Cineworld Pull Film on Life of Prophet’s Daughter Fatima Due to Intimidating Protests from Sectarian Sunnis

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:

Leo Kearse and others discussing the protests.

A Warning to the Left: Blacks United with Whites against Grooming Gangs behind Tommy Robinson

Or at least one Black man did, though he may well be the only one. A couple of weeks ago Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley Lennon, held a rally against the Muslim grooming gangs and particularly their depredations on Telford’s White girls. During this he showed his film, which included testimony from the abused girls themselves. He was met by counter protestors from the trades union and Stand Up to Racism, who in my opinion showed themselves so utterly incompetent and unable to tackle Robinson on his own ground that they actually made him look good. Callum, one of the wretched Lotus Eaters alongside Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin and their frequent guest, right-wing Scots comedian Leo Kearse, went there to film it all. Stand Up To Racism said and did nothing against the grooming gangs. Instead they shouted the usual anti-Nazi slogans down a megaphone: ‘Off the streets, Fascist scum’ and ‘Refugees welcome’. As I said in a previous blog post about this, these slogans would have been absolutely fine and appropriate if it was the usual kind of right-wing, anti-immigrant racist rally. But it wasn’t. Robinson was ostensibly protesting against real racist abuse of White girls by men who were largely, but not wholly, Pakistani Muslims. If Stand Up to Racism had been serious about tackling Lennon, they would or should have found a way to address the racism that caused these men to attack the girls in what looks very much like racist sexual assault without supporting Lennon and his followers. But they didn’t. Indeed they turned their backs and marched off when the film came to the girls themselves speaking about their assaults. Callum had walked over to the counter protesters and asked them if they supported the grooming gangs. ‘Of course not’, they replied. So he raised the question why they weren’t over there with Robinson. No answer.

Of course they shouldn’t march with Robinson, because Robinson is a genuine Islamophobic thug, as well as a convicted criminal. He’s been sent down for assault, convicted of mortgage fraud and has spent the last few weeks trying to hide his financial assets so that he doesn’t have to pay the tens of thousands he owes in libel damages to a Syrian lad. This poor kid was the victim of racist bullying at his school, but Danny Tommo sided with the bully, who claimed to be the victim and that the Syrian lad was the aggressor. Robinson also has form for turning up at his critics’ homes, or those of their parents and relatives, at night with his followers demanding a word. He’ll also post their addresses, but say that he doesn’t want them touched, before taking the addresses down. But not before his followers have been able to make good note. One of his opponents, the teacher and vlogger Mike Stuchbery, he libelled as a child molester. Hence Stuchbery has lost his job and moved to Germany. Stand Up To Racism are entirely right not to want to give an inch of support to Robinson. But they should have made it clear that they also supported the grooming gangs’ victims.

Instead they demonstrated the complete opposite, that they were unable to tackle the issue because they were White, and that to them, White victims of racist abuse don’t count.

Earlier today I found on YouTube a video Robinson’s supporters made of the proceedings, or part of it. It was produced by Free Man Media and Voice Of Wales, and with a title about the ‘Rape of Telford’. I’m not putting it up because I don’t want to give Robinson publicity, but you’re free to Google for it. And I have to say it’s well done. Robinson and his followers claim they’re not racists, because Islam is a religion, not a race. True, but in this country it’s strongly linked with Asians and other non-Whites. Robinson’s video shows the crowds marching behind him coming to join his rally. Most of them are White. There are a few people at the front giving their views. These are also mostly White, but the second person to speak on the video is young Black guy or mixed race guy, hair in dreadlocks, wearing a sweatshirt with the slogan ‘Black and White Unite’.

And I salute him, even though I think he’s made a poor choice in following Robinson.

He’s doing what the Left should be doing, but isn’t. Racism and Fascism aren’t confined to any one colour, creed, nation, or race. Blacks, Whites and Asians should be uniting behind all racism, including that against Whites. This was the case in the 90s and in the first years of this century. The CRE published a report, authored by Independent columnist and liberal Muslim, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, attacking anti-White racism at the time when it was revealed that 60 per cent of all racist assaults and incidents were against Whites. Birmingham police also talked about this as a problem in their city. There was an anti-White racist incident in Bristol, which was reported on Points West, the local BBC News programme. The anti-racist organisation responded to the incident with a statement that they were there for all victims of racism, regardless of colour. And in 2006 a Muslim journalist wrote a piece in one of the left-wing papers stating that Blacks and Asians should united with the White working class against Islamist extremism and racism in the form of Hizb ut-Tahrir. That’s a proscribed group that wants an Islamic caliphate in Pakistan or somewhere. Ed Hussein used to belong to it before he saw sense and broke away.

But it seems that, in the age of Black Lives Matter, the Left is completely unable to cope with anti-White racism.

I think much of this is because the anti-racism movement emerged to tackle the threat of White racism and Fascism and this is so much the ingrained attitude, that they cannot conceive of, let alone tackle, organised anti-White racism. This is shown at its most extreme in the attempts by Black activists to change the definition of racism to ‘persecution + institutional oppression’, so that only Whites and White society are guilty of it. But it’s also shown in the way the grooming gangs were able to get away with it for so long. The police, social services and local authorities knew about it and did nothing, absolutely nothing.

Because they were afraid of being called racist.

And because the left identities racism almost wholly with Whites, they haven’t a clue how to handle it or protest against it. And thus Tommy Robinson and his wretched crew end up looking much better than them.

I’ve said again and again that Black and Asian people would join Whites in marching against anti-White racism. Just as Whites have marched alongside their Black brothers and sisters against anti-Black and Asian racism, violence and discrimination. Liberal Muslims have marched against the Islamists, really nasty types like Kalim Saddiqui. This bigot was filmed by the Beeb declaring that British society was a monstrous killing machine and killing Muslims comes very easily to them. But the Muslims who marched against him complained that they got no support or publicity from the mainstream.

The left’s blind spot when it comes to BAME racism is part of the problem, not that of the Black or Asian communities. It is itself catastrophically bigoted and incompetent. I therefore believe that if it is serious about tackling Robinson, it has to recognise the existence of anti-White racism and show that it can tackle this with impartiality, just as it combats racism against Blacks and Asians.

Because if the left doesn’t unite Blacks and Whites against predators like the grooming gangs, Robinson will.

Labour Party Asks Muslims for their Input

I don’t know why I got the email, as I’m not a Muslim. A few days ago the Labour party sent out a general email to its Muslim Labour members requesting them for their views and opinions on how the party could help them. This was on behalf of a Muslim Labour party organisation. My guess is that it was a general mail-out, because I have some views on institutional Islam in the UK which definitely do not fit with elements of current anti-racist orthodoxy.

