This is going to be controversial, but I think this video is important as it exposes the biases and distortions in the official reportage of the Pakistani grooming gangs and the fear of being accused of racism that allowed them to get away with their crimes for decades. I’m very much aware that the New Culture Forum is part of the free market fanatics, the IEA and that GB News is a Conservative media outlet pushing the culture war issues because the Tories don’t really have anything else to use to boost their image. But this is a very, very real issue, and the ingrained refusal to investigate and prosecute these men because of their religion and ethnicity has led to the horrific abuse of 1,500 + extremely vulnerable girls in Rotherham alone. And it also demonstrates how this scandal has its deeper roots in the refusal to tolerate anything that contradicted the multicultural dogma that states that ethnic minorities and immigrants somehow automatically adopt British culture and values when they immigrate to this country. These men didn’t, and the interviewees state that this was partly due to the nature of chain migration itself and the backward culture of the region from which most of the groomers came – the Mirpur region of Pakistan.
The video is part of a new series, ‘Deprogrammed’, being launched by the NCF, Presumably the title means that its against the supposed falsehoods with which we’ve been programmed like robots by the lamestream media. The video features Harrison Pitt, a writer for the European Conservative, interviewing Evan Rigg, a Canadian freelance journalist, and Charlie Peter, a presenter on GB News who produced a documentary on the Pakistani grooming gangs. It begins with Sajid Javid’s 2018 investigation of the gangs. Despite expectations, this turned into a whitewash as the Tories were sensitive about race in the wake of the Windrush scandal. It therefore concluded that the majority of abusers and gang members were White men. The report was originally withheld from publication and it took an internet petition with 180,000 signatures to get it released. In fact, the report on which Javid’s report was based contradicted its findings. It stated that the collection of statistics for ethnicity had been so poor, it was impossible to say which race the majority of offenders was composed of. What evidence there is stated that White men constituted 30 per cent of offenders, and Asians 28 per cent. This was despite Whites constituting 85 per cent of the British population and Asians 8 per cent. By these statistics, Asians are massively overrepresented as groomers and abusers.
Peter’s stated that one effect of his documentary was that it had helped changed the law. The news about the gangs in Rotherham had first been broken a decade ago by Andrew Norfolk, after which more reports from other towns flowed in. However, these reports were mealy-mouthed and heavily censored. More documentation on the ethnic composition of the gangs is needed, along with the imprisonment of their members. Many of those convicted served only light sentences and returned to the same areas in which their victims were living afterwards because of a reluctance to send offenders to Britain’s overstretched and crowded prisons. He supported the launch of Cruella’s National Crime Agency taskforce because local authorities and police forces and had been too mired in political corruption. The problem was that these organisations prioritised community cohesion and multiculturalism over the safety of women and girls. The girls were further regarded by politicians and the media as belonging to the underclass, wild girls whose unsafe lifestyle brought their abuse on themselves. There was the further problem in that it had gone on for decades, but the people who initially talked about it were far right. In fact, they were often ordinary, decent people who were branded far right because they talked about this taboo topic. When patriotic, decent, socially conservative members of the left spoke about it, they were bullied and harassed. Anne Crier was ignored when she spoke out in 2003. Jack Straw was pilloried for complaining about it, and Sarah Champion was similarly removed from Labour’s front bench for the same reason. Peters therefore considered Braverman very brave for taking on the rape gangs. He was struck by her comments that the truth wasn’t racist as something that needed to be said to defend a government policy.
The abused girls were targeted because they were White. This was a result of mass migration, which had produced a very insular and clannish community. The immigrants involved came from the very backward Mirpur and Kashmir regions of Pakistan. It was chain migration operating through first cousin marriage. This prevented these communities from establishing links with the wider community and entrenched the traditional gender power structures that gave men immense power and control over women. It also meant that these abusers were extremely difficult to catch because family members did not want to inform on each other. This occurred at the same time the social solidarity of the wider community was declining due to the economic devastation of local industries and a process of social atomisation. Sexual behaviour became more licentious during the ’90s and Noughties, when it became acceptable to go out of an evening for casual sex. But this was also contrasted with the moral conservatism and judgmental attitudes of the tabloid papers.
The emergence of the Pakistani rape gangs flew in the face of the classical liberal doctrine that held that relentless waves of unwanted migrants would not lead to the destruction of social bonds, and especially the left-wing mantra that ‘diversity is strength’. Peters here contrasts the state of three of the countries with the highest rates of diversity – Liberia, Congo and Papua New Guinea, with very homogenous societies like Denmark, Japan and South Korea. Nevertheless, the assumption is that the more Britain becomes diverse, it can still function like Denmark and the other two nations. It’s assumed new immigrants will assimilate, but assimilation only goes so far. The Canadian journalist remarked that although he comes from a very similar nation, he will never be British. How will people from very different cultures like Liberia do so? Will it be their children or grandchildren who become British? Some migration is needed for countries to remain dynamic. The problem in Rotherham was that it was too much, too quickly and unwanted. And as the new immigrants could join the electorate after a few years, this resulted in the creation of a new electorate without the consent of the old one.
He then discusses the noxious activities and careers of some of those involved in the gangs and the suppression of action against them. One of these ratbags was Maruf Hussein, Rotherham’s Community Cohesion Officer, who refused to accept the reports that 1,500 + girls were being molested. The gangs were also assisted by White female converts to Islam, such as Shifra Ali. Ali set up a bogus taxi hotline which was supposed to supply taxis to take the girls to school. She died in 2009, unfortunately, before she could face justice. After Hussein resigned, he rebranded himself as an anti-racism activist. It has also been alleged that Hussein also launched a failed accusation of racism against a Labour colleague on the council for expressing concerns about the grooming gangs. He was then found working for NHS England as a diversity and inclusion officer. on £49,000 p.a. It is a disgrace that the doctrine of diversity hasn’t been harmed and even been strengthened by it, because it showed how such monstrous crimes could be ignored through censorship and lies. Once again the 2020 report is mentioned for its conclusion that the majority of abusers were White men. It showed that the ‘blob’, the right-wing name for the obstructive civil service and the diversity industry could spin the gangs as a White problem. This is despite the fact that there were 19 trials in which the gangs were composed only of Pakistani men. And while the police may not collect statistics on ethnicity, the names are included in the trial records. Further studies have also shown that Pakistani men dominate this issue. But the blob, Sayeeda Warsi, the Guardian and parts of the government will accuse you of racism if you talk about this.
The conversation then goes back to 2015 and comparison with the way the continental countries such as Germany were able to combat the Syrian rapists in Cologne and other cities. The interviewees make the point that Syria isn’t the same as Mirpur and Kashmir. England also has a particular nervousness when it comes to migration and accusations of racism. Peters then goes back to 1870 and Gladstone’s violent denunciation of the Turks’ atrocities in eastern Europe. His comments, if made now, would result in his being thrown out of every political party except, perhaps, Reform and the SDP. And there is the problem of the ethnic composition of constituencies affecting what their politicians are prepared to say about particular issues. Would Gladstone have made his comments, if his constituency had included a large Turkish population? He mentions the comments Tracey Brabin, the mayor of West Yorkshire, made three weeks ago on the Daily Politics. Brabin dismissed Cruella’s comments about the grooming gangs as ‘dog whistles. This is two years after a teacher in Batley was forced into hiding for showing cartoons of Mohammed in class as part of a lesson on free speech. It’s also just a few weeks after the controversy when an autistic boy scuffed a Quran, and his mother was dragged before the local mosque to beg its congregants’ forgiveness in what is described as a ‘Maoist struggle session’. Present at this kangaroo court was a police inspector urging restraint. Peters saw parallels here with the grooming gangs, especially as Maruf Hussain had also spoken to the police. If Brabin cannot tell the truth about these problems, what else will she cover up?
The video ends with a discussion of what ordinary people can do. They state that there are good resources out there about what people can do if they feel their children are being abused. The NSPCC is one, although they have reservations about them because of the charity’s statement that different communities should not be singled out. They are particularly impressed with Maggie Oliver and her campaign and organisation against the gangs.
