Yesterday, Simon Sideways, a self-proclaimed ‘White activist’, put up a piece on his YouTube channel asking people what they will do when the Muslims finally take over and start forcing people to convert. It was once again the Eurabia myth, that Muslim birth rates are far more than White Europeans, and so in a few decades they will become the majority religion on the continent and take it over. It’s nonsense, although Muslim populations are set to expand and this could cause problems if the alienation and turn of some Muslims to radical theologies continues. He illustrated his prediction by stating that Muslims had established sharia police in Germany, who were forcing both Muslims and non-Muslims to attend the mosques.
I checked this story by Googling it, and it appears to be several years old. From what I’ve uncovered, it appears that a group of seven radical Muslims led by a German convert, Sven Laue, set up an Islamic sharia patrol in Wuppertal in Bavaria in 2014 or 2016. The German police arrested them and charged them under the Basic Law. This is article in the German constitution that forbids anti-democratic organisation and political parties. It’s a product of the denazification after World War II and has been used against neo-Nazi organisations like the National Democrat Party. The German Communist party evaded a ban by dissolving themselves and then holding a special congress at which it was declared that they recognised that society would have to go through a period of democracy. This is standard Marxist dogma, in which society goes through a stage of bourgeois democracy in which the remains of feudalism are cleared away before the workers take over and establish socialism. The seven were acquitted, but there was some kind of appeal, and in 2019 they were convicted and sent down.
The German authorities are as concerned as our political class about the growth of parallel societies. In the 1980s the German trade union confederation accused the Turkish sections of practising separatism while claiming to integrate with ethnic Germans. A few years ago the mayor of one of the German cities with a large Turkish population wrote a book describing their alienation and anti-social behaviour, sometimes violent, towards ethnic German. This was somewhat surprising, as he was a member of the SPD, the German socialist party, who I think expelled him soon after. It hasn’t, however, been only in Germany that vigilante sharia police have appeared. A group of fanatics at Anjem Chaudhury’s mosque in London set one up and posted their exploits on YouTube, before the police pounced on them.
As for forced conversion, Islamic laws forbids the forcible conversion of Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians and/or Hindus, although massacres have occurred throughout history. This law was obeyed by the Ottomans in the Balkans. In the 7th century one of the sultans wanted to convert the indigenous Christian population by armed force, only to be told by the majlis, the assembly of Muslim clergy, that it was not permitted. Such toleration does not extend to pagans and atheists, who may be forced to convert to Islam on pain of death.
Sideways seems to have seen or read a garbled, very dated version of the story about the German sharia patrols, probably from an extreme right-wing source. There are problems with the growth of parallel Islamic societies in Britain, France, Germany and no doubt elsewhere, but the Muslims aren’t set to take over Europe and what attempts there have been to set up sharia police are minuscule – there were only seven members of Laue’s wretched outfit – and have not been tolerated by the authorities.
GB News, the self-proclaimed alternative to the ‘wet, woke BBC’, is in this fortnight’s Private Eye. The broadcaster apparently has overtaken Sky News in ratings, and has taken to pushing stupid, and potentially dangerous conspiracy theories. These include myths that the vaccine doesn’t work, or is responsible for deaths, and that there’s no need for the lockdown. Pretty much staples of the wider right-wing anti-vaxxer fringe. But one of these conspiracy theories comes very close to fascism. Mark Steyn has apparently told his viewers that the coronavirus vaccine is the cause of the falling birthrate in the west of the ‘Aryans’, who built civilisation. Firstly, as the 19th century linguist, who used the term ‘Aryan’ for what are now termed the Indo-European languages, George Muller, it’s a linguist not racial term. A dark-skinned Indian, who speaks Hini or one of the other languages descended from Sanskrit, or an Urdu-speaking Pakistani can both be fairly described as Aryans, because their languages are derived from that introduced by the Aryans, who invaded Indian c. 3000 BC. But both would be targeted by the Nazis over here because of their race. Muller stated quite clearly that conflating Aryan with race was dangerous, and it’s a pity more people didn’t listen to him otherwise the carnage of the Third Reich might have been avoided.
He’s right that the birthrates in the developed west are falling along with the sperm count of western men. This is alarming, as there have been predictions by respectable magazines and newspapers that if it continues, by 2050 half of western men will be considered clinically infertile. No-one really knows the cause of this, but it’s been suggested since the 1990s that a type of plastic, phthallates, may be responsible. Other causes are probably the industrial pollution responsible for the reproductive deformities in amphibians, which Alex Jones notoriously declared were ‘turning the frickin’ frogs gay’. These chemicals are believed to mimic female hormones, hence their damage to those animals. I’ve also seen claims that it’s all due to female hormones from the reproductive pill getting into the biosphere, but I haven’t seen any scientist make this claim. In my opinion, it comes from that part of the right which is anti-feminist and so pro-life as to condemn contraception as well as abortion. I also got the impression that all western men were affected, including Blacks and Asians, and not just Whites.
Steyn’s claims resemble the conspiracy theories that were going around the Black communities in America and possibly apartheid South Africa back in the 90s. These claimed that the government was putting chemicals in Coca-Cola to sterilise young Black men. That was totally wrong, though it was understandable given the persecution of Blacks in both those countries. Steyn’s is a first-world, White version of this. It comes very close to all the stupid and murderous conspiracy theories about the machinations of the Jews to enslave and destroy the White race, although as far as I know Steyn isn’t an anti-Semite.
He is, however, an Islamophobe. About a decade ago he was a partner with late Reaganite bloviator Rush Limbaugh and his radio station out in New Hampshire. Much of the content Steyn put out on his blogs and columns on the internet were attacks on Islam, including some of the weirder rulings made by Iran’s late Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini. He was one of those pushing the ‘Eurabia’ fear. This holds that Muslim birthrates are outstripping those of indigenous European Whites to such an extent that they will become the dominant race and religion and impose sharia law. A friend of mine told me he did some calculations, and that’s simply not going to happen. I don’t doubt that the Muslim population will expand immensely in the next decades, and this will present serious problems if the radicals and Islamists extend their influence over these communities, but it won’t lead to their population overtaking everyone else’s.
Steyn also tried to warn or scare people with the example of Feyenoord in the Netherlands. This is a majority Muslim town where some decades ago the Muslim dominated city council publicly invited the non-Muslim population to convert. I don’t know, but I think their attitude would be unremarkable, perhaps even ordinary in very pious, hardline Muslim countries like Pakistan, where non-Muslims can come under very intense pressure to convert. But obviously in the context of the non-Muslim, secular west, where religion is considered a matter for the individual’s private conscience, it’s totally unacceptable. The problem is, I don’t know how common such political moves by Muslim-controlled local authorities are. As far as I know, it only happened in Feyenoord, although I’m sure that non-Muslims living in solidly Muslim areas are under pressure to conform to their standards of behaviour.
Away from Steyn, the article describes how GB News, like Fox over in the US, threw in their lot with Donald Trump, talking him as US president until it became the ‘MAGA channel’. Their predictions of Trump’s eminent suitability for the Oval Office was definitely born out by the Orange Buffoons massive greed, incompetence and disastrous policies towards blue collar workers – more attacks on their rights, further decimation of their welfare provisions to enrich Trump’s friends and donors, and more outsourcing. As well as attempts to muzzle federal climate and environmental scientists for the benefit of the oil industry. And I could go on.
As for GB News’ attitudes over here, it’s solidly behind Farage and Brexit and resolutely against the welfare state and the NHS. If you’re a member of the working class, GB News is not your friend. But the stupid conspiracy theories about the coronavirus vaccine threaten to do real harm. We’ve already seen instances where people have refused the vaccine, then caught the virus and died. And Steyn’s story about birthrates and ‘Aryans’ threatens to encourage real Nazis and Fascists, who’ll target not just Muslims but Jews.
This obviously isn’t something you want to hear, but it needs to be recognised and the problem tackled properly. A few days ago the Shawcross Report into the operation of the Prevent programme was leaked to the press. The Prevent programme was the scheme launched by Blair as part of the ‘War on Terror’. It was set up to identify and deradicalize people, like schoolchildren, who were being drawn into Islamist terrorism. The report has been repeatedly delayed from fears that some of the individuals discussed in it would sue. It found that instead of the money being used to deradicalize people, it was instead being used by Islamist groups to fund their activities and propaganda. This included one group, who called on Muslim soldiers in the British army to disobey orders. Which is mutiny. Furthermore, the programme was more focussed on identifying and punishing White nationalists in contrast to the other anti-terrorism organisations. Of course, the report was immediately denounced as ‘harmful to community cohesion’ and racist and islamophobic.
Unfortunately, I am not remotely surprised. Private Eye a long time ago quoted a passage from Ed Hussein’s book, The Islamist, in which he described watching a long line of Muslim clergy and community leaders entering No. 10 to reassure Blair that they were all moderates and were doing their bit to tackle extremism in their communities. And he knew that every one of them was lying, and that they were all Islamist radicals. A friend of mine used to help teach Islam at university. One year his university arranged to host an interfaith conference between Christians and Muslims. He told me that the Muslim delegates were all jihadis. As for the misplaced focus on White fascism, I think this is a result of repeated criticisms from the Muslim community. Before the BNP finally collapsed, whenever the subject of tackling Muslim radical organisations was raised someone from one of the main Muslim organisations would indignantly retort that this was racist and islamophobic, and that they should ban the BNP instead. The Prevent programme has come under repeated attack from Muslims for supposedly being racist and Islamophobic. And whenever Muslim bigotry is exposed, as in the 2007 Channel 4 programme, Undercover Mosque, there are inevitably the same defensive claims about harming community cohesion. This is despite the fact that community cohesion was harmed the moment someone took the decision to invite the preachers of hate in. Simon Webb, who has very far right opinions himself, stated in one of his videos that the focus on tackling White extremists rather than Muslim was an attempt to mislead the public into believing that there were more of them and they were a bigger problem than the Islamists. Even allowing for Webb’s own views, I think he has a point. White fascists have used violence and terrorism. In the 1960s they bombed a couple of synagogues in London. Many of us still remember the mass violence between far right football hooligans and Black and Asian youths in the 70s and 80s, and the racist murder of Black kids has inspired pop songs attacking the hate and violence like ‘Down in the Subway’. In the 90s there was a bombing campaign by a member of the National Socialist party against Blacks, gays and Asians, in which nail bombs were planted in three pubs. People are very aware of the threat from White racial terrorists. Targeting these groups is also easier because it will have greater support from the left from the kind of people, who would suspect that a programme targeting Black or Asian terrorists is persecuting them unfairly. The police and local authorities, who refused to tackle the Pakistani grooming gangs in Rotherham and elsewhere did so because they didn’t want to start riots. I think the same attitude is behind the skewed focus in the Prevent programme. I think there is a reluctance amongst the political class to tackle ethnic minority criminality and extremism because of memories of the race riots of the 60s, 1981/2, and Oldham more recently, and a determination to prove Enoch Powell wrong in his lurid predictions of racial violence in the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.
Islamism is a real danger, but the proportion of people who hold Islamist views are trivially small. Only about five per cent of the Muslim population, according to the polls, want to be governed by shariah law. There are far greater numbers who support British democracy and values, albeit often moderated. This is why the Lotus Eaters, in order to show that the Muslim community rejects British traditional values, concentrated on single issues like Muslim disapproval of homosexuality and singing the national anthem. There is genuine opposition to Islamism and the preachers of hate from other parts of the Muslim community here in Britain. Back in the ’80s and ’90s Muslims organised their own demonstrations against the protests and hateful preaching of the extremists demanding the death of Salman Rushdie. Ed Hussein in his recent book states that his fathers’ generation came to Britain because they believed in our country and its values. I’ve heard other Muslims say that their parents came here to enjoy the freedom and opportunities they were denied in their own country. Mahyar Tousi, a true-blue Tory Brexiteer, said something similar in a recent video of his on the channel migrants. He stated that second and third generation British Blacks and Asians were against further immigration, not because they were traitors to their own kind, but because their parents and grandparents had come to this country to share and support its values and were concerned that later migrants did not share these. Tousi’s a libertarian Tory, who’d sell off the health service if he could, but he does have a point. Some of the Muslims in Hussein’s recent book stated that much of the violence and criminality their communities now suffered from came from recent migrants, like asylum seekers from war-torn parts of the world, who could not adapt to peace nor fully accept that they were not under threat from the state. One of the issues connected with immigration identified by one genuinely moderate imam, writing in the Financial Times in the ’90s, was that the shortage of home-grown Muslim clergy meant that bigoted preachers from Pakistan were being allowed in to rectify this shortage.
We really need to tackle the problem of Muslim radicalisation properly and squarely, without listening to reassuring blandishments and assurances of peace and cooperation from those who don’t believe remotely in it. And we can do so by strengthening and listening to genuinely moderate, liberal Muslims voices and supporting their protests and initiatives against such hate.
Sargon and his chums in the Lotus Eaters have asked their readers to send them suggestions for what issues they should write articles about. I’ve therefore sent them three in the comments section. These aren’t suggestions about what they should do about their libertarianism, their frantic support of privatisation and free market capitalism when both are disastrously failing. Nor did I tell them what they could do about their support for Donald Trump, who may well be making a come-back bid to be president. They just wouldn’t publish them and I expect all I’d get would be a storm of anger and abuse from their supporters if they did. Instead I just sent them three suggestions regarding the skewed attitudes among anti-racist activists regarding the historiography of slavery, the failure to protest against the Pakistani grooming gangs and demands for autonomous communities by Islamic theocrats and Black activists. Here’s the comments I left:
‘I could present you with a list. I’d like it if you could tackle the way the historiography of slavery is being skewed. I’ve got the distinct impression that the anti-racist activists demanding reparations for slavery do not want it taught in schools or people made aware that slavery was universal and not invented by Whites; that it existed in Europe long before Europeans enslaved Africans; that Africans were also enslaving other Africans long before the transatlantic slave trade, and that some African states were not only complicit but did extremely well out of it. They also do not want to hear how the British government began improving conditions for slaves before abolition, nor how we attempted to abolish indigenous slavery in other parts of the British empire and around the world. They don’t want to know that Indians also enslaved Africans, or that the Arab slave trade resulted in the export of 14 million slaves from the continent. And above all, the really don’t want the Barbary pirates discussed. They have been erased from the narrative about slavery in the view of one academic author because they don’t fit with the idea that Whites enslaved Blacks, not the other way round. And the French postmodernists have a very racist view of them in which the pirates are ‘nationalists’ and their ‘white victims ‘imperialists’.’
‘Going further, the utter failure of the anti-racist left to protest against the Pakistani grooming gangs. Following Callum’s coverage of Unite’s and Stand Up To Racism’s protest against Tommy Robinson and his film about the rape of Telford, I wrote to Unite and SUTR complaining about their failure to protest against the gangs. I suggested that the organise a multicultural march against them, ’cause Whites have protested with Blacks on their campaigns against racism. No reply. I wrote to my local paper, the Bristol Post, suggesting this, and also to the Independent. No reply. I also wrote to Asher Craig, Bristol’s deputy elected mayor and head of equalities and children’s services. She’s a Black woman who said she wanted a museum of slavery in Bristol. No reply there either. This said very clearly to me that when it comes to racism, for the anti-racist left racism against Whites does not matter.’
‘And if you really want to be controversial, you could write a piece about colonialist attitudes among Muslims and Blacks. This exists. Anjem Chaudhury’s outfit in Belgium, Sharia4Belgium, wanted a separate Muslim territory in that country, governed by sharia law and with Arabic as the spoken language. The same demands were made over here in some of the literature published by the British Muslim publishers. A more recent argument I came across a couple of years ago explicitly ties it to the colonisation of America. The way the British encouraged other nations to settle in their colonies by allowing them to preserve their culture and laws, these Muslims argue that Muslims in the west should also be allowed to retain their laws under the protection of the British state. I’ve also seen Black British writers and politicos demand separate spaces for Blacks and autonomous communities.’
I know there are issues about people from the left dealing with right-wingers like Sargon and his crew. These are issues that I’d like the left to tackle. But they really don’t want to tackle them or see them discussed. And so, unfortunately, the only avenue is to take them up with the right and see if they will.
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.
Okay, I’ll admit it. One of the reasons I bought Jonathan A.C. Brown’s Slavery & Islam was to see if there was any truth in the allegation by Tommy Robinson, the EDL and related anti-Islam groups that the Pakistani grooming gangs based their abuse in Islamic sex slavery. And reading his book, it seems very strongly that the answer it ‘no’.
Part of their argument comes from the revival of slave-concubinage by ISIS in the sale of the Yezidi women and girls in Iraq as sex slaves. But this also shocked the Muslim world. Islamic abolitionism began in the 19th century. It was prompted by the abolitionist movement in Christian Europe and America, but was no less sincere for that. Muslim abolitionists have demanded the abolition of slaves for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it was simple political expediency, for others it was a genuine revulsion at forced servitude. For these Muslims took their cue from the sharia’s assumption that slavery is humanity’s default state, as Adam and Eve were both free. Again, similar views were held by Christians in Europe, such as the Lollards in the 15th century. ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’, for example. While the Quran and the sharia permits slavery, it is heavily regulated. Muslim abolitionists and anti-slavery activists see this as looking forward to final extinction of slavery and the condition when everyone shall be free. ISIS caused widespread outrage amongst nearly all Muslims because it was particularly extreme. It went much further in its reactionary attitudes than al-Qaeda. Which doesn’t mean that there weren’t already Salafists interested in enslaving infidel women. During the war in Bosnia a number of foreign Muslims wishing to fight to the defend the Muslims there inquired of a Saudi salafist preacher if they could enslave Serb women for concubines. He told them ‘no’, for the simple reason that it would make Islam look bad. This is feeble and nasty, but it’s something, I suppose. It shows that the Salafists wanted to revive sex slavery before ISIS, but they were very much a minority.
Brown states that slave-concubinage was very common in Islam. The mothers of the sultans and rulers of many Islamic states were slave concubines, and these could wield great power. Some of these women were highly educated and powerful, endowing grand mosques and other civic buildings. During the 17th century the Turkish empire entered a period of decadence, called by Turkish historians the ‘Sultanate of Women’ as the various slave-concubines vied with each other to promote their sons and rule through them.
Brown admits that the status and treatment of slave concubines could vary enormously. Some were beloved partners, mourned bitterly on their deaths by their husbands. Some could be highly educated in the arts and sciences, and the slave-concubines of the elite often felt that they had the same rights as free wives. There were also laws protecting them. A slave-concubine who became pregnant with her master’s child could not be sold, the child was free under Islamic law and the slave-concubine was manumitted after her master’s death. Other slave-concubines were treated much worse, but it does seem that they could invoke the law to protect them. Brown cites one case where slave-woman prosecuted her master because he had forced her to have sex with him and his brother. She had become pregnant and they had beaten her to abort the child. The qadi ruled in her favour. This is like the grooming gangs and they way they exploited their White female victims, including getting them pregnant and forcing them to have abortions. Rather than rooted in Islam, however, it just seems a product of ordinary, banal human evil, of a type that many Muslims, even in the Middle Ages, found abhorrent.
Brown also mentions a case from 13th century Damascus when a singing-girl sued her master for trying to force her into prostitution. Again the judge ruled in her favour, and demanded that she be sold. I realise that these are individual cases, and we don’t know how many other cases there were where women were successfully exploited, especially over such a wide cultural area. But it does show that at least in certain times and places slave women could invoke legal protection against such exploitation.
As for the grooming gangs themselves, they started their predation before the emergence of ISIS and were not practicing Muslims. They didn’t attend their local mosques, and I don’t think they prayed or read the Quran. This was recognised by one of the intellectuals in the EDL, who recommended instead that anti-Muslim activists should look instead to explanations in the ‘islamicate’, the underlying systems of attitudes, customs and values that guide everyday Muslim life but aren’t a formal part of the religion.
I think the motives behind the grooming gangs were racist as well as sexual, and they certainly have parallels to slavery, but it’s the exploitation of enslaved Black women by their master on the plantations in North and South America, rather than the Islamic world. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, when she was still worth reading, wrote a report for the Committee for Racial Equality in the 990s noting that a bitter anti-White racism existed in some parts of the Black and Asian communities. She was also appalled at the way Asians looked down on White women and the sexual freedom they enjoyed as immoral. She was not alone. One of the sketches on the Asian comedy show, Goodness Gracious Me, was a skit of the Country and Western song, ’30 Ways to Leave Your Lover’. This was about the stifling relationship Asian men could have with their mothers, titled ’30 Ways to Leave Your Mother’. Sung by Sanjeev Bhaskar, one of the lines was ‘She says that White girl’s just a whore’. Similar attitudes to western White women were recorded in the chapter on a Moroccan immigrant worker in the Netherlands in the book Struggle and Survival in the Middle East. The victims of the Pakistani grooming gangs were racially as well as sexually abused, and it looks like it came from a racist attitude towards the gora, a derogatory Asian terms for Whites, rather than anything in formal Islam.
And the parallels with the sexual exploitation of Black women in plantation slavery are very strong. The planters exploited their slaves because they were in their power, and could do as they liked. Western paedophiles have also exploited children in care homes, because they’re particularly vulnerable, sometimes sending them out to service their friends or political connections. But this was also opposite to the sexual restraint and high standards of chastity and purity required in relationships with respectable White women. While I was working at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum, I found a fascinating book on Brazilian slavery and racial attitudes by a Brazilian anthropologist. He noted that in traditional White Portuguese Brazilian culture sexual attitudes were extremely puritanical. Sex was supposed to be between husband and wife and solely for procreation. And you definitely weren’t supposed to enjoy it. There was a type of counterpane that was supposed to be placed between husband and wife, with a hole in it to allow them to do the deed, but not get any pleasure from it. Faced with these restrictions, the planters turned instead to exploiting their slaves for sex.
I got the impression that sexual attitudes amongst the Asian community in Britain are similarly puritanical. Sex is supposed to occur solely in marriage, which is frequently arranged. There have been honour killing of women for defying their families’ demands regarding marriage partners or for pursuing western-style relationships with people outside their religion. Like Whites or Hindus. In this situation, it does not seem remotely surprising to me that some Asians see White girls and women as suitable targets for sexual abuse and exploitation. After all, White women are all whores anyway and they deserve it. The same attitudes that motivated White planter to abuse enslaved Black women, because Blacks are racially inferior and highly sexed.
The grooming gangs therefore aren’t a product of Islam, except perhaps in the most general way as the product of Pakistani sexual puritanism and anti-White racism. But what annoys me about the scandal is not only that it was known about and covered up for 20 years or more, but that the authorities and the left are still trying to deny that anti-White racism played a part. This seems partly a fear of provoking anti-Asian racism among Whites in turn. Simon Webb of History Debunked put up a video about a report on the grooming gangs, which didn’t once mention what race or ethnicity they belonged to. This is wrong. All racism has to be seen as equally poisonous, whether it’s White, Black, Asian or whatever.
If White silence against anti-Black racism is violence, then so is silence when it comes to the racist abuse of Whites. And the left should be tackling that as well, rather than leave it to be exploited by the likes of Tommy Robinson.
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.
On Tuesay I put up a piece comment on the plans by two Black entrepreneurs to set up a Blacks-only town in rural Georgia, to be named Wakanda after the fictional African supertechnological nation in Marvel’s Black Panther. The idea’s part of a long tradition of American ideal communities, beginning with the first Puritan settlers. it recalls the Utopian Socialist communities of the 19th century as well as the Free Black townships set up by Baptist missionaries in Jamaica, Antiqua, Demerara and Berbice in order to protect the newly freed former slaves from re-enslavement by the planters. However, coming nearly a century and a half after the abolition of slavery in America and the British Empire, this looks more like the compounds and proposed colonies of White racists, that have been set up in the Hayden Lakes area of America and which a group of British Nazis tried and failed to set up on a French farm.
Paul Boateng and the Black and Asian Studies Association
Way back in 1984/5 the Black British Labour politician, Paul Boateng, called for the establishment of autonomous Black communities in Britain. He was criticised for this in the pages of the Observer, which rightly viewed it as an attempt by Blacks to introduce apartheid. I’ve mentioned before that when I was doing voluntary work for the Empire and Commonwealth I was for a time corresponding with a Black studies organisation. This was the Black and Asian Studies Association, based in London. I split with them over the views they expressed of Whites in a copy of their magazine they sent me. I think it was no. 32/33, around about 2001-3 or so. One of the views, which I objected to was their comment that Blacks need their own space. I presume they meant by this separate arts and community centres, rather than separate geographical areas. When Blacks and other ethnic groups are a minority, and a depressed minority, this is actually reasonable and just. But they made it after reporting an article in the Observer that predicted that after the middle of this century Whites would be a minority in Britain and Europe. This was followed by another comment firmly rejecting any restrictions on non-White immigration, because it was racist. Now there was no comment about the Observer article itself. It was simply presented as something their readers should know about. I don’t know whether the editor believed the prediction or not. They could have felt it was alarmist. I don’t know. But coming after this prediction, the continued support for unlimited immigration and separate spaces for Blacks – but not for Whites – struck me as simply a form of colonialism.
Demands for Muslim Autonomous Colonies
I recall reading a passage in Ali A. Allawi’s The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation (New Haven: Yale University Press 2009) in which he discusses the establishment of autonomous Muslim communities in America. He bases his argument on the methods used by the British in founding their own colonies. The British themselves were a minority, and so they encouraged the citizens of other European nations to settle in their colonies in exchange for which they promised to respect and preserve these peoples’ own languages, culture and laws. Thus America should permit the similar establishment of autonomous Muslim communities, who would be free to follow their own culture under sharia law but which nevertheless would still be loyal to the American state. Allawi, a former Minister of Defence and Minster of Finance in the postwar Iraqi government, is a critique of both the westernisation of Islam and Salafi fundamentalism and Islamism. But this call for Islamic colonisation really can’t be tolerated. The best defence against it is the American separation of church and state, which was used against the followers of one of the grunge gurus from India when he tried to set up a theocratic town in Oregon.
The radical Islamist Anjem Chaudhry made the same demand for an autonomous Muslim community in the pages of the Financial Times colour supplement for the 1st January, 2000. Chaudhry, then running an outfit called Sharia4Belgium, was claiming that Muslims should have their own separate community with Arabic as its language under sharia law. I think he may have been able to argue this as Belgium is already split into several different regions occupied by its different traditional ethnic groups – French-speaking Wallonia, Flanders and a German-speaking enclave. Chaudhry’s own lack of engagement with Belgium’s traditional peoples is shown in the title of his organisation. The 4/for pun simply doesn’t work in either of the country’s two majority languages, French or Flemish. This is another demand for what is in effect Muslim colonisation.
Way back in the 1990s I briefly tried a postgraduate degree researching British Islam. I eventually gave up, partly because I couldn’t handle some of the polemic coming from the radical fringes. During this time I came across similar arguments contained in books from British Islamic publishers. One was on sharia law by Ibrahim E. Doi, the former head of the Islamic society at Oxford University. Another was a guide to the adab, the traditional Muslim system of morals and courtesy. The introductions to both books demanded the establishment of independent, autonomous Muslim communities, governed by sharia law, in Britain. If these were not permitted, then British multiculturalism was a sham.
Self-Enclosed Communities in Britain and Germany
Since then I have seen plenty of articles in the press, including liberal journals like Prospect, worrying about the increasing separation between White and Muslim communities. There was an article a while ago in that magazine discussing a city in the north of England, where the Muslim and non-Muslim White communities were nearly separate with a minimum of interaction. Other articles elsewhere in the press have mentioned the situation in Germany, where the Turkish minority may also form self-enclosed communities. It has been argued that in these communities, people can get by without any knowledge of German, supported as they are by Turkish businesses and able to watch and listen to Turkish broadcasting. But I don’t believe I’ve ever come across anyone discussing the demands for separate Islamic colonies, at least not in Britain. It’s possible that the journos writing those articles don’t know about and neither do British politicians. I’ve also never heard Tommy Robinson mention them either, so it seems very likely that he and his gang of thugs don’t know about it. On the other hand, it’s also possible that the authorities are aware of them. They’re just not publicising them for fear of riots and the breakdown of ‘community cohesion’. The same reason they permitted the Asian paedophile gangs in Rotherham to go on for so long.
In many ways this is doubtless a good thing, as you can imagine the massive scaremongering and islamophobia that would be generated by the right, including Tommy Robinson and the EDL and the Daily Heil. 9/11 saw a rise in hate crimes against Muslims, and Boris Johnson’s infamous article in the Torygraph attacking the burqa resulted in further physical attacks on the minority of Muslim women clad in the garment. Several were murdered.
Sharia Law Small Minority in British Islam
It’s important not to exaggerated the numbers of western Muslims, who may support this view. One of the papers a few years ago notoriously claimed that the majority of British Muslims wanted the establishment of sharia law here. In fact a close reading of the stats showed that only 5 per cent of Britain’s Muslims wanted it, and then only where it didn’t conflict with British law. I’ve heard that most Muslims in the West base their ideas on Islamic law on the Qu’ran, where most of this is about inheritance, rather than systems of government. I very much doubt that the majority of Muslims would welcome the formal imposition of what amounts to a system of autonomous ghettos, and certainly not those immigrants who have come to Britain to escape persecution in very draconian and authoritarian Islamic states.
The demands for separate, autonomous Muslim communities seem to be attempts by Islamic traditionalists to impose their views on the majority of their coreligionists, who seem more comfortable in a multi-faith society allowing the free interactions of people with different religious or non-religious views. And the general Muslim community seems to have become less insular, stressing engagement with wider British society rather than retreat. This has been shown in Muslim restaurants feeding the poor and homeless during the Christmas period, and community festivals like Eid, commemorating the end of Ramadan. This is celebrated with a large feast, which the Muslim community in parts of Bristol shared with their non-Muslim fellow residents.
No No-Go Zones in Britain
Fox News made itself a massive laughing stock a few years ago when it hysterically claimed that Muslims were taking over Britain. Birmingham was 100 per cent Muslim, which surprised the mayor and people of that great city. There were no-go areas in towns throughout Britain, where non-Muslims feared to tread. This was also angrily refuted by the mayors and politicos of those towns so accused, as well as ordinary British peeps.
Nevertheless, these calls for segregation do seem to be still around. A while ago I noticed in the ‘ethnicity’ shelves in Bristol’s Central Library a book by a prominent Muslim woman from one of the northern cities. I can’t remember who she was, but one of her claims was she was a matchmaker and an agony aunt, who had appeared on the Beeb’s Asian Network. The book’s blurb stated that it was about the rise of racial conflict and violence between Asians and other ethnic groups, and offered ‘a surprising solution’. The only surprising solution I can think of is segregation. I didn’t look at the book, so I might be wrong.
Belfield on Islam in Birmingham
I also wonder if this, or similar views, are secretly held by some of the leaders of Britain’s Muslim communities. Following the stabbings in Birmingham, right-wing radio host and Youtuber Alex Belfield put up video calling for Birmingham’s authorities to clamp down on the threatening environment in one particular area of the city. Some of this was uncontroversial. He specifically mentioned the druggies on the streets there. But he also, and some of the callers to his programme, claimed that there was a Muslim presence there which was overpowering and threatening to non-Muslims. He attacked the chanting coming from the local mosque, as well as preaching, some of which seemed to be political by Muslims on the street. This, he said, was not tolerated in other towns.
I wouldn’t like to say that Belfield is personally racist. Certainly one of the callers supporting his view wasn’t. She said she had no problem with the Black population of the area, who were also Brummies. But he is vehemently anti-immigrant, condemning the arrival of asylum seekers from Calais. He also seems to be have been taken in by the rumours that the stabbings were committed not by a Black Brit with mental health problems, but by one of the Somalian asylum seekers he and Nigel Farage have been moaning about. He also attacked Leeds English language local radio for broadcasting warnings about the Coronavirus in Urdu, which is the language, or one of the languages used on the Beeb’s Asian Network, which is also based in Leeds.
Covert Support for Extremism Among Some British Muslim Leaders
But there is a problem in that the leaders of Birmingham Central Mosque and British Islamic organisations have a history of saying one thing and believing quite another. Ed Hussain in his book, The Islamist, an account of his time as a militant Islamic radical, describes the various leaders of the British Muslim community, who visited No. 10 to reassure Tony Blair that they supported his campaign against Islamic radicalism, all the while holding the very beliefs they affected to condemn. It’s therefore quite possible that the leaders of whatever mosque Belfield was attacking may want Muslim autonomous areas, and are acting on this belief as far as they can in a democratic, pluralist society. I hope not, but I don’t know.
This is a situation that needs watching. It will be interesting to see if Black British and Muslim radicals start making demands for autonomous areas following developments in America. If so, they need to be discussed, refuted and fought. Such views would be unacceptable coming from White supremacists and racists, and should be no more tolerated coming from any other colour or religion.