My views on elements of Islam in the UK have been strongly influenced by the Satanic Verses affair and the Islamists goose-stepping around in the first decade of this century proclaiming that Islam would conquer the west and demanding death for blasphemers, including the previous pope. I also found a lot of anti-Christian, frankly racist Muslim polemic when I was studying Islam at college, and a number of texts from British Islamic presses openly demanded the creation of self-governing Muslim ghettoes ruled by shariah law.

There was international outrage in the Muslim community worldwide at the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. In fact the book isn’t blasphemous. It is, however, immensely tedious. It was labelled as such by the Ayatollah Khomeini as part of an attempt by his regime in Iran to gain the moral leadership of the international Islamic community. This is the real reason he seized on the book and placed a fatwa on Rushdie’s head. In Britain the protests were led by Mohammed Akhthar and Kalim Saddiqui, both of whom were hard-liners with bitterly intolerant views. Saddiqui appeared on a Beeb programme, The Trouble with Islam, telling the congregation of his mosque that ‘British society is a monstrous killing machine, and killing Muslims comes very easily to them’. This is pure racism, and if it came from a White, non-Muslim preacher would result in immediate legal action. When asked about his comments by the interviewer, Saddiqui waffled about the Satanic Verses.

Way back in 2007 Channel 4 broadcast a highly controversial issues of Dispatches, entitled ‘Undercover Mosque’. They sent their reporters in disguise to a hundred mosques, and filmed the imams preaching violent hatred against Jews, Christians and homosexuals. This was immediately denounced as racist and islamophobic, but I got the distinct impression that it was a fair picture of much Islamic preaching in Britain today. Way back in the 19th century the British government protested against the demonisation of Christians by Muslim preachers in the Balkans. I think much of this hate comes from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. When I was studying Islam at College in the 1980s we were told that there were some terribly anti-Christian polemical literature published in Pakistan. We were told this not by Islamophobes but by people with a sincere appreciation of the religion. I even remember one of them saying that the Qur’an was his favourite religious text after the Gospel of Luke, and going over to a window to chant it while we were working on some task set for us.

As for the British Muslim establishment, Birmingham Central Mosque, the British Council of Mosques, British Islamic Council or whatever, I am deeply distrustful of them. A few years ago they were caught out giving platforms to the preachers of hate, and every time they excused themselves by saying something like it had been out of their hands and was the responsibility of another organisation to whom they had delegated the function of booking preachers. And there has similarly been considerable deceit by official Islam in the condemnation of Islamism, at least if Ed Hussein’s The Islamist can be believed. Hussein was a member of the militant Islamist organisation, Hizb ut-Tahrir, which would like to set up a caliphate in Pakistan, before seeing reason and getting out. He’s associated with the Quilliam Foundation, I believe, which is another right-wing think tank. Hence to many people on the left, he’s poison. In The Islamist he describes the various leaders of the Muslim community traipsing into 10 Downing Street to reassure Tony Blair that they were solidly against Islamism and backed his campaign to stamp it out. And all of them were hypocrites as they all secretly supported it. I’ve heard from others that some of the Muslim groups they attempted to establish a Christian-Muslim dialogue with were also Islamists.

This is not the kind of thing the left in particular wants to hear, but it is part of the problem. As is the growing Islamophobia within the Labour party itself. Now I’m sure that the majority of Muslims in the UK don’t want to take over the place, and only five percent of them want sharia law despite all the alarmist fear-mongering by rags like the Heil. As for the preachers of hate, I honestly don’t know how seriously their congregations take them. I can see many of them simply getting bored, listening politely while wondering what their having for lunch and tea, or how the local football team is doing. They’ve also been condemned by liberal Muslims, who have organised marches against them. But these marches are rarely covered, and their organisers have said that they haven’t received the support they need from anti-racist organisations and the wider community. This is a pity, because I think it could change opinions of Islam radically. White allies supporting their Muslims friends marching against such hatred and intolerance under the banner of ‘Black and White, Unite and Fight’ would demonstrate graphically that by no means all Muslims are terrorists and jihadi wannabes, and that Muslims genuinely wanted pluralism and tolerance. This also means bringing up and supporting home-grown imams, imbued with proper British values. There have been complaints that the shortage of imams in this country has led to the importation of preachers from Pakistan, who are viciously intolerant and grossly unsuitable to lead a congregation in a genuinely democratic, tolerant society.

But apart from these issues in the wider British society, the Labour party can do much for its Muslim members by cleaning up the real Islamophobia and bullying in its ranks. One third of Muslim members have reported Islamophobic incidents, and there was the bullying of BAME activists and politicos last year by Labour apparatchiks. This went unpunished, undoubtedly because the same people were supporters of Keef Stalin. Now Stalin’s in the shtuck, he’s looking for their support. If he genuinely wishes, he can start by purging the genuine Islamophobes and punishing the apparatchiks responsible.

But I doubt that he will. Starmer’s an inveterate liar, and this looks like more window-dressing and sham.

Vox Political on the Under-Reported Racist Terror Attacks on Muslims

Mike yesterday put up a piece commenting on a report by The Canary about rise in hate crimes against Muslims in recent months. These have included a recent acid attack on a Muslim couple in their car by a White man. There’s also a clip of another racist attack by a racist gang on a group woman and children, who were celebrating the Muslim feast of Eid al-Fitr in a public park. The clip was posted on Twitter by a man, who was clearly utterly disgusted by the incident. The Tweets Mike has posted about this issue are by ordinary folks, who are outraged by these attacks. One makes the point that the attack on Resham Khan was the 84th in the past six months. There’s a photograph of this poor woman, showing the terrible burns she has suffered. Other Tweets wonder what May is doing about it, and why she doesn’t ban the sale of acid.

The British public has responded generously, and a crowdfunding campaign has raised £52,000 for the victims. But he also quotes The Canary on the near absolute silence from the press, in stark contrast to the extensive coverage it would have given, had the attacker been a Muslim with a history of pasting anti-British rants and material on his Facebook page, and the victims were a White couple.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/07/03/you-probably-wont-read-this-because-its-about-terror-attacks-in-the-uk-on-muslims/#comments

Mike and The Canary are making a very good point. White racist terrorism is not taken as seriously as Islamicist terrorism. That’s particularly true in the US. The Young Turks have reported on their show that official figures from the FBI have shown that the vast majority of terrorist offences committed in America are by White supremacist groups. However, this is played down or denied outright by the American right-wing media. There’s an hour-long video by Reichwing Watch, a YouTuber, who puts up videos documenting and exposing the American racist right, which includes a section about the mainstream right’s response when someone in the media dared report this fact. They angrily denied it, and then demanded that the offending journo should issue a retraction.

Despite the fact that he was entirely correct.

Worse, not only are the right-wing media actively trying to deny that the terrorist attacks occur, Donald Trump was trying to close down the very department of the FBI that was set up to monitor and counter domestic Far Right extremism.

