Category Archives: Liberal

Martin Amis on Islamism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

martin amis“Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is ‘a civil war’ within Islam. That’s what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is…. we respect Islam – the donor of countless benefits to mankind, and the possessor of a thrilling history. But Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination…. Islam, in the end, proved responsive to European influence: the influence of Hitler and Stalin. And one hardly needs to labour the similarities between Islamism and the totalitarian cults of the last century. Anti-semitic, anti-liberal, anti-individualist, anti-democratic, and, most crucially, anti-rational, they too were cults of death, death-driven and death-fuelled.”

Martin Amis in the Observer, 10 September 2006

Here, “Islamism” is ignorantly conflated with terrorism. Judging by the article, Amis’s sources of information on this question are Paul Berman’s book Terrorism and Liberalism and Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. Perhaps he should read a little more widely on the subject. He would discover that, to quote Soumaya Ghannoushi, “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….”

Richard Seymour describes Amis’s piece as “an utterly clueless essay that casually asserts this and that idiocy about the West and Islam with evidently no more thought than the average Sun leader writer”.

Update:  See Pankaj Mishra, “The politics of paranoia”, Observer, 17 September 2006

Media stereotyping in the ‘Molly Campbell’ case

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Misbah and fatherMolly’s case holds lessons for us all

By Sarfraz Manzoor

Guardian, 4 September 2006

When the news first broke that a 13 year old girl called Molly Campbell – also known as Misbah Iram Ahmed Rana – had been “abducted” by her Pakistani father and taken to Lahore the media appeared certain what kind of story this was: a vulnerable Asian girl is plucked from her Scottish home and forced into an arranged marriage.

The Independent quoted Molly’s grandmother claiming the schoolgirl had been taken to Pakistan and forced to marry a 25 year old man. Meanwhile, in the Times, Mary Ann Sieghart was bemoaning how “even the Outer Hebrides failed to provide sanctuary for Molly Campbell against a father determined to take her off to Pakistan”. Fellow columnist Camilla Cavendish waded in, noting that Molly’s “abduction” raises “fundamental issues of equality that cannot be swept under the carpet to protect ‘cultural sensitivities’.”

Cavendish was right that the alleged abduction raised fundamental issues, but wrong about everything else. On Friday afternoon Molly appeared on television with her father to announce she had left Scotland of her own free will and that she wanted to stay in Pakistan because she wanted to remain with her father. When the reporters continued referring to her as Molly she told them: “My name isn’t Molly, it’s Misbah.”

What I find particularly powerful about the case of Molly/Misbah is that it illustrates the dangers of racial profiling as practised by some of the media. No sooner had the story emerged than the news editors were preparing special reports on abductions and child brides, and the white middle-class columnists were busy revealing their lack of insight.

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‘My vote’s for Trevor, not Ken’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Joan SmithJoan Smith takes sides in the dispute between the Mayor of London and Trevor Phillips, the newly appointed head of the CEHR who is of course a great favourite of Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch. In particular, and predictably, she endorses Phillips’s views on multiculturalism:

“Phillips’s pronouncements on the subject are robust – earlier this year he suggested that Muslims who want to live under Islamic law (sharia) should leave the country – but more coherent than anything the Mayor of London has come up with. Livingstone’s take on multiculturalism certainly isn’t mine. It’s a form of relativism that allows him to park his values when they’re inconvenient and embrace religious extremists with repellent views on women and homosexuals. Living in a society that has abolished the death penalty, Livingstone welcomes to London a Muslim cleric whose website discusses whether death is the appropriate penalty for gay men, and appears at public events with an academic who refuses to call for a ban on the hideous practice of lapidation….

“In fact, the biggest threat to multiculturalism comes not from organisations such as the BNP but politicians such as Livingstone who refuse to have this debate, seeking to close it down with accusations of racism and Islamophobia. The UK is a diverse society, but it won’t remain so if millions of ordinary people feel they’re not allowed to criticise the minority who hate gay people, treat women as second-class citizens and support political or religious violence.”

Independent on Sunday, 3 September 2006

The “academic who refuses to call for a ban on the hideous practice of lapidation” is of course Tariq Ramadan. As I think we’ve observed before, rejecting engagement with an influential Muslim liberal like Professor Ramadan is a sign that Islamophobia has reached the point of dementia. It can only be a matter of time before Joan Smith joins the likes of Melanie Phillips in ranting on about “Eurabia” and the Muslim plot to destroy western civilisation.

Cant on cohesion

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Ever since Margaret Thatcher’s comment in 1978, that the British people were worried that ‘this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’, those on the Right of British politics have seen cultural diversity as a threat to national cohesion and security. But since 9/11, it has been parts of the ‘liberal’ Left that have attacked multiculturalism most forcefully, seeing in it the cause of segregation in Britain.

“…  a cacophony of voices has singled out Muslims in the ‘integration’ debate: it is their cultural difference which needs limits placed on it; it is they who must subsume their cultural heritage within ‘Britishness’; it is they who must declare their allegiance to (ill-defined) British values. In so doing, an idea that Muslims are inherently at odds with modern values, into which they need to be forcibly integrated, has been reinforced …. But it is entirely dishonest to pretend this is a demand for ‘integration’, when what is really being called for is assimilation.”