Peters is questioned about the response by the working class to the documentary. Did they regard him as a hero? Peters replied by stating that he was only a documentary film-maker and not a hero. The real heroes were the survivors of the abuse, who put their lives at risk to talk to him. He was immensely grateful to them. It was easier talking to them and editing their accounts than talking to politicians as there was no waffle. As for Braverman’s proposed actions, the proof would be in the pudding. He would be very impressed if the offenders were imprisoned and deported. The survivors were cautiously optimistic, and Peters said he would be there to hold the government to account if it failed them.
The Torygraph ran a story yesterday claiming that over half of Hindu schoolchildren in Britain had been bullied by their Muslim classmates. This included throwing beef at them, a particular insult given the Hindu veneration for cattle. The victims were supposedly told that the insults and violence would stop if they converted to Islam. The blog’s favourite YouTube non-historian, Simon Webb, posted a video about it on his channel this morning in which he added his own peculiar viewpoint on it. He claimed that the bullying was being ignored by Guardian-reading liberals, who would have otherwise been extremely annoyed and organising protests if the bullying had been by White children against Blacks and Muslims. I’m sure he’s right there. However, he claimed that the anti-Hindu bullying was being ignored because Guardian readers had convinced themselves that Hindutva was fascism, and because India was friends with Israel. This is nonsense. Many academic historians of Fascism across the world have concluded that Hindutva, militant Hindu nationalism, is fascistic. One of the Hindu nationalist prayers appears in a collection of fascist texts because it exemplifies the mystical strain of fascism. The RSSS, a paramilitary Hindu organisation, was modelled on Mussolini’s black shirts. I’ve put up a piece about ultra-nationalist Hindu priests putting bounties on the head of dissident Indians and calling for the death of blasphemers. There have been mass rallies calling for the abandonment of India’s secular, pluralist constitution and its transformation into a Hindu state. Muslims, Christians and Sikhs are the target of militant Hindu nationalist violence, with Muslims and their mosques especially targeted. I also remember a particularly repulsive incident back in the ’90s when one local Hindu nationalist politico announced his support for Hitler against the Muslims, and used the Nazi version of the swastika. But western liberal hatred of India fascism almost certainly isn’t behind the liberal left ignoring such anti-Hindu bullying.
Playground violence between different Asian groups has been around for a long time. I heard back in the 1980s that in one of the schools in a multicultural ward of Bristol the real conflict and violence wasn’t between Black and White, but between different Asian groups. I don’t know if the violence was based on religion, ethnicity or caste. I do remember, however, that talking about it to friends there was a real opposition to any recognition that Asian racism could be as bad or worse than White racism.
Part of the problem is that the anti-racist movement arose specifically to tackle White prejudice, hostility and discrimination against Blacks and other people of colour. It therefore has immense difficulty recognising that non-Whites also have their own racial prejudices and can also be responsible for racist abuse and violence. Some of this comes from the way the right-wing press in the 1980s framed the 1980s/81 race riots and continuing racial controversies as due to Black racism. Diane Abbott has said several times that she wasn’t going to tackle racism within ethnic minority communities, because this would lead ‘them’ to ‘divide and rule’. The result is that racism from non-Whites is played down or ignored. One Jewish writer for the right-wing online magazine, Spiked, wrote a piece describing how she also received anti-Semitic abuse and treatment from ethnic minorities. But this wasn’t reflected in the public discussions about anti-Semitism, which only dealt with it when it came from Whites.
This exclusive focus on White racism does not represent the complex reality of racial attitudes in multicultural Britain. This is grossly unjust, and needs to change, however uncomfortable it may be to official anti-racists like Diane Abbott.
A few days ago I posted a piece about a Pakistani TV programme, which featured a panel of violently intolerant religious fanatics ranting about what they feared was a wave of unbelief and blasphemy threatening the country of the pure. Well, that’s one explanation I’ve seen for the country’s name: ‘paki’ – ‘pure’, ‘stan’ country. I’ve also seen another explanation that claimed the ‘Paki’ element is an acronym made up with the country’s various provinces. These men claimed to have seen a report by the Federal Intelligence Agency and the branch of the country’s judiciary or law enforcement tasked with protecting the Pakistani people from blasphemy, that there were 400,000 internet accounts put up by blasphemers. They then went on to complain that despite these numbers, only 119 people had been arrested and of these only 11 were executed. Later on in the programme they claimed that the blasphemous internet accounts had started with only four people, who had been arrested and executed, but the number had mushroomed. This was accompanied with histrionic demonstrations of grief and outrage. One of them wished he had died before he had seen this day. Another wondered if they shouldn’t react to this news by burning down the towns. I hope that’s just hyperbole, otherwise it’s going to kill an awful lot of people and increase any disaffection with Islam. An elderly mullah was seen crying in a corner of the studio. They also went to describe the dreadful acts the blasphemers were committing, claiming that it was all part of a conspiracy to bring down the country and that the blasphemous internet sites were using women to lure men onto them to commit these outrages. I’m not going to describe them, as they are very shocking, far more extreme than the Danish cartoons that provoked such outrage across the Islamic world when they were published.
The ex-Muslims atheists on the net believed that the stories of these blasphemous acts were genuine, and were an expression of real, bitter hatred by alienated young Pakistanis against the country’s dominant religion. But the acts they described are so grotesque, I wondered if they weren’t made up. Years ago I read an account of the furore over the Danish cartoons on one of the Islamophobic sites. After the cartoons had been published in a Danish provincial paper, the Jyllands Aftenposten or whatever it was, a group of five imams went on a tour of the Muslim world to show them to the masses. However, it seems that one of the cartoons they showed had not been published by the paper.
I’ve been told that in that part of the world there’s a culture of embroidering the truth in disputes. It was a problem for the British authorities during the Raj, as both sides would start inventing details to reinforce their side of the argument until it was impossible to tell who was actually in the right. I don’t doubt that there are internet sites in Pakistani posting blasphemous material, but I wonder if the supposed acts they contained weren’t, in actual fact, the products of the nasty, lurid imaginations of those complaining about them.
The ex-Muslims themselves wondered about how many of the 400,000 blasphemers were really non-Muslims. Islam in Pakistan is composed of different sects – Sunni, Shia, Barelvi, Deobandi and so on, some of whose doctrines are seen as blasphemy by the others. So some of what was being denounced as blasphemous by the various fanatics could simply be honestly held beliefs by pious Muslims, who themselves see them as true and respectful expressions and formulations of their religion. Some of the ex-Muslims therefore suggested that the number of real blasphemous internet accounts was therefore half the official number, 200,000. But even if 400,000 is the real figure of atheists attacking Islam on the Pakistani net, it’s a trivial number compared to the country’s population. I think Pakistan has a population of c. 250 million. Which means that the proportion of people posting this material is less than 1/500 millionth of the population. In other words, a vanishingly small number. To outsiders like myself, when put like this the issue seems hardly worth bothering with. But not to these guys, who lined up in the studio to sing a song about how they would cut the heads off the blasphemers and burn them by day and night.
The same week Pakistani television broadcast this fiasco, Muslims in Britain had been celebrating Eid with the Big Iftar, in which they shared their religious meal with their non-Muslim neighbours. The One Show also covered on Muslim, who had dedicated himself to doing good deeds during Ramadan, and had assembled a team of Muslims and non-Muslims to help him. All of which was obviously far more constructive than the Pakistani programme’s demands for mass death. As for its wretched song, I can remember when one of the great Pakistani Sufi musicians came to Britain with his band back around 1991. He performed in Bradford, I think, and the Beeb televised the concert late one evening. I watched some of it, as I was then trying to do a postgraduate degree in British Islam. What came across from the little I saw was the sheer joy of the musicians and the audience. Joy in their religion, joy in the music. No hate at all. Round about the same time there was a documentary about Islam, Living Islam, which attempted to give a positive view of the religion. When it came to Pakistani politics, the presenter admitted that yes, politically the Pakistani electorate did demand more Islam. When the politicians attempted to give it to them, however, they were much less enthusiastic. Looking back, this is a mistakenly optimistic view. But then, despite the continuing controversy over the Satanic Verses, in some ways the ’90s were far more optimistic when it came to race and religion than today. To many people, both Black and White, racism was declining as conditions for Blacks and minorities improved. Another piece of optimism that has vanished in recent years.
