About hostility-mongering on Feltz’s phone-in

Last Friday, in the Guardian, Simon Jenkins wrote that he welcomed the decision of the Scottish Qualifications Authority that they would accept text-message spellings in school examinations in “a direct challenge to the English at their most reactionary”. “The dark riders of archaism will protest and the backwoods will howl. No spell is cast as dire as spellcheck. But the champions of reason are massing north of the border and need our support,” he declares. This, he hopes, might set off some renewed interest in reforming spelling, the discussion of which “has become a no-go area, an intellectual tundra”.


Text messaging forms have their place, not least in text messages where you can only fit so many letters into your message. They exist to improve the flow of writing, as they do also in instant message conversations, to save time when using phones on which an S takes four key-presses, and to conserve space so as to get as many words as possible into those 160 character spaces. Shortenings such as the use of the letter 8 to symbolise the “ate” sound may not have been adapted from Braille, but they have been used in that medium for years, to reduce the use of letters, as Braille documents take up an awful lot of space. There are times and places for abbreviations, and standard written English is not the place to abbreviate common words.The last major English spelling reform, Jenkins informs us, was carried out by Noah Webster in the years after American independence:

When the great Noah Webster invented American spelling after independence, he left British English immured in bigotry. He chided “even well-bred people and scholars for surrendering their right of private judgment to literary governors”. To Americans, spelling reform was the sovereignty of common sense. For that reason the British treated it as foreign, vulgar and, worst of all, American.

In the rest of the article, however, Jenkins voices the usual complaints about silent consonants, unncessary vowels and multiple pronunciations of “ough”. “Every time I write cough, bough, through and thorough (not to mention write), I think of the teeming millions of students who ask their teachers: why? There is no answer. I suggest they learn American English instead.” The only difficulty is that American English has most of the same inconsistencies which frustrate learners of British English. American English is easier for some foreigners to learn probably because it lacks the flat R sound characteristic of middle-class and urban southern English, although even this exists in some American idioms. But it has its own fair share of oddities, such as pronouncing the letter T, mid-word, as a D. The “ough” variations still exist in US English. It’s still I before E, except after C. Reading over this paragraph, I can’t find a word I would have spelled differently if I were an American.

There are often good reasons why words are sometimes spelled the way they are, even if they are often historical ones. We spell doughnut that way because a doughnut is made of dough. Simple, right? To spell it “donut” is only appropriate when you desperately need to make room for more letters, but it should not be confused for proper English for the purpose of answering an academic exam question. Words which have a silent consonant or two often sound identical to a word with a different meaning (rite, without the W, being a religious practice). There are no doubt words whose spelling could be reformed without consequences worse than the present situation, but there is a simple answer teachers can give children or students who ask “why?” when struggling to learn a relatively few inconsistently-spelled English words: history. And perhaps they should actually teach them that history.

There are two separate reasons why we should resist radical spelling reforms. The first is that it risks codifying the pronunciation of English as spoken in one particular region, rather than English in general. For example, we pronounce colour as “culla” in London, while Americans tend to say “cuhlr”. Neither of them particularly resemble color or colour, both of them clinging to the tendency to spell Latin-derived words as they were spelled in Latin, rather than how they sound in English (a practice not replicated in actual Latin-derived languages such as Italian, in which letters are doubled and accents added as needed by its own speakers). However, if we were to go down the route of spelling things phonetically, we simply could not do it without making written London English incomprehensible to Americans, or even people in other parts of the British Isles. Do we leave the silent R’s in or take them out? Either way, they will only be phonetic on one side of the Atlantic. Right now, we have consistency and mutual intelligibility.

The second, more profound, reason is that it would constitute cultural vandalism on a grand scale. Learning to read and write English presently gives one access to a vast range of literature, which would have to be rendered into the new script in a huge transliteration effort, at huge cost, if future generations who learned the new writing method in primary school were to be able to read it. It is likely that some authors, who still held the copyright to their own works, would reject the new script, refuse to write in it or to allow their works to be published in it while their copyrights remained valid. Otherwise, the children would have to learn the present script as well, as “literary English”, in order to read a lot of classical English literature, which would defeat the whole object of inventing a new script.

It would thus cut off future generations of English-speakers from their history, which is usually what is intended when a language is radically reformed as Turkish was in the early 20th century. The cut-off there is such that young people cannot readily understand the early speeches of the author of those reforms, Kemal “Ataturk”. This is the equivalent of English-speakers being unable to understand the writings of the Edwardian period or Virginia Woolf, to say nothing of the classic literature of the preceding century. If we are really to go down the radical Shavian route of adopting a new alphabet, we would not only be cutting ourselves off from our past, but also from other speakers of European languages – an even more extreme cut-off than that which “Ataturk” perpetrated. If we want to know how easily such reforms could be effected in a democracy, we only need look at the German spelling reforms which were rejected by sections of the country’s press.

I’m not suggesting that there should be no reforms, simply that any reform should be incremental and not result in our being cut off from our literary heritage. Whatever might result might be dismissed as “tinkering around the edges”, but that’s all we can do if we are to avoid uprooting our entire culture. Of course, in a context where text-message language or some other colloquialism is used for literary effect in an examination, it should be rewarded rather than penalised, because it shows that the writer has insight into the situation he or she is writing about. But we should not permit such usages to be confused with proper literary English. If we are to allow academic examinations to be abandoned to such practices, then we abandon the principle that there are times and places where informality is appropriate and other times and places where it certainly is not.

He starts off on very familiar territory – the Munich peace agreement at which Neville Chamberlain agreed to a German take-over of Czechoslovakia. Churchill told him on his return that he had been given the choice between dishonour and war, had chosen dishonour and would have war. The notion of Chamberlain as the cowardly appeaser has been common currency in apologia for any sort of aggression for decades now. A few months ago Iain Duncan Smith gave a speech on the Iraq war using exactly this same appeasement formula, obviously bringing his dad’s war exploits into it as well. The fact was that at that time Czechoslovakia had been a state for only twenty years, before which it had been under Hapsburg rule since the fall of Hussite Bohemia. Its incorporation into yet another German empire may have seemed a relatively small price to pay to avoid yet another major war for their generation than it would for ours, who have grown up in a Europe of nation-states rather than of empires.

The present threat, he goes on to claim is not of the nature of what we faced then, and if it was, there would be no difficulty in persuading people to fight it:

The conflict which we are now in – which we have been most visibly engaged in for five years, but which had in truth opened far earlier – is not a conflict which looks familiar to the people of Europe. It barely resembles conflicts of their past. And just as this war does not much look like earlier wars, so victory in this war will not look like earlier victories. This poses a problem: what will victory in the war on terror – the war against Islamic extremism – look like? How will we know when it is over? How will we know when we’ve won? The only, and deeply imperfect, guide may be time – the length of time in which we are not hit, seriously threatened or cowed. If we are to have victory then it will emerge as an almost imperceptible victory: it will be a diminuendo towards victory. Only historians will then be capable of determining which battles were vital, which significant, and which illusory triumphs of their time.

Similarly, defeat will not look as it would have in the 1930s: it would “consist of a gradual accretion of hurts on our society, a wearying accumulation of often minor humiliations: death by a thousand cuts”. Our society “will simply become aware, with a growing sense of numbness, that what we had has slipped away”. Europeans, as Brits did in the 1930s, prefer to pretend that the threat Murray claims faces us now was not there, and refuse to accordingly cut their welfare budgets, increase defence spending, and do what is “required to cease or reverse the disastrous effects of mass immigration”. He cites a Transatlantic Trends survey which suggested in 2003 that “fewer than half of Europeans believe that any war at all – even one in the national interest – can be considered just”. The notion that this may be a legacy of the Cold War, in which Europeans relied on the USA for defence from their only likely foe, Russia, and were able to build up their welfare states and their industries (with the exception of the UK, whose industries stagnated and ended up closing or falling into foreign ownership), is not even mentioned.

His position – “the neoconservative position” – is that among the answers to the “problem of Islam and the West” is “a putting onto the right track of the fundamental problems of the Islamic world”, namely the misrule of most, if not all, of the Muslim countries. Among the answers to this is that, while there are a few ugly regimes which could be removed with relative ease, assuming a “duty” to take care of the affairs of the Muslim world is a recipe for a disaster similar to Iraq, but on a much vaster scale. How difficult would it have been to remove the secularist dictatorship in Tunisia, which routinely earns praise for its championing of “women’s rights” (excluding religious rights), for example? Or, for that matter, Colonel Qaddafi? The assumption behind this is that all of the Arab world’s govenments are so awful that an invasion would prompt an Iraq-style abandonment of defence, something which should not be assumed for a moment. The Islamists, after all, have offered the Arabs an alternative to the pseudo-democracies and “crime-syndicate families” for decades, one which has always been rejected – hence their tendency to increase in brutality, as we saw in Algeria.

Murray goes on to suggest that, while the al-Qa’ida tendency has never won a serious battle, they have the potential to win “the war of ideas”:

If you doubt this, then just think back on the so-called “defeats” which we are meant to have suffered since 9/11. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, 100,000 civilians alleged to be dead by a fanciful survey courtesy of The Lancet magazine. What did our enemy do to win these victories? Absolutely nothing. It all came from within.

In short, we cannot lose on the battlefield, but we can be stabbed in the back by defeatists at home. Where have we heard this before? In this case, the “stab in the back” is coming from the press reporting that “our boys” are capable of dreadful brutality, something which has been well documented since well before 9/11. The fact that our press is entitled to criticise “the boys” for torturing and humiliating prisoners and for beating up citizens of an occupied country in the streets should not be discussed in these terms; to include Guantanamo, many of whose inmates are innocent and were picked up by criminal gangs, among these demonstrates a disregard for the truth. Perhaps Murray figured his audience did not care.

As for his jibe about “hoping your Kalashnikov un-jams in time to fire at those Daisy-Cutters”, it’s also a well-known fact that “our boys” are kitted out with the much less reliable SA-80. Lions led by donkeys, indeed.

Murray’s explanation for the various so-called capitulations which have taken place in response to terrorist attacks, such as the “sympathetic socialist” who was elected in the wake of the Madrid bombings, ignore the simple fact that there had been massive popular opposition to participation in the Iraq war in all the countries which took part except, possibly, for the USA. This was coupled with the attempt by the then prime minister of Spain to blame the bombings on ETA. The people were not voting “for al-Qa’ida” but against the people who had exposed them to danger. Consider this: if someone pushes you in front of a car driven by someone they know will not stop, and you are unable to get out of the way for whatever reason, you will blame both the driver and the person who pushed you. The same is true of people who had been exposed to danger by their politicians. Nobody, not the Muslims nor those in western countries, Muslim or otherwise, voted for the terrorists. They do not represent anyone but themselves, and they cannot gain anyone’s sympathy unless their enemies narrow the moral gap between themselves and the terrorists. So the worst enemies of the western occupation are elements in the occupying forces, who have proven themselves time and again incapable of upholding the civilised values to which the western democracies hold themselves, and hold others.

He goes on to explain the reasons for the west “losing this war” in terms of a “creeping increase of dhimmitude”, meaning any accommodation to Muslim sensibilities, at a time when “the enemy is, as a demographic and political fact, massed not just on foreign shores, but within the gates of our cities”. Manifestations of “dhimmitude” include a judge apologising to a Muslim for “inadvertently bringing [him] to court to answer criminal charges on what turns out to be a Muslim religious festival”, the French government pretending last year’s riots had nothing to do with Islam while getting imams to act as intermediaries, the cancellation of screenings of an offensive bad movie because its co-director was murdered, and non-Muslims referring to “The Prophet” without believing that the person they are referring to is in fact a prophet. One notices that he refers to this country’s Muslim population as “the enemy” when a fair percentage were born here and have never been any trouble. He stereotypes a report by “a bunch of Islamists” commissioned by the government after last July’s bombings as saying “that the fact that Britain was attacked was Britain’s fault – oh, and the fault of the Jews of course” – and compares the Muslim authors to nazi apologists in a similar fashion to “Will Cummins” in the Sunday Telegraph last July. Of course, the difference between those who wrote said report and any Nazi apologist of the 1930s or 1940s is that the Nazis would have directly supported an invasion, a difference lost on Murray, assuming he cares to tell the truth.

The root of this is, Murray claims, relativism, the “AIDS of the west” which “has made the opportunist infection of Islam so deadly”, referring to a remark by Mark Steyn calling “radical Islam” an opportunist infection which leaves other diseases to kill. “It is the belief that all cultures are equal even while one culture (our own) is ridden over daily and even while another (Islam) is becoming uniquely violent. The belief that all things are relative has led to an inability among the cultural elites of Europe to stand up for what is right, or even to stand up for their own, because right does not exist in their vocabulary, and in the moral armoury of a self-flagellator, self-defence is the only inexcusable vice.”

Relativism is, of course, what has made Europe and the societies it has spawned in the Americas and Oceania what they are today. Absolutism is what preceded it: the era when the church ruled, when heretics were burned at the stake and control was maintained over the people by refusing to allow them to read the scriptures in their own language. His solution is that Europe become absolutist, but the question must be asked: about what? About Christianity, or about a few traditions borrowed from it, or about “our way of life”, or about “freedom” – that is, about a practical form of relativism?

Murray supposes that tackling relativism would diminish the appeal of relativism to the young, who “are at present attracted to Islam because they see in it a rigidness they do not at present see in other faiths”. This is a gross misrepresentation. Islam is in so many ways a moderate path, and its commands are very often less severe than other religions which have clearly-defined laws, which are without exception observed in small, isolated communities. Its purity laws and dietary constraints, for example, are markedly less stringent than those followed by strict Jews. We have no menstrual huts – as found in parts of south Asia and west Africa – and no concept of a transmissible state of impurity. I have personally met many converts and not all of them appear to have converted in any search for rigidity. Quite a few, in fact, maintain a middle-class lifestyle and liberal outlook. They fit in well in middle-class parts of Middlesex and Buckinghamshire.

He likens converts to Islam to the Last Men spoken of by Nietzsche and Fukuyama:

Living under the system of representative governance – always the end-point of human aspiration – there is yet a type of Last Man who cannot bear the lack of struggle, cannot live without struggle and who as a result struggles for the sake of struggle. When there is nothing left to struggle against, he struggles against liberty, against democracy and against freedom. Now the majority of struggling Last Men are presently found among the left who support dictators over democracies, those people whose relativism has brought them full circle back to a support for authoritarian tyranny. But a much smaller section of Last Men are the converts. When we hear of Western converts from Last Men to Muslims, we are witnessing the breaking away of people who never wanted to be part of the system they were fortunate enough to live under.

As stated earlier, the number of converts who came by the route Murray describes, having been some sort of liberal who hates their own society, is miniscule. Many more come through the ghettoes and prisons, and others come through privately searching for the Truth. The fact that a lot of our converts are unbalanced may well have much to do with da’wah concentrated on the easy targets of prison and the ghetto and virtually none concentrated on rural areas, for example, does not give any credence to Murray’s observation. There are, of course, plenty of old-lefties knocking around who were veterans of the anti-Thatcher struggle of the 1980s, but very few of these have converted to Islam. Many of them are irreligious and secularist even if they support a schoolgirl’s right to wear hijab, which may well be why they opposed a war in Iraq which aimed to unseat a secularist government and may have led to an Islamist one taking its place.

I would also dispute the notion that living “under the system of representative governance” is “always the end-point of human aspiration”. Representative governance as we know it today matured only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the working classes and women were given the vote (in some places, the process was delayed until the 1960s or 1970s). And while the system as we know it has obvious advantages in terms of allowing observations on societal ills and suggestions of ways to put them right without the fear that comes with doing this in a police state, those who see reasons to struggle against it may not see this as what is wrong with it: they may be thinking of the rampant crime, the breakdown of the family, the abysmal, pornographic and scurrilous content of the popular press. The notion that liberty produces a space where corruption may flourish is hardly a new one; today, the notion that government action might be taken to reverse the decline in popular culture seems an absurd one, while the abolition of ancient rights precisely to appease the aforementioned popular press is ongoing.

As means to “stop the further humiliation of Europe, and its eventual morphing into an entirely different continent”, his first imperative is to “turn around the demographic time-bomb (sic) which will soon see a number of our largest cities fall to Muslim majorities”. The means to this are entirely concentrated on the Muslims: the cessation of all Muslim immigration, save (temporarily) in the event of another genocide, and that existing refugees be “persuaded back to the countries which they fled from”. He insists that Muslims who “for any reason take part in, plot, assist or condone violence against the West (not just the country they happen to have found sanctuary in, but any country in the West or Western troops) must be forcibly deported back to their place of origin”. While many people would no doubt support the removal of rabble-rousers like Abu Hamza and anyone actually complicit in terrorism, his proposal would take in, for example, Muslims in the UK openly supporting the Turkish side in any flare-up in Cyprus, or any resistance to western “intervention” in any Muslim country, or indeed any country. What he is proposing is that norms such as respecting someone’s birth and citizenship, and freedom of speech, be torn up in favour of kicking someone out for expressing an opinion.

Besides all this, the other side of the “demographic time bomb” is that westerners are not reproducing at the rate they need to replace themselves: nearly all the countries in Europe, east and west, have declining populations, with (according to a UN report from 2001) fewer than two children on average per family in all countries except the Czech Republic, Iceland, Albania and (if you count it as Europe) Turkey, which all have stable populations. Clearly, workers have to come from somewhere if British families are not raising them, and we cannot expect a supply of cheap Polish labour forever (particularly once the motorways start getting built in Poland). The point is made in the same article by Mark Steyn (It’s the Demography, Stupid) from which Murray got his quote about an “opportunistic infection”. The fact is not disputed that the trend in the west is towards having children later and later, long after the most fertile period in a woman’s life (late teens and early to mid twenties) is past. As Steyn puts it, “the design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it”. Furthermore, the increasing strength of Muslims in urban areas has much to do with non-Muslims, and whites especially, moving away. They are not necessarily fleeing Muslims; they are fleeing crime and seeking out better housing in the suburbs and semi-rural areas (often pricing poorer locals out of their own neighbourhoods in the process), while Muslims are seeking a Muslim infrastructure (mosques, halal shops and the like) which they cannot build in isolation.

He then suggests that Europe be made less attractive to Muslims by making conditions “harder across the board”; no doubt this means petty obstructions to mosque building and malicious impositions on schoolchildren and workers. (Hugh Fitzgerald, in a recent article on one of Robert Spencer’s blogs, openly recommended that people not employ Muslims.)

From long before we were first attacked it should have been made plain that people who come into Europe are here under our rules and not theirs. There is not an inch of ground to give on this one. Where a mosque has become a centre of hate it should be closed and pulled down. If that means that some Muslims don’t have a mosque to go to, then they’ll just have to realise that they aren’t owed one. Grievances become ever-more pronounced the more they are flattered and the more they are paid attention to. So don’t flatter them.

Another obviously glossed-over fact: whatever the situation on the continent, only one mosque in the UK has ever become a “centre of hate”, and that did not belong to the people who made it so, but rather to the community they forced out. The takeover could have been reversed by legal action at any time, but the state declined to intervene until Abu Hamza’s gang became an embarrassment to them rather than just to the Muslim community. Other extremists, like Abdullah Faisal and Abu Qatada, did not use mosques, but rather community centres. Apart from the obvious fact that the buildings belong legally to the community and exist not because of any right to have mosques, but because the community raised the money, bought the land and built them, simply closing down one mosque may well have the effect of dispersing the problem to places where it is less easy to find the people involved, or to places where they can spread their poison among other impressionable people. (As with a fair number of anti-Muslim bigots, he cares only for what they might do or say that affects non-Muslims. As for the fact that Muslim parents might not want their children involved in such activity, or that they do not want to be bothered and harrassed by extremists, who are also sectarians, as they go about their worship does not occur to Murray in the slightest.)

Murray, of course, believes in more war as well:

Abroad we must continue our work at taking the war to the terrorists. We are winning that war, and we should extend that war. Iran, Syria and any regime which sponsors or supports terrorism must be made aware that their days are numbered. We must remind the malignant that this war and this era will be dictated on our terms – on the terms of the strong and the right, not the weak and the wrong.

A preposterous suggestion: where does he propose getting the troops to fight this extended war? He will most likely not get them from Germany or France, and other European countries will not be willing to send troops to Syria just to depose a regime that threatens only Israel. Of course, a planted atrocity – another Reichstag, another Bay of Tonkin – might be enough to persuade many of the public to accept war, or the reintroduction of conscription – assuming that the troops called up will not be too busy dealing with the unrest this itself might cause. The upshot of our declining birth rates is that people are more used to comfort: we are likely to be one of two or three children, to have been the focus of much parental attention and expense. The British who fought Germany in the 1940s were used to a lot more hardship than we are, having just lived through the Depression. Could we be relied on now to engage in the sort of war that repeated “anti-terror” adventures might lead to? And if all our troops are bogged down in Iran, that leaves the question of who will actually defend Britain from the enemy of which nobody knows yet: perhaps Russia, or another mainland European country, perhaps a resurgent Scandinavian country, perhaps even the USA.

And he tells Europeans (those who are not Muslims, I suppose) to “become absolutist – absolutist in defence of our societies, our traditions, our heritage, culture, freedoms and democracies”. This is hardly consistent with his earlier proposals: kicking out anyone who condones violence, digging ourselves deeper and deeper into war until most of our young men are away fighting. How is that a defence of our traditions? Unlike most continental countries, Britain has no tradition of a conscript army: it had one for much less than half of the twentieth century. Murray’s proposals are nothing less than a recipe for a complete transformation of British society into one which, like his imaginary dhimmified Europe, the public would not recognise, and all for what? An illusory security on the streets of London massively outweighed by losses abroad, and the driving out of a mostly productive religious minority. It would benefit nobody except the undertakers and the arms manufacturers.

You can find a translation of the piece, published 6th October this year in the Swiss newspaper Le Temps here at an Australian Baptist ministry website. (You might notice that it assures the reader that this is “not a conspiracy theory”; you might remember receiving messages assuring you that they are “not spam” which then offer you penis enlargements – even if you’re a woman – or a share in the author’s $30m stash if you can help him get it out of Nigeria.) It seems that only one copy of the document has ever been found anywhere, namely at Mr Nada’s villa; Nada denies that it is Brotherhood policy or that he is its author, claiming that it was written by researchers he refused to name, and said that he agrees with 15 to 20% of the document’s content. Put another way, he disagrees with 80 to 85% of it. Youssef Nada is a long-standing member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and has run a chain of companies including an offshore bank, al-Taqwa, registered in the Bahamas. The bank was closed down in 2001, and came under investigation after 9/11, along with the Barakaat bank alleged by the US government to be a conduit for al-Qa’ida. However, Newsweek reported in June this year that after three and a half years of investigation, Swiss investigators could not find enough evidence to charge Mr Nada with anything.

As an example of the kind of red herrings I found when doing my own investigations, an earlier Newsweek report claimed that among al-Taqwa’s shareholders were three of the Bin Laden clan, a vast and wealthy extended family with close connections to both the Saudi royal family and the Bush family. One of them, of course, is now better known for his involvement in terrorism, but the rest of the family is known to have nothing to do with this. Any Google search for Nada’s name will return dozens of results from hostile weblogs.

An un-named western civil servant who studied the document described it as “a totalitarian ideology of infiltration which represents, in the long term, the greatest danger to the European societies” (the auto-translation substituted “companies”, which is also translated in French as societes), alleging that it will become a danger over ten years during which the establishment of parallel state institutions such as “Muslim Parliaments” of the sort existing in the UK will be seen. “The slow destruction of our institutions, our structures will start then.” Quite apart from the fact that the “Muslim Parliament” in London was not a Muslim Brotherhood foundation, it was not really a parliament either; it was one of many organisations established by the Khomeini fan club in London, and supported Iranian positions on such matters as the Rushdie fatwa. The Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought, which is supportive of the “parliament” and those around it, alleges that both its founder, Kalim Siddiqui, and his successor personally appointed and dismissed members of the “parliament” without going through normal procedures – hardly the way a parliament is run! The institution declined with the passing of Dr Siddiqui, but is commonly used by Islamophobes today as a “proof” of the existence of Muslim para-state entities.

Scott Burgess has begun translating sections of it, having reached the third of the tract’s so-called “points of departure”, a summary of which can be found listed at this post. One might notice that only one of these, the fifth, pertains to the establishment of an Islamic state, and one might ask whether its advocacy of “parallel, progressive efforts targeted at controlling the local centres of power through institutional action” concern non-Muslim countries at all, or just Muslim ones. Burgess intends to translate the rest over the weekend, so we will see how the fifth point expands and exactly how much it should concern anyone in the west. I see little in the parts of the document translated so far to give the impression that it is a plot for gaining control over non-Muslim western societies by infiltration, as was hinted at by Melanie Phillips in the diary post which drew my attention to the controversy.

Perhaps the question we should be asking regarding this document is not whether it is authentic but rather whether it is really relevant. The aim of the Muslim Brotherhood, namely the establishment of Islamic modes of government in Muslim countries, has never been any secret. Burgess suspects that Yusuf al-Qaradawi is either heavily influenced by it (judging by similarities between it and his own book, Priorities of The Islamic Movement in The Coming Phase) or among its authors, more likely the latter.

He cites Reuven Paz, “an internationally recognised expert on Muslim extremist groups”, as claiming that the Project “reflects a vast plan which was revived in the 1960s, with the immigration of Brotherhood intellectuals, principally Syrian and Egyptians, into Europe”. The reader might remember that the Brotherhood was involved in the Hama uprising in Syria in 1982, which led to that city being destroyed by the Russian-backed Assad regime and much innocent loss of life. The reason these intellectuals moved to Europe and America is because the dictatorships of the Arab world made their operations impossible. Their influence, even today, is concentrated in areas with a heavy Arab immigrant population. While the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideas have their adherents in the Asian Muslim community, that community has its own traditions (and its own variety of political Islam, the Jama’at-i-Islami and some well-appointed organisations run by its members); like other Egyptian scholars, Yusuf al-Qaradawi has a mostly Arab audience. This may well explain why the European Council for Fatwa and Research is based in Dublin, not London; while London no doubt has more Arabs than Dublin, Dublin’s Muslim community is mostly Arab.

The tract will, of course, strengthen the position of those who complain when people like al-Qaradawi visit this country, but really I fail to see why his involvement in what they think is a conspiracy to take over the west by underhand means is more serious than his support for suicide bombings. What fruit has this “conspiracy” borne in twenty years? The fact that they can get their articles published from time to time in the UK’s third biggest “quality” daily and have occasional contacts with mayors like Ken Livingstone, and only then on matters affecting the Muslim community, and share a platform with some Marxists and people from the outsider faction (Benn, Corbyn etc) in the Labour party. And all this while Muslims in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, which are mostly Arab and thus more likely to be influenced by al-Qaradawi et al, are considerably worse off than they are here.

As a commenter on the latest Daily Ablution post on the issue has already pointed out, little in this document suggests violence, “atleast right out there in glaring obviousness”. The latest extract Burgess has reproduced mentions assisting Muslim causes in places like Eritrea, Sudan, the Phillippines, Kashmir and Somalia (remember that it was written in the early 1980s at a time when a Marxist regime was in power there, hence the references to killing scholars and persecuting the religious). Such matters are unlikely to raise any disagreement from Muslims anywhere, and that would particularly have been so in the early 1980s when, for example, Pakistan was allied to the USA (unlike India) and was a relatively free country for religious Muslims. As so often happens, attitudes are being attributed to groups like the Muslim Brotherhood which are in fact common among Muslims generally.

“The Project” is, in my assessment, not the explosive document some might think; it will give some people one more excuse (as if they need one in this day and age) to oppose visits by some Arab scholars to this country, and no doubt people will be accused from time to time of Brotherhood sympathies and of being part of “the Project”. People might ask how much progress they have made in this country in a conspiracy lasting more than twenty years. Of course, if someone who contributes to a debate has an agenda, it’s important that we know what that agenda is, whether it is the Muslim Brotherhood’s or anyone else’s, but if this really is a plan for the secret infiltration of institutions of all sorts worldwide, it’s not come to much.

Cross posted from my blog, Indigo Jo Blogs.

Here is an extract:

“Southern Decadence” has a history of filling the French Quarters section of the city with drunken homosexuals engaging in sex acts in the public streets and bars. Last year, a local pastor sent video footage of sex acts being performed in front of police to the mayor, city council, and the media. City officials simply ignored the footage and continued to welcome and praise the weeklong celebration as being an “exciting event”. However, Hurricane Katrina has put an end to the annual celebration of sin.

On the official “Southern Decadence” website (www.SouthernDecadence.com), it states that the annual event brought in “125,000 revelers” to New Orleans last year, increasing by thousands each year, and up from “over 50,000 revelers” in 1997. This year’s 34th annual “Southern Decadence” was set for Wednesday, August 31, 2005 through Monday, September 5, 2005, but due to massive flooding and the damage left by the hurricane, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco has ordered everyone to evacuate the city.

The past three mayors of New Orleans, including Sidney Barthelomew, Marc H. Morial, and C. Ray Nagin, issued official proclamations welcoming visitors to “Southern Decadence”. Additionally, New Orleans City Council made other proclamations recognizing the annual homosexual celebration.

As a Muslim, I have no objection whatsoever to preachers saying that natural disasters are acts of God (which I believe they are) and warning their flocks to fear God. The problem here is that someone thinks he knows that this was a manifestation of Divine Wrath and what exactly attracted that wrath.

While I myself lay no claim to be able to speak for God, the facts on the ground are that both the Boxing Day tsunami and Katrina struck areas prone to natural disasters. In the case of the tsunami, a cursory look at a map will show that this is an area prone to earthquakes: that’s how island chains are formed, by the plates of the earth’s crust pushing up at their boundaries. The whole of Indonesia, like Japan, the Phillipines and New Zealand, consists of such a chain. The cause of earthquakes is well-known and that one, while of unusual magnitude, happened in a part of the world notorious for them. (I wrote two articles on my blog about that, and about a certain right-wing blogger’s comments on it: here and here.)

New Orleans was built below sea level behind inadequate defences in a part of the world which is, and was, known to be prone to hurricanes and floods, as my fellow Muslim blogger Kelly “Izzy Mo” Crosby explains:

New Orleans was founded by explorers Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville and John Law in 1817. They decided that it would be a good idea to establish a city on a swamp. And while living on a swamp has been great for our agricultural industry, hurricanes and outbreaks of yellow fever plagued this city for years. We are below sea-level, shaped just like a bowl so that the Mid-city area always gets the worse flooding. No matter where you live, you are surrounded by water, you live by the river or the lake [Ponchartrain] and sometimes both. I live by the lake and I’ve seen the lake on a windy day. It’s puts the fear and awe of God in you. We have the best pumping and sewage system in the world–even better than the systems of Venice, Italy. We pump out water everyday continously during normal times so now we are wondering how our drainage systems are going to hold up. Can they handle 12 inches of constant rain fall? And there are the millions of trees that have been eaten away by termites during termite season–will they say in place, fall safely or fly into some buildings? Allahu ‘alim [God knows best].

I pointed out in Izzy Mo’s comments that Mexico City was founded on a similarly stupid location, so that when earthquakes hit, the ground turns to mush (liquefaction). David Usborne in today’s Independent points out that New Orleans’ defences have been weakened further by the removal of wetlands:

Arguments are already breaking out over the connection between global warming and Katrina. Most agree the rising sea levels and temperatures may have contributed to the damage it caused. But many scientists say the real problem is what has been wrought on the ground in the Gulf Coast region itself. And most serious of all may be the loss of the wetlands. Wetlands, along the edges of rivers and near the coast itself, are vital for absorbing and storing floodwaters. As such, they provided New Orleans with a natural defence against storm surges such as the one generated by Katrina.

But, according to the US Geological Survey, Louisiana has lost 1,900 square miles of wetland in the past seven decades – an area larger than the state of Rhode Island.

The draining of the wetlands to make way for roads, malls, beach communities, marinas and condominiums has also meant shrinkage of the shoreline. Louisiana, in fact, loses 25 square miles of coast every year.

So, a natural disaster (which would in any case have been terrible) is worsened by the stupidity of the rich and powerful, but of course certain preachers don’t want to draw attention to that. They don’t want their rich friends to be open to criticism, and anyway, attacking the rich leads to socialism, doesn’t it? So they blame the usual suspects – the homosexuals, the people cavorting in the streets during Mardi Gras, the poor women who have abortions, and the Hindus and Muslims who just happen to be the majority around most of the Indian Ocean.

It just so happens that similar displays of decadence happen in cities the world over – we just had one in west London, of which attendee Darcus Howe wrote in this week’s New Statesman:

Muscles unused for a year were overburdened with the prance and the dance of the streets of Notting Hill. I make the special effort this year, to join in the collective stand of Londoners against the murderous attacks of suicide bombers.

Carnival is the direct opposite of what Islamists claim is good social practice. Alcohol flows in abundance. In almost all the costumed bands the women are barely covered. Bacchus reigns in the expression of all that is openly lewd, suggestive and bawdy – in short, it is a gathering of infidels that must be a prime target for jihadists.

The revellers of Notting Hill, however, were spared the fate of New Orleans. Admittedly homosexuals are not a major part of the carnival (they have their own so-called Mardi Gras, held – horror of horrors – in central rather than west London), but in both cases the decadence takes place in a part of London where, barring an actual miracle, it would take a very large tsunami for it to flood! I presume Michael Marcavage is not so stupid as to say that this sort of behaviour is not a sin if you do it on high ground? Hurricanes are the norm on the Gulf Coast; this organisation has no authority to say that the disaster was anything more than what it looks like, namely the predictable destruction of a city which should never have been built in that location in the first place.

On the subject of stupid speculation, today was the eighth anniversary of the death of Lady Diana and Emad “Dodi” al-Fayed, which has of course been the subject of a lot of conspiracy theories over the years. Vanessa Feltz, on the morning phone-in on BBC London Radio, interviewed a journalist who had had access to a French police report on the death which concluded that there was no conspiracy.

The conspiracy centres around the fact that Diana, the mother of the heir to the British throne, was seeing a Muslim, might have married him and given a future king a Muslim half-brother. It’s an idea I first heard on Usenet newsgroups in the months after the crash; one thread to which I contributed was entitled “Princess Diana assassinated – was she a Muslim?”. I have never believed them, because as I pointed out at the time, “conspiracy theorists are always hot on motives, but short on proper evidence”. The journalist on the show today listened to someone who came out with three commonly-offered pieces of “evidence” for a conspiracy to assassinate Diana, and debunked all of them.

Another reason I don’t believe the theories about Diana’s death is because the only royal who gives anyone serious cause for concern about the future of the monarchy is Prince Charles himself, because he has opinions of his own, generally quite conservative, which he expresses. Royals are supposed to be uninvolved in politics except for purely ceremonial purposes; their “prerogative” is in practice exercised by the Prime Minister. While Charles has never actually expressed support for one party or another, I’m sure his activities give the establishment far more disquiet than Diana’s dalliances would have done.

While I had been under the impression that most of the people who believed these theories were Muslims (and in some Muslim countries, including Egypt, conspiracy theories are often popular), it seems a lot of her sentimental British supporters feel the same way, and have added grievances against the Royals for the way they treated her. They rightly claim that she was the victim of a deceptive marriage to a man who always loved someone else, and insist that her death couldn’t have been an accident; of course she had brought bad publicity on the royal family, and had to be got out of the way. As ever, long on motive, while the evidence they offer is flimsy.

(Feltz also pointed out that the anniversary was covered only in the Express; the other papers did not even mention it. I’m sure that if the anniversary was the tenth, it would have received a lot more coverage, but eighth anniversaries are never big, are they? Except perhaps to the Chinese, in whose language the word for “eight” sounds like the word for luck – not a connection many would see in this particular anniversary.)

His decision to leave the country for Lebanon, where he holds citizenship, demonstrated that his claim of refugee status in any case has no merit. If you fear persecution in a country, you don’t go there for a holiday or to see Mama or to “take the pressure off the Muslim community”, as if he has shown much concern for that with his behaviour since 2001. “Not conducive to the public good” is a fairly good assessment of his presence in this country, unless his contributions to the economy by helping to sell papers with his various pronouncements and interviews counts as “public good”.

His presence has been so damaging that I have heard it suggested on many occasions that he is an agent provocateur. I first heard this suggestion well before 9/11, but this impression was reinforced by what took place in May: a group of his followers turned up at a demonstration outside the US embassy and chanted bellicose anti-American slogans. The media reported that such slogans were chanted at a demo at which the likes of Martin Mubanga, the former Guantanamo detainee, spