Yes, the Germans Have Banned Muslim Vigilante Sharia Police

Yesterday, Simon Sideways, a self-proclaimed ‘White activist’, put up a piece on his YouTube channel asking people what they will do when the Muslims finally take over and start forcing people to convert. It was once again the Eurabia myth, that Muslim birth rates are far more than White Europeans, and so in a few decades they will become the majority religion on the continent and take it over. It’s nonsense, although Muslim populations are set to expand and this could cause problems if the alienation and turn of some Muslims to radical theologies continues. He illustrated his prediction by stating that Muslims had established sharia police in Germany, who were forcing both Muslims and non-Muslims to attend the mosques.

I checked this story by Googling it, and it appears to be several years old. From what I’ve uncovered, it appears that a group of seven radical Muslims led by a German convert, Sven Laue, set up an Islamic sharia patrol in Wuppertal in Bavaria in 2014 or 2016. The German police arrested them and charged them under the Basic Law. This is article in the German constitution that forbids anti-democratic organisation and political parties. It’s a product of the denazification after World War II and has been used against neo-Nazi organisations like the National Democrat Party. The German Communist party evaded a ban by dissolving themselves and then holding a special congress at which it was declared that they recognised that society would have to go through a period of democracy. This is standard Marxist dogma, in which society goes through a stage of bourgeois democracy in which the remains of feudalism are cleared away before the workers take over and establish socialism. The seven were acquitted, but there was some kind of appeal, and in 2019 they were convicted and sent down.

The German authorities are as concerned as our political class about the growth of parallel societies. In the 1980s the German trade union confederation accused the Turkish sections of practising separatism while claiming to integrate with ethnic Germans. A few years ago the mayor of one of the German cities with a large Turkish population wrote a book describing their alienation and anti-social behaviour, sometimes violent, towards ethnic German. This was somewhat surprising, as he was a member of the SPD, the German socialist party, who I think expelled him soon after. It hasn’t, however, been only in Germany that vigilante sharia police have appeared. A group of fanatics at Anjem Chaudhury’s mosque in London set one up and posted their exploits on YouTube, before the police pounced on them.

As for forced conversion, Islamic laws forbids the forcible conversion of Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians and/or Hindus, although massacres have occurred throughout history. This law was obeyed by the Ottomans in the Balkans. In the 7th century one of the sultans wanted to convert the indigenous Christian population by armed force, only to be told by the majlis, the assembly of Muslim clergy, that it was not permitted. Such toleration does not extend to pagans and atheists, who may be forced to convert to Islam on pain of death.

Sideways seems to have seen or read a garbled, very dated version of the story about the German sharia patrols, probably from an extreme right-wing source. There are problems with the growth of parallel Islamic societies in Britain, France, Germany and no doubt elsewhere, but the Muslims aren’t set to take over Europe and what attempts there have been to set up sharia police are minuscule – there were only seven members of Laue’s wretched outfit – and have not been tolerated by the authorities.

My Suggestions for this Issues the Lotus Eaters Should Tackle

Sargon and his chums in the Lotus Eaters have asked their readers to send them suggestions for what issues they should write articles about. I’ve therefore sent them three in the comments section. These aren’t suggestions about what they should do about their libertarianism, their frantic support of privatisation and free market capitalism when both are disastrously failing. Nor did I tell them what they could do about their support for Donald Trump, who may well be making a come-back bid to be president. They just wouldn’t publish them and I expect all I’d get would be a storm of anger and abuse from their supporters if they did. Instead I just sent them three suggestions regarding the skewed attitudes among anti-racist activists regarding the historiography of slavery, the failure to protest against the Pakistani grooming gangs and demands for autonomous communities by Islamic theocrats and Black activists. Here’s the comments I left:

‘I could present you with a list. I’d like it if you could tackle the way the historiography of slavery is being skewed. I’ve got the distinct impression that the anti-racist activists demanding reparations for slavery do not want it taught in schools or people made aware that slavery was universal and not invented by Whites; that it existed in Europe long before Europeans enslaved Africans; that Africans were also enslaving other Africans long before the transatlantic slave trade, and that some African states were not only complicit but did extremely well out of it. They also do not want to hear how the British government began improving conditions for slaves before abolition, nor how we attempted to abolish indigenous slavery in other parts of the British empire and around the world. They don’t want to know that Indians also enslaved Africans, or that the Arab slave trade resulted in the export of 14 million slaves from the continent. And above all, the really don’t want the Barbary pirates discussed. They have been erased from the narrative about slavery in the view of one academic author because they don’t fit with the idea that Whites enslaved Blacks, not the other way round. And the French postmodernists have a very racist view of them in which the pirates are ‘nationalists’ and their ‘white victims ‘imperialists’.’

‘Going further, the utter failure of the anti-racist left to protest against the Pakistani grooming gangs. Following Callum’s coverage of Unite’s and Stand Up To Racism’s protest against Tommy Robinson and his film about the rape of Telford, I wrote to Unite and SUTR complaining about their failure to protest against the gangs. I suggested that the organise a multicultural march against them, ’cause Whites have protested with Blacks on their campaigns against racism. No reply. I wrote to my local paper, the Bristol Post, suggesting this, and also to the Independent. No reply. I also wrote to Asher Craig, Bristol’s deputy elected mayor and head of equalities and children’s services. She’s a Black woman who said she wanted a museum of slavery in Bristol. No reply there either. This said very clearly to me that when it comes to racism, for the anti-racist left racism against Whites does not matter.’

‘And if you really want to be controversial, you could write a piece about colonialist attitudes among Muslims and Blacks. This exists. Anjem Chaudhury’s outfit in Belgium, Sharia4Belgium, wanted a separate Muslim territory in that country, governed by sharia law and with Arabic as the spoken language. The same demands were made over here in some of the literature published by the British Muslim publishers. A more recent argument I came across a couple of years ago explicitly ties it to the colonisation of America. The way the British encouraged other nations to settle in their colonies by allowing them to preserve their culture and laws, these Muslims argue that Muslims in the west should also be allowed to retain their laws under the protection of the British state. I’ve also seen Black British writers and politicos demand separate spaces for Blacks and autonomous communities.’

I know there are issues about people from the left dealing with right-wingers like Sargon and his crew. These are issues that I’d like the left to tackle. But they really don’t want to tackle them or see them discussed. And so, unfortunately, the only avenue is to take them up with the right and see if they will.

I’ll let you know if I get any replies.

Desperate GB News Hosts Notorious Fascist Jack Buckby

Hat tip once again to Tim Fenton for his excellent article on yet another grotty point on GB News’ downward trajectory. As he points out, the channel must be really desperate if one of its presenters, Patrick Christys, has far-right activist Jack Buckby as a guest, and even boasts about it on Twitter. The wretched station even called Buckby a ‘counter-extremism researcher’ and proudly boasted of his praise for Christys, tweeting “‘People on the right are so scared of being smeared as being far-right extremists to the point where they say the far-right doesn’t exist’ … [Jack Buckby], counter-extremism researcher, praises Patrick Christys for talking about extremism”. Well, the real counter-extremism researchers over at Hope Not Hate have been following Buckby for years along with the Islamists Buckby is claimed to be an expert on. Because Buckby may himself be justly described as a far-right extremist. Citing pieces from the Liverpool Tab and Examiner Live, Zelo Street then proceeds to give a brief precis of Buckby’s career.

Buckby is a former member of the BNP, getting mixed up with them when he was at school and then going on to study briefly at Liverpool University before he was thrown out for his views. Buckby said, “I initially got involved with the BNP in high school. I wasn’t very political, but I had my opinions, as everyone does. I saw Nick Griffin and the real bias that he was facing on the television and I thought, ‘That can’t be right.’ I did my own research and thought, ‘Shit, I agree with him. He actually seems like a good bloke.’ I started supporting it and went through college being the notorious BNP guy. It was later that I met Nick and started talking about these culturist ideas”. He was expelled eight years ago in 2013, and went on from the BNP to Liberty GB, which describes itself as an anti-Islamisation party and a radical patriotic conservative organisation. Following the murder of MP Jo Cox, Buckby stood for Liberty GB against Labour in the Batley and Spen by-election, stating that Labour could not go unchallenged. He also claimed that Labour had duped working class people and were walking into the election with smug little grins on their faces. He also issued tweet stating that if Jo Cox’s murder was true, it was either a case of the ‘moronic’ Britain First damaging the cause of the far right, or a false flag attack by the Remain campaign. He was also strongly criticised for a rant on Channel 4 News in which he said to Barbara Ntumy, ‘Take in a Syrian refugee, I hope you don’t get raped’”. The good peeps of Batley and Spen weren’t impressed, and Buckby got 1.1 per cent of the vote and lost his deposit. Tim’s article also quotes tweets from Dr. Louise Raw and anti-racism campaigner Mike Stuchbery. Dr. Raw was horrified at the platforming of Buckby, because he had called for terror attacks in the Netherlands and was in the BNP, as was David Copeland, the man who radicalised Jo Cox’s assassin. Stuchbery has also been a victim of fanatics claiming to fight Islamisation. He was targeted for harassment by the noxious Tommy Robinson. Stuchbery also wondered why GB News was platforming him, ending his tweet with“Disgraceful from [GB News] … A known fascist with despicable views on the murder of Jo Cox & much more that should shame [GB News], who clearly did no background checks here”.

Tim, on the other hand, ends his piece with the conclusion that GB News knew exactly what they were doing, and should hang their heads in shame. But they won’t, because they don’t have any.

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2021/10/gb-news-platforms-known-fascist.html

I’m afraid Tim’s precisely right. A quick search on Google reveals this article on For Britain, its leader Anne-Marie Waters, and Jack Buckby. https://hopenothate.org.uk/research-old/investigations/undercover-inside-britains-far-right/for-britain/. I realise that neither Buckby nor Hope Not Hate are exactly household names, but the researchers at GB News would have known of them and who Buckby was when gathering information for the show. Even if they didn’t come across Hope Not Hate, they would have been able to get the facts about Buckby. It looks very much like the broadcaster wanted someone controversial to talk about Islamisation in the aftermath of David Amess’ murder, and weren’t particular about who they were inviting.

As for describing Buckby as an anti-Islamisation expert, this strikes me as nonsense. I think it’s a mistake to underestimate the Islamophobic far right, as from my own reading of their web pages there are people there who do have a deep knowledge of Islam. This is apart from the football hooligans and other thugs who simply want to beat up brown people. There are issues with Islam in Britain. I think some sections of it are very alienated from mainstream British society and there is a danger of the creation of parallel societies. But the vast majority of British Muslims aren’t terrorists and have very publicly condemned it. The problem is that Fascists and Islamophobes like Buckby don’t distinguish between Islam and Islamism.

