal to conservative, from modern to traditional, from moderate to radical, from democratic to theocratic, and from peaceful to violent. What these trends have in common is that they derive their source of legitimacy from Islam.”

Politically engaged Christians encompass a similar range of tendencies, from representatives of the evangelical Right such as Pat Robertson to anti-war activists like Bruce Kent. As Tariq Ramadan has observed, in the case of Christianity people are prepared to recognise these political distinctions. However: “In the case of Islam, engaging in the defence of the poor or carrying the most reactionary ideas does not make any difference. Judgement here falls like a chopper: ‘fundamentalists’.”

Tatchell, OutRage! and the Grand Mufti

Posted on by Bob Pitt

MoscowPride06Last month the notoriously homophobic mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, attended a mayoral summit meeting in London hosted by London’s mayor Ken Livingstone, prompting a protest by Peter Tatchell and the gay rights organisation OutRage! The website Gay.com reported:

“The Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, has denounced same-sex relationships and gay pride events as ‘satanic’, ‘unnatural’, ‘deviations’, ‘blasphemy’ and ‘deadly moral poison’. In February 2006, Grand Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin was quoted as saying about Moscow gay pride marchers, ‘If they come out on to the streets anyway they should be flogged. Any normal person would do that – Muslims and Orthodox Christians alike.’ For these reasons Outrage are co-ordinating a protest at London’s City Hall.”

Although the criticism of Luzhkov was right on the button, the reference to the Grand Mufti appeared, on the face of it, inexplicable. It is a well-established fact that, as Gay.com itself reported at the time, the attack on Moscow Pride in May 2006 was carried out by “skinheads and militant Orthodox Christians”. Yet the idea that the leader of Russia’s Muslims was the main instigator of the violent suppression of Moscow Pride has now apparently entered folklore among a section of the LGBT community in the UK.

The mayor of London had his own view on where this myth originated. In a statement issued by his press office in response to the controversy over Luzhkov’s visit, Livingstone condemned attacks on LGBT rights in Russia and Eastern Europe and the role of politicians in legitimising homophobia. But he continued: “The attempt of Mr Tatchell to focus attention on the role of the grand Mufti in Moscow, in the face of numerous attacks on gay rights in Eastern Europe which overwhelmingly come from right wing Christian and secular currents, is a clear example of an Islamaphobic campaign.”

Tatchell and his supporters responded with predictable indignation. Pink News quoted Tatchell as stating: “A year ago we once criticised the grand Mufti after he urged his followers to violently attack gay people in the streets. But the main focus of our criticism during that campaign was on the homophobia of the Chief Rabbi, the Russian Orthodox Church, neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists. To suggest that this was an Islamophobic campaign was nonsense, despicable and brings the Mayor’s office into disrepute.”

In a post on the neocon website Harry’s Place (to which he is a regular contributor) Brett Lock of OutRage! denounced Livingstone as “a shameless liar” and “a man without principles or integrity”. Lock insisted that “Tatchell didn’t say Russian Muslims were the leading force attacking gay rights”. He also accused the mayor of hypocrisy, on the grounds that in May 2006 Livingstone himself had condemned “support given by the Russian Orthodox Church, the Grand Mufti, and the Chief Rabbi” to the ban on Moscow Pride.

Somewhat contradictorily, George Broadhead of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA) – a group closely associated with OutRage! – weighed in with a further attack on the mayor, accusing him of refusing to criticise Muslim homophobia. “Mr Livingstone is clearly determined to treat Islam with kid gloves no matter how stridently homophobic its adherents are,” Broadhead declared. “The slightest criticism of Islam is immediately branded Islamaphobic.”

What was the actual practice of Tatchell, OutRage! et al during the run-up to Moscow Pride 2006? Is Lock correct in claiming that Tatchell “didn’t say Russian Muslims were the leading force attacking gay rights” in Moscow? Is there any truth to Tatchell’s assertion that they condemned the Grand Mufti only “once”, and that “the main focus of our criticism during that campaign was on the homophobia of the Chief Rabbi, the Russian Orthodox Church, neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists”? Let us examine the record.

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Straw: ‘big cultural divide’ between Muslims and the rest of British society

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jack Straw waded into a race row again last night by calling on Asian women to learn English before being allowed to settle in the UK. The Leader of the House of Commons also said there was a “big cultural divide” between Muslims and the rest of British society.

The Labour MP’s comments come just four months after he stirred up fury by calling on Muslim women to remove their veils, describing the garment as a “symbol of separation”.