There was outrage at the end of last month when Jake Hepple, an employee at Paradigm Precision, an aerospace engineering firm took exception to the Black Live Matter movement. Hepple flew a light aircraft over the Etihad stadium shortly after a matched had kicked off between Burnley and Manchester City, incensed at players from the two sides wearing shirts with the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ to support the movement, and so. The aircraft flew a banner across the sky declaring ‘White Lives Matter Burnley’. Despite initial statements by the police that no crime had been committed, this was seen very much as an example of hate speech. Hepple’s partner, Megan Rambadt, was sacked by her employer for making comments such as “I love Burnley but I must admit it’s pretty grim, that town centre is like a foreign country. Needs sorting” and “They need sending back on banana boats, stinkin bastards”. Hepple was also dismissed from his job soon after, with Paradigm Precision declaring that it did not condone or tolerate racism in any form. Apart from the stunt, it was revealed that Hepple had strong racist views of his own. Unite Against Fascism went through his Facebook page and found that he supported the EDL and had been photoed standing with its former fuhrer, Stephen Yaxley Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson. He had also posted these racist comments “Why would anyone in their right mind pay £90 for the new England shirt when it probably cost a company full of tree swinging spear throwers about 80p to make? Not a chance I’m paying that” and “I’m not even going to go into detail of how fucked up Sharia Law is, which is what some ‘people’ want in this country, absolutely mental this government”.
Burnley’s captain Ben Mee condemned Hepple’s stunt, saying “Fans like that don’t deserve to be around football … We’re ashamed, we’re embarrassed. It’s a minority of our supporters – I know I speak for a massive part of our support who distance ourselves from anything like that”. The Mirror also reported that those responsible for the stunt would face a lifetime ban from the Burnley ground. The club said “We wish to make it clear that those responsible are not welcome at Turf Moor”. Hepple himself was defiant, tweeting “Thanks a lot, no apology will be coming out as I’m not apologising for stating that white peoples lives matter as well”.
Unfortunately, Hepple has a point. The police and the authorities all too often have a needlessly aggressive attitude to Blacks and have shown apathy and indifference to their murder. This was also shown a week or so ago when the Met police stopped Black British athlete Bianca Williams and her family, dragging her and her husband out their car and seizing their baby on the suspicion that they were carrying drugs. They weren’t, and the rozzers’ behaviour served to stir up even further resentment against the police and the stop and search policy following the killing of George Floyd in America.
On Thursday at 9.00 pm, ITV are showing again the 1999 drama, The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, about Lawrence’s parents, Neville’s and Doreen’s battle to get justice for their son after he was killed by a White gang in a racist attack back in 1993. At 8.00 pm, before the drama begins, the commercial broadcaster is showing a programme Stephen Lawrence: Has Britain Changed? hosted by Rageh Omaar ande Anushka Asthana and with a panel of experts debating this question following Floyd’s death in Minnesota and the corresponding wave of protests around the world.
Older readers of this blog will remember the murder, and the scandal of the Met’s own racism and incompetence in failing to prosecute the youths responsible despite the overwhelming evidence against. Part of the problem may also have been police corruption, as the young perps were the sons of leading London gangsters. The scandal was front page news for weeks, months and years afterwards and there was rightly a major outcry against it. Private Eye, however, published a couple of separate articles revealing that a young White and an Asian man had been also been murdered into two different unprovoked racial attacks. And the Met had behaved in exactly the same way, steadfastly refusing to do anything to investigate the murders and prosecute the perps responsible.
Unlike Stephen Lawrence, these murders garnered no coverage and no media or public outrage. They were forgotten.
And the real elephant in the room here is the Rotherham Asian grooming gang scandal. For well over a decade, a gang of taxi drivers of mostly Pakistani origin had been grooming, raping and exploiting as prostitutes White girls from a care home. The police and local authority had been repeatedly told about it, but had refused to take action. Instead, at least one of the girls had been offered Urdu lessons to somehow help her. One of the cops responsible for this debacle stated that they didn’t act because they didn’t want to start a riot. This scandal has naturally provoked even more outrage, and since then more grooming gangs have been uncovered. It’s been a gift to the racist right, and Tommy Robinson was running up and down the country exploiting the trials by posting his own highly prejudiced take on them on the internet, thus risking a mistrial. He was thus hauled up before the beak himself on contempt of court charges after he filmed himself commenting on the trial of one of these gangs outside the court, and trying to interview them as they were being ushered in.
Academics and anti-racists have stressed that these gangs are not representative of the Asian community. One academic specialising in these issues posted a piece on the Net showing that Asians are no more likely to be predatory paedophiles than Whites. The point has also been made that Islam was not a motive in the crimes. They were simply a case of sick people abusing messed-up, vulnerable children. One Asian journo or celebrity was also outraged by the cops’ attitude in fearing that their arrest would spark riots. He maintained that British Asians wouldn’t have objected to the arrest of the offenders and would not have rioted. He may well be right, but as quoted by the papers, the cop in question made no mention of who would be doing the rioting. He just said they would start. He might have felt it would give White bigots an excuse to attack Asians.
The point here is that the police and authorities refused to take action because they feared a breakdown in what may be described as ‘community cohesion’ because of the races of the attackers and the victims. The girls didn’t matter, because they were White.
Although these crimes have been revealed and other similar gangs uncovered, arrested and tried since then, the Rotherham scandal remains. According to right-wing commenters, there is supposed to be a report on the grooming gang that has not been published. I don’t know if that is the case, but if so, it’s a scandal in itself. I doubt such a report would show that racial and religious motives were behind the assaults, as the islamophobes claim. They suggest that the decision not to prosecute or take action went all the way up to Blair’s or Gordon Brown’s government. If that’s the case, then its suppression – if that has happened – is almost certainly due to the authorities trying to protect their rear ends.
Now I certainly don’t begrudge the Lawrences the attention they managed to focus on their son’s murder and the disgusting conduct of the Met police. I am simply trying to make the point that sometimes the police and authorities also won’t take action against the abusers and killers of people of other ethnicities. The Black Lives Matter protests in some areas, like Cheltenham, have extended to include other ethnic minorities. But they all seem to believe that crimes against Whites are universally and automatically investigated to a higher standard than those against people of ethnic minorities. But this doesn’t seem to be the case.
There should be outrage when the police fail to prosecute perps in crimes where race is a factor, regardless of the ethnic background of the victim. It shouldn’t matter if the victim is Black, White, Brown or whatever, no-one should die from racist attacks and their murderers go Scot free, or young people repeatedly abused and assaulted with impunity.
If the victim of a racist attack is White or Asian, then people should unite across the racial divide to condemn the attacks, just as they should if the victim were Black. As the Black Lives Matter protesters stress, the movement does not mean that White lives don’t matter.
But unfortunately, sometimes White lives are ignored because of their race. And that should cause every bit of outrage as the culpably negligent attitude towards Black.
Before the really serious stuff, I though I’d start with a funny story from yesterday’s I, for 29th June 2019. This reported that cops in Limestone, Alabama, had finally arrested a man, who owned a vicious squirrel. This was no ordinary fluffy-tailed denizen of the trees, but an attack squirrel kept on methamphetamine. The article, ‘Owner of meth-fuelled ‘attack squirrel’ arrested’, by Francis Blagburn, ran
An Alabama man who allegedly kept a so-called ‘attack squirrel’, fired up by giving it methamphetamine, has been arrested on new charges.
Limestone County Sheriff’s Office in Alabama tweeted that 35-year-old Mickey Paulk was apprehended following a chase in which he rammed an investigator’s vehicle.
Authorities had been seeking Mr Paulk on multiple warrants unconnected to the squirrel he named Deeznutz, which was made infamous after police said they were warned about a meth-fuelled squirrel that had been trained to attack. Earlier this week, Mr Paulk posted a video to Facebook of himself with Deeznutz, which he considers a pet, in which he denied accusations that the squirrel represented a danger to the public, or that it had been given drugs.
“You can’t give squirrels meth; it would kill ’em”, he said in the video.
In a phone interview with Associated Press, Mr Paulk said he had “a few loose ends to tie up” before he surrendered himself to authorities, including sorting out alternative accommodation for the squirrel.
The sheriff’s office said narcotics investigators spotted Mr Paul leaving a motel on a stolen motorcycle and chased him. He has been booked into Lauderdale County Jail on charges of attempting to elude, criminal mischief, receiving stolen property and felon in possession of a pistol after it was discovered he had a handgun in his waitband.
As for Deeznutz, authorities say he could not be tested for meth and has been released. (p. 27).
Okay, it’s clear from the article that, squirrel aside, Paulk himself was a crim, and the cops were right to arrest him.
But it also made me wonder what the press and various politicos on both sides of the Atlantic would do, if they thought they could get votes out of this.
Donald Trump would probably start claiming that it was all down to Mexicans. They were not giving the US their best squirrels, and instead Mexican drug gangs were smuggling meth, cocaine and crack-fuelled squirrels into the country, to embark on a reign of crime. It would be categorically proven that most rapists and murderers were Mexican squirrels, and that was why America needs that wall.
Hillary Clinton would claim, regardless that Paulk’s colour isn’t mentioned in the article, that a new breed of superpredator was breeding these vicious, meth-addicted squirrels. She would then demand harsher legislation against Black men feeding squirrels in inner-city America.
And the corporate Dems as a whole would claim that this was all part of a plot by Putin. The Russian spy services, in collaboration with RT America, had infiltrated the American eco-system, radicalising squirrels and turning them away from true, patriotic American values. At a secret signal from Moscow, the squirrels would all leap into decent Americans’ homes, grab the TV remote control and occupy the computers, and change them over to Russian fake news promoting Donald Trump.
Over here, the Scum and the Times would declared that it was Corbyn and his supporters, who had radicalised the animals, brainwashing them with the works of Trotsky and Stalin. They were being trained to jump on people and start indoctrinating them with socialism. Momentum had already sneaked thousands of these squirrels into the Labour party as part of a far-left take-over, and it was well-known that Corbyn himself and other members of his group had squirrelist tendencies.
And the Scum, Heil, Depress and Sunday Times would also claim that the squirrels were anti-Semitic, Corbynist squirrels. The animals were known to believe in and promote evil, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Israeli interference in British politics. Corbyn had several times in the past attended conferences held by squirrels, attacking Israel. And it was well known that leading squirrels were also Holocaust deniers. The CAA would declare that the typical anti-Semite was a young Muslim male who kept a squirrel as a pet. Squirrels were also being recruited by ISIS as suicide bombers, and it was well-known that there were already no-go areas up and down the country, which non-Muslims couldn’t enter, patrolled by squirrels trained in sharia law.
And all the right-wing newspapers would fall in, saying that only a strong Tory party under Boris Johnson could deliver Brexit. This would be good for Britain, and allow us to take control of sovereignty and immigration, and allow us to combat squirrelist subversion.
All right, so the papers aren’t that bonkers yet. But all the racism, bigotry and prejudice is there, as well as the sheer desperation to smear Corbyn with whatever they can. And the latest attack on him by the Times, claiming he’s too elderly, smells to me of very rank desperation. So perhaps it won’t be long at all before they sink to trying to run stories about him and Labour, smearing him as the leader of vicious, subversive squirrels.
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