It’s not hard to see why he would. Very many of Trump’s supporters come from the Fascist right. And right-wing talk show hosts like Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones have also been spewing violent hatred against ethnic minorities and ‘liberals’ for years. It seems that there is a sizable chunk of the Republican party that looks back with nostalgia on the era of segregation, and views with horror the empowerment of Blacks and other minorities. It’s a section that has grown more strident, more aggressive, and is determined to return America to this era of racist injustice and oppression.

The same is true to a certain extent over here. While the Tory party has tried to present itself as being open to ethnic minorities, and there have been Asian faces in the cabinet, the Tory press has been bitterly critical of non-White immigration for decades. I can remember how the Torygraph and the Express regularly carried article about attacking the growth of ‘unassimilable’ immigrant communities here. The Mail is notorious for its racism and hatred of minority and marginalised groups, which include women, as is the Scum.

Racist attacks on Muslims, and indeed on any other ethnic minority, don’t fit the narrative with which they want to indoctrinate their readers. They want to give the impression that Britain, meaning primarily its White population, is under attack, both morally and physically, from non-Whites. At the moment, it’s Muslims, because of the rise of Islamist terror in the Middle East, and militant Islam in Britain. The latter emerged as a result of the controversy over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Back in the 1980s, it was Blacks, who were held by the press to be anti-White racists.

Now there is clearly a problem with extremist forms of Islam in Britain. I can remember watching a BBC documentary on the dire state of the British Muslim community in the early 1990s, which included footage of Kalim Saddiqui in his mosque telling his congregation that ‘British society is a monstrous killing machine, and killing Muslims comes very easily to them.’ It’s a gross distortion, of course, and when the Beeb tackled him on it he huffed and puffed about the publication of the Satanic Verses being the preparation for ‘a holocaust of Muslims’.

Utter crap, of course. And many Muslims really didn’t want to have anything to do with his bigotry. There were marches against Saddiqui and others like him. And the people attacked have been ordinary British Muslims just going about their lives. But many members of ethnic minorities have suffered racist abuse, including Muslims, and so it gives their ranting the appearance of truth. And Saddiqui and the rest of the bigots, like ISIS, al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist butchers, would just love this rise in anti-Muslim violence. It’s what they want, to radicalise the Muslim population, to make them believe that all White and non-Muslim Brits really are racists bent on their harm.

Another problem, which prevents attacks like these from being identified or treated as terrorism is that proportionally only a few racist assaults are actually carried out by members of Fascist organisations. This doesn’t mean that the BNP, National Action, NF and the rest of them aren’t violent thugs. They are, and you read just how violent they are in Matthew Collins’ own account of his time in the racist right, Hate. But most racist incidents are committed by people, who don’t belong to such organisations. And so, while they fit the definition of terrorism, as violent crimes committed for religious or ideological reasons, they’re more likely to be seen, or excused, simply as ‘lone wolf’ attacks. So you have the spectacle of various right-wing pundits the other week trying to explain away the man, who killed and injured a total of 10 people, when he drove into them outside Finsbury Park mosque, as just as ordinary man with mental health problems.

White, right-wing terrorism should be called what it is, and treated with the same seriousness as Islamist terror. This should not mean declaring that all White people are somehow racist, as some anti-racist activist have, or appear to have done. The Tories feed off the resentment caused by such accusations and play them up. Way back in the middle of the last decade, the Spectator carried a piece entitled ‘Blackened Whites’, about how Whites were being unfairly maligned by equalities activists as racists. It simply means treating White racist terror as what it is – terrorism.

Outrage at Theresa May’s Refusal to Condemn Trump’s Sneer at Sadiq Khan

After Sunday’s terror attack on London, Donald Trump responded with a disgusting Tweet sneering at Sadiq Khan, the capital’s mayor. Trump said

At least 7 dead and 48 wounded and Mayor of London said “there is no reason to be alarmed.”

The Orange Buffoon then followed this with

Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his “no reason to be alarmed” statement. MSM is working hard to sell it!

In fact, Mayor Khan was misquoted. He has said London is the safest city in the world, but that’s a relative statement. It does not mean, and he made it clear that it did not mean, that there was no danger.

This would, of course, be lost on Trump, a political opportunist, islamophobe and general numbskull, who would not recognise the important point, and distinction, Khan made.

Mike over at Vox Political has asked the vital question of why his state visit should be allowed to go ahead, when he can’t even show proper respect to our capital’s mayor?

And Theresa May has added insult to injury – and shown her similar lack of backbone – by failing to rebut Trump’s slur. In a press conference, May was asked something like five times if she would had or would criticise Trump for his statement. She didn’t. Instead, she went on about how Mr Khan is ‘doing a good job.’ You can see the transcript and video of this over at Mike’s blog, as well as reading the disgusted Tweets against May’s cowardice that followed.

I will say one thing in May’s favour: she did at least acknowledge that Khan was doing a good job. But the fact that she hasn’t condemned Trump’s remarks, as the Tweeters like Owen Jone, Tom London, and others Mike has reblogged, have said, shows she isn’t fit to be Prime Minister.

Isobel Tweeted

Sadiq Khan is the Elected Mayor of London, May is an insult to her office, we have no space in the UK for Trump who insults or elected Mayor.

Mike’s article concludes

This is the will of the country.

We don’t want our government to welcome a US President who insults us after we have been attacked.

And we certainly don’t need a prime minister who won’t condemn the man who utters such an insult.

That is why you should do this:

Vote Labour on Thursday – for our national pride.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/06/06/can-we-really-tolerate-a-state-visit-from-a-us-president-who-trolled-us-after-a-terror-attack/

Trump’s sneering attack on the man the people of London chose as their mayor doesn’t surprise me. A week ago after the Manchester terror attack the conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, sneered at the young victims of that atrocity as ‘liberal trendies’, many of whom ‘supported open borders to let the Islamicists’ in. He later repeated the slur, stating that they had ‘run the white flag up’ to Islamicists.

Jones has given his unswerving support to Trump, and had him several times on his programme, Infowars, when Trump was campaigning for the presidency. Jones has claimed that the US government orchestrated the Oklahoma bombing, the 9/11 attacks and that the kids killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting were actors. He claims that the incident was faked so that the American government could bring in greater gun controls.

He also believes that real babies are sacrificed to Satan at occult ceremonies attended by the global elite in Bohemian Grove; that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were satanically possessed, and that Barack Obama was going to have everyone incarcerated in FEMA camps.

In the clip below from The David Pakman Show, Pakman and his producer discuss Jones’ smears and the fact that Infowars has been given a press pass to attend Trump’s meetings. Pakman makes the point that one of the victims of the Manchester suicide bomber was an eight year old girl. How was this innocent child a ‘liberal trendie’?

Of course, Jones is an islamophobe, who believes that Britain has surrendered to Muslims by passing legislation outlawing hate speech. He thinks this makes it illegal to criticise Islam.