Some of the posts I’ve seen about it made the point that the country has bigger issues to worry about than blasphemy. The country is supposedly deteriorating economically, socially and politically. But I wonder if that wasn’t the point. It looks like a diversion, to get ordinary Pakistanis to look away from the country’s real, material problems. Just like the Conservative MP Lee Anderson wants his party to fight on the culture war issues, because Rishi Sunak’s material policies about the economy are terrible and indefensible.
Even so, the programme is still chilling for the hatred it was trying to stir up. Accusations of blasphemy have resulted in rioting, murder and assassination in Pakistan. In one particular insane case, a schoolgirl allegedly murdered her teacher. The teacher herself hadn’t actually blasphemed. The child merely dreamed that she had, and so attacked and killed her. In my previous post about this I worried that this could set off a wave of mass persecution. So were the ex-Muslims, one of whom urged people to post about this and add hashtags copying in the American embassy and British High Commission as it looked like this could lead to serious human rights violations. And there’s the additional problem that this fanaticism could easily spread over here. The rioting between Hindus and Muslims that erupted a few months ago was supposed to have been caused by radical preachers from India and Pakistan.
We really need preachers now to emphasise peace against all the bigots anywhere in the world trying to divide us with hatred.
I feel I have to comment on this story now going the rounds on the right-wing satellite news shows like GB News and the Murdoch-owned Talk TV, if only to provide some perspective on it. They’ve been discussing Cineworld’s decision to remove a British-made film, in which a young Muslim girl learns about the life of Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima. The film’s directed by Eli King, and was written by a Muslim clergyman, and its executive producer, Malik Shlibak, appeared on GB News talking to Nigel Farage to defend the movie. There were mass protests outside cinemas in Bolton and Birmingham, which led to the cinema chain removing the movie, first from those towns and now across the country. They stated that they were afraid that if they did not do, they could not guarantee the security of their staff.
One of the accusations against the film is that it is blasphemous, because it shows Mohammed’s face. This is frequently omitted in Islamic art, it has to be said. There’s either an oval hole left for the face, or else the face of Mohammed and other leading members of the early Muslim community are hidden behind veils. Shlibak explained to the Fuhrage that Habib, the Islamic scholar who wrote the film, was a highly respected clergyman with a following around the world. They were also very careful to base it on the historical sources. As for blasphemy in portraying the Prophet’s face, Shlibak stated that this wasn’t true, as there is a variety of attitudes towards the portrayal of Mohammed across the Muslim world.
The real issue, it appears, is sectarian. The protesters were all Sunnis, the orthodox branch of Islam, who objected to the film because it was from the Shia perspective. Fatima was married to Ali, whom the Shias revere as the first Imam and the true successor to Mohammed as the leader of the nascent Muslim community. However, he was passed over in favour of three members of the Meccan aristocracy, who had converted to Islam. Ali’s sons, Hassan and Hussein, attempted to seize power but were defeated in battle by the forces of the Caliph Muawiya. They were killed, their forces routed and the women of Ali’s family captured. Shia Muslims commemorate this event annually with processions and a passion play, in which they carry models of the Hassan and Hussein’s mausoleums.
Apart from Shlibak, the Fuhrage also talked to a Muslim who supported the protests. He denied that the film was being accused of blasphemy, because blasphemy doesn’t exist in Islam. The protests were instead against it because it caused sectarian tensions. Now the statement that blasphemy doesn’t exist in Islam is pure taqiyya, a lie to defend the faith. Technically what he said is correct – it doesn’t have quite the same concept, but has a similar idea. This is ‘insulting Islam’. There have been mob lynchings and murders of people accused of blasphemy in Pakistan. The Pakistani legal code also considers it a crime, and there are 200 people on death row in the country on blasphemy charges. When the man defending the protests repeatedly refused to answer Nige’s questions about blasphemy, Nige ended the interview ‘in the interests of free speech’.
I found an other video today in which the protests were being discussed by Leo Kearse, a Conservative comedian, who has appeared with Sargon of Gasbag’s Lotus Eaters, and another man, whom I didn’t recognise. It seems that the protesters were also recorded chanting ‘Allahu akbar’ and ‘Shia kaffir’, Shia unbelievers. Although unremarked by the three discussing the issue, this is particularly chilling. Muslims cannot enslave other Muslims under the explicit dictates of sharia law, although this was frequently violated. In the Middle Ages, however, a number of Sunni theologians and jurists ruled that the Shia were not Muslims, but unbelievers. They could thus be killed and their children enslaved. A few years ago the Grand Mufti of Mecca declared that the Shia were ‘heretics, worthy of death’, which is a call to genocide if ever I heard one. Kearse added that this was a problem of importing thousands, millions of people from other cultures that don’t share our values. He was corrected by the second panellist, who made the point that the people speaking were all born here. The problem was about parallel societies. This is a genuine problem. There have been articles in the press discussing the way White and ethnic minority communities are growing apart. There was one such in the left-wing political magazine, Prospect, a few years ago about one town in which Whites and Muslim lived in separate areas and had nothing to do with each other. The panellists stated that there wasn’t much in the way of British values on display. No, the protesters were following the traditional values of the Sunni Muslim world. They also made the point that it was similar to the teacher, who was hounded of his job at a school in Batley because he dared to show his class the French cartoons of Mohammed. This fellow and his family are still in hiding a year later. And it was for showing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that the French teacher, Thomas Pattie, was murdered following similar protests.
Julia Harley-Brewer on Talk TV tried to put it into some kind of perspective by comparing it to Christian protests against Monty Python’s Life of Brian. And a few years before in the ’70s there were also protests against the horror film The Exorcist because of its portrayal of demonic possession. But as far as I know, these protests never included death threats, whether explicit or tacit, against those involved in the movie. The real parallels, and the source of the problem, are the protests in Bradford in the 1980s against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. This was intended as a critique of western racism, and the Mahound character, who was supposed to be a caricature of Mohammed, actually wasn’t at all. People I know who’ve read the book have said it’s not blasphemous. It is, however, incredibly boring. The book was denounced by the Ayatollah Khomeini as a cynical political ploy in order to gain some kind of moral leadership over the Muslim world against Saudi Arabia. In Britain there were mass protests, led in Bradford by Mohammed Akhthar, Kalim Saddiqui and other intolerant hardliners. Akhthar penned a pamphlet, Be Careful With Mohammed, which I had the misfortune to read when I was briefly trying to study Islam at postgraduate level. It’s a staunch defence of traditional Islam, which is held up as everything good and admirable as compared to western society and Christianity, which is everything inferior and wrong. And Akhthar makes very explicit the British Muslim community’s rejection of British culture and values ‘They came to Britain to work, not to become Englishmen’. These protests gave the Muslim radicals in Britain as sense of power, especially as Rushdie was forced to go into hiding for a decade or so. In 1991 or so Kalim Saddiqui was filmed in his mosque in a BBC documentary, The Trouble With Islam, telling his flock that British society was a vast killing machine, and killing Muslims comes very easily to us. When asked about this, he bleated some nonsense about a forthcoming Muslim holocaust.
But to return to the death threats, these are not confined to the leaders of the mass protests. The Muslim evangelist Ali Dawah in one of his videos told one of the ex-Muslim atheist YouTubers that when Britain becomes an Islamic state, he’d be put to death. One of the ex-Muslim atheists, Harris Sultan, appealed for donations a little while ago to pay for protection after a British Muslim put a price on his head.