From what I’ve read and watched, many of the Islamist activists and terrorists have a similar background. Apart from those radicalised abroad, they seem to be individuals, who’ve been radicalised over the Web or from particular hate preachers. A number had connections to Anjem Chaudhury, a grotty individual who’s spent time in the slammer for supporting terrorism. I don’t know if this the case with Amess’ alleged killer, but quite often they’ve spent their lives drinking, taking drugs and having sex before their conversion to radical Islam. Chaudhury, if I’m correct, is a case in point. Some of them, like those responsible for attacks in France, seem to have been violent criminals. Quite often they’ve precious little connection to their local mosque, the congregation of which haven’t seen them in years.

As for the political motivations behind the attacks, some of it simply seems to be rage at the west’s repeated invasions and attacks on Muslim nations, such as the invasion of Iraq. While there’s more to the ideology than simply this – it also seems to be coupled to stupid conspiracy theories about the Jews plotting against Islam and Mohammed from the foundation of the religion in the 7th century onward, cultural shock and dislocation caused by the massive changes in Middle Eastern and broader Islamic society, as well as an idealisation of pre-modern, traditional Islam – that seems to be the primary motive.

This is a tense time. Our Muslim brothers and sisters are naturally afraid of increased prejudice and abuse following Mr. Amess’ horrendous murder. I saw a piece on the internet news page yesterday stating that Muslim organisations were giving them advice on handling this increased suspicion and hate. We need informed, sane experts, who can properly explain the issues, drawing people together to dispel such prejudice and unite against violence and hatred.

This means real experts, not bigots and Nazis like Buckby.

GB News risk increasing tension simply by platforming him. It seems to be a publicity stunt, though I also wonder if the broadcaster couldn’t get anyone who really knew about Islamist terror and radicalisation on.

Either way, it shows how low it really is going on its way to being eventually wound up.

Blairite Anti-Semite: Labour Investigating Another Pro-Palestinian Jew on Vacuous Charges

This is what Smeeth’s and Hodge’s gaslighting at the Labour conference was intended to protect: Stalin and the Blairites’ continued sectarian anti-Semitic persecution of decent, self-respecting Jews. The Jews they’re smearing as self-hating and anti-Semitic because they’re socialists and/or support the Palestinians. Zelo Street has put up a piece today reporting that Heather Mendick, an active member of Hackney and Shoreditch Labour party is now being investigated for actions that  “may reasonably be seen to involve antisemitic actions, stereotypes and sentiments”. Mendick is herself Jewish, and the real reason for her investigation may not be un-adjacent to her position as co-secretary of Hackney Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

She was insensitively sent the email accusing her of anti-Semitism on Erev Rosh Hashanah, the ten days of repentance observed by Jews before the festival of Yom Kippur. Last week’s Private Eye contained a number of replies from readers to my letter in the previous issue attacking Labour for their accusation that I’m an anti-Semite. One of the letters was from a Jewish woman, who found their printing of my letter insensitive during one of her faith’s festivals. This is not something I have any control over. I was just responding to a false accusation by a malicious party bureaucracy. A party bureaucracy, who, it seems, themselves have absolutely no sensitivity about causing distress to Jews during a solemn holiday. Mendick states that  “This was done in the name of … making the party welcoming for Jewish people. In making this claim, the Labour Party is excluding me from the category of ‘Jewish People’”. Absolutely. One of the most vile aspects of the particular smearing of decent Jews, is that the accusation causes strain and suspicion with other members of the community. Jackie Walker states that the false smear against her caused problems with her partner’s family. Her partner was Jewish, as is Walker.

Mendick has been accused because her twitter account appeared in a report compiled by the Community Security Trust. She says “In August 2019, my Twitter account was listed in the Community and Security Trust’s report Engine Of Hate. The report’s authors do not discuss my account except generically but they do state that looking in detail at my Twitter feed they found no anti-Semitic material”. In fact, only 12 of the 36 twitter accounts the CST examined contained anti-Semitic material. Mendick states “The group has needlessly defamed 24 individuals. It hasn’t retracted or apologised. And it appears unwilling to do so …The thought occurs that the CST may have selected some of its targets, knowing they did not have the means to go to law in order to defend themselves”. She further remarks that some of those smeared “are left to try and defend themselves as best they can, fearful of being attacked online, or worse, tracked down and attacked physically, while those who hang on the CST’s every word as if it were unvarnished fact compound the smear”. Absolutely. Jackie Walker has said that her daughters have stopped her looking at her email, because so much of it contains abuse and death threats.

As for the CST, they are, from what I’ve gathered, little more than a bunch of thugs in uniform. They were set up to defend Jews and Jewish buildings and monuments, like synagogues and cemeteries, from assault and vandalism. If they’d kept to that, then I wouldn’t have any problem with them. Jews have been assaulted by anti-Semites, and homes, synagogues and cemeteries vandalised. But they don’t confine themselves to that. They’ve been employed as stewards for Zionist rallies, and have abused and assaulted pro-Palestinian counterprotesters. According to the estimable Tony Greenstein, they’ve separated Muslim and Jewish protesters, ’cause heaven forbid that Jews and Muslims should march in peace and friendship against the persecution meted out by Israel. They’ve also assaulted women and punched an elderly rabbi in the mouth at one rally. But they’ve got the backing of officialdom and are supposedly trained by Mossad in self-defence, so behaving like a mob of White, gentile Fascists is perfectly OK.

