More overt fascism from the channel that has begun its livestreams with footage of Oswald Mosley and his stormtroopers goose-stepping about. This afternoon they put up a meme supposedly showing that present mass migration to the west is all due to the Kalergi plan as part of a UN-backed ‘Great Replacement’, financed by the Rothschilds, the Baruchs and the Warburgs. In other words, it’s just a new wrinkle on the old conspiracy theory about the UN one-world dictatorship plotted by Jewish bankers. Lobster put up a review of a book on Richard Von Kalergi a few years ago, and I put up a post about it. Kalergi did believe that countries should include different ethnic groups, but for quite different reasons from those attributed to him by the paranoids. He was writing after the First World War, and believed that countries would be less likely to go to war on each other if their opponents contained members of their people. It’s about preserving peace in Europe, not replacing its people. As for his connection to the EU, I think he was just one of a number of political thinkers at about that time who were trying to create a pan-European state in order to protect international peace, and I don’t think he had much success or influence on the EU architects. If you want to find the ultimate roots of the EU, it’s possible that it’s derived from Kant’s On Perpetual Peace, in which he argued that the world should be organised into a federation of states. This was back in the 18th century, long before mass migration from outside Europe.
The meme also states that the UN calls this migration ‘the Great Replacement’. I’m sceptical about this, as I understood the term was invented in 2012 by a far-right Frenchman. In any case, ‘the Great Replacement’ is just another version of the old Fascist myth that the Jews are encouraging Black and Asian immigration to destroy the White race. I’m quite prepared to believe that the UN has declared criticism of its migration laws hate speech out of concern for the refugees subject to racist attacks.
As well as this fascist nonsense, their lead man also says in the comments that he hates David Bowie and Mick Jagger because they were Satanists. I don’t know about Jagger, but there was a vogue for the occult among some rockers at one time, including Bowie. There’s supposed to be a lot of occult material in his last album, Black Star. But I’m not sure if you could call him a Satanist. The late 19th-early 20th century occult society, the Golden Dawn, was mostly composed of High Church Anglicans, who were very definitely not Satanists, with the exception of the vehemently anti-Christian Alistair Crowley.
This is very interesting. One of the great commenters on this blog remarked a few days ago that he doubted the Tories would honour their pledge to cut immigration, and that the Labour party had a better policy towards it. I agree. From what I remember, Labour’s policy would remove the barriers that encourage aspiring migrants to cross the channel in flimsy inflatables and put them in with the rest of the asylum-seekers. They would also negotiate and try to find solutions to the problem of migration with the countries of origin. This is undoubtedly much more sensible and humane, in that it makes the crossing safer for the migrants and seeks to end some of the push factors that force them to risk their lives coming to Europe and Britain in the first place. But it’s not as exciting as having illegal immigrants exiled to Rwanda.
I have real doubts that the Tories have the will or the wish to find proper solutions to the migrant crisis. The Rwanda policy looks very much as if Johnson and Patel cooked it up just to take the pressure of Johnson, partygate and his general massive ineptitude. I also wonder if the Tories actually want to keep channel migration going, as it whips up nationalistic anger against immigration, anger that they exploit with promises that they and only they will tackle it while making sure that they don’t, or just tinker with it through malicious policies like Patel’s. The Tories used fears over immigration to boost support by Brexit by deliberately giving the impression that Black and Asian immigration was being assisted by the EU constitution. It wasn’t. In fact EU law stated that migrants, once in Europe, should remain in the countries in which they landed. And the Schengen agreement, which the Tories also claimed were enabling non-White immigration through the EU, actually only affected those countries which signed up to it. And we weren’t one of them. In fact the real legislation enabling asylum seekers to reach this country was the 1950s UN agreement on the rights of the refugee. Mike pointed this out on one of his articles. But the Tories kept very quiet about that, is their lies about immigration and Europe were too useful for pushing Brexit.
And now we’ve got Brexit, and illegal immigration hasn’t stopped. Indeed, it is claimed that there have been 100,000 such migrants this past year. There are signs that parts of the right are talking about scrapping the 1950s UN agreement, and that part of the hard-right Tory base are ready to desert the party over its inaction on immigration. Yesterday I caught the thumbnail for a video by the Lotus Eaters, which castigated the Tories for the lack of will to tackle immigration. I can’t remember the title’s wording, but the thumbnail featured a photo of one of the prominent Tory politicos with a speech bubble saying that the issue would wait until after the election.
This morning there’s been a video from the New Culture Forum featuring its main man, Peter Whittle, stating that the Tories have to act against the wokeness destroying British society. Critical Race and Queer Theory should be banned in schools, and woke quangos should be cut. This was the subject of a previous video from them, entitled ‘Bonfire of the Quangos’. And I’ve seen the odd video from Farage on GB News stating that it is now the time to act on the UN agreement on refugees.
But I wonder how far the Tories can tackle immigration. Britain needs a certain amount of immigration to get technicians, medical staff and skilled workers. The Tories are also keen to give British citizenship to rich foreigners. But I also wonder if there are diplomatic constraints. For example, the Indian prime minister Modi gave a speech the other year stating that Indian would still provide science graduates to other countries. When Boris announced that he was going to cut immigration from the sub-continent, he got a sharp rebuke from India’s premier. I’ve got the distinct impression that there’s a lack of domestic jobs in India, and so the country and its economy depends to a certain extent on exporting workers, who then send their remittances home. I have absolutely no doubt that other developing countries are in the same boat. I did see somewhere that the country most dependent on remittances is Somalia, where they’re more or less keeping the economy afloat. All this makes the pledge to cut down on non-White immigration – which is essentially what is being meant here – extremely difficult. It isn’t just going to be opposed by domestic anti-racism protesters, but also by the non-White commonwealth countries. I can remember a period a few years ago where tensions between Britain and these nations were so great that some of the newspapers speculated about Britain being thrown out of the Commonwealth as Pakistan and South Africa had been previously. No government would want such a diplomatic catastrophe.