I feel very strongly that we have to start pushing back against these bigots. One of the criticisms levelled against the handling of these protests is that the police didn’t turn up. I’m not surprised. They were no doubt scared of being accused of racism and Islamophobia, which may have been blown up into mass demonstrations around the globe. But I also despise the way protests like these are being ignored and played down by our politicians. I well appreciate why. They’re afraid of stoking real hatred against ordinary Muslims, who have nothing to do with the protests and who may not share these views. When Akhthar and Saddqui were organising protests in Bradford, there were counter protests against them from liberal Muslims. One of my former college’s lecturers on Islam also went up, and quote the passage in the Quran which condemns religious intolerance. I think it was probably the verse that runs ‘There should be no compulsion in religion’.
And protests carrying real or implied death threats aren’t confined to Muslims. A year or so ago Kathleen Stock, a feminist scholar, was forced out of her job following mass protests by students. She was accused of transphobia because of her stated belief that transwomen aren’t women. The university first tried sacking her for bigotry, which she successfully challenged. But she went anyway because she no longer felt safe.
I think this all needs to be stopped now. People have the right to protest but not to the extent where others fear for their lives. I wonder if it’s time to demand legislation against protests where there is a reasonable fear of threats to life and limb, and to make sure it is properly enforced. And I realise that this is an attack on free speech and the right to protest, but I cannot see any other way of defending free speech against such mobs without it.
Here are the videos I’ve mentioned.
Farage talking to executive producer Malik Shlibak:
One of the books I’ve been reading recently was Jonathan A.C. Brown’s Slavery and Islam. I did so partly to see whether there was any truth in the accusation by the islamophobic right that the Muslim grooming gangs were rooted in Muslim sex slavery. They aren’t. They’re just evil men with a racist attitude to Whites, who wanted to rape and degrade young girls. Brown states in his introduction that his book was a response to the shock he and the overwhelming majority of Muslims the world over felt when ISIS revived sex slavery. His book is also partly an attempt to answer the question why, if slavery is such a monstrous crime, did it take so long for Christians, Muslims and other religions and philosophies to ban it. His conclusion is that slavery wasn’t condemned but regulated by religions like Christianity and Islam because it was too much a part of everyday life for previous civilisations to consider outlawing it. Not even rationalist philosophers like Aristotle argued against it, because they felt it was too indispensable. Aristotle apparently said that it could only be banned ‘when looms drive themselves’. Brown therefore concludes that abolitionism arose in the west when a series of social and technological changes showed that society could still survive and prosper economically without slavery. Part of his argument is that it survived so long in Islam because Muslim slavery was more benign than western chattel slavery and even the western treatment of free workers. It was heavily regulated, slaves had rights, most could expect to be manumitted in 8-10 years and female slave concubines could rise to become powerful women, the mothers of Ottoman emperors and caliphs.
Brown’s a White American convert to Islam and a professor of the religion at one of the American universities. He amasses a wealth of information and sources to prove his point. At the same time, it strikes me that he’s producing a biased account of Islamic slavery intended to impress the reader with its comparative mildness. Others have produce much more critical studies to Islamic slavery. The White European and American victims of the Barbary pirates complained of constant beating by their masters. They were given meagre rations and expected to make money for their masters. They lived in particular fear of being pressed into the pirates’ galleys. As oarsmen they were kept chained to their benched night and day, fed little and deprived of sleep. Many were driven to ‘strange ecstasies’ – madness. Another fear was that, if their relatives and friends back home could not raise the money to ransom them, their masters would sell them on to the big Ottoman slave market at Constantinople, and they would be lost among the enslaved masses of the Ottoman empire for ever.
Nevertheless, despite the book’s bias, Brown chronicles the process of abolition in the Islamic world and the attempts by Muslims themselves to abolish slavery. Sometimes this was by sincere reformers, who felt that Muhammed had intended slavery to be banned eventually, but circumstances prevented him from doing so in his own time. Sometimes the bans were simply for reasons of diplomatic expediency. Islamic states and rulers wanted to make treaties with western nations. These wanted to ban slavery around the globe, and so their Islamic partners did so. Brown notes the existence of radical Muslim groups we haven’t heard about in the West, because their radicalism is that of left-wing opponents of racism, sexism and homophobia in the West. These include movements like the Progressive Muslims.
But unfortunately, despite the hard work put in by Islamic abolitionists, the fanatics are coming back to preach aggressive jihad and the enslavement of the kufar.
Harris Sultan and Nuriyeh Khan are two ex-Muslim atheists with their own channel on YouTube, which attacks religion in general and Islam in particular. They are very concerned about the rising intolerance in the Islamic world, like Pakistan where people have been murdered on the mere accusation that they have committed blasphemy. A few days ago they discussed a recent case in which a schoolteacher was murdered by three of her pupils, because one of them apparently had a dream in which the teacher blasphemed against Islam. It’s sheer, mindless fanaticism, though there’s also the suspicion that there may have been more mundane motives for the killing. They’ve also attacked similar trends among extreme right-wing Hindus in India and also among the Sikhs. and recently they’ve put up a couple of videos showing Muslim preachers calling for or defending aggressive jihad and the enslavement of non-Muslims.
One was an Indonesian preacher on Zakir Naik’s PeaceTV. Naik’s a Muslim anti-Christian polemicist. This delightful preacher told his congregation that in 50-60 years, Muslims would be strong enough to make war and invade the non-Muslim world. If non-Muslims allowed them to take over their countries without struggle, they would be allowed to keep their homes and property. If, however, they fought back, or continued with un-Islamic practices like nightclubs after they allowed Islam to take over their countries, they would be conquered by military force and enslaved.
The other day they put up another video of a female professor of Islam at one of Islam’s most prestigious universities, al-Uzzah, as recorded and translated by Memri TV. This woman attacked the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis. But she was in favour of Muslims enslaving non-Muslim women as sex slaves, because this would humiliate them. This particularly shocked Nuriyeh Khan. As a modern, liberated woman she found it deeply distressing and incomprehensible to hear another woman advocating such vile treatment of the members of her own sex. Sultan also made the point that the Israelis weren’t enslaving Palestinian women for sex. If they did, this would be a crime against humanity and would be condemned by the international community. This is probably true, but condemnations by the UN haven’t stopped the decades long process of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by the Israeli state, the erection of a system of apartheid or the imprisonment and torture of Palestinian children.
To show what these policies meant in practice during Ottoman history, they show clips from a Hungarian TV series about Magyar, Serb and Croat girls, who are carried off into slavery by Ottoman raiders. These kill the girls’ fiances and husbands. At the slave market they are stripped and humiliated with their breasts and buttocks prodded by prospect male buyers. This is historically accurate. Under the sharia the only legitimate source of slaves was prisoners of war, and so Muslim states were engaged in warfare and raiding for slaves to supply the slave markets. And Brown states in his book that female slaves were treated like this.
Now this TV series raises a number of issues. There’s a bitter hatred of Muslims in Hungary and the Balkans. These countries were invaded and conquered by the Ottomans. The Turks only succeeded in conquering two-thirds of Hungary, and it was later reconquered by the Austrians, hence the Austro-Hungarian empire. But Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and Greece, for example, spent five hundred years as provinces of the Ottomans. Most of the hatred, though, dates from atrocities committed by the Muslim forces during these nations’ wars of independence. A revolt on one of the Greek islands was put down with terrible massacres in the 1820s, after which 17,000 + Christian Greeks were enslaved. It should be noted too that the Christians were also capable of committing atrocities of their own against Muslims, but this received much less publicity in the west. During the Second World Bosnian Muslims united with the forces of Croatian Fascist leader Ante Pavelic to perpetrate appalling massacres on the Serbs. The Fascists wanted to have 1/3 of the Serbs converted to Roman Catholicism, a third forced in slavery and another third simply wiped out. Concentration camps like those for Jews in Nazi Germany were set up. Captured Serb women and children were thrown off mountains to kill them.