I’ve written in a previous article that the CST ought to be wound up. They behave like a gang of out-of-control thugs, and act as a precedent for other groups and ethnicities demanding their own private police forces. Some of us remember the noxious ‘Muslim Patrol’ set up by Anjem Chaudhury, who marched up and down threatening non-Muslims in the streets outside his mosque. These included people drinking alcohol and a man wearing makeup. Chaudhury’s an Islamist, who ran an outfit in Belgium, ‘Shariah 4 Belgium’, that wanted a Muslim-only enclave in that country governed by Islamic rule and with Arabic as its official language. Chaudhury was jailed for supporting terrorists and his wretched Muslim Patrol closed down by the rozzers. The trouble is, you can’t reasonably stop Muslims having their own volunteer police forces while permitting Zionist Jews to have theirs. Muslims are at far greater risk of abuse and violence than Jews, except for Orthodox Jews because of their distinctive clothing.

As for Ms Mendick being investigated simply because she was mentioned in the CST’s wretched report, this is very much like the historic witch hunts, where the mere accusation was taken as proof. Except that you probably had a greater chance of acquittal in the Middle Ages. It’s more like Pemberton Billing in the years just after the First World War and his wretched ‘little black book’. Billing was a bigot, who claimed to have a book containing the names of 50,000 ‘devotees of Sodom and Lesbia’. These gays were a security threat, because they were open to being blackmailed into spying by Germany. But it looks like he was also simply just a massive homophobe. He was constantly accusing people of homosexuality, which was then illegal, and being sued for libel as a consequence. Once such trial collapsed when he loudly claimed that the judge, too, was in his wretched little black book.

This strikes me as much the same phenomenon. Decent people are being deliberately smeared by individuals with no real evidence for an ultra-nationalist end. And the mere accusation is being taken as proof, even when there isn’t any.

The majority of people being falsely accused are Jewish. This seems to me to be sectarian anti-Semitism. And its being rightly called as such by the Labour left. People in the video I put up the other day on The World Transformed talk on Starmer’s attack on democracy in the Labour party mentioned not just the purges generally, but the purges of Jewish members specifically. Despite the fact that Starmer’s wife is Jewish, and his children are being brought up in that faith, the Labour leadership and bureaucracy are so anti-Semitic in this sense that I wonder if a new nickname for Keef isn’t called for.

Instead or as well as ‘Stalin’, it struck me that ‘Stormfront’ would also be fitting after the American neo-Nazi website.

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2021/10/labour-party-goes-all-1984.html

‘I’ Report on Macron’s Vow to Fight Islamist Separatism in France

Here’s another piece from the I about extremism, from last Saturday’s edition for 3rd October 2020. Written by their columnist Michael Rose, it discusses the announcement by French president Macron that he intends to fight against the separatism and extremist Islam in Muslim communities on the other side of la Manche. The article runs

President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to fight “Islamist separatism”, which he said was threatening to take control in some Muslim communities around France.

France has struggled with Islamist militancy for years but the government is increasingly worried by broader radicalisation within Muslim communities. Officials cite the refusal of some Muslim men to shake women’s hands, swimming pools that impose alternate time slots for men and women, girls as young as four being told to wear full-face veils, and proliferation of Islamic schools.

More than 250 people have been killed on French soil over the past five years in attacks by Islamist militants or individuals inspired by Jihadist groups. “What we need to fight is Islamist separatism,” Mr Macron said during a visit to the impoverished Paris suburb of Les Mureaux. “The problem is an ideology which claims its own laws should be superior to those of the Republic.”

France follows a strict form of secularism which is designed to separate religion and public life. The principle was enshrined in law in 1906.

Many French Muslims have long complained of discrimination and marginalisation that have contributed to poverty and social alienation.

Foreign imams will no longer be able to train clerics in France and there will be tighter controls on the financing of mosques.

“There is a crisis of Islam everywhere, which is being corrupted by radical forms,” Mr Macron said. But he added France had a responsibility . “We have created our own separatism,” he said, citing the ghettoization of minority neighbourhoods.” (p.30).

We were taught a little about the French suburbs, the banlieus, or at least those in Paris, in Geography ‘A’ Level when I was at school nearly 40 years ago. I don’t know about now, but they were then hit by poverty and marginalisation. They were built simply to house people and so consist of nothing, or at least precious little, except tower blocks. It was assumed that the residents would go into the centre of Paris for their shopping and amusement, and so there are no, or very few, shops or local amenities. As for poverty and marginalisation, Ali A. Allawi describes the deprivation, poverty and underprivileged conditions of European Muslims in his book, The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation.

There’s also been much prejudice against Arabs and Muslims in France. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown described the very cold reception her mixed race family got there when they went for a holiday a few years ago in the Independent. I thought things had improved somewhat, as a few years later she wrote another piece about a recent holiday there in which she and her family were welcomed and treated with courtesy. There was also a series of anti-racist protests a few years ago, the name of which translates as ‘Don’t Touch My Mate’. This consisted of White young people showing their solidarity by standing up to racism and discrimination against their Black and Muslim friends.

But there has also been trouble with Muslim extremism and Islamist violence. Over a decade ago there were protests across France when the government ruled that under the doctrine of laicism, the official policy of French secularism, Muslim girls were banned from wearing the hijab in schools. This broke out despite leading French imams declaring that the ban didn’t contradict Islam and could be observed by pious Muslims. The insistence that girls as young as four should wear full-face veils is definitely extreme and not required by Islamic law. From what I remember from when I studied Islam at college as part of the Religious Studies course, girls up to seven years old can wear whatever they like. The dress requirements gradually come after they reach that age, and I think that they are only required to wear the full veil at puberty.