Although, I don’t know though. The Tory right are pushing the idea of an Anglosphere, essentially an international federation of White majority, English-speaking countries – Britain, America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Would the fanatics desiring such as union as a bulwark against Black and Asian immigration go so far as to see the Commonwealth destroyed to set it up? Well, the fanatics of the Tory Brexiteers have shown themselves more than willing to sacrifice the Union just to leave the EU, all the while blaming Nicola Sturgeon and the Scots Nats.
I can therefore quite see various papers like the Heil and Depress pushing for an end Britain’s membership of the Commonwealth, if they thought they could spin it that it’s the Commonwealth’s fault and it would stop non-White immigration.
I found this on the Community page of the right-wing YouTube channel Correct Not Political. They seem to be a group of right-wingers who go around staging counter protests or demonstrations at left-wing events. They’ve been demonstrating at the recent Pride marches, Drag Queen Story Hour, also against Extinction Rebellion, anti-racism marches for refugees and they also seem to be militant anti-vaxxers. One of their collections of videos is simply titled ‘Socialists and Commies’. But they posted this about ordinary people struggling with poverty while the fuel and water companies make hugely inflated profits.
Well after yesterdays announcement from the Bank of England , there is something very very very wrong in the system… So… let me get this straight:
* British Gas made a profit of £1.3bn between January & June
* BP announced profits of £6.95 billion between April and June alone
* Shell has profited by £9.4bn in a year
The MEN at the top:
* John Pettigrew, boss of National Grid received £6.5m bonus on top of his salary
* Chris O’Shea, chief executive of British Gas owner Centrica was paid almost £2m last year in salary and benefits
* Centrica’s non-executive directors were paid almost £1m
* Scottish Power’s CEO Keith Anderson is on £1.15m.
* E.On boss Michael Lewis is on £1m
* EDF’s Simone Rossi is also on £1m
* And their top execs enjoyed a share of £4.65m
* Peter Simpson of Anglian Water earned a £1.3m pay package
* Welsh Water bosses awarded themselves bonuses of over £930,000
* Severn Trent bosses awarded themselves bonuses of £5.56m
* Thames Water’s Sarah Bentley, received a £727,000 bonus on top of her £2m annual salary
Meanwhile there are…
* People who haven’t had breakfast and/or lunch TODAY, because they can’t afford it.
* People using FoodBanks because food is becoming more of a luxury than a necessity.
* Children celebrating a birthday without presents.
* Parents worrying about new school uniforms – and some schools enforcing rules which are not cost-effective.
* People who can’t get to work because they can’t afford to put petrol in their cars/pay for public transport anymore.
* People who are working so much they’re making themselves ill, and they STILL CAN’T AFFORD to pay their bills.
* People who have been given fines by these same energy/water companies because they couldn’t afford to pay their bills in the first place – increasing their debt.
* Customers being told to do STAR JUMPS TO KEEP WARM for crying out loud!
* Hose pipe bans when gallons of water leak away everyday.
* Elderly people NOT DRINKING because they’re worried about running out of water!!!
All this and energy prices are set to rise up to 75% in October…
THIS IS MADNESS!.. I’m all for supporting profits ..I’m not for supporting greed at the cost of lives of others..
Something needs to change.. Why are customers’ money being used to make life more comfortable for those who are making life more intolerable for the rest of us?
I actually don’t understand how the energy companies are allowed to get away with this and why the government aren’t stopping them instead of handing out money…..
Copied & pasted from others. Keep this going around for all to see’
I’ve got absolutely no problem posting this up despite where it comes from. Because these profiteers do need to be named and shamed. And this whole scam is why the public utilities need to be nationalised, so that they work for this great country’s people rather than exploiting them.
Ed Hussain, Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain (London: Bloomsbury 2021)
Ed Hussain is a journalist and the author of two previous books on Islam, the House of Islam, which came out in 2018, and The Islamist of 2007. He’s also written for a series of newspapers and magazines, including the Spectator, the Telegraph, the Times, the New York Times and the Guardian. He’s also appeared on the Beeb and CNN. He’s an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and has been a member of various think tanks, including the Council on Foreign Relations. The House of Islam is an introduction to Islamic history and culture from Mohammed onwards. According to the blurb, it argues that Islam isn’t necessarily a threat to the West but a peaceful ally. The Islamist was his account of his time in Hizb ut-Tahrir, a militant Islamic organisation dedicated to restoring the caliphate. This was quoted in Private Eye, where a passage in the book revealed that the various leaders Tony Blair appealed to as part of his campaign against militant, extremist Islam weren’t the moderates they claimed to be, but the exact type of people Blair was trying to combat. Among the Mosques continues this examination and critical scrutiny of caliphism, the term he uses to describe the militant to set up the caliphate. This is an absolute Islamic state, governed by a caliph, a theocratic ruler, who is advised by a shura, or council. This, however, would not be like parliament as only the caliph would have the power to promulgate legislation. Hussain is alarmed at how far this anti-democratic ideology has penetrated British Islam. To find out, he travelled to mosques across Britain – Dewsbury, Manchester, Blackburn, Bradford, Birmingham and London in England, Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland, the Welsh capital Cardiff, and Belfast in Northern Ireland. Once there, he goes to the local mosques unannounced, observes the worshippers, and talks to them, the imams and other local people. And he’s alarmed by what he sees.