It doesn’t. You can still criticise Islam, just as you can any other religion or ideology. Or at least, you should. What you can’t do is spread hate against Muslims simply for being Muslims.

Now there are extremists within the Muslim community, who do want to stop criticism of Islam. The people demonstrated against Salman Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses in the 1980s, Mohammed Akhtar, Kalim Saddiqui and the rest, did want to make blasphemy against Islam an offence in British law. And there have been riots and screams for the deaths of those Muslims believed had blasphemed against their religion around the world. One of those, whose beheading was demanded by the bigots and the fanatics, was the previous pope after he quoted a medieval Byzantine emperor’s views on Islam.

But the legislation the British government introduced was designed to protect innocent Muslims from attack by racists and xenophobes, simply for their faith, when they were normal, peaceable people. It was designed, not to surrender to the Islamists and bigots, but to stop them creating the hatred and division they wish to exploit to radicalise more Muslims.

Jones doesn’t recognise this, and so he thinks we’re soft on them. And he’s not alone. There are plenty of extremely right-wing Republicans, who believe the same. And it looks very much like Trump is one of them. Hence the sneers.

Given these sneers from Trump and Jones, and Trump’s own vicious islamophobia, it would be an injustice and a mistake to let him enter the country on a state visit.

The Empire Files on the Foundation of Israel and Ethnic Cleansing of the Palestinians

This is part of a longer piece from The Empire Files, no. 37, presented by Abby Martin, formerly of RT and now, I think, a presenter with Telesur English. This tells the story of the shrinking of Palestine from the foundation of the early Zionist settlements to the carnage of the foundation of Israel in 1948. It’s a grim, ugly picture of organised, imperialist brutality, meted out by people Albert Einstein and other western Jewish critics compared to the Nazis and the Fascists, a view also held by one of the Israelis’ own army officers.

It’s entitled The Untold History of Palestine and Israel, and Martin states that this is the history that is not taught in schools. She and her team had been there filming the Israeli occupation of the West Bank for two weeks. It’s a brutal occupation that is funded by the US taxpayer to the tune of $30 billion in aid. But Israel is presented to Americans through the images of ‘Birthright Tours’, which show Israel as a fun-loving, peaceful land threatened by militant Muslims.

Palestine was originally a province of the Ottoman Empire. During Ottoman rule, it had a population of 500,000 people. 75 per cent of these were Muslims, 20 per cent Christian, and 5 per cent Jewish. Nearly all of them were Arabs. Its cities were centres of intellectual culture and art, drawing visitors and scholars from across the Middle East. Even before it had borders, Palestine constituted a distinct, recognisable nation through its peoples shared customs and culture.

Martin explains that the Zionist movement began in the late 19th century as a reaction to the anti-Semitic violence and pogroms, which broke out in eastern Europe. She correctly states that Zionism was the belief in an exclusively Jewish state. I make this point here, because Nazis used the term incorrectly to mean their stupid and imaginary Jewish conspiracies to enslave gentiles. The Zionists were at this point only a small minority within the Jewish people. Most Jews wanted to stop to anti-Semitism in their own countries. This is illustrated with an article from the New York Times about Jewish Ukrainians organising to stop anti-Semitism in Ukraine. Many Jews resisted leaving Europe on the grounds that this would be giving in to the anti-Semites.

Zionism became a fervent movement under its Theodor Herzl, who claimed to be its father. Herzl was an Austrian atheist. He first considered homelands in Argentina and Uganda, before finally deciding on creating a Greater Israel in the Middle East. As shown on a map, this would include not just Palestine, but also the whole of Jordan and Lebanon, and parts of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and a tiny section of Turkey. Herzl spent his time travelling around the West trying to gather support and sponsorship for his scheme. He wrote to the Duke of Baden, for his aid, saying

If it is God’s will that we return to our historic fatherland, we should like to do so as representatives of western civilisation and bring cleanliness, order and well-established customs, … to this plague-ridden, blighted corner of the Orient.

The Zionists promised to make Palestine a vanguard against barbarism, which meant that it would be an extension of western military power, and ‘build highways of the civilised peoples’, which meant trade for western millionaires. Their slogan was ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’. But the Zionists were all too aware that the land already had a people, and were determined to cleanse them. Another Zionist leader, Israel Zangwill, said

Palestine is not so much occupied by Arabs as overrun by them.

From the first the Zionists planned on the expulsion of the indigenous peoples. Much of the country was semi-feudal, with tenant farmers labouring for absentee landlords away in the cities of Jordan or Syria. From 1892 onwards the Zionists began purchasing this land. In many cases the new, Jewish owners evicted the original inhabitants. Jews, Christians and Muslims had lived in peace and harmony in the region for thousands of years, but these purchases and expulsions resulted in immediate conflict.

New opportunities for the further expansion of the Jewish settlements arose during World War I. The Zionists were aware that the Russians, British and French were planning to carve up the region. The infamous Syke-Picot agreement divided the Middle East between the French and British. Britain was given control of Palestine by the League of Nations. The British government, composed of lords, then issued the Balfour Declaration, which pronounced the British government’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The British Mandate resulted in riots in Jerusalem by the indigenous Palestinians, who naturally resented having their homeland given away without their consultation.

Again, the Zionist settlers were planning the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. In 1924 the US envoy stated

The Zionists look forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine.

At this point, settlers comprised 10 per cent of the population. But this was already producing a refugee crisis. This section of the film shows a picture of rally of Palestinian refugees in Syria from 1929. Already there were 50,000 of such people, thrown out of their homes. As more land was purchased, and people evicted, David Ben Gurion, the future prime minister and mascot of Ben Gurion airport, declared

We were not just working. We were conquering, conquering, conquering land. We were conquistadors.

From 1920 to 1939 the settler population rose from ten to thirty per cent. Ben Gurion himself laid out the settlers’ plans for ethnic cleansing:

We must expel the Arabs and take their places.

This policy naturally produced a rise in clashes between the Palestinians and the Zionist settlers. In 1936 the Palestinians launched a general strike against British rule. This was initially peaceful, until the British declared martial law, and recruited Zionist settlers to attack dissidents and Arab villages. This provoked the strike to become an armed uprising. The British in response embarked on a policy of blowing up Arab homes. 200 were destroyed in the Arab village of Yaffa. The rebellion was eventually crushed three years later in 1939. The death toll was 5,000 Palestinians against 300 settlers and 250 British soldiers. The Zionists formed their own armed forces, which were later used in the war of independence. These comprised the Hagana, the official force recognised by the British authorities, and various unofficial militias, the largest of which was the Irgun. These militias began by attacking the Palestinians, before moving on to British soldiers. It was the Irgun which bombed the Kind David Hotel, killing 91 people, including 17 Jews. This was so popular that one of the militias’ leaders, Menachem Begin, later became president of Israel.