Arun Kundnani on the IRR website, 24 August 2004

Johann Hari – correct on Bat Ye’or, wrong about Islamophobia Watch!

Posted on by Bob Pitt

johann hari 2Johann Hari has a go at Melanie Phillips et al in today’s Independent:

“There are intellectuals on the British right who are propagating a conspiracy theory about Muslims that teeters very close to being a 21st century Protocols of the Elders of Mecca. Meet Bat Ye’or, a ‘scholar’ who argues that Europe is on the brink of being transformed into a conquered continent called ‘Eurabia’.

“In this new land, Christians and Jews will be reduced by the new Muslim majority to the status of ‘dhimmis’ – second-class citizens forced to ‘walk in the gutter’. This will not happen by accident. It is part of a deliberate and ‘occult’ plan, concocted between the Arab League and leading European politicians like Jacques Chirac and Mary Robinson, who secretly love Islam and are deliberately flooding the continent with Muslim immigrants. As Orianna Fallacci – one of the best-selling writers in Italy – has summarised the thesis in her hymns of praise to Ye’or, ‘Muslims have been told to come here and breed like rats.’

“Rather than dismissing her preposterous assertions, high-profile writers such as Melanie Phillips, Daniel Pipes and Niall Ferguson laud Ye’or as a suppressed hero, silenced by (you guessed it) ‘political correctness’. Her name is brandished as a gold standard in right-wing Tory circles. It’s interesting that writers so alert to anti-Semitism have lent their names to an ideology that is so startlingly similar. In this theory, the Star of David has simply been replaced by the Islamic crescent. If the term has any meaning, this is authentic Islamophobia, treating virtually all Muslims as verminous sharia-carriers. So why are these people still treated as serious and sane by the BBC and its editors?”

Great stuff. And who could disagree? Unfortunately, having made these excellent points, Hari goes on to denounce Islamophobia Watch.

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MCB defends open letter

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, replies to Polly Toynbee:

“The open letter to the prime minister – which I signed alongside more than 40 Muslim groups, MPs and peers – has been subject to deliberate misinterpretation, suggesting a willingness among Muslim leaders to excuse violence and promote a simplified view of how extremism takes root. Toynbee’s accusation – that the letter sails ‘perilously close to suggesting the government had it coming’ – may be an unintentional misrepresentation but it is a grave one.

“The letter articulated the need to base foreign policy on principle. It condemned attacks on civilians wherever they take place. It also sought acknowledgement that, though the causes and motivations are complex, British foreign policy contributes to the radicalisation of Muslims here and elsewhere. The welcome debate that followed the letter illustrates that this has been widely accepted.”

Guardian, 17 August 2006

The venomous media voices who think no Muslim is worth talking to

Posted on by Bob Pitt

With the government’s policy of engagement with Muslim community under strain, Madeleine Bunting takes on the “media commentators pouring out a flood of venomous advice on exactly why no Muslim is worth talking to anyway”. She points out that “there are many people in this country who have no interest in listening to any Muslim unless they can chorus their own loathing and suspicion of Islam – the former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the case par excellence”.

Bunting writes: “Some of this armchair advice to government can be pretty briskly dismissed, such as the paranoid fantasies of the rightwing Daily Mail commentator Melanie Phillips in her book Londonistan or those of the Conservative MP Michael Gove in his book Celsius 7/7. Both authors haven’t troubled themselves to get much beyond revived imperial delusions of demented, violent Muslims (check out Britain’s history in India, Sudan or Egypt).

“More insidious is the comprehensive attack on Whitehall’s policy towards the Muslim community over the last decade by the New Statesman‘s political editor, Martin Bright. He argues that the government should have no truck with any Muslim organisation in the UK that has had any involvement with any person who has ever been influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood, the political Islamist organisation.

“That rules out the Muslim Council of Britain, the Federation of Student Islamic Societies and other mainstays of the government’s ‘engagement’ policy of the last 10 years. It would even include intellectuals such as Professor Tariq Ramadan (grandson, no less, of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood), who was a member of the government taskforce set up to tackle Islamist extremism last year, and a star turn on its travelling roadshow for young Muslims.

“We are talking sweeping here. In fact, implement Bright’s advice and you’ve got a pretty small tea party for your next round of engagement.”

Guardian, 16 August 2006

In response, right-wing blogger Scott Burgess rallies to the defence of “Martin Bright’s groundbreaking work” and denounces Bunting as one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s “British fifth columnists “.

Daily Ablution, 16 August 2006

‘We must stand up to Islamo-fascism’, says Harold Evans

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“History tells us it takes a long time to rouse the British, though once roused they see things through. Maybe the latest terrorist outrage [shouldn’t that read “alleged terrorist outrage”? Or are arrested Muslims deemed automatically guilty? – ed.] will give second thoughts to all those well-meaning battalions of left and right and leaders of the Muslim community who have yet to see an anti-terrorism measure they approve. No to 90 days to question suspects; no to identity cards; no to selective telephone monitoring; and yes, in the name of free speech, to the radical mullahs brainwashing deluded youth.”

Harold Evans at Comment is Free, 15 August 2006