Last week, Tom over at Pride’s Purge posted a piece on a virulent, genocidal rant against Muslims published on Youtube by an angry White man as a message to David Cameron. As its author in the first few moments of his rant said that UKIP would ‘sort out’ David Cameron, Mr Pride’s post about it took the title, ‘The Party Political Broadcast UKIP Don’t Want You to See’. Some of the commenters on the Proud One’s blog pointed out that there was no obvious connection to UKIP beyond this opening comment, and that it may not have come from Farage’s party at all. That’s correct, but it does show that the poster of the original video nevertheless does see UKIP and its anti-immigration policies as defending White Britons from the threat of foreign, and particular, Muslim immigration.
UKIP and the Anti-Islamic Far Right
And certain UKIP politicians do have close personal connections to the anti-Islam far right. Apart from those with connections to the English Defence League and Britain First, a year or so ago one UKIP councillor in Wiltshire ended up being censured after he made comments supporting the twisted ‘Eurabia’ ideas of the Far Right. ‘Eurabia’ is the name given to the future Europe, which the Far Right believes will arise a few decades from now, when Muslim immigration and their higher birth rate cause the Islamic population to outnumber indigenous White Europeans. There are some very nasty videos on the web by the Far Right predicting a war between Islam and its supporters in the European Left, and White nationalists. In fact, there’s plenty of material by sociologists, demographers and political scientists refuting this whole prediction. A friend of mine looked at the demographic projections behind it and concluded that they were rubbish. Nevertheless, there are videos about it posted with the intention of recruiting people to the White nationalist cause. One of these was the Kipper counsellor, who similarly appeared to believe that a war was coming in the ’20s between Muslim and White non-Muslim.
The video reblogged by Tom was nasty, vile stuff. Its author didn’t just want to ban Muslim immigration, he actively wished to see them expelled. He then ranted about how he wanted to go down to the coast if he could and shoot Muslim immigrants as they came to shore. Now under current legislation, it is an offence to stir up racial hatred, which this video clearly intended to do. I understand that one blogger was so concerned about it, that he alerted the police. He’s right to do so. I’ve Asian and Muslim friends, who have suffered murderous threats from White Nazis. And since 9/11 and 7/7 the danger of racial violence against Muslims simply because of their religion is all too real.
White Racism and Islamic Radicalism
The video is also dangerous for another reason: it actively plays into the hands of the Militant Islamic bigots and fanatics themselves. These people are convinced and actively promote the idea that all Westerners are racists, who wish to beat and kill Muslims. According to these Muslim bigots, the only way Muslims can be safe from White attack is either to retreat into their own communities, or actively engage in violence against them.
I studied Islam as part of the Religious Studies I took as my minor subject when I was at college over two decades ago. After gaining my BA, I tried doing a postgraduate study in British Islam, but had to stop for a variety of reasons. One of these was the radical Islamic polemic that I came across in the controversy surrounding the publication of the Satanic Verses. Some of the material produced by those seeking to defend Islam from what they saw as its blasphemy was frankly racist and religiously bigoted.
Kalim Saddiqui and Predictions of Genocide
Sometime around 1994/5 I believe the BBC broadcast a documentary, The Trouble with Muslims, which looked at the wretched conditions of the British Muslim community. These included poor academic performance and education compared to other demographic groups, unemployment, and so on. The programme included excerpts from a sermon by Kalim Saddiqui at his mosque. Saddiqui declared to his congregation that
British society is a monstrous killing machine, and killing Muslims comes very easily to them.
When the film-makers challenged him about his comments, he ranted that the Satanic Verses were published in order to prepare for a ‘holocaust of Muslims’.
Akhthar’s Claims that Western Intellectuals Despise Islam
Other radical imams also published anti-Western invective in response to the Satanic Verses. One of these was Akhthar’s Be Careful with Mohammed, which was basically one long rant against Christianity and Western society. It ended with a kind of appendix, ‘What Western Intellectuals Think of Islam’. This consisted of a list of quotations from various Western writers and intellectuals criticising or attacking Islam. The whole piece was intended to show that the West was evil and fundamentally hostile to Islam and Muslims.