There have been fears about Islamic separatism in other European countries. In the 1990s there was controversy in the main Germany trade union organisation. This claimed that while the affiliated Muslim organisations or its Muslim members claimed to support integration, in reality they had a separatist attitude towards their non-Muslim brothers and sisters.

I also wonder if the accusation of separatism may not be literally true, in that some Muslims extremists may be pursuing a conscious policy of apartheid. I’ve written in previous posts how, when I was studying Islam, I came across passages in books published by British Muslim presses that demanded autonomous Muslim communities. And way back in January 2000, right at the dawning of the new millennium, the Financial Times included a brief piece featuring Anjem Chaudhry, who never met an Islamist terrorist he didn’t like. Chaudhry was then running an outfit called Sharia4Belgium, which wanted Belgian Muslims to have their own autonomous enclave with Arabic as it official language, governed by sharia law. Chaudhry’s now in jail for his support for al-Qaeda and ISIS. I don’t know if such demands are still being made by sections of British and European Islam following the 9/11 attacks and the government’s attempts to curb Muslim radicalism and promote integration. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was, somewhere, though the vicious Muslim firebrands like Kalim Siddiqui, who declared that British society was a monstrous killing machine and that killing Muslims comes very easily to non-Muslim Brits, seem to have gone quiet. The imam, who received Salmon Rushdie back into the faith, also recommended that Britain should train its own imams. When he was writing their was a shortage of Muslim clergy in Britain, and he was afraid that religious extremists from places like Pakistan were being allowed in thanks to this.

Macron’s comments also came at the same time that the Spectator published a piece claiming that the Swedish authorities had announced that immigrant communities in some of their cities were dominated by criminal gangs and had turned whole areas into a no-go zones. There was a war going on between a number of immigrant criminal gangs, in which firearms and even rocket launchers had been used. The Swedish chief of police had supposedly appeared on television to state very clearly that the immigrants responsible for the violence were not proper asylum seekers, but had come to the country simply to make money through selling drugs. This was apparently confirmed by the Swedish prime minister, Lofven, who said that his country would not be taking any of the former residents of the destroyed immigrant camp in France. Or so it has been claimed by right-wing, ant-immigration websites.

A few years ago the Islamophobic, ‘counterjihad’ websites Gates of Vienna and Vlad Tepes wrote pieces praising a book by the former mayor of one of the German towns. He claimed that his town had effectively been overrun by Muslims, who maltreated and forced out ethnic Germans. The book was widely attacked and criticised. They also claimed that Malmo in Sweden, or at least parts of it, had been taken over by Muslim immigrants and become violent, crime-ridden no-go zones for non-Muslims. I don’t know how true these reports are as they come from the racist right, websites which did have connections to the EDL. Certainly Fox News’ claim that British cities like Birmingham had been taken over by Muslims and were now no-go zones for White and non-Muslim Brits provoked widespread criticism and hilarity when they made it a few years ago.

It seems to me that nevertheless, even if these claims are exaggerated, there is nevertheless a real fear of Islamic separatism throughout Europe and that Macron is reacting to it in France.

One contributory factor, I have no doubt, is neoliberalism and the destruction of the welfare state. The French scholar, Alfred Kepel, advances this argument in his book on the resurgence of Christian, Muslim and Jewish fundamentalism, The Revenge of God. When Thatcher started her attacks on the welfare state in the 1980s, she hoped that it would lead to a resurgence of charity. This didn’t happen. But Muslims are obliged to support the poor through the zakat, the alms-tax paid to the local mosque. I think this concern to give to the local poor amongst Muslims isn’t confined just to their own community in Britain. There were Muslim restaurants giving free meals to the homeless at Christmas, and my parents bumped into a young Muslim woman, who was also buying stuff she could give to the food bank, in our local supermarket. But the support provided by the mosques in the absence of state aid does mean that communities may become more isolated and inward-looking.

If we really want to stop Islamic separatism, as well as White racism, not only should Britain and Europe take measures promoting racial integration, but neoliberalism urgently needs to be ditched. It’s dividing communities as it pushes people into real, grinding poverty. But there’s no chance of that, at least in this country, as the very rich are making too much money at the expense of the rest of us, regardless of our colour and religion.

After Christchurch Massacre, Beeb Invites Nazi on to Newsnight

This is another story from Tim Fenton over at Zelo Street, and it’s absolutely unbelievable. Just as the world was in shock and mourning for the 49 Muslim lives lost and the many more wounded at the hands of Fascist gunmen in Christchurch, New Zealand, the Beeb decided to get the views of the other side of the incident on Newsnight. They invited on Benjamin Jones, the leader of Generation Identity UK. Zelo Street then quotes Wikipedia to show why they’re considered a Fascist organization.

According to the Wikipedia article, Generation Identity have gone in for such racist stunts as distrusting soup containing pork in order to exclude Jews and Muslims, and in 2018 Facebook banned them for hate speech and extremist content. In December that year, Al-Jazeera broadcast another documentary, Undercover Hate, in which one of their journo infiltrated Generation Identity, and secretly filmed them racially abusing and attacking immigrants in Lille, calling for violence against Muslims, and which alleged they had contacts with the Front National.