Abroad, many Jews were far less impressed. Albert Einstein and a group of other Jews wrote a letter to the New York Times condemning Begin’s movement. They wrote that it was

A political party closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.

But the Zionists continued with their plans for the country’s ethnic cleansing. Joseph Weitz, the head of the Jewish National Fund, wrote in 1940

There is no room for both people in this country … and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries, to transfer them all.

… We must not leave a single village, a single tribe.

The terror created by the Holocaust with its six million Jewish dead, along with the mass murder of other peoples, political prisoners and gays, propelled Zionism from the political fringe to a mass movement. In 1947 the British turned Mandated Palestine over to the UN. This finally gave in to 70 years of Zionist campaigning, creating the state of Israel. The new state was given 70 per cent of the area’s land. Palestine was divided into three zones. However, the new Israel still had a population that was forty per cent Arab. This was a situation that the Israeli founders and leaders were determined to remove. Ben Gurion announced that

There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of 60 per cent.

In 1948 the tensions culminated in a full-blown war, during which the Israelis launched Plan Dalet for the mass terrorisation, murder and expulsion of the Palestinian people. This was the Nakba, the Palestinian term for the destruction of their homeland, a word which means, ‘disaster’ or ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic.

This section of the film describes some of the massacres that were committed, and the atrocities perpetrated against innocent civilians. One of the villages targeted for extermination was Deir Yassin, where there had been no terrorist attacks committed against the settlers. Israeli soldiers murdered nearly the entire population, raping the women before butchering them. One survivor described seeing his entire family lined up to be shot, including his mother, who was breastfeeding a baby. 200 people were murdered. A Red Cross official stated

Here the cleaning up had been done with machine guns, then hand grenades. It had been finished with knives.

!2 days after this, the Zionists attacked and massacred the people of Haifa. At the same time the Israelis broadcast radio messages intended to terrorise the Arabs. These included recordings of women wailing, and the message ‘Flee for your lives. The Jews are using poison gas and nuclear weapons.’ In Abu Shusha, the Palestinians who remained in their homes were raped, then hacked to death with axes. Those who tried to flee were shot on sight. 110 people were killed. At al-Dawayima 450 were killed, with a further 250 missing. In another village, the mosque was bombed, killing the 80 people, who had sought refuge within it. The remaining villagers were rounded up in the town square and shot, leaving a further 70 dead. In Lydda the Zionists massacred around 250-500 people, 250 of which were killed in about half an hour. This was supposedly in response to gun shots being fired from the local mosque. John Bagehot-Howe, a British army officer, commented

It would be an exaggeration to claim that great numbers were massacred. But just enough were killed, or roughly handled, to make sure all the civilian population took flight.

A senior Zionist officer, Joseph Imani, saw Palestinians shot after they came out of their homes waving white flags and carrying food. He said

Where did they come by such a measure of cruelty, like Nazis. Is there no more humane way of expelling the inhabitants than such methods?

During this period 800,000 Palestinians fled their homes, comprising 80 per cent of the Palestinian population of Israel. 500 villages were razed to the ground.

This is the history that you will mostly definitely not find taught in schools, as Abby Martin says. Nor will you see it covered on the mainstream news, whether in the US or over here, by the BBC. Lobster has remarked on the way the Beeb ‘ties itself in knots’ trying to tell itself that it is not biased towards Israel, while being biased towards Israel. And that monster and apologist for mass murder, Mark Regev, the Israeli ambassador, would scream blue murder if anyone in the mainstream media dared to do so, or called those responsible for these atrocities what they are – butchers and mass murderers. As Einstein and the other Jewish critics said, the Zionists responsible for such atrocities and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians are very much like the Nazis and Fascists. But Regev will scream that you’re an anti-Semite or ‘self-hating’, if you’re Jewish, if you dare to mention this.

But we do need to be aware of these atrocities, if we are to understand the paranoid mindset of the Muslim radicals in Britain today. Kalim Saddiqui, a vile bigot, who was one of those responsible for the hate campaign against Salman Rushdie in the 1980s and 1990s, was filmed at his mosque by the Beeb telling his congregation that

British society is a monstrous killing machine, and killing Muslims comes very easily to them.

When the documentary team challenged him on this, he tried to bluff his way out of it by blustering about how Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses had been published as part of a propaganda campaign to prepare for a ‘holocaust of Muslims’. It’s a risible, stupid slander. But to some Muslims, it has a terrible verisimilitude. Many mosques do cover the atrocities committed against Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere around the world in their equivalent of Christian parish magazines. They’re acutely aware of campaigns of terror against their co-religionists. Hence such hysterical claims over here. But these atrocities are deliberately kept hidden from us, so that Islamic terrorism can appear as completely irrational, and Muslims presented as violent terrorists and butchers, killing for the sake of it. That is, admittedly, true to a certain extent of Daesh and al-Qaeda, though even with these cases there is more to it than simply that. If there is ever to be a just peace in the Middle East, we need to know about the real history of the region, how it has been conquered and its people brutalised by western imperialism and the rapacity of multinational corporations. Not only do we need to defeat the Islamists, we also need to defeat the thugs, genocides and corporate despoilers in our own societies.

Secular Talk on the Iranians Raising the Bounty on Salman Rushdie by $600,000

The cover of Private Eye for Friday 13th March 1989. If you can’t read the caption, one mullah is saying to the Ayatollah, ‘Have you read the book?’. He replies, ‘Do you think I’m mad?’

Kulinski in this clip discusses a report in the Guardian that a group of 40 newspaper and other media companies in Iran have clubbed together to raise the money offered under their government’s fatwa for killing Salman Rushdie by a further $600,000. The fatwas was imposed way back in 1988 by the leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, for Rushdie writing the book, the Satanic Verses, which the Ayatollah considered blasphemous against Islam. Kulinski points out that it hasn’t just been Rushdie whose life has been put in danger by the fatwa. The book’s Japanese translator, Hitoshi Kirigashi was fatally stabbed in 1991. That same year, the Italian translator, Ettore Caprioli, was also the victim of a stabbing, though mercifully he survived. Aziz Nessin, the Turkish translator, survived an arson attack on an hotel in which 37 other people died in 1993. William Nyegard, the Swedish translator, was also attacked in 1993. He was shot three times in Oslo, though thankfully he too survived. And last year, 2015, Iran withdrew from the Frankfurt book fair because they had announced that Rushdie was speaking.

Kulinski states that the Iranians have the attitude that they’re being oppressed, because of their offence at Rushdie’s book. He points out that for civilised people, the solution to such a difference of opinion is to argue about it, and then move on. He states very strongly that the reason why the Iranians aren’t doing this is because they know their arguments are weak. This is why they have to force it on children when they’re young. He also points out that the younger generation in Iran is also disgusted by this. Iran is a very young country, and most of them are much more liberal than their elders. ‘Tick tock,’ he says, ‘the clock is ticking. Times running out for you.’