Caliphism Present in Mosques of Different Sects
The mosques he attends belong to a variety of Islamic organisations and denominations. Dewsbury is the centre of the Deobandi movement, a Muslim denomination set up in Pakistan in opposition to British imperialism. Debandis worship is austere, rejecting music, dance and art. The Barelwi mosque he attends in Manchester, on the hand, is far more joyful. The Barelwis are based on an Indian Sufi preacher, who attempted to spread Islam through music and dance. Still other mosques are Salafi, following the fundamentalist brand of Islam that seeks to revive the Islam of the salaf, the Prophet’s companions, and rejects anything after the first three generations of Muslims as bid’a, innovations. But across these mosques, with a few exceptions, there is a common strand of caliphism. The Deobandi order are concerned with the moral reform and revival of Muslim life and observance, but not political activism, in order to hasten the emergence of the caliphate. Similar desires are found within the Tableegh-e Jama’at, another Muslim revivalist organisation founded in Pakistan. This is comparable to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Christianity, in that its method of dawa, Muslim evangelism, is to knock on lax Muslims’ doors and appealing to them become more religious. It’s a male-only organisation, whose members frequently go off on trips abroad. While the preaching in Manchester Central Mosque is about peace, love and tolerance as exemplified in the Prophet’s life, the Barelwis themselves can also be intolerant. Mumtaz Qadri, the assassin of Salman Taseer, the governor of the Punjab, was a member of the Barelwi Dawat-e-Islami. He murdered Taseer, whose bodyguard he was, because Taseer has dared to defend Pakistani Christians accused of blasphemy. Under strict Islamic law, they were gustakh-e Rasool, a pejorative term for ‘insulter of the Prophet’. The penalty for such blasphemy was wajib-e qatl, a mandatory death. Despite being tried and executed, Qadri is regarded by many of the Pakistani faithful as a martyr, and a massive mosque complex has grown up to commemorate him. In his meetings with various imams and ordinary Muslims, Hussain asks if they agree with the killing of blasphemers like Taseer, and the author Salman Rushdie, who had a fatwa and bounty placed on his life by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran for his book, The Satanic Reverses. Some of them give evasive replies. One imam even defends it, claiming that Rushdie deserved death because he insulted love, as represented by Mohammed and Islam. A Muslim female friend dodges answering by telling him she’s have to ask her husband.
In the mosques’ libraries he finds books promoting the Caliphist ideology, denouncing democracy, immodest dress and behaviour in women, who are commanded to be available for their husband’s sexual pleasure, even when their bodies are running with pus. Some are explicitly Islamist, written by Sayyid Qutb and his brother, the founders of modern militant Islamism. These mosques can be extremely large, serving 500 and more worshippers, and Hussain is alarmed by the extremely conservative, if not reactionary attitudes in many of them. In many, women are strictly segregated and must wear proper Islamic dress – the chador, covering their hair and bodies. The men also follow the model of Mohammed himself in their clothing, wearing long beards and the thawb, the long Arab shirt. But Hussain makes the point that in Mohammed’s day, there was no distinctive Muslim dress: the Prophet wore what everyone in 7th century Arabia wore, including Jews, Christians and pagans. He has a look around various Muslim schools, and is alarmed by their demand for prepubescent girls to wear the hijab, which he views as sexualising them. Some of these, such as the Darul Ulooms, concentrate almost exclusively on religious education. He meets a group of former pupils who are angry at their former school’s indoctrination of them with ancient, but fabricated hadiths about the Prophet which sanction slavery, the inferior status of women, and the forced removal of Jews and Christians from the Arabian peninsula. They’re also bitter at the way these schools did not teach them secular subjects, like science, literature and art, and so prepare them for entering mainstream society. This criticism has also been levelled Muslim organisations who have attacked the Darul Uloom’s narrow focus on religion. The worshippers and students at these mosques and their schools reject the dunya, the secular world, and its fitna, temptations. One Spanish Muslim has immigrated to England to get away from the nudist beaches in his home country. And the Muslim sections of the towns he goes to definitely do not raise the Pride flag for the LGBTQ community.
Hussain Worried by Exclusively Muslim Areas with No White Residents
Hussain is also alarmed at the way the Muslim districts in many of the towns he visits have become exclusively Muslim quarters. All the businesses are run by Muslims, and are geared to their needs and tastes, selling Muslim food, clothing, perfume and literature. Whites are absent, living in their own districts. When he does see them, quite often they’re simply passing through. In a pub outside Burnley he talks to a couple of White men, who tell him how their children have been bullied and beaten for being goras, the pejorative Asian term for Whites. Other Whites talk about how the local council is keen to build more mosques, but applications by White residents to put up flagpoles have been turned down because the council deems them racist. Hussain objects to these monocultures. Instead, he praises areas like the section of Edinburgh, where the Muslim community coexists with Whites and other ethnicities. There’s similar physical mixture of Muslim and non-Muslim in the Bute area of Cardiff, formerly Tiger Bay, which has historically been a multicultural cultural area. In the mosque, however, he finds yet again the ideology of cultural and religious separatism.