Zelo Street then gives a series of tweets from rightly angry members of the public wondering what got into the Beeb’s heads. One of them, Tom Kibasi, demanded answer from Esme Wren, the programme’s editor, and said he would be putting in a complaint. Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar also complained, and said that it showed how disposable Muslim lives were to the Beeb. She also said she didn’t recall ISIS being given a chance to speak on Newsnight after the Manchester bombing. But Waqas Tufail did remember how Newsnight had on Anjem Chaudhury, the Islamist extremist, after the murder of Lee Rigby, and complained that some things don’t change.

The article concludes

Is Newsnight trying too hard to be a bit edgy? Is this the current idea of balance at the programme? Someone isn’t engaging brain first. And that’s not good enough.

See:
https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/03/bbc-platforms-actual-nazi.html

This once again raises the question of bias on the Beeb. I can remember a decade or so ago when it seemed Nick Griffin and the BNP were about to make their final breakthrough into British politics. The Beeb caused uproar then when they invited him on to Question Time. And Buddy Hell over at Guy Debord’s cat has consistently argued that the television producers are softer on their treatment of the Far Right than they are with the left, inviting leading figures in the National Front and even Oswald Mosley onto their programmes to be interviewed. The Beeb’s argument in these cases is that it has duty to represent all forms of opinion across the spectrum. A case is also made that by bringing Fascists on to television and interrogated, they can be shown for what they are and their appeal tackled and undermined. The argument against that is simply that they are being given a platform to disseminate their vile views.

There’s also more than just a whiff of hypocrisy here. The Beeb has joined the rest of the media in its smearing of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party as anti-Semites. But to my knowledge absolutely none of those smeared – Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Cyril Chilson, Martin Odoni, Mike Sivier, Marc Wadsworth and so on – have been invited onto any mainstream news or current affairs show to present their side. As far as I know, the only news networks that have were the alternative media, like RT, which had both Livingstone and Walker on, if I recall correctly. And I’m not surprised, because if they really allowed Leninspart, Walker and co. to speak, it would show how utterly shallowed and false these accusations are.

And so we have the serious injustice that genuine anti-racists are debarred from appearing on television because of utterly false accusations of Jew-hatred, while the real racists are given a platform after those, who share the views commit horrific acts of violence.

This shows that there is something very, very wrong with mainstream, and particularly BBC news. It is no longer fit for purpose.

Vox Political on the Racist, Islamophobic Booklets at the Tory Conference

Mike also raised further questions about the prevalence of racism in the Tory party in an article he put up about a report by Vice that they had discovered far-right literature at a meeting of the Bruges group, a Thatcherite anti-EU group within the Tories. The book in question was Moralitis: A Cultural Virus. This was a long, racist rant against ‘Cultural Marxism’ using the metaphor of bacteriology. It stated that

The body politic has become infected. Like the growth of bacteria in a petri dish, the subversive tenets of cultural Marxism have spread as a pinking of the public discourse.

Mike goes on to explain that ‘Cultural Marxism’

refers to a far-right conspiracy theory with its origins in anti-Semitic beliefs that Jews – as a culture – want to undermine traditional Western values.

In its modern variant it seems to be a product of the Republicans in America. Right-wing organisations like Prager U and Paul Joseph Watson, formerly Alex Jones’ Brit sidekick on Infowars, rant about it. It seems to be based on a confused and garbled understanding of the German Frankfurt School and Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was a Marxist, who turned Marxism on its head by discussing and analyzing how culture helped perpetuate capitalism. In orthodox Marxism, it’s the other way round: the economic basis of society determines the culture. Scholars from the Marxist Frankfurt School sought refuge in America when the Nazis took power. In the form the Republicans and their followers over here are retailing, there’s no explicit reference to Jews, and I think many of those who have adopted this view may also believe the lie that anti-Semitism is also something unique to the Left.

But critics of the idea have also pointed out that the idea of ‘Cultural Marxism’ actually goes all the way back to the Nazis and their idea of Kulturbolschevismus – Cultural Bolshevism. This was the idea that the supposed Jewish plot to enslave White Aryans, and particularly Germans, included the destruction of German culture. Jews were members of many of the modernist movements in art, music and literature the Nazis despised, such as 12 note Serialism in music and Expressionism. And so the Nazis and anti-Semitic mobs angrily denounced anything dangerously modern as ‘Jewish’.

Mike goes on to quote the Vice article on the contents of this nasty booklet.

The Vice article states: “The booklet blames immigration for “relentless population growth” and suggests that the growth of Britain’s Muslim population was “a deliberate policy to replace one set of voters with another”. It also notes that it is absurd for progressives to favour immigration, “considering the very conservative cultures that they bring” – for instance, “the growth of fundamentalist Islam”.” It goes on to suggest that such “progressives” are like turkeys voting for Christmas.

He explains that

This refers to a far-right conspiracy theory called “The Great Replacement”, that believes Western culture is being systematically “replaced” by the culture of immigrants from third-world continents who are allegedly “pawns for the revolutionary zeal of cultural Marxism”.

This idea is merely a modern version of the old conspiracy theory that the Jews are encouraging racial mixing in order to destroy the White race. You may remember that the Nazis and Klansmen marching through Charlottesville last year chanted ‘You will not replace us!’ and ‘Jews will not replace us!’ It also seems to be partly based on the fact that some parts of the radical American Left in the early part of this century did look forward to immigrants from Latin America and elsewhere revitalizing American radicalism. You also hear regularly on this side of the Atlantic the claim that Blair deliberately allowed in greater numbers of immigrants because he wanted to create a multicultural society that the Tories would be unable to undo or appeal to. This claim was first made by a former civil servant under Blair, who remains its only source. And the positive attitude of the American Left towards immigration, and its alleged deliberate increase by Blair are far from being the racist plot the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory claims.