I’m reblogging this as there’s much more going on here than simply a revival of anti-Rushdie feeling in Iran. In fact, the evidence points the other way. If these media companies have decided to band together to add even more money to the fatwa, then it shows very effectively that few people in Iran are interested in killing the author. Again, thankfully.

The book has been a source of tension between Islam and the secular West almost from the first. Not all Muslims are as extreme as the Ayatollah, but many, perhaps the majority, do resent what they see as an attack on their religion. The book’s Islamic opponents have also pointed out that Viking Penguin was also ambivalent about publishing the book. The publisher’s advisors told them three time that it would result in serious trouble, including mass protests. These were eventually ignored and overridden. Roald Dahl, the renowned children’s author, speaking on Radio 4 several years ago, also felt that the book should not have been published given the hatred and violence that this had caused. He did not consider it great literature, and felt it should be pulped.

The outrage caused by The Satanic Verses is also a major cause of the current surge of anti-western and Islamist Muslim activism. Outrage at the book prompted Muslims to band together for pretty much the first time in protest, organising demonstrations and book burnings. And the preachers of hate used it as a pretext to attack Britons and British society in general. I can remember Kalim Saddiqui speaking in his mosque on a documentary shown late at night on the Beeb, The Trouble with Islam, in which he described Britain as ‘a terrible killing machine’ and stated that ‘killing Muslims comes very easily to them.’ When the documentary-makers picked him up on this, he blustered that it was about the Satanic Verses, which had been published in preparation for a ‘holocaust of Muslims.’ He was, of course, talking poisonous rubbish.

In fact all the people I know, who’ve actually read the book, tell me that it’s not actually blasphemous. I know a lecturer in Islam, who actually got his students to read the book when he was teaching in Pakistan. They’d been talking about how the book was blasphemous, so he asked them if they’d read it. When they said they hadn’t, he asked them if they would, and gave copies to them to read. They carried them home in brown paper bags so no-one would see them. When they’d read the book, he asked them again if they thought it was blasphemous. They said, ‘No’.

There were very cynical, political reasons for the Ayatollah’s decision to put a price on Rushdie’s head. He was afraid he was losing Iran’s position as the premier Islamic revolutionary regime to others, like Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya. In order to try and whip up some more popularity, he resorted to that classic Orwellian technique: the five minute hate. This is the episode in Orwell’s classic 1984, where ‘Big Brother’ orchestrates a wave of hatred against a traitor figure for about five minutes. It’s very, very much like the way Stalin whipped up hatred in the Soviet Union against Trotsky, who was accused of all kinds of treachery and perfidy against the state and its people. Khomeini was doing the same here, but with Rushdie as the hate figure.

The fatwa didn’t work as well as the Iranians hoped it would, though I have Iranian friends who feel that the Satanic Verses was deliberately published by the British government to sever relations with Iran. After about a decade or more, the Iranians announced that, while the fatwa couldn’t – or wouldn’t – be lifted, they weren’t going actively going to enforce it.

Then a few years ago, more money was placed on the price. This was after the rioting around the world against the film, The Innocence of Muslims, which was a genuinely blasphemous attack on Mohammed. The film, however, was the group of expatriate Egyptians and nothing to do with Salman Rushdie. Again, it looked like a cynical attempt by the Iranian revolutionary authorities to gain some kind of political advantage, which they felt they had lost.

And now this. And everything about this says exactly the same to me: that this is nothing but a cynical attempt to exploit Rushdie’s notoriety to marshal support for the regime. Except that I don’t know how successful they’ll be. Not very, is my guess. They weren’t before, despite the vicious attacks on Rushdie’s publishers and translators. After all, they had to drop it as a dead letter for several years. And Kulinski is right about the Iranian population. They are on average very young. Most of the population is under 30. This generation doesn’t remember the Shah or the Islamic Revolution, and Rushdie to them is nothing but decades old news.

Now I don’t share Kulinski’s atheism. I think that people have the right to bring their children up and have them educated in their faith, and I don’t see it as brainwashing. But I do share his feelings that if the Iranians are resorting to violence, or advocating it, then it does mean that they don’t have confidence in their own ability to confront and overcome Rushdie in the realm of ideas. Which is itself astonishing, considering the rich heritage of Islamic philosophy. But then, I don’t think combating Rushdie’s ideas are what the fatwas is intended for. As I said, I think it’s an appeal to raw emotion simply to bolster the regime.

So why would the Iranian state and authorities need this renewed campaign against Rushdie? It might be because the young general is much less religious, and more secular. Atheism is expanding across the Middle East, including Iran. This is pretty much what you’d expect when religion, or indeed any ideology, becomes oppressive and the source of violence instead of peace and prosperity. Christopher Hill, in one of his books on what he called the English Revolution, his term for the British Civil War notes that the religious violence in Britain in the mid-17th century led to a similar growth in atheism and unbelief. And Iran many people resent their lack of political and social freedoms, and the immense corruption of Islamic clergy, who have enriched themselves through backhanders from commerce, industry and control of the bonyads, the religious trusts, which manage about 50 per cent of the economy, including the oil industry. All this growth in atheism is very, very clandestine. Atheism and apostasy are capital crimes in many Islamic countries, and so people have to be very careful about who they talk to about this issue. Even social media is very carefully monitored. ISIS in Syria kept the facebook and twitter accounts of a female anti-Islamist activist open long after the woman herself had been captured and murdered by them, as a honey trap to catch other anti-Islamist dissidents. And Nokia sold software across the Middle East to the despots and autocrats enabling them to hack into people’s mobiles in order to spy on them. So it’s still incredibly dangerous. Nevertheless, atheism and general disaffection against these regimes is growing. So I’m very sure that the Iranians have raised the fatwa bounty once again, because they hear the ticks of the clock sounding out the final moments of their regime only too well.

UKIP Candidate: Licence Islamic Clergy and Mosques

I found this piece on the Ham & High site through Hope Not Hate’s news column. Entitled, Hampstead and Kilburn Ukip candidate: ‘My great aim is to licence the mosques’ it reports the highly controversial views on Islam by Magnus Nielsen, the UKIP candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn. It describes Nielsen’s background and career, including his reasons for joining UKIP in 1993. He seems to feel that the EU is about to collapse, and that UKIP has the necessary policies for getting the country ‘back on track’ when it does.

However, the article begins with his highly controversial attitude towards Islam. It notes that he got into the news last year for describing Islam as ‘organised crime under religious camouflage,’ and that it’s founder, the Prophet Muhammad, ‘was a gang leader of criminals’.

He now declares that his ‘great aim is to licence the mosques and licence the clergy’.

“So that if the clergy are preaching doctrine that is in contravention of UK law and human rights then they lose their licences.