It was memory of these horrors that spurred the Serbs in their turn to commit horrific atrocities against Bosnian Muslims during the War in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. One of the paramilitary groups responsible, under a particular vicious brute called Arkan, had taken part a few years earlier in a re-enactment of the Battle of Kosovo Polje at the end of the fourteenth century in which the Ottoman forces defeated the Christian armies and conquered Serbia. However much based in fact the Hungarian TV series is, it worries me that it has the potential to inspire a similar genocidal hatred of Muslims. Hungary has attracted international criticism from the EU amongst other for refusing to admit Muslim asylum seekers. I also seem to recall that Serbia also refused to let the mass caravan of migrants from Syria and the Middle East pass through their country on the way to western Europe in 2012. But I might be wrong. At the moment Britain is going through a period of post-imperial guilt because of the enslavement of indigenous peoples during the empire. But I wonder how tolerant we would be, if we had not been the conquerors but the conquered.
But the Hungarian TV series also raises questions about TV series about the enslavement of Blacks in America and Europe, such as Alex Haley’s landmark book, Roots in the 1970s. Since then there have been a number of films, TV shows and documentaries about the enslavement of Blacks by westerners, such as Amistad and 12 Years A Slave. These are partly a response to the poverty, racism and marginalisation experienced by many western Black communities which it is argued have their basis in their enslavement. But if it is not only permissible but laudable to produce such historical dramas about transatlantic Black slavery, why shouldn’t series about the enslavement of Whites by Muslims also be shown? I doubt that any mainstream western European or American TV station would want to show such a series like the Hungarians because of the fear that it would promote islamophobia. But nevertheless, this occurred, and its legacy is felt in Orban’s Hungary and other parts of the Balkans.
But it’s also frightening to see that, after ISIS shocked decent people across the world, the preachers of hate in the Dar al-Islam by picking up their ideas and calling for jihad and sex slavery.
I wish the heirs of the great Islamic abolitionists every success in combating these intolerant fanatics, and the continuation of an international order marked by peace, respect and dignity for everyone, regardless of their colour or religion.
I haven’t posted the videos by Harris and Sultan here, because they make harsh comments about Islam as a whole. I’m not an atheist and genuinely don’t wish to upset Muslim readers of this blog. This is a time when the Conservatives are forcing working people of all religions into ever greater poverty. European Muslims are, in general, the most impoverished group after Blacks. See the book The Crisis in Islamic Civilisation. It shouldn’t matter what our individual religious faiths are or their absence thereof. We all need to stand together against genuine intolerance wherever it is found, and the Tories’ and neo-liberals to drive us further into poverty and despair.
If you want to see their videos, please look for them on YouTube. Their titles are
The ex-Muslim atheist Harris Sultan discussed the plans of French president Emmanuel Macron to tackle radical Islamic preaching in the country’s mosques in video with his co-host Nuriyeh Khan on their channel a few days ago. France, like Britain, has suffered a series of Islamist terror attacks, one of the worst being the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Macron has therefore decided to start clamping down on preaching in the mosques. He intends to set up a board that will monitor and censor the imams’ sermons. At the same time the importation of imams from abroad will be restricted and an emphasis placed instead on creating and promoting home-grown Muslim clergy. Sultan approves of these measures. He states that they were doubtless going to be greeted with shouts of ‘islamophobia’, but thinks that’s just BS. He also approved of the fact that Macron wasn’t trying to outlaw the wearing of the hijab. This became a major cause of Muslim outrage in France a few years ago when the government tried to ban it in schools because it was against the French state’s official policy of laicism, secularism. Out of a Muslim population of five million, only a few thousand women wear the headscarf and any ban on it would have the danger of pushing Muslims into the hands of the Islamists, not away from them. As for the proposed board, Harris states that French Muslims can’t really complain as such a board exists in Saudi Arabia, where every sermon has to be passed by the state censors. In his own country of origin, Pakistan, no such board exists and as a result the country has become increasingly radicalised.
Sultan is particularly appalled at religious intolerance and violence, not just in Islam, but also in Hinduism and other religions. He’s posted very many videos about blasphemy cases and lynching in Pakistan. The laws against blasphemy were first enacted by the British as a way of preventing inter-religious violence as they applied to all religions. However, General Zia imposed the death penalty for it and made them really apply only to Islam during his dictatorship in the 1970s. As a result there are 200 or so people on death row because of the law. It’s used against Christians, Hindus and other religious minorities, but also against other Muslims of different sects. Sometimes the accusation is levelled as a cynical means of getting rid of the opposition in a dispute over property. People have also been murdered and mass lynchings carried out of others, who’ve been accused of blasphemy. Hence Sultan’s desire to see the bitterly intolerant, fanatical preaching that fuels such hatred and violence curtailed.
I’ve also seen the other two proposals put forward nearly a quarter of a century ago in the ’90s by a liberal British imam in the pages of the Financial Times. He was felt it was also necessary to restrict the importation of foreign imams. At the time, and it may well still be the case now, there was a shortage of imams for British mosques. As a result foreign imams from countries like Pakistan were given greater preference when immigrating to Britain. And many of them shared the vicious intolerance present in their home countries. He wanted to see the education and promotion of imams from the already settled Muslim community, who shared the British values of pluralism, multiculturalism and tolerance.
I have mixed feelings about the idea of a board of censorship. It looks like another infringement of the right to free speech, one of the very cornerstones of western liberal democracy. But unfortunately I can also see that it may well be necessary, not just in France but also over here. Way back in 2007 Channel 4 caused a storm of controversy with an edition of its Despatches documentary, ‘Undercover Mosque’. The producers had secretly sent in their journalists to film the preaching in a hundred or so British mosques. In doing so they recorded the imams preaching violent hatred against Christians, Jews and gays. However, instead of outrage at the intolerance of the preachers, there was a storm of protest against the programme itself. It was accused of being islamophobic and one police force considered and finally decided against prosecuting the producers. I am very, very much aware that not all Muslims by any means hold these views, and it may be the case that rather than be influenced by them, their congregations listen politely before going back to work and forgetting all about it. But I do believe that such violently intolerant preaching is far more common than is realised. And while there’s a tendency to think that such a measure is only needed in France, I can also see it being demanded over here.
However the creation of a board to censor sermons may not work. In Egypt, Islamism has emerged in opposition to official, state-regulated Islam. Official Egyptian Islam has been more or less liberal since the early 19th century., when the Muslim clergy realised how far behind the west their country was in science and learning. They thus went on trips to Europe to research European advances in order to introduce them and their benefits back home. I have a feeling that the Egyptian state also closely monitors what is taught in the mosques. But the radical groups demanding the return of sharia law and the creation of a Muslim state, and which have carried out terrorist attacks on foreigners, has emerged outside and in opposition to mainstream Egyptian Islam. There’s a danger that this could also occur in France, and that the fanatics and terrorists will set up their own, underground, parallel set of mosques.
There’s also the problem that many of the terrorists are self-radicalised. They often don’t go to the local mosque, and the congregation there haven’t seen them in years. Instead of getting their weird, vile ideas from the local imam, they’ve got them instead from the net. Macron’s proposals aren’t going to help tackle this type of fanaticism, though the creation and expansion of a domestic French Muslim clergy may change the culture to such an extent that such lone wolf terrorists really are seen by everyone as total outsiders, whose views and actions violate a native French Islam.
The article from which Harris gets the report also states that Macron may well be putting these proposals forward in order to take votes away from the extreme right and boost his centrist party. He approves of this, stating that the centre and the left should be tackling this problem rather than the far right. And he’s correct. The far right uses such issues to create further hatred and division in order to legitimise the further persecution of ethnic minorities. You can see that with Tommy Robinson and his exploitation of the outrage over the Muslim grooming gangs. But unfortunately the left tends to be silent when it comes to anti-White racism. Some of this comes from a desire not to be accused of racism, some of it to avoid making a common cause with the right and people who really are racist, but also partly because they find anti-White racism literally unthinkable. This is shown in the attempts by Critical Race Theorists to redefine racism as abuse plus institutional power. This clearly criminalises White racism, but exempts it from marginalised Black and ethnic minority groups.