The Treatment of Women
He is also very much concerned about the treatment of women, and especially their vulnerability before the sharia courts that have sprung up. A few years ago there were fears of a parallel system of justice emerging, but the courts deal with domestic issues, including divorce. They have been presented as informal systems of marriage reconciliation. This would all be fine if that was all they were. But the majority of the mosques Hussain visits solely perform nikah, Muslim weddings. Under British law, all weddings, except those in an Anglican church, must also be registered with the civil authorities. These mosques don’t. As a result, wives are left at the mercy of Islamic law. These give the husband, but not the wife, the power of divorce., and custody of the children if they do. Hussain meets a battered Muslim woman, whose controlling husband nearly killed her. The case was brought before the local sharia court. The woman had to give evidence from another room, and her husband was able to defeat her request for a divorce by citing another hadith maintaining that husbands could beat their wives.
London Shias and the Procession Commemorating the Deaths of Ali, Hassan and Hussain
Hussain’s a Sunni, and most of the mosques he attends are also of that orthodox branch of Islam. In London, he attends a Shia mosque, and is shocked and horrified by the self-inflicted violence performed during their commemoration of the Battle of Karbala. Shias believe that Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, was the true successor to Mohammed as the leader of the early Muslim community. He was passed over, and made a bid for the caliphate, along with his two sons, Hasan and Hussain, who were finally defeated by the Sunnis at the above battle. This is commemorated by Shias during the month of Moharram, when there are special services at the mosque and the jaloos, a commemorative procession. During the services and the processions, Shias express their grief over their founders’ martyrdom by beating their chests, matam, faces and whipping themselves. They also slash themselves with swords. All this appears to go on at the London mosque, to Hussain’s horror. He is particularly disturbed by young children beating their chests and faces in the worship the night before, and wonders how this isn’t child abuse.
Separatist Attitudes and Political Activism in Mosques
He is also concerned about the political separatism and activism he sees in some of the mosques. They don’t pray for the Queen, as Christians and Jews do, but there are prayers for the Muslim community throughout the world and funeral prayers for Morsi, the former Islamist president of Egypt. He finds mosques and Islamic charities working for Muslims abroad, and activists campaigning on behalf on Palestine, Kashmir and other embattled Muslim countries and regions, but not for wider British society. Some of the worshippers and Imams share his concern. One Muslim tells him that the problem isn’t the Syrian refugees. They are medical men and women, doctors, nurses and technicians. The problem is those asylum seekers from areas and countries which have experienced nothing but war and carnage. These immigrants have trouble adapting to peace in Britain. This leads to activism against the regimes in the countries they have fled. Afghan and Kurdish refugees are also mentioned as donning masks looking for fights. Some of the worshippers in the mosques Hussain attends had connections to ISIS. In London he recalls meeting a glum man at a mosque in 2016. The man had toured the Middle East and Muslim Britain asking for signatures in a petition against ISIS. The Middle Eastern countries had willingly given theirs. But an academic, a White convert who taught at British university, had refused. Why? He objected to the paragraph in the petition denouncing ISIS’ enslavement of Yazidi and other women. This was in the Quran, he said, and so he wouldn’t contradict it. This attitude from a British convert shocked the man, as usually objections to banning slavery come from Mauretania and Nigeria, where they are resented as western interference. And in another mosque in Bradford, he is told by the imam that he won’t allow the police to come in and talk about the grooming gangs. The gangs used drugs and alcohol, which are forbidden in Islam and so are not connected to the town’s mosques.
Islamophobia against Northern Irish Muslims
But Islam isn’t a monolith and many Muslims are far more liberal and engaged with modern western society. Going into an LGBTQ+ help centre, he’s met by a Muslim woman on the desk. This lady’s straight and married, but does not believes there’s any conflict between her faith and working for a gay organisation. And in reply to his question, she tells him that her family most certainly do know about it. He meets two female Muslim friends, who have given up wearing the hijab. One did so after travelling to Syria to study. This convinced her that it was a pre-Islamic custom, and she couldn’t find any support for it in the Quran. She also rejected it after she was told at university that it was feminist, when it wasn’t. In Belfast he visits a mosque, which, contrary to Islamic custom, is run by two women. The worship appears tolerant, with members of different Muslims sects coming peacefully together, and the values are modern. But this is an embattled community. There is considerable islamophobia in Northern Ireland, with Muslims sufferings abuse and sometimes physical assault. One Protestant preacher stirred up hate with a particularly islamophobic sermon. Many of the mosque’s congregation are converts, and they have been threatened at gun point for converting as they are seen as leaving their communities. Travelling through Protestant and Roman Catholic Belfast, Hussain notices the two communities’ support for different countries. On the Nationalist side of the peace walls are murals supporting India and Palestine. The Loyalists, on the other hand, support Israel. But back in London he encounters more, very modern liberal attitudes during a conversation with the two daughters of a Muslim women friends. They are very definitely feminists, who tell him that the problem with Islam, is, no offence, his sex. They then talk about how toxic masculinity has been a bad influence on British Islam.
Liberal Islam and the Support of the British Constitution
In his travels oop north, Hussain takes rides with Muslim taxi drivers, who are also upset at these all-Muslim communities. One driver laments how the riots of 2011 trashed White businesses, so the Whites left. In Scotland, another Muslim cabbie, a technician at the local uni, complains about Anas Sarwar, the first Muslim MP for Scotland. After he left parliament, Sarwar left to become governor of the Punjab in Pakistan. The cabbie objects to this. In his view, the man was serving just Muslims, not Scotland and all of its people. During ablutions at a mosque in Edinburgh, he meets a British army officer. The man is proud to serve with Her Majesty’s forces and the army has tried to recruit in the area. But despite their best efforts and wishes, Muslims don’t wish to join.