Moderate Muslims against the Bigots
Now Saddiqui and Akhthar were immensely controversial figures within the Muslim community. Moderate and liberal Muslims despised them, and organised marches and demonstrations against them. One of the complaints by Islamic moderates has been that there has been insufficient media coverage of Muslim demos and protests against the bigots. One of my lecturers at College went up to one of Akhthar’s demonstrations, and quoted Mohammed to show he was wrong. Mohammed himself said that there should ‘be no compulsion in religion’.
Also, not all of the Muslims offended by the Satanic Verses were religious bigots by any means. One of the most interesting of the articles collected in the book, Civility and Sacrilege: Muslim Perspectives on the Satanic Verses published by one of the Muslim presses, took the view that Rushdie’s tome was nasty and offensive to everybody, not just Muslims. This piece argued that the book contained nasty racist caricatures of Blacks and Chinese, while all the White characters were racist.
Bigots like Saddiqui, Akhthar and Anjem Choudhary are controversial minority, but they are there, and will use comments by White supremacists, such as that reblogged and criticised by Tom Pride, to turn others in their community against their non-Muslim fellows.
Anti-Islam Stories from the West and Persecution of Non-Muslim Minorities in Islam
And it won’t just be people in this country that will suffer. News about negative comments and abuse of Islam by Westerners travels to the Islamic world, where it is used to whip up hatred and violence against Christians and non-Muslim minorities. While I was briefly attempting to do my post-grad in British Islam, I came across an anthropological study from the 1970s of the Pakistani Muslim community in Bristol. The book’s author had also looked at the city’s Christian Pakistani community at the same time. She reported that many Christian Pakistanis had said that they decided to emigrate to Britain after a series of anti-Christian riots in Pakistan in 1973. These were caused by a story in one of the Pakistani newspapers about passages from the Qu’ran having been posted up as wallpaper in an Asian restaurant in Britain.
There has been renewed persecution of Christians in the Dar al-Islam as a reaction to Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq. The Syriac Christian community in Mosul, which has been there since the days of the Persian Empire back in the 6th and 7th centuries, has been attacked along with other Christian communities. A few years ago the BBC’s architectural expert, Dan Cruikshank, travelled to Iraq to gaze in wonder at its antiquities, from the great ziggurat of Babylon, to one of the earliest mosques, which itself was influenced architecturally by the ziggurat tradition. He spoke briefly to one of the Christian community’s leading clergy in what was a very strained interview, with the clergyman carefully watching every word. The cleric stated that before the invasion, relations between Christians and Muslims in Iraq had been good and harmonious, but that this had changed after the Western invasion. Christians now suffered from attack and the threat of violence.
Nor are Christians alone. The Yezidis, an ancient religion that contains elements of Islam and Zoroastrianism, are also being attacked by ISIS, who also despise liberal, moderate Muslims along with everyone else, who doesn’t share their very narrow interpretation of Islam.
Videos and material like that Pride’s Purge blogged about and denounced present a very real danger, not just in encouraging the racist and bigoted in Britain to attack innocent Muslims, but also because they play into the equally genocidal, twisted worldview of the Muslim bigots. If racism is to be stamped out in Britain, vicious material intended to inflame racial or religious hatred needs to be attacked and clamped down on and their authors refuted and prosecuted. This needs to be done equally, both to the White supremacists and the Muslim fanatics, who would exploit it to promote their own campaign of hate and violence.
Tags: 'Be Careful With Mohammed', 'Civility and Sacrilege', 'Eurabia', Akhthar, Anjem Choudhary, BBC, Bristol, Britain First, Dan Cruikshank, David Cameron, English Defence League, Genocide, Immigration, Kalim Saddiqui, Mosques, Mosul, Nigel Farage, Persian Empire, Pride's Purge, racism, Salmand Rushdie, Satanic Verses, Syriac Christianity, Tom Pride, White Supremacism, Yezidis, Ziggurats
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