As for the book’s title, Moralitis is ominously similar to the Nazis’ explicit rejection, common to Fascism generally, of humanitarianism.

As for the claim that Muslim immigration presents a particular danger because of the conservative nature of those societies, there is indeed a problem with the very hardline, intolerant form of Islam promoted by the Saudis. And I can remember one moderate Muslim imam complaining in the Financial Times back in the 1990s that the lack of properly trained Muslim clergy in Britain meant that dangerous fanatics and bigots were able to come here from Pakistan unchecked in order to meet this spiritual need. However, this was before 9/11 and I doubt very much the same type of clergy find it quite so easy to get into this country or others in the EU. Furthermore, many, if not the majority of the Islamic terrorists so far caught are second or third generation Brits, coming from integrated, westernized homes. Anjem Chaudhury, the raving bigot behind a whole host of Islamist organisations in Britain and Europe, like Sharia4UK, is an example of this. Before he converted to hardline Islam and became an ardent, vocal supporter of terrorism, Chaudhury was a law student at Oxbridge. He managed to fail his degree, largely due to drink and drugs. While many people reach out to religion and God during personal crises like that, they don’t all of them by any means decide that the way to the divine is by the destruction of their surrounding society and the murder of its people. It looks to me very much like Chaudhury and those like him turned to nihilistic, destructive Islamism because of their own personal failings and destructive tendencies. They aren’t representative of wider British Islamic culture.

Mike’s article concludes

The meeting of the Bruges Group was said to be well attended this year, with a cabinet whip keeping watch over hard-Brexiteer MPs – that’s right, Conservative members of Parliament have been swallowing this tripe.

The title of his article asks ‘Are these far-right, racist booklets influencing Conservative MPs?’

It’s a good question. Even if they aren’t, they show that people elsewhere in the Tory party are reading them, and are being influenced. Which in turn shows that vehement racism is still a powerful force amongst the ‘Nasty Party’.

Vox Political on Sadiq Khan’s Rebuff to Donald Trump

Mike over at Vox Political has also written a piece about the rebuff by the new Labour mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, to Donald Trump. Trump would like to ban Muslims from entering America, but has said that there would be exceptions. Including Mr Khan, whom he would be happy to see enter the Land of the Free. Khan has said clearly that he would not go to America if such a ban was in place, not while it discriminates against his friends, his family, and others like him. He attacked Trump’s proposal as divisive, and pointed out that it could alienate moderate Muslims. He also stated that Trump’s idea that Islam was incompatible with western liberal values was wrong.

Mike states that Mr Khan is right, and his ban on Muslims is divisive and dangerous. See Mike’s article at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/05/10/khan-is-right-to-rebuff-ignorant-donald-trump/

Of course, Khan’s right. No self-respecting member of any ethnic, national or religious group would want to go to a country that discriminates against their people. I am aware, though, of the people from all over the world, who go to work in the brutally intolerant nations of the Gulf States. In the case of the migrant workers from the Developing World, they’re driven by the sheer necessity to find work in the face of terrible, grinding poverty. For Mr Khan and people like him, the situation is somewhat different. I used to work with a Black historian, who strongly disliked America because of that country’s long history of racism. The man didn’t hate Whites, as some might allege because of this. He had a White wife and friends. But he was concerned about how he might be treated in the more prejudiced parts of the country, and about the way the country had treated people of colour like him.

And going to America under a Trump presidency is not an option for Mr Khan as a British Muslim politician. It would create division and play into the hands of extremists. The fire-breathing preachers of hate, like the wretched Anjem Chaudhury, sneer at moderate, liberal Muslims as ‘chocolate Muslims’, their term for an Islamic ‘Uncle Tom’. If Khan went to America, he’d get this label, and with a certain amount of justification. And as a result, the hands of the extremists – the preachers of hate, who encourage the young, impressionable, naïve and just plain stupid to kill, and maim and rape, or destroy their lives and those of innocents in suicide bombings, would be strengthened immensely.

No true citizen of a diverse, multicultural world city like London would ever want that for their city, let alone a genuinely responsible leader. Khan’s right to turn the coiffured buffoon down. So, I hope, will the people of America at the forthcoming elections. Trump’s a Nazi demagogue, playing on racist fears and insecurities. The American people deserve far better.

Hope Not Hate: Luton Churches Protest against ‘Christian Patrol’ and ‘Britain First’

Hope Not Hate have published a great piece on their blog reporting the efforts churches in Luton have made in trying to stop Britain First and their ‘Christian Patrol’. Britain First are another Fascist hate group, with ties to Ulster loyalist paramilitaries and the BNP. They claim to be British Christians protesting against the Islamicisation of this country, and protecting its non-Muslim peoples from Muslim attacks. In fact it’s fair to say they’re racist, sectarian fanatics, of the same stripe as the Klu Klux Klan in America. The only difference is that instead of persecuting Jews, they’re targeting Muslims. They harass Muslims on the street, and have staged invasions of mosques.

Last Saturday 20 of them goose-stepped around Luton, led by Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen, haranguing the local Muslim population. They’ve videoed it, and put it on Youtube, where it’s supposedly garnered 18 million hits. The piece by Hope Not Hate reports the efforts some 30 Christian leaders in Luton to dissuade Britain First from coming, and then reason with them when they insisted on doing so. They were also active trying to restore some kind of interfaith harmony after they did so. The piece particularly mentions the vicar of Bury Park, David Keveston, for his efforts in organising a counter-protest against them which included both Muslims and Christians.