Macron’s proposals show that French politicians are taking an increasingly firm line over Islamic preaching, and it’s better that democrats like Macron do it than the country suffers a military coup. Which is what a group of ex- and serving army officers and men threatened a year or so ago.
The Apostate Prophet is an ex-Muslim atheist YouTuber, who posts videos criticising and attacking Islam, as well as religion in general and occasionally other faiths such as Christianity and Hinduism. His main concern is the human rights abuses committed in the name of Islam in places such as Pakistan, where blasphemy carries the death penalty, for which people have been arrested and murdered. I am very definitely not an atheist, and I don’t support his farewell at the end of each video, ‘Stay away from Islam’. Islam isn’t my religion, but it’s by no means monolithic and not all Muslims by far are fanatical supporters of Islamic theocracy. I don’t want Muslim readers of this blog to feel unwelcome, or to spread even more baseless fear of perfectly innocent people because of their religion. But he has today posted a video explaining why the Taliban have had such success retaking power in Afghanistan.
He argues that the western occupation has failed because the majority of Afghans favour Islamic law, citing Pew research and polling by the Asia Foundation Survey. A Pew poll in 2017 found that 99 per cent of Afghans questioned supported sharia law. In similar research four years earlier in 2013, the pollster found that only 30 per cent of Afghans believed that women should decide for themselves if they wanted to wear the veil. In other words, 70 per cent felt that it should be compulsory. The polls also found that 96 per cent felt that it was obligatory to spread Islam to others, 79 per cent wanted apostates from Islam to be punished with death, and 85 per cent wanted stoning as the punishment for adultery. The Asia Foundation Survey of 2020 found that 65 per cent of those polled were willing to accept a peace deal with the Taliban in which they formed the majority government.
He therefore argues that it has been a useless waste of time and money trying to impose a western way of life on a country and its people, who simply don’t want it. He states very clearly that he believes that America should keep out of Islamic countries that don’t want western values and government. He states that in the case of Afghanistan, he’d change his mind if the majority, or even less than half of the population, actually wanted western style freedom and democracy. But they don’t. As a result, the Taliban has been successful because the Afghan people have largely been very close to them in their religious views and support for strict sharia law.
As horrific as the Taliban are, I think that he is correct. Afghanistan has been an Islamic state for centuries, and secular government is only very recent and fundamentally opposed by many of the country’s own people. As a result, the democratic government set up by the west was always dependent on the west’s military support, which explains its collapse the moment the American troops left.
We should not be invading other nations to impose our values and style of government on peoples that don’t want them. Especially, as I believe, when the construction of such democracy is merely a pretext for the looting of these nations simply for the profit of western multinationals.
Jeremy Taylor was the chaplain of King Charles I and the rector of Uppingham. After the royalists were defeated in the British Civil War, he fled to Carmarthenshire in Wales, where he wrote his book arguing for religious freedom, The Liberty of Prophesying. After the Restoration he was appointed bishop of Down and Connor. He was also the author of a number of devotional works and sermons, but it’s his defence of religious freedom that I find particularly interesting. He said ‘they were excellent words which St. Ambrose said in attestation of this great truth, that the civil authority has no right to interdict the liberty of speaking, nor the sacerdotal to prevent speaking what you think.’
See the article on him in John Bowker, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (Oxford: OUP 1997) 958.
I’m very much aware that throughout Christian history there has been very little freedom of religion and conscience, and that the Anglican church’s toleration of Dissenters was very limited until the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in the 19th century. Until then Protestant nonconformists were excluded from the grammar schools, universities and government, and could only hold their services five miles away from towns. Atheism and Roman Catholicism were illegal again until the 19th century. But it was clergymen like Taylor and his fellows in the Nonconformist churches, like the Quaker William Penn and a number of Presbyterian ministers, who laid the foundations for the British and American tradition of religious tolerance. The most famous of the works calling for religious freedom from this period is Milton’s Areopagitica.
Despite the passage of the centuries, their message is still acutely relevant. Many countries still don’t have freedom of conscious or religious liberty in the 20th century. The Communists attempted to destroy religious and viciously persecuted people of faith, while the Nazis, apart from trying to exterminate the Jews, also sent their other religious opponents, especially Jehovah’s Witnesses, to the concentration camps.
We have recently seen a French teacher murdered for showing schoolchildren the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Mohammed in a class about free speech, and mass demonstrations against France for permitting the cartoons in Muslim countries. To many people, their calls for legislation against such disrespect seem like demands for Muslim blasphemy laws. Christians and members of other religious minorities, such as Shia and Ahmadiyya Muslims have been murdered in Pakistan as well as orthodox Sunni Muslims because of supposed blasphemy. This is banned in Pakistan and punishable with the death penalty. The only permitted religion in Saudi Arabia is Wahhabi Islam, and a few years ago the Saudis declared that atheism was terrorism. This was just atheist unbelief itself, regardless of any act of genuine terror, such as killing people or destroying property.
I’m sympathetic to Muslims regarding the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. I don’t like the way Christianity and Christ are mocked by certain sections of the media and the entertainment business either. I’ve also heard the argument that Charlie Hebdo is a nasty rag. It’s not left-wing, but right, apparently, and its targets also include Roman Catholicism and immigrants.
But there’s a greater principle of free speech and the sanctity of human life here. All religions and ideologies, including atheism, should be up for debate, with people free to choose as they will. They’re fundamental human rights, the violation of which either leads or is part of tyranny.
Over the past week or so we’ve seen mass protests across the Islamic world, including the Islamic community in Britain, over the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. These have followed the assassination of school teacher Samuel Paty for simply showing his class the cartoon as part of a lesson about free speech. It’s been pointed out in articles in the I that Paty was far from a racist or Islamophobe. He had taken lessons in Islam in order to understand his Muslim students better, and had warned the Muslims in his class what he was about to do so they could leave to avoid being offended. One girl remained, told her father, her father told the local mosque, the mosque told the community. And a Chechen Islamist heard them, and took matters into his own hands. Other Islamists have carried out further attacks on innocents, who had absolutely no part in the affair. Three people, including a priest, were stabbed to death in a church, simply for being Christians, and there have been shootings in other nations.
The murders of these innocents has not been denounced by the Muslim protesters, however. Instead we have seen former cricketer Imran Khan, now leader of an Islamic party and the president of Pakistan, denounce Macron for the publication of the cartoon. He has been joined by Turkish president Erdogan, another leader of a Muslim party Who wouldn’t know free speech if it came up and bit him on the elbow. Tunisia has also denounced France, and when I looked online last night, Islamists in Bangladesh were giving their government a few hours to sever links with France.
It’s been reported that Khan has been complaining about the hurt felt by Muslims around the world about the publication of the cartoons. Supposedly the right to free speech does not mean the right to offend. But others have pointed out over and over again that that is precisely what it means. The type of free speech that only permits what is inoffensive is no free speech at all.
At the heart of this are the Muslim blasphemy laws. This is an attempt to impose them on France and, by implication, other western nations. However, Muslim are a minority in Europe and so the only arguments Khan and the others can use against Europeans is that their feelings are hurt, and that there will be political repercussions.
I looked up the article on blasphemy in The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, ed. by John Bowker (Oxford: OUP 1997). This provides information on the concept of blasphemy in Christian, Judaism and Islam, its punishments, and the problems of enforcing such laws in Britain. It runs
‘Blasphemy (Gk: ‘speaking evil’ ). Impious or profane talk, especially against God; and in many western legal systems , the offence of reviling God or Jesus Christ or an established church. To be blasphemous a publication must be intended to shock and endanger the moral fabric of society; one that is merely anti-religious (e.g. denying the existence of God) is not. In England in 1977 the editor of Gay News was convicted of blasphemous libel for publishing a poem which portrayed Christ as a practicing homosexual. This was the first successful prosecution for blasphemy since 1922, and showed the difficulty of objectively applying the common law definition. The appearance of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, raised the issue whether blasphemy should be extended to become a more general offence (in the UK), or whether it is an offence in the domain of inciting unrest.
‘In Judaism, ‘blasphemy’ is speaking scornfully of God (Heb. gidduf, heruf) and is described euphemistically as birkat ha-shem (‘blessing the name’, i.e. God). According to Leviticus 24. 10-23, the penalty for cursing God is death, but in discussing this passage, the rabbis defined blasphemy in such a way that it became an improbable crime-and thus the death penalty did not need to be invoked. Excommunication (herem) became the punishment in any case once legal autonomy had been lost…
‘The nearest equivalent in Islam is sabb, offering an insult to God. Qur’an 9.74 condemns those who sear by God that they said nothing but in fact spoke a word of rejection (kalimat al-kufr) after they had become Muslims. This relates blasphemy closely to apostasy (ridda). The expression of contempt for God, the Prophet Mohammed, the angels, or the traditional explications of revelation constitute the offence. Accidental blasphemy is not usually excusable (though Malikites allow it if it is expressed by a recent convert to Islam).. The punishment varies between different Schools of Islamic Law -e.g. the Hanafites remove the offenders legal rights, declare his marriage invalid, and declare any claims to inheritance or property void; the Malikites demand immediate execution of the death penalty.,’
The British prosecution for blasphemy mentioned in the article was brought by Mary Whitehouse, who made it her professional duty to be offended about everything. The gays on the opposite side took this as an attack on them, and launched their own protests against Whitehouse. There’s a comic aspect to this, as Whitehouse recalled that she woke up one morning to find militant gays marching about her garden waving placards.
I think the enforcement of the blasphemy laws is more or less impossible. They’re a dead letter, if they haven’t been repealed. As an example, just consider how many TV comedians since then have expressed their own contempt for Christ and his followers. The comedians Lee and Herring regularly did so on their BBC 2 programme, Fist of Fun. It came as a surprise to me a few years ago when Muslims around the world were again up in arms demanding the execution of blasphemers because of something Pope Benedict said about Mohammed in a speech when one of the two appeared on television attacking Islam. When they were interviewed by the short-lived mag Comedy Revue in the 1990s, they were asked about their attacks on Christianity and whether they would do the same to Islam. They laughingly made it clear that they definitely wouldn’t because they were afraid of violence and attempts on their lives. And thought themselves very clever for doing so. Which shows the British media establishments general attitude to Christianity.
The Muslim blasphemy laws are extremely dangerous. At the moment there are 200 people on death row in Pakistan on charges of blasphemy. Most of these are probably entirely spurious. They’re brought for entirely cynical reasons, such as getting rid of an opponent in a dispute over a completely unrelated issue. Muslims have also claimed that their attacks on Christians were also motivated by the outrage they felt at blasphemies committed by their victims. But some of it seems to me to be an attempt to enforce the Pakistani caste system. Indian and Pakistan Islam has a caste system like Hinduism, only not as severe. Most of the Christian community in Pakistan are of the lowest caste, and many are bonded labourers in brickyards, effectively slaves. One of the Christian women accused of blasphemy was accused after she brought water from a well to a group of Muslim women. Along the way she took a sip of the water. It looks to me that the real crime here was that she broke their laws of caste purity, and that the accusation of blasphemy was added on after this offence.
The ex-Muslim vloggers the Apostate Prophet and Harris Sultan have also pointed out the hypocrisy in Khan’s denunciations. When western countries have criticised Pakistan for human rights abuses, Pakistan has simply told them to mind their own business. But when France defends the publication of cartoons Pakistan and its Islamic leadership find offensive, suddenly he’s justified in interfering in their affairs. He has also denounced the closure of radical mosques and the expulsion of extremist imams as an attack on Islam. It isn’t. It is simply France protecting itself against Islamist violence, in the same way right-wing terrorist groups are banned. And Khan is again being hypocritical in his denunciations. When the Taliban made a series of bloody attacks in Pakistan a few years ago, the armed forces and security services cracked down hard. According to the two above vloggers, they went from house to house in the province of Waziristan arresting anyone with a beard. I haven’t linked to the two because I don’t want to offend any Muslims reading this blog. But you can Google the articles on YouTube if you want to find out more.
Macron should stand firm against all this. Blasphemy laws are a severe attack on free speech, and the penalties inflicted for it and the flagrant abuse of such accusations are particularly dangerous. Freedom of speech and conscience, including that of Muslims, is far too important to be sacrificed because of hurt feelings and outrage.
There’s been some coverage here in the west of the underground Christian church in China. China’s a Communist state, and although religion has been allowed to re-emerge after its ferocious persecution under Mao, it is heavily regulated. There’s an official church, which has to agree to and abide by the various conditions set down by the Communist authorities. Alongside this is a growing underground church, that meets in secret and is heavily persecuted because it is outside the control of the Communist party.
Fewer people, however, are aware that there’s also a growing underground church in Iran. The Anglican church in Tehran, which is recognised and tolerated, is remarkable for a Christian church in a Middle Eastern, Islamic country, in that most of its members are indigenous Iranians. About three per cent of the Iranian population is composed of Armenian Christians, who have their own churches. But outside these official, tolerated churches, there is a secret church of indigenous Iranians, who are turning from Islam to Christ. Apostasy is banned under Islamic, sharia law. The penalty has traditionally been death, although some law schools were of the opinion that the death penalty could only be imposed if the apostate then blasphemed against Islam. Other legal scholars stated that the apostate from Islam should be imprisoned for three days so that they could reconsider their decision to abandon Islam. If they repented during this time, they would be spared. This means that those Iranians converting to Christianity do so at the risk of their own lives. They are savagely persecuted and imprisoned. At the same time, the Iranian authorities surround the Armenian churches with armed police to make sure that only Armenians go there to worship. The Armenians have adopted a series of tactics to help their Iranian co-religionists avoid the police. One of these is teaching them a few words or phrases of Armenian, so that they can pass themselves off as Armenian Christians, and so avoid arrest, imprisonment and torture.
This isn’t widely known in the West, and I don’t think this is an accident. America is a profoundly religious country, but I think the support of religious freedom by the American military-industrial complex is, and has always been, cynically utilitarian. There was a massive campaign of Christian evangelism and preaching in America itself during the Cold War. You think of all the extreme right-wing Christian movements that emerged in the 50s, like Moral Re-Armament, and so on, that were dedicated not just to spreading Christianity, but also combatting Communism. Or, for that matter, just about any other left-wing, progressive movement. Even if it was led by other Christians. Communism is an aggressively materialistic political system. Marx actually wrote little about religion, beyond his famous words that it was ‘the opium of the people’, but he certainly believed his system was an extension of the materialist doctrines of the ancient world and the Enlightenment philosophes. He took over their critique of religion and that of Ludwig Feuerbach, which viewed religion as a projection of humanity’s own alienated essence, and extended it. Lenin himself was bitterly anti-religious, and the persecution of religious believers – Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Taoists, the followers of indigenous shamanic religions and so on – was state policy in many Communist countries.
Hence the promotion of Christianity and the defence of religious freedom against a persecuting, literally Satanic, evil empire was a useful ideological tool for the capitalist leaders of society during the Cold War. Thus much of the religious literature published during the Cold War stressed the anti-Christian nature of Communism to the point where this overshadowed the other atrocities and crimes against human rights committed by these regimes. Such as the artificial famines Stalin created during the collectivisation of agriculture, the deportation of ethnic minorities to Siberia and the persecution of dissenting socialist and Communist intellectuals.
But very little is said about the persecution of the underground Iranian church. And I don’t think this is an accident. I think it’s because it doesn’t serve American geopolitical interests, and those of its allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. China’s a Communist country, and so atheism is the official state dogma, even if it is not as rigorously enforced as it has been. But Iran and the other Middle Eastern countries are religious states to a greater or lesser degree. And American foreign policy in the Middle East has consisted of supporting theocratic and Islamic fundamentalist regimes and movements against secular Arab nationalism or socialism, as these are seen as too close to Communism. Hence the hostility to Gamal Nasser’s Egypt, which was socialist, but not Communist. In the case of Saudi Arabia, America and the West forged an alliance that goes back to the 1920s. In return for the right to exploit the country’s oil, America and the West pledged themselves to support the country and its rulers. Saudi Arabia is an extremely intolerant state, where the only permitted religion is Wahhabi Islam. No other religions are tolerated. There are indigenous Shi’a Muslims, but they are also savagely persecuted. Their villages do not have running water or electricity, and their religious literature and holy books will be confiscated if they are discovered by the authorities. A few years ago the Grand Mufti, the religious head of Saudi Arabia, declared that the Shi’a were heretics ‘worthy of death’, a chilling endorsement of religious genocide. And the Shi’a aren’t the only non-Wahhabi community to be subjected to his prayers for pious violence. The other year he also led prayers calling on Allah to destroy Jews and Christians.
Saudi Arabia is one of the main sponsors of Islamist terrorism. It is not Iran, nor Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. 17 out of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, and the trail from them goes all the way to the top of Saudi society. They were active sponsors of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which became the Taliban. The current Saudi king and his head of intelligence were also responsible for funding and aiding al-Qaeda and ISIS in their attacks on the other Islamic nations of the region. In continuing to support Saudi Arabia, America, Britain and the other western countries are supporting a viciously intolerant state that persecutes other religions, including Christians.
The other pillar of western interests and foreign policy in the Middle East is Israel. Israel is a White, European/American settler state, and it looks towards Europe and America rather than the Middle East. And it’s also religiously intolerant. The official state religion is Orthodox Judaism. Israel defines itself as the Jewish state, and the Law of Return stipulates that only Jews may become citizens. The Israeli government has also repeatedly refused calls to allow the Palestinians, who fled the country in 1948 fearing massacre by the Israelis to return, as this would upset the ethnic composition of the country. At the same time the Israeli state has pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing, expelling and massacring the indigenous Palestinian population. And this includes Christians.
Before the foundation of Israel in 1948, 25 per cent of the population of Palestine was Christian. Now it’s only one per cent. The literature on the dwindling Christian community states that this is because of pressure from both Israel and Islam. The Christian community has suffered persecution from Muslims, as they are seen as traitors, even though many Palestinian Christians are as bitterly opposed to the Israeli occupation as their compatriots. However, other historians have also pointed out that traditionally, Muslims and Christians coexisted peacefully in Palestine. In one of the papers on Israel and Palestine in Albert Hourani’s book, The Modern Middle East, it is stated that Muslim Palestinians traditionally regarded Christian churches as mawsin, an Arabic term which means holy, sacrosanct, and were thus treated with respect. Palestinian Christians, however, have complained about their treatment by the Israeli authorities. Special permits are required before new churches may be built, and the authorities are not keen to give them.
And like Muslims, Christians have also been attacked by Israeli racist extremists. A little while ago a Christian monastery in Israel was the subject of a price-tag attack by Israeli extremists. The price-tag attacks are acts of destruction in retaliation for Palestinian attacks on Jews or Jewish property. They’re called ‘price-tag’ because the attackers leave a mock price-tag behind giving some cost for the damage done. The Israeli authorities were keen to distance their country from the attack, and tried to present it as somehow unique. But I got the distinct impression that this is far from the case. About ten or so years ago Channel 4 screened a programme by a Black presenter, in which he went to Israel and covered the maltreatment of Christians there. This included an attempt by a group of Orthodox Jews to terrorise the members of a church of Messianic Jews. In fact, the Messianic Jews were saved by the Muslim doorman, who effectively blocked the Orthodox posse from coming in. And the programme gave the impression that this was actually quite common, and that it was frequently Muslims, who saved Christians from violence at the hands of Jewish settlers.
This is all kept very hidden from the American Christian public. The tours of Israel arranged by right-wing Christian Zionist groups in America and the Israeli authorities will not allow American or western Christians to meet their Palestinian co-religionists. And while there’s a considerable amount of information on the web about Israeli intolerance and persecution of Christians, in the mainstream western media it is always presented as the fault of Muslims. And the right-wing press, such as the Times and Telegraph, have published any number of articles presenting Israel as the protector of the region’s Christians, often with quotes from a Christian Arab to that effect. Thus the Christian Zionist right in America are supporting a state, which has expelled the majority of its indigenous Christians from its borders and continues to limit their freedom of worship. Just as it does Muslims.
Some of the motivation behind this Christian Zionism is based in apocalyptic theology. Christian Zionism started in the 19th century, when some Christians decided that they wanted to refound the ancient state of Israel in order to bring about Christ’s Second Coming. This now includes a final battle between good and evil. This used to be between the forces of capitalism and Communism, but has now morphed into the forces of the Christian West and Israel versus Islam. At the same time, the American Conservatives started supporting Israel in compensation for the defeats America had suffered in the Vietnam War, so that American Christian leaders declared that the Israelis shared their values.
I also think there’s an element of religious imperialism here as well. In the 19th century British explorers to other parts of the Christian world, including Greece when it was dominated by the Ottoman Empire, and Abyssinia, declared that these nations’ traditional churches were backwards and obstacles to their peoples’ advancement. They therefore recommended that they should be destroyed, and the Greeks, Ethiopians or whoever should embrace one of the western forms of Christianity instead. it wouldn’t surprise me if the same attitude permeated American Zionist Christian attitudes towards Middle Eastern Christians. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the same kind of Christian fundamentalist pastors, who rant about how ‘Satanic’ Roman Catholicism is, also don’t believe that the ancient churches of the Middle East – the Syriac and Coptic Churches – are also not really Christian.
Thus American imperialism, and the Christian Zionists in the case of Israel, are supporting states dedicated to removing the indigenous Christian communities from their parts of the Middle East.
And American Christians are more fervent in their Zionism than American Jews. Norman Finkelstein has repeatedly stated and demonstrated how American Jews were traditionally uninterested in Israel. And Tony Greenstein, a Jewish British critic of Zionism, has also shown that the majority of Jews around the world wished to remain in the Diaspora, but live as equal, respected citizens of the countries in which they were born. There are a growing number of Jewish Americans, who despise Israel because of the way it persecutes its indigenous Arab population. This includes Jews, who have suffered genuine anti-Semitism abuse and violence.
Within Israel itself, there is opposition to the official religious policy of the state. There is a sizable minority that would like a total separation between synagogue and state. Other Israelis don’t go this far, but do want Israel to become more secular. And there is tension between Reform Jews, and the Orthodox, who do not regard their theologically more liberal co-religionists to be proper Jews, and may even regard them as anti-Jewish.
But American Conservatives are unable or unwilling to understand Middle Eastern Christians, or why they would not want to support Israel. A few years ago Ted Cruz addressed a meeting of Middle Eastern Christians in America. This went well, until he started urging them to support Israel, at which point he was surprised to find that he was being booed. Part of his speech urged them to support the Israelis, because of the terrible persecution of Jews in the past. But the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected this argument, pointing out that they are being persecuted by the Israelis because of the way Europeans persecuted Jews. Cruz walked off, making comments about anti-Semitism, if I recall correctly. He failed to understand that to his audience, the Israelis were those doing the persecuting.
And this ignorance and the views and political situation of indigenous Middle Eastern Christians seems to be common to elite America. It’s shown by Trump’s decision to relocate the American embassy to Jerusalem, which has been supported by the leader of the Democrats in Congress, Chuck Schumer, and Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton. All of whom will stress their identity as Christians when it suits them.
It isn’t just rising Islamism and Muslim intolerance in the Middle East that is a threat to the indigenous Christian communities there. It is also American imperialism, and the country’s alliance with the ethnic and religiously intolerant regimes of Israel and Saudi Arabia. Thus, the media only covers Christian persecution when they can blamed it on Islam, But when it’s awkward for the American, and western military-industrial complex, the media is silent about it.
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