Speaking at an integration conference in his constituency in Blackburn, Lancs, he said he knew a family who moved to the UK in 1954 but the woman could still not speak a word of English. Mr Straw said: “One of the things we should be looking at is the subject of Asian women speaking English and whether we need to engage them and require them to speak English before they are given a settlement visa.”

He added: “One of the things we need to recognise is that there is a big cultural divide between Muslims and the rest of us, more than say with the Afro-Caribbean community.”

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On the absolute right to satire

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Over at the Guardian‘s Comment is Free, Sue Blackmore defends the publication of Islamophobic material in the Clare College student magazine Clareification on the grounds that “it’s offensive, and funny, and that’s what satire is all about”.

Comment is Free, 5 March 2007

In the interests of defending the absolute right to engage in satire, and in order to provide some historical background to this principle, perhaps Sue Blackmore could do a follow-up post defending the right of Der Stürmer to publish anti-semitic caricatures. She could entitle it: “Julius Streicher – what a laugh”.

‘Not possible to modernize Islam’ says WPI representative

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Spiegel interviews Mina Ahadi of the Worker Communist Party of Iran, who has set up a “Central Council of Ex-Muslims in Germany”. Ahadi launches an attack on mainstream Muslim organisations in Germany: “They want to force women to wear the headscarf. They promote a climate in which girls aren’t allowed to have boyfriends or go to discos and in which homosexuality is demonized. I know Islam and for me it means death and pain.”

Spiegel, 27 February 2007

The co-founder of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims, one Arzu Toker, used the press launch to claim that Islam “humiliates women and turns them into servants of the men”. She refused to distinguish between Islam and extremist fundamentalism, claiming that that “Islam is inherently radical”. Comrade Ahadi added: “I know all about political Islam. It ends up with us being stoned to death, even here in Germany.”

Monsters and Critics, 28 February 2007

There should be no covering-up in court

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Barbara Hewson argues that allowing Muslim women to wear the veil in courtrooms is an affront to open justice and (you can hear this coming can’t you?) Enlightenment values:

“A critic of multiculturalism in the UK, Elie Barnavi, argues in the recent best-selling essay Les Religions Meurtrieres (Murderous Religions) that Europe needs to recall its own bitter experiences of religious extremism and religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in order to counter Islamic fundamentalism effectively today. Europe’s current separation of state and church reflects the triumph of Enlightenment values over religious rule, but it needs to defend those values against political religion vigorously, and not lapse into post-colonial guilt. This is important, if democracies are not to morph back into theocracies again.”

“Post-colonial guilt”, “Islamic fundamentalism” threatening to turn civilised European societies into “theocracies” – what is this, the Telegraph perhaps, or the Daily Mail? Nah, it’s from Spiked, the online journal run by the tendency which used to be the Revolutionary Communist Party but has since morphed into a bunch of right-wing libertarian individualists whose obvious natural home now is the Tory party.

In another Spiked article, Josie Appleton attacks the evil collectivist mayor of London Ken Livingstone, who is intent on suppressing the priceless individual freedom to drive round the capital in one’s 4×4 and destroy the environment in any way one sees fit. Appleton’s proposal that voters should consider removing Livingstone at the next mayoral election does, however, suffer from the small flaw that when they turn up at the polling booth “in two years’ time”, as she recommends, the election will have taken place ten months earlier.

Hitch condemns Muslim masochism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Hitchens“We are supposed to watch what we say about Islam, lest by any chance we be considered ‘offensive’. A fair number of authors and academics in the West now have to live under police protection or endure prosecution in the courts for not observing this taboo with sufficient care.

“A stupid term – Islamophobia –  has been put into circulation to try and suggest that a foul prejudice lurks behind any misgivings about Islam’s infallible ‘message’. Well, this idiotic masochism has to be dropped.

“There may have been a handful of ugly incidents, provoked by lumpen elements, after certain episodes of Muslim terrorism. But no true secularist or even Christian has been involved in anything like the torching of a mosque….

“But where are the denunciations from centers of Sunni and Shiite authority of the daily murder and torture of Islamic co-religionists? Of the regular desecration of holy sites and holy books? Of the paranoid insults thrown so carelessly and callously by one Muslim group at another? [Er … here, here and here, for example? – ed.] This mounting ghastliness is a bit more worthy of condemnation, surely, than a few Danish cartoons or a false rumor about a profaned copy of the Quran in Guantanamo.

“The civilized world – yes I do mean to say that – should find its own voice and state firmly to Muslim leaders and citizens that respect is something to be earned and not demanded with menace. A short way of phrasing this would be to say, ‘See how the Muslims respect each other!'”

That well-known representative of the civilised world, Christopher Hitchens, lectures Muslims on the meaning of respect.

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