The piece can be read here: http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/blog/nick/churches-challenge-britain-first-lsquo-christian-patrol-rsquo-4724

They also have this piece, http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/britain-first/, giving further information about Britain First. They’re an extremist Christian version of Anjem Chaudhury’s ‘Muslim Patrol’, and like him and his despicable network of jihadis, deserves nothing but contempt.

I’m very aware of the persecution Christians are facing in countries around the world, including the Dar al-Islam, as well as the need to crack down on the preachers of hate here. However, bigotry and intimidation are not the way to do it, and definitely not the harassment of the innocent.

Hope Not Hate are concerned that some Christians might be taken in by them. So don’t be deceived. There’s nothing mainstream about Britain First. They don’t represent the majority of Christians in this country. They are just bigots and Nazis, who’ve found someone else to persecute. I went to an Anglican church school, which gave me a solid, Christian education while at the same time the staff and clergy had a profound horror of sectarian bigotry, racism and the violence these breed. I did my first degree at a former Anglican teacher training college, where I was taught Islam by Indian Christian, who had Muslim friends among the staff, and who was similarly horrified by religious violence. Britain First has absolutely nothing in common with them and the thousands of other churches, schools and colleges like them. They’re a disgrace, and I don’t want them misrepresenting either British Christianity, or worse, drawing anybody else into their vile beliefs.

The Origin of the Fear of a Muslim Holocaust in Nazi Propaganda

Yesterday I put up a piece about Paul Berman’s book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, which argues that the modern Islamist movements – al-Qaeda, but also Hamas, and the Islamic Republic of the Ayatollah Khomeini, ultimately have their origins in the writings of Hassan al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood. The book also describes the role of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al-Husseini, in translating Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda into the Muslim and Arab worlds. Al-Husseini claimed, despite the evidence of the very limited dimensions of the Jewish state at the time, that the Jews were planning to wipe out Islam and the Arabs, and to turn all the Arab countries in the Middle East into homelands for themselves and Black Americans. He therefore urged, and organised, a genocidal war against Jews, commanding his audience to kill the Jews and their children before the Jews killed them.

It’s vile, poisonous stuff from someone, who played an enthusiastic part in the Holocaust of European Jews, as well as massacres of those in Palestine. His fear-mongering of a Jewish superstate goes far beyond the Nakba, or ‘disaster, catastrophe’, the term Palestinians have given to the eradication of their communities and their displacement at the establishment of Israe. Looking through al-Husseini’s rhetoric also makes sense of the claims of a similar genocide made by one British Muslim firebrand in the 1990s.

This was Kalim Saddiqui, who was one of the Muslim leaders involved in stirring up hatred against Salman Rushdie over the Satanic Verses. In the early 1990s the Beeb screened a documentary on the problems afflicting the Islamic community in Britain. These problems included poor academic performance, unemployment and the consequent feelings of disenfranchisement and alienation. They filmed Siddiqui preaching in his mosque. He told the assembled worshippers that ‘British society is a gigantic killing machine, and killing Muslims comes very easily to them.’ I’m aware of the racism and violence many Muslims have to face, not least from the Stormtroopers of the Far Right, like the BNP, and their successors, the English Defence League. But this went far beyond a complaint about racism to a bigoted, racist statement about non-Muslims Brits.

To their credit, the Beeb tried to tackle Siddiqui about this. His response was that it was part of his defence of Islam against the forces, of which Rushdie’s book was a part. He then claimed that the Satanic Verses was simply part of a ‘Holocaust of Muslims’ that was being prepared. It’s rubbish, of course, but such fears do now unfortunately have a certain verisimilitude now that Trump is demanding a halt to Muslim immigration, and the registration of those already in America. Against this, it needs to be noted that there are other Americans on the streets, including not just Muslim Americans, but also members of the traditional White and Black communities and Jews demonstrating against Trump’s poison. Several Jewish organisations were so horrified by Trump’s plans, which were so close to what they experienced during the Third Reich, that they organised demonstrations against the tousle-haired Nazi in 17 cities across the US. Siddiqui also made the comments at the time of the Bosnian War, when the Serbs were committing massacres against Bosnian Muslims. That might partly explain Siddiqui’s vile rant.

But mostly it seems to me now that Siddiqui had absorbed the conspiracy theories and the rhetoric of genocide against Muslims shoved out by the Grand Mufti as part of his pro-Nazi campaign. In which case, the roots of Islamism and Islamist terrorism in Britain go back at least two decades. Siddiqui and the other preachers of hate prepared a paranoid, intensely hostile mindset within the audiences, which may have made some susceptible to the teachings and propaganda of al-Qaeda and now ISIS later on.

Siddiqui and his fellows, like Anjem Chaudhury, do not represent all Muslims in Britain by any means. They’re extremely controversial, and there have been demonstrations against them as bigots, who pervert the message of Islam, by liberal Muslims. There are a number of books and Muslim organisations, like Imams Online, which exist to tackle the Islamism and hate they promote. If you go over to the anti-racist organisation’s Hope Not Hate site, there are also numerous articles on events that have been organised around the country to bring Muslims and non-Muslims together, with pictures of Muslim imams talking and laughing with Christian vicars, and members of the other faiths. Siddiqui’s rhetoric is part of the Nazi distortion of Islam, and doesn’t represent the whole of the ‘umma or its history.