In London, on the other hand, he talks to a modern, liberal mullah, Imam Jalal. Jalal has studied all over the world, but came back to Britain because he was impressed with the British constitution’s enshrinement of personal liberty and free speech. He believes that the British constitution expresses the maqasid, the higher objectives Muslim scholars identified as the root of the sharia as far back al-Juwaini in the 11th century. Jalal also tells him about al-shart, a doctrine in one of the Muslim law schools that permits women to divorce their husbands. The marriage law should be reformed so that the nikah becomes legal, thus protecting Muslim wives with the force of British law. And yes, there would be an uproar if prayers for the Queen were introduced in the mosques, but it could be done. Both he and Hussain talk about how their father came to Britain in the late 50s and early 60s. They wore three-piece suits, despite the decline of the empire, were proud to be British. There was time in this country when Muslims were respected. In one factory, when a dispute broke out, the foreman would look for a Muslim because they had a reputation for honesty. The Muslim community in these years would have found the race riots and the terrorist bombings of 7/7 and the Ariana Grande concert simply unbelievable. Had someone told them that this would happen, they would have said he’d been watching too much science fiction.
Muslim Separatism and the Threat of White British Fascism
Hanging over this book is the spectre of demographic change. The Muslim population is expected to shoot up to 18 million later in the century and there is the real prospect of Britain becoming a Muslim majority country. In fact, as one of the great commenters here has pointed out, this won’t happen looking at the available data. If Scotland goes its own way, however, the proportion of Muslims in England will rise to 12 per cent, the same as France and Belgium. For Hussain, it’s not a question of how influential Islam will be in the future, but the type of Islam we will have. He is afraid of Muslim majority towns passing laws against everything the Muslim community considers forbidden. And as politicians, particularly Jeremy Corbyn and the Muslim politicos in the Labour party treat Muslims as a solid block, rather than individuals, he’s afraid that Muslim communalism and its sense of a separate identity will increase. This may also produce a corresponding response in the White, Christian-origin English and Brits. We could see the rise of nationalist, anti-Islam parties. At one point he foresees three possible futures. One is that the mosques will close the doors and Muslims will become a separate community. Another is mass deportations, including self-deportations. But there are also reasons to be optimistic. A new, British Islam is arising through all the ordinary Muslims finding ways to accommodate themselves within liberal, western society. They’re doing it quietly, unobtrusively in ordinary everyday matters, underneath all the loud shouting of the Islamists.
The Long Historical Connections between Britain and Islam
In his conclusion, Hussain points out that Islam and Britain have a long history together. Queen Elizabeth I, after her excommunication by the Pope, attempted to forge alliance with the Ottoman Sultan. She succeeded in getting a trading agreement with the Turkish empire. In the 17th century, the coffee shop was introduced to Britain by a Greek-Turk. And in the 8th century Offa, the Anglo-Saxon king of Mercia, used Muslim dirhams as the basis for his coinage. This had the Muslim creed in Arabic, with his head stamped in the middle of the coin. Warren Hastings, who began the British conquest of India, opened a madrassa, sitting on its governing board and setting up its syllabus. This is the same syllabus used in the narrowly religious Muslim schools, so he’s partly to blame for them. During the First World War 2.5 million Muslims from India willingly fought for Britain. Muslim countries also sheltered Jews from the horrors of Nazi persecution. He’s also impressed with the immense contribution Muslims gave to the rise of science, lamenting the superstition he sees in some Muslim communities. He really isn’t impressed by one book on sale in a Muslim bookshop by a modern author claiming to have refuted the theory that the Earth goes round the sun.
To Combat Separatism and Caliphism, Celebrate British Values of Freedom and the Rule of Law
But combatting the Muslims separatism is only one half of the solution. Muslims must have something positive in wider mainstream society that will attract them to join. For Hussain, this is patriotism. He quotes the late, right-wing philosopher Roger Scruton and the 14th century Muslim historian ibn Khaldun on patriotism and group solidarity as an inclusive force. He cites polls showing that 89 per cent of Brits are happy with their children marrying someone of a different ethnicity. And 94 per cent of Brits don’t believe British nationality is linked to whiteness. He maintains that Brits should stop apologising for the empire, as Britain hasn’t done anything worse than Russia or Turkey. He and Imam Jalal also point out that the Turkish empire also committed atrocities, but Muslims do not decry them. Rather, the case of a Turkish TV show celebrating the founder of the Turkish empire, have toured Britain and received a warm welcome at packed mosques. He points out that he and other Muslims are accepted as fellow Brits here. This is not so in other countries, like Nigeria and Turkey, where he could live for decades but wouldn’t not be accepted as a Nigerian or Turk. And we should maintain our country’s Christian, Protestant heritage because this is ultimately the source of the values that underlie British secular, liberal society.
He also identifies six key values which Britain should defend and celebrate. These are:
The Rule of Law. This is based on Henry II’s synthesis of Norman law and Anglo-Saxon common law, to produce the English common law tradition, including Magna Carta. This law covers everyone, as against the sharia courts, which are the thin end of an Islamist wedge.
Individual liberty. The law is the protector of individual liberty. Edward Coke, the 17th century jurist, coined the phrase ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’. He also said that ‘Magna Carta is such a fellow he will have no sovereign’ It was this tradition of liberty that the Protestant emigrants took with them when they founded America.
Gender equality – here he talks about a series of strong British women, including Boadicea, the suffragettes, Queen Elizabeth and, in Johnson’s opinion, Maggie Thatcher. He contrasts this with the Turkish and other Muslim empires, which have never had a female ruler.
Openness and tolerance – here he talks about how Britain has sheltered refugees and important political thinkers, who’ve defended political freedoms like the Austrians Wittgenstein and Karl Popper.
Uniqueness. Britain is unique. He describes how, when he was at the Council for Foreign Relations, he and his fellows saw the Arab Spring as like Britain and America. The revolutionaries were fighting for liberty and secularism. There was talk amongst the Americans of 1776. But the revolutionaries didn’t hold western liberal values.
Racial Parity. Britain is not the same nation that support racists like Enoch Powell. He points to the German roots of the royal family, and that Johnson is part Turkish while members of his cabinet also come from ethnic minorities. Britain is not like France and Germany, where Muslims are seen very much as outsiders.
Whatever your party political opinions, I believe that these really are fundamental British values worth preserving. Indeed, they’re vital to our free society. On the other hand, he also celebrates Adam Smith and his theories of free trade as a great British contribution, because it allowed ordinary people and not just the mercantilist elite to get wealthy. Er, no, it doesn’t. But in a book like this you can’t expect everything.
Criticisms of Hussain’s Book
Hussain’s book caused something of a storm on the internet when it was released. The peeps on Twitter were particularly upset by the claims of Muslims bullying and violence towards Whites. There was a series of posts saying that he’d got the location wrong, and that the area in question was posh White area. In fact the book makes it clear he’s talking about a Muslim enclave. What evidently upset people was the idea that Muslims could also be racist. But some Muslims are. Way back c. 1997 Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote a report for the Committee for Racial Equality as it was then on anti-White Asian and Black hatred and violence. Racism can be found amongst people of all colours and religions, including Muslims.
People were also offended by his statement that in the future there could be mass deportations of Muslims. From the discussion about this on Twitter, you could be misled into thinking he was advocating it. But he doesn’t. He’s not Tommy Robinson or any other member of the far right. He’s horrified by this as a possibility, a terrible one he wishes to avoid. But these criticism also show he’s right about another issue: people don’t have a common language to talk about the issues and problems facing Britain and its Muslim communities. These need to be faced up to, despite the danger of accusations of racism and islamophobia. Tanjir Rashid, reviewing it for the Financial Times in July 2021, objected to the book on the grounds that Hussain’s methodology meant that he ignored other Muslim networks and had only spoken to out-of-touch mullahs. He pointed instead to an Ipsos-Mori poll showing that 88 per cent of Muslims strong identified with Britain, seven out of ten believed Islam and modern British society were compatible and only one per cent wanted separate, autonomous Muslim communities. It’s possible that if Hussain had also travelled to other towns where the Muslim population was smaller and more integrated with the non-Muslim population, he would have seen a very different Islam.
Intolerant Preaching Revealed by Channel 4 Documentary
On the other hand, the 2007 Channel 4 documentary, Undercover Mosque, found a venomous intolerance against Christians, Jews and gays being preached in a hundred mosques. A teacher was effectively chased out of his position at a school in Batley because he dared to show his pupils the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in a class on tolerance. He is still in hiding, fearing for his life. Hussain cites government statistics that 43,000 people are under police surveillance because political extremism, 90 per cent of whom are Muslims.
These are vital questions and issues, and do need to be tackled. When I studied Islam in the 90s, I came across demands in the Muslim literature I was reading for separate Muslim communities governed by Islamic law. This was accompanied by the complaint that if this wasn’t granted, then Britain wasn’t truly multicultural. More recently I saw the same plea in a book in one of Bristol’s secondhand and remaindered bookshops, which based its argument on the British colonisation of America, in which peoples from different nationalities were encouraged to settle in English territories, keeping their languages and law. It might be that the mullahs are preaching separatism, but that hardly anybody in the Muslim community is really listening or actually want the caliphate or a hard line separate Muslim religious identity.
Conclusion
I do believe, however, that it is an important discussion of these issues and that the sections of the book, in which liberal Muslims, including Hussain himself, refute the vicious intolerance preached by the militants, are potentially very helpful. Not only could they help modern Muslims worried by such intolerant preaching and attitudes, and help them to reject and refute them, but they also show that a modern, liberal, western Islam is very possible and emerging, in contradiction to Fascists and Islamophobes like Tommy Robinson.
I’m trying not to blog too much about Ed Hussain’s book, Among the Mosques, as I wish to write a review of the book as a whole when I finish reading it. But this is too important. The report on the Rotherham Pakistani grooming gangs was released last week and has been widely criticised. Although the report acknowledge the massive failure of the police and local authorities to deal with the massive abuse of White girls – there were 1,400 odd victims – no-one responsible has been punished or even named. The report’s and the authorities’ failure to do this has been widely reported and attacked on various right-wing media, such as GB News.
One of the errors the report identifies in the handling of the abuse was that neither the police nor the local authorities attempted to engage with the local community. I’m sure this is correct, but I’m not sure how cooperative the local Asian and Muslim community would have been even if they had. In his book Hussain describes a conversation he had with Imam Hasnain, the pir, or leader of a Sufi biraderi (brotherhood) that acts as a patronage network controlling a large number, if not the majority, of the mosques in Bradford. Hasnain and the other leaders of the brotherhood are so influential that they are courted by local politicians. On page 132, the pir tells Hussain that he won’t let the police come into the mosques to talk about the grooming gangs and their abuse.
”The police want to come into our mosques and speak to the congregations about not grooming white girls. It has been an issue in the past.’
‘And?’ I ask, probing his reticence.
‘I can’t let that happen.’
‘Why not?’ I ask, aghast. ‘Surely you’ve heard the facts about what happened in Rotherham, how Muslim men targeted non-Muslim White girls over decades?’
‘What have these men to do with Islam?’ he asks, with a defensive shrug and the characteristic twist of the hand of Asian elders.
‘There are two factors involved in those cases again and again: drugs and alcohol. Does Islam permit these two things? Of course not. Yes, they have Muslim names and Pakistani backgrounds, but our mosques are not responsible for their criminality. These issues will be with us for a long time in Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Keighley and other cities. But unless the police can prove it is now down to drugs and alcohol, we will not open the mosque doors to them.”
The same pir blames the British and our government for a variety of ills affecting Muslims, from the partition of India to the disappearance of the White community in Bradford. He denies that Whites are absent from the city and recites a list of postcodes to show where they allegedly still reside, despite Hussain telling him he hasn’t seen an White people. And he goes on to blame the massive Islamic presence on the town on the fact that the government sent a great number of Syrian refugees there. It’s all British double standards against Muslims, double standards that are creating Islamophobia. And he defends the demands for Salman Rushdie’s death because of the Satanic Verses.
Now Hasnain is right that the groomers used drugs and alcohol to seduce their victims, and they weren’t connected with the mosques. But the refusal to allow the police in to speak to the mosques’ congregations seems too facile and more than a little suspicious in itself. No-one has claimed that the mosques as organisations were responsible for the abuse. But one the natural places to reach out to particular communities is through their places of worship, regardless of the particular religion. Back in the 90s, for example, the police came to the local church in my part of south Bristol to talk about drugs and the immense harm they cause. This obviously doesn’t mean that the cops thought the local congregation was seething with drug freaks and dealers. It was just a good venue to address the local community. And the same would also be true of the cops talking about the grooming gangs in the mosques in Bradford.
And what comes across to me from Hasnain’s defensive attitude and blank refusal is that he’s motivated by the Asian honour and shame culture. My guess is that he feels that the grooming gangs are deeply shameful and that talking about them will also shame and dishonour the Muslim community in Bradford, and so there’s not just a refusal to accept that the mosques were responsible, which is perfectly right, but a refusal to allow the police to even talk about it in them. And in such a deeply religious community as Muslim Bradford appears to be, it seems to me that this effectively stops the police addressing the community on this issue.
And I wonder whether the cops and local authorities in Rotherham would have met with a similar blank refusal, had they tried to approach them about addressing them in their mosques and community centres about the gangs.
More dangerous nonsense from the Johnson gang currently holding Britain hostage. A few days ago the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the deportations of the channel migrants to Rwanda was illegal and stopped it from taking place. This has sent the Tories and their supporters into what Molesworth would sa was ‘a fearful bate’. They and various right-wing YouTubers are now suggesting that Britain should leave the court, and that Boris should issue a British bill of rights. You know, like parliament did at the time of the Glorious Revolution. They’ve been talking about this for as long as Brexit has been an issue, if not before. How dare those dreadful foreigners tell us what to do! Patrick Stewart made an excellent video about this issue a few years ago. He played a Prime Minister, who said he was physically sick of Europe and European legislation. His cabinet then inform him that the European legislation on human rights is based very much on British law, and that we were one of the major parties to its compilation. If you’re against European Human Rights Legislation, you’re also attacking it’s basis in British law, at least when it was formulated. But why worry about such petty historical facts when you have the chance to get the Brexiteer public into a frothing nationalistic rage?
And then there’s the problem of what the Tories are going to replace the European legislation with. The chances are that it’s going to be much weaker on protections. We’re already seeing the Tories passing legislation to clamp down on demonstrations, especially after the various protests by Extinction Rebellion. My guess any Bill of Rights the Tories pass will be worse, and very much curb the right to free speech and assembly, as well as a range of other rights, all while proclaiming that it’s doing the opposite.
Tony Benn is absolutely right. He said that what the Tories would do to migrants, they will start doing to the rest of us. And they are.
They are using the public outrage against migrant deportation – outrage they have done much to foment – to begin another stage in their campaign to deprive the rest of us of our rights. Let’s not fall for their lies and nationalist hysteria.
I had this bit of news come today in an email newsletter from the Stop the War Coalition. Following the fatal shooting of a journalist for Arab news agency, al-Jazeera, the Coalition are organisation a protest tomorrow, 14th May 2022, outside the Beeb’s headquarters in Portland Place in the Smoke. The email reads
‘Protest for Palestine – Tomorrow!
Israel’s murder of Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in occupied Jenin is part of an escalation of violence against Palestinians. She was fatally shot in the head by Israeli forces while reporting on a military raid in the Jenin refugee camp yesterday. Her murder is described by Al-Jazeera as an “assassination in cold blood.”
The shameful and disturbing scenes of occupation forces attacking her funeral today highlight the urgent need to end Israeli apartheid. People across the world are taking to the streets to demand that Israeli forces are held to account and push for an end to the oppression of Palestinians.
Join us tomorrow at midday outside the BBC on Portland Place. The Palestinian people need our solidarity now more than ever.
Somehow I don’t think the lady’s shooting was entirely accidental. One of the articles in the Counterpunch book about the decline of critical reportage, especially of Bush and Blair’s Gulf War, End Times: The End of the Fourth Estate, discussed the number of journos who’d been killed covering the war. This isn’t exactly suspicious in itself, as war reporting, by its very nature, is extremely dangerous. But these were journalists who didn’t follow the approved Pentagon line, and were determined to show what was really happening rather than follow American state propaganda. William Blum in one of his book on American imperialism attacked the hypocrisy of the American government for decrying enemy attacks on civilian news broadcasting stations and journalists, while at the same time doing exactly the same. One major example was the American strike against the Serbian state broadcaster during the war in Yugoslavia. It looks to me that Abu Akleh was deliberately shot because she was a journalist for al-Jazeera, and therefore would have been instrumental in producing footage and commentary of what was really going on, outside Israeli and American spin.
I got this email from the Stop the War Coalition about changes to the meetings they were going to hold about the war in Ukraine and Yemen. The meeting about Ukraine was a teach-in, which was due to be held in London. However, Covid has meant that the event is being moved online, as is the meeting about the war in Yemen, solidly supported by our military-industrial complex. The email runs
Our Ukraine teach-in is now taking place online due to a number of speakers having Covid. Tomorrow’s event will run from 11am-2.15pm and has an excellent panel of speakers of leading activists and experts, including anti-war speakers from both Ukraine and Russia.
It is an important opportunity to analyse the causes of the war, discuss some of the key controversies it has raised and examine its likely consequences.
There will be discussion of Ukraine’s history, NATO’s record, the threat of nuclear war, attacks on Russian culture and the issue of refugees.
In January of this year over 400 civilians were killed or injured in airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition in their war on one of the poorest countries on earth – Yemen.
The war is approaching its eighth year. It’s a war in which British personnel produce the bombs, train the pilots, coordinate air strikes and gather intelligence. All while our government provides political cover and our media largely turns a blind eye.
Join us and Liberation on Zoom later in the day tomorrow to call for an immediate end to this horrendous British-backed war.
I’m not planning to go to them myself, but I thought I’d post it up here for anyone else who might want to attend. I think holding it online actually might be better, as not everyone can go to London. Holding it on Zoom means people from across the country can attend simply by logging on, so they might have a bigger audience. The teach-in on Ukraine has a truly stellar cast of speakers, one of whom, if I recall correctly, is Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani.
As for the war in Yemen, our government is deeply implicated through selling the Saudis the armaments and providing them with military personnel and expertise in the first place. This is what all the ‘wonderful kit’ does, that Dave Cameron boasted about on his visit to an arms factory in Lancashire.
The idea behind the arms sales, apart from just sheer, amoral profit, is that they will act to encourage the countries buying them to purchase other British products. But they don’t. They just buy arms. Arms we shouldn’t be selling to deeply repressive, murderous despotism like Saudi Arabia.
Leonid Hrabovsky, Ukrainian/English, English Ukrainian Dictionary (New York: Hippocrene Books 1993).
I’ve an interest in languages. In addition to doing German for ‘O’ and ‘A’ level at school all those years ago, I also did Russian ‘O’ level as an additional language. Back in the 90s I thought I’d try and teach myself a bit of Ukrainian as well. It’s an east Slavonic language like Russian, and is also written in the Cyrillic alphabet. It’s also somewhat like Polish. For example, the Russian word for town is gorod, but the Ukrainian is misto, similar to the Polish miasto. This isn’t surprising, as for centuries Ukraine, along with Lithuania, was part of the Republic of Poland. It’s doubtless due to those historical ties that Poland has taken in so many Ukrainian refugees.
In the end I never actually got round to teaching myself the language, but I still find it and the history and culture of the nations of eastern Europe fascinating. Since the Berlin Wall fell there have been other books available on Ukrainian in the high street bookstores as well. A few years ago I saw a book on colloquial Ukrainian in the Bristol branch of Waterstones.
I’m sure that the people offering to help with the Ukrainian refugees, including opening up their homes to them, probably have some connection to the country and its people already and may well be more than familiar with the language. But I thought I’d post this anyway to show what is available.
Best wishes to everyone helping those seeking sanctuary in the West.
I got an email yesterday from Arise, the festival of Labour left ideas, announcing their agenda and the speakers for their Zoom meeting this afternoon, ‘Making Another World Possible’. The email runs
Making Another World Possible – Agenda announced.
Register here // Share & invite here // Retweet here to spread the word. Online event. Saturday March 5, 13.00-16.30.
Hello David
We are writing to announce the agenda for the major Making Another World Possible: An Internationalist Agenda for the Left & Labour event taking place this Saturday, which can be found below, with sessions on The Global Struggle for Climate & Vaccine Justice; Build voices for peace : No to war – no to nuclear weapons – refugees welcome here +a Women for peace, global justice & socialist change closing rally.
In the context of the increasingly dangerous times we live in, the whole event on March 5 (full details below) will be a key point to organise for an international agenda for justice and equality. Be there!
Yours in solidarity, The Arise Festival volunteers.
EVENT AGENDA:
1pm-2.05pm The Global Struggle for Climate & Vaccine Justice
Diane Abbott MP Jon Trickett MP Gyekye Tanoh, Third World Solidarity Network, Ghana Nick Dearden, Global Justice Now Asad Rehman, War on Want Chair: Mish Rahman, NEC & Momentum
2.15pm-3.20pm Build voices for peace : No to war – no to nuclear weapons – refugees welcome here
Jeremy Corbyn MP Richard Burgon MP Jess Barnard, Young Labour Chair Sophie Bolt, CND Murad Qureshi, Stop the War Coalition Sabby Dhalu, Stand Up to Racism Chair: Matt Willgress, Labour Outlook
3.30-4.15pm Closing Rally – Women for peace, global justice & socialist change #IWD2022
Jeremy Corbyn MP Richard Burgon MP Jess Barnard, Young Labour Chair Sophie Bolt, CND Murad Qureshi, Stop the War Coalition Sabby Dhalu, Stand Up to Racism Chair: Matt Willgress, Labour Outlook
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