“If the mosque can’t find a licensed imam, they have to close down until they can.”

When asked if the same should apply to other religions, whose preaching he could find offensive, such as Roman Catholic priests or Jewish rabbis, Nielsen shrugged it off with the reply “I don’t think the other religions would present the same sort of problem”.

The interviews at http://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/politics/hampstead_and_kilburn_ukip_candidate_my_great_aim_is_to_licence_the_mosques_1_3956520.

Now Nielsen should be entitled to express his view of Islam and its founder, no matter how bigoted and offensive others may find it, without fearing for his life in attacks like those against Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish supermarket in France, and Lars Vilks and a local synagogue in Copenhagen this weekend.

Nielsen’s anti-Islam Comments close to Hate Speech

His attitude to Islam is, however, extreme and some would consider that they border on the illegal. His description of the religion as ‘organised crime’ seems to me to come very close, if not actually into, hate speech. It suggests that all Muslims are criminals, or criminal sympathisers, simply because of their religion. It is illegal in Britain to make comments designed to stir up racial or religious hatred. While anti-Islam bigots like Geert Wilders are generally very careful to argue that they’re aren’t racists, because Islam is not a religion, it certainly comes close to what they act would consider as provoking religious hatred.

Licencing and the Erosion of Freedom of Belief

As for his plans to licence Islam and the mosques, this is a profoundly dangerous and deeply counterproductive policy. Firstly, gives the state the power to regulate and interfere with citizens’ private religious beliefs. While there should be limits to what is legally acceptable, such as the promotion of terrorism, this gives the state too much power to decide what their citizens may or may not believe. It brings the country close to having the same highly authoritarian attitudes towards religion, like China, where only government approved religious groups are officially tolerated. The result of this has been the vicious persecution of Falun Gong, as well as those Christians, who do not wish to submit to official government control. And this is after the vicious persecution of all religions, including Taoism, Buddhism and Christianity, by an aggressively atheist form of Communism during Mao’s bloody ‘Cultural Revolution’. If such laws are applied to one religion, it could quite easily be applied to another, or stretched to include a secular philosophy that, in the view of the authorities, presented a similar danger. It isn’t hard to see how an intolerant, fiercely nationalist regime could move from licencing and banning Islam as potentially terrorist, to prosecuting conscientious objectors and anti-War activists amongst other religions or secular Humanists for being ‘insufficiently patriotic’, or harmful to morale in wartime.

The Libertarian Alliance’s Attack on Charities for Political Liberalism

The threat presented by such legislation isn’t an exaggeration. In the 1980s what became the Libertarian Alliance carried out a long campaign to have various charities and international aid organisations deprived of their charitable status. These charities’ campaigns against hunger and poverty in the Developing World were, they argued, political. And hence they attacked respectable charities like the Roman Catholic organisation, CAFOD. And this is quite apart from the concerns American liberals had about the sweeping provisions of Bush’s Patriot Act, and the powers granted to the authorities to investigate perceived anti-American individuals and groups. Among those placed under suspicion were even Quaker anti-war protest groups.

Official, Reforming Islam vs. the Islamist Counterculture

It’s also useless and counterproductive. The Egyptian-German scholar, Bassam Tibi, in his book Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change, points out that the mosques in Egypt are already strictly controlled by the state. Furthermore, the country’s westernisation and modernisation movement came from its Islamic leaders in the 19th century. These were members of the ulema – Muslim clergy – who were impressed by the great advances in the natural sciences and engineering that the West had made. They wished to introduce these to the Egypt and the Islamic world so that their people could also enjoy the benefits.

The radical Islamism of the terrorist extremists comes from outside this official milieu. It’s an underground movement that has been formed in opposition to the official, liberal Islam of the 19th century reformers and their 20th and 21st century successors. Despite the close supervision of the mosques in Egypt, and the proscription and persecution of the extremists, these groups still emerged to become a powerful, destructive force. I can’t see that licencing the mosques over here would have any effect in stamping out extremism. Most of the domestic terrorists appear to have been radicalised outside the mosques, often on-line. This form of propaganda by the extremists would continue, and it is probably that an underground Muslim counterculture would emerge, parallel but outside and beyond official, tolerated Islam.

Licensing Islam Would Drive Moderates Away

It may even have a negative effect. Lobster’s columnist, Corinne DeSouza, has written about the failure of the British intelligence agencies, particularly in Iraq. She notes that since Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq, far fewer Iraqis have offered their services to British intelligence. It’s not hard to see why. While some would be prepared to pass sensitive information on to a sympathetic foreign power in the hope of overthrowing an oppressive dictatorship, far fewer would want to take the step of becoming an active collaborator with a foreign occupying force. Similarly, if the mosques and their clergy were licenced, it would possibly drive away liberal Muslims and actively discourage them from passing on information about terrorism or extremist preaching to the authorities. Licensing the mosques would be a sign that, as far as the British authorities were concerned, Muslims did not really have a place in British society and were barely tolerated. Few Muslims would wish to co-operate with authorities in a regime that automatically viewed all Muslims, regardless of sect or shade of belief, as potential terrorists and traitors. Any Muslim that did so could easily find themselves reviled as a ‘chocolate Muslim’ – an Islamic ‘Uncle Tom’.

Bigots Also Unpopular in British Islam

There is a problem in this country with preachers of hate. Finsbury Park mosque was closed because it was a centre promoting terrorism. I also recall a number of other scandals with other extremist preachers, like Kalim Saddiqui. He was actually filmed by the Beeb back in the 1990s telling his congregation that ‘British society is a massive killing machine, and killing Muslims comes very easily to them.’ Saddiqui was one of the most notorious of the bigots, and there were demonstrations and protests against him by moderate Muslims. One of the complaints of the moderates is that you don’t hear enough of the counterdemonstrations, only of the protests and ranting of the militant firebrands.

Stress Common Britishness; Treat All Extremists with Same Rights and Contempt

Much more positive is an even-handed approach to tackling extremism, to show that it’s not Islam that is under suspicion or attack, but simply those, who would preach murder, hate and death in its name. And that those prosecuted for such offences will be treated exactly the same as their non-Muslim counterparts, demanding death and horror in the name of whatever they believe in.

White Supremacism, Militant Islam, and the Rhetoric of Genocide

Last week, Tom over at Pride’s Purge posted a piece on a virulent, genocidal rant against Muslims published on Youtube by an angry White man as a message to David Cameron. As its author in the first few moments of his rant said that UKIP would ‘sort out’ David Cameron, Mr Pride’s post about it took the title, ‘The Party Political Broadcast UKIP Don’t Want You to See’. Some of the commenters on the Proud One’s blog pointed out that there was no obvious connection to UKIP beyond this opening comment, and that it may not have come from Farage’s party at all. That’s correct, but it does show that the poster of the original video nevertheless does see UKIP and its anti-immigration policies as defending White Britons from the threat of foreign, and particular, Muslim immigration.

