Category Archives: Liberal

Muslim family values produced 7/7 bombers – Muriel Gray

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“John Reid telling devout Muslims to watch out in case their children become, oops, even more devout Muslims was bordering on the ridiculous….

“These brainwashed young men threatening us are not coming from liberal, Westernised homes full of moral relativism and then suddenly turning psycho. If they come from observant Muslim families – which the 7/7 bombers all did despite all the nonsense about them being ‘ordinary Westernised boys’ – then the priming started long ago. They would have been brought up to genuinely believe that Allah intended women to have a single purpose in life as subservient wives and mothers; gay people are perverts; freedom of speech does not apply to any kind of criticism of their belief; democracy is a man-made sham; and the values of the West are inferior….

“The leap to ‘radicalism’ from such a narrow background is not exactly over a chasm…. since many devout, law-abiding Muslims have publicly expressed agreement with a great deal of the bombers’ philosophy – except the killing part – what possible help can they be in this war? It would be of more practical help to try and reasonably persuade devout Muslim parents to let their children absorb a far wider cultural agenda….”

Muriel Gray does her Melanie Phillips impression in the Sunday Herald, 24 September 2006

See Osama Saeed’s reply at Rolled Up Trousers, 26 September 2006

Salman Rushdie ‘feels sorry’ for Pope

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Salman RushdieControversial novelist Salman Rushdie has said he feels “sorry” for Pope Benedict XVI, whose comments about Islam recently angered the Muslim community across the world.

“I’m in the unusual position of feeling sorry for the Pope. It’s a first for me. I just think people should calm down a bit. This immediate, manufactured outrage that takes place is getting to be excessive,” he said in an interview to The Times newspaper on Tuesday.

“Look at the things that are not being protested about. In Darfur you’ve got a Muslim massacre of other Muslims. Why aren’t there demonstrations about that in the Muslim world? That seems to me to be a much bigger thing than the Pope using a 15th-century quote,” Rushdie, against whom a ‘fatwa’ was issued by the then Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, said.

Asked to comment on the term Islamo-fascist, Rushdie said, “I think there are fascists who use Islamic ideas, so I’ve no problem with the term.”

“Islamophobia is a word that I do disapprove of quite a lot because it seems to me there is no reason why you should not dislike an idea. But if you have ideas that I don’t like, it’s perfectly okay for me to be phobic about them.”

“To use that as a term of criticism is very anti-intellectual. There are people who dislike my ideas who have not been afraid of being phobic about them,” he added.

Press Trust Of India, 26 September 2006

See also the Times, 26 September 2006

Who’s to blame for terrorism? The Islamofascists, and the Left, apparently

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Who is really responsible for the suicide bombers that target us? Is it the fault of George Bush or Tony Blair? Are we all somehow to blame? David Aaronovitch, journalist and commentator, has had enough of this argument. He asks how we’ve got to the point where British Socialists support Islamofascist Terrorism. Aaronovitch explains where the left have gone wrong on Israel, Palestine, the War in Iraq and the War on Terror.”

“David Aaronovitch: No Excuses for Terror” – documentary in the Don’t Get Me Started slot this evening, 7.15pm, on Channel 5.

Or, as today’s Morning Star prefers to summarise the contents of the programme: “The notorious reactionary launches into an extended right-wing rant.”

Postscript:  Yes, I’ve just watched it, and the Morning Star is right on the button.

Update:  With the enthusiastic approval of Atlas Shrugs, Harry’s Place has posted the documentary on YouTube.

‘Battle to block massive mosque’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“A plan to build a ‘mega mosque’ in east London has become mired in controversy with allegations that it is being bankrolled by Islamist groups in Saudi Arabia. Opponents say it would promote a radical form of Islam. They accuse its backers of not consulting local people.”

Jamie Doward writes in the Observer, 24 September 2006

This piece is little more than a rewrite of Andrew Gilligan’s scare story that appeared in the Evening Standard back in July, complete with a quote from the discredited “expert” on Islam, Patrick Sookhdeo. You’d have thought that the Observer‘s home affairs editor might have done a bit of original research into the subject and maybe even challenged racist stereotypes about the threat from Muslim radicals, rather than just recycle second-hand Islamophobic fantasies. Or then again, perhaps not, given that one of Doward’s predecessors in that post was Martin Bright.

The neocons’ lexicon

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Salim Muwakkil analyses the origins and meaning of the term “Islamofascism”:

“Many pundits trace the neologism to historian Malise Ruthven, who used it in a September 1990 article in the London Independent. But Ruthven used it to describe authoritarian Muslim states like Morocco, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Stephen Schwartz, the neocon author of Two Faces of Islam, insists that he is the first Westerner to use the term in the contemporary context.

“But the term gained its greatest currency in the lexicon of pro-war progressives Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman and Ron Rosenbaum, to name three. They argued that the totalitarian aspirations of theocratic groups like al-Qaeda threatened the libertarian freedoms that are the legacy of the Enlightenment.

“These polemicists were less concerned (at least, originally) with the geo-strategic issues that preoccupied the administration’s neocon warmongers, so their arguments had some resonance on the secular left. After all, how could progressives oppose the theocratic agenda of the religious right within the United States and not reject similar developments elsewhere?

“In Hitchens’ last column for The Nation, he wrote ‘the theocratic and absolutist side in this war hopes to win it by exporting it here, which in turn means that we have no expectation of staying out of the war, and no right to be neutral in it’.

“By framing the war on terror as a struggle between the liberal soldiers of the Enlightenment and the dark forces of theocracy, these progressives gave cover to warmongers with rationales much less lofty. In fact, one of the major ironies is that their support has aligned them with right wing religious groups with their own theocratic agendas.”

In These Times, 21 September 2006

How to deal with Muslims – Martin Amis offers some advice

Posted on by Bob Pitt

martin amisGinny Dougary has posted the text of her Times magazine interview with Martin Amis, who opines:

“… the only thing the Islamists like about modernity is modern weapons. And they’re going to get better and better at that. They’re also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered….

“There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs – well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.”

Ginny Dougary website, 17 September 2006

Martin Amis and the politics of paranoia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pankaj Mishra replies to Martin Amis’s article in last week’s Observer:

“Martin Amis’s essay on Islam and Islamism goes on for more than 10,000 words without describing an individual experience of Muslim societies deeper than Christopher Hitchens’s acquisition of an Osama T-shirt in Peshawar and the Amis family’s failure to enter, after closing time, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

“‘The impulse towards rational inquiry,’ Amis asserts, ‘is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male.’ There are countless other startling claims (according to Amis, the army was on the Islamist side in the Algerian civil war) in his essay, whose pseudo-scholarship and fanatical conviction of moral superiority make it resemble nothing more than one of bin Laden’s desperately literary screeds.

“Such a bold and hectic display of prejudice and ignorance invites the dinner-party frivolity of Amis’s genitals-centric analysis (constipation and sexual frustration) of radical Islam. But what forces us to take it seriously is not only that its author is one of our leading novelists, but also that his cliches about non-western peoples (they are all very irrational out there) and strident belief in ‘Western’ rationality are now commonplace in elite liberal-left as well as conservative circles in the government and media.”

Observer, 17 September 2006

Don’t pick on the poor pontiff

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Poor old Pope Benedict XVI (not a description I thought I’d ever use) seems to have inflamed some excitable sections of Muslim opinion around the world with his ruminations to scientists at Regensburg University during his trip to Germany this week.

“He’s not the first elderly academic inadvertently to stir up outrage with what he thought were innocent remarks and, in the modern digital age, he certainly won’t be the last, but on this occasion at least I think he’s innocent of the charges of stirring up hatred against Islam being made against him.

“It is difficult to believe that those making the claims, who include the Muslim Brotherhood, the Pakistan parliament, Sheikh Youssef al-Qardawi (a fine one to feel insulted, given what he says about Jews), the Organisation of Islamic Conferences and a senior religious official in Turkey, can possibly have read the remarks in full or in their proper context.”

The Guardian religious affairs correspondent, Stephen Bates, rallies to the defence of il papa.

Comment is Free, 15 September 2006

So does Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who blames the fuss on whingeing Muslims and implies that they would be better occupied putting their own house in order.

Carey said: “The Pope is a distinguished scholar and one unlikely to say offensive things. If he quoted something said 600 years ago we should not assume that this represents the Pope’s beliefs about Islam today. But Muslims as well as Christians must learn to enter into dialogue without crying foul. We live in perilous times and we must not only separate religion from violence but also not give religious legitimacy to violence in any shape or form.”

Scotsman, 15 September 2006

More lies about Qaradawi

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Qaradawi and MayorJonathan Freedland spares a moment from attacking the Mayor of London over his relations with Hugo Chávez to take a swipe at Yusuf al-Qaradawi:

“It’s only on foreign policy that the Mayor gets the chance to strike some of the old, Leftist poses. I am sure that the folk at City Hall are sincere in their admiration for Chavez’s social reforms – but they also love that el presidente styles himself as George W Bush’s great Latin nemesis. Standing next to him gives the Livingstone circle a rush of ideological blood.

“The less forgivable example is the relationship with Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian cleric still hailed by Livingstone as the voice of moderate Islam – yet who recently added to his earlier positions condoning wife-beating and the stoning of homosexuals with a declaration that today’s Jews bear responsibility for the death of Jesus.

“The Mayor likes al-Qaradawi’s tough line on Israel – the sheikh supports suicide bombings against Israeli civilians – so he ends up hugging a man who bends Islamic theology to take on the vilest tropes of Christian anti-Semitism.”

Evening Standard, 14 September 2006

Except that Qaradawi supports neither wife-beating, nor the stoning of homosexuals nor suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. And the story about Jews bearing responsibility for the death of Jesus originates with the Middle East Media Research Institute – an organisation headed by a former colonel in Israeli military intelligence which has a long history of misrepresenting Qaradawi’s views by publishing carefully selected extracts from his speeches and interviews. By these means MEMRI has been able to “prove”, for example, that Qaradawi believed the victims of the tsunami deserved to die and that he argued it was a duty for Muslims to become suicide bombers in Iraq.

You can see why a right-wing rag like the Evening Standard hires a supposedly liberal journalist like Freedland to write for them. His standards of journalistic integrity fit right in with theirs.

Martin Amis: aimless and confused

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“As well as neglecting the impact of the Iraq war and delivering a tendentious account of Qutb’s radicalisation, Amis also indulges in a display of casual prejudice: ‘No doubt the impulse towards rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male’. No doubt.”

Inayat Bunglawala replies to Martin Amis’s piece in last Sunday’s Observer.

Guardian Comment is Free, 12 September 2006