UKIP and the Anti-Islamic Far Right

And certain UKIP politicians do have close personal connections to the anti-Islam far right. Apart from those with connections to the English Defence League and Britain First, a year or so ago one UKIP councillor in Wiltshire ended up being censured after he made comments supporting the twisted ‘Eurabia’ ideas of the Far Right. ‘Eurabia’ is the name given to the future Europe, which the Far Right believes will arise a few decades from now, when Muslim immigration and their higher birth rate cause the Islamic population to outnumber indigenous White Europeans. There are some very nasty videos on the web by the Far Right predicting a war between Islam and its supporters in the European Left, and White nationalists. In fact, there’s plenty of material by sociologists, demographers and political scientists refuting this whole prediction. A friend of mine looked at the demographic projections behind it and concluded that they were rubbish. Nevertheless, there are videos about it posted with the intention of recruiting people to the White nationalist cause. One of these was the Kipper counsellor, who similarly appeared to believe that a war was coming in the ’20s between Muslim and White non-Muslim.

The video reblogged by Tom was nasty, vile stuff. Its author didn’t just want to ban Muslim immigration, he actively wished to see them expelled. He then ranted about how he wanted to go down to the coast if he could and shoot Muslim immigrants as they came to shore. Now under current legislation, it is an offence to stir up racial hatred, which this video clearly intended to do. I understand that one blogger was so concerned about it, that he alerted the police. He’s right to do so. I’ve Asian and Muslim friends, who have suffered murderous threats from White Nazis. And since 9/11 and 7/7 the danger of racial violence against Muslims simply because of their religion is all too real.

White Racism and Islamic Radicalism

The video is also dangerous for another reason: it actively plays into the hands of the Militant Islamic bigots and fanatics themselves. These people are convinced and actively promote the idea that all Westerners are racists, who wish to beat and kill Muslims. According to these Muslim bigots, the only way Muslims can be safe from White attack is either to retreat into their own communities, or actively engage in violence against them.

I studied Islam as part of the Religious Studies I took as my minor subject when I was at college over two decades ago. After gaining my BA, I tried doing a postgraduate study in British Islam, but had to stop for a variety of reasons. One of these was the radical Islamic polemic that I came across in the controversy surrounding the publication of the Satanic Verses. Some of the material produced by those seeking to defend Islam from what they saw as its blasphemy was frankly racist and religiously bigoted.

Kalim Saddiqui and Predictions of Genocide

Sometime around 1994/5 I believe the BBC broadcast a documentary, The Trouble with Muslims, which looked at the wretched conditions of the British Muslim community. These included poor academic performance and education compared to other demographic groups, unemployment, and so on. The programme included excerpts from a sermon by Kalim Saddiqui at his mosque. Saddiqui declared to his congregation that

British society is a monstrous killing machine, and killing Muslims comes very easily to them.

When the film-makers challenged him about his comments, he ranted that the Satanic Verses were published in order to prepare for a ‘holocaust of Muslims’.

Akhthar’s Claims that Western Intellectuals Despise Islam

Other radical imams also published anti-Western invective in response to the Satanic Verses. One of these was Akhthar’s Be Careful with Mohammed, which was basically one long rant against Christianity and Western society. It ended with a kind of appendix, ‘What Western Intellectuals Think of Islam’. This consisted of a list of quotations from various Western writers and intellectuals criticising or attacking Islam. The whole piece was intended to show that the West was evil and fundamentally hostile to Islam and Muslims.

Moderate Muslims against the Bigots

Now Saddiqui and Akhthar were immensely controversial figures within the Muslim community. Moderate and liberal Muslims despised them, and organised marches and demonstrations against them. One of the complaints by Islamic moderates has been that there has been insufficient media coverage of Muslim demos and protests against the bigots. One of my lecturers at College went up to one of Akhthar’s demonstrations, and quoted Mohammed to show he was wrong. Mohammed himself said that there should ‘be no compulsion in religion’.

Also, not all of the Muslims offended by the Satanic Verses were religious bigots by any means. One of the most interesting of the articles collected in the book, Civility and Sacrilege: Muslim Perspectives on the Satanic Verses published by one of the Muslim presses, took the view that Rushdie’s tome was nasty and offensive to everybody, not just Muslims. This piece argued that the book contained nasty racist caricatures of Blacks and Chinese, while all the White characters were racist.

Bigots like Saddiqui, Akhthar and Anjem Choudhary are controversial minority, but they are there, and will use comments by White supremacists, such as that reblogged and criticised by Tom Pride, to turn others in their community against their non-Muslim fellows.

Anti-Islam Stories from the West and Persecution of Non-Muslim Minorities in Islam

And it won’t just be people in this country that will suffer. News about negative comments and abuse of Islam by Westerners travels to the Islamic world, where it is used to whip up hatred and violence against Christians and non-Muslim minorities. While I was briefly attempting to do my post-grad in British Islam, I came across an anthropological study from the 1970s of the Pakistani Muslim community in Bristol. The book’s author had also looked at the city’s Christian Pakistani community at the same time. She reported that many Christian Pakistanis had said that they decided to emigrate to Britain after a series of anti-Christian riots in Pakistan in 1973. These were caused by a story in one of the Pakistani newspapers about passages from the Qu’ran having been posted up as wallpaper in an Asian restaurant in Britain.

There has been renewed persecution of Christians in the Dar al-Islam as a reaction to Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq. The Syriac Christian community in Mosul, which has been there since the days of the Persian Empire back in the 6th and 7th centuries, has been attacked along with other Christian communities. A few years ago the BBC’s architectural expert, Dan Cruikshank, travelled to Iraq to gaze in wonder at its antiquities, from the great ziggurat of Babylon, to one of the earliest mosques, which itself was influenced architecturally by the ziggurat tradition. He spoke briefly to one of the Christian community’s leading clergy in what was a very strained interview, with the clergyman carefully watching every word. The cleric stated that before the invasion, relations between Christians and Muslims in Iraq had been good and harmonious, but that this had changed after the Western invasion. Christians now suffered from attack and the threat of violence.

Nor are Christians alone. The Yezidis, an ancient religion that contains elements of Islam and Zoroastrianism, are also being attacked by ISIS, who also despise liberal, moderate Muslims along with everyone else, who doesn’t share their very narrow interpretation of Islam.

Videos and material like that Pride’s Purge blogged about and denounced present a very real danger, not just in encouraging the racist and bigoted in Britain to attack innocent Muslims, but also because they play into the equally genocidal, twisted worldview of the Muslim bigots. If racism is to be stamped out in Britain, vicious material intended to inflame racial or religious hatred needs to be attacked and clamped down on and their authors refuted and prosecuted. This needs to be done equally, both to the White supremacists and the Muslim fanatics, who would exploit it to promote their own campaign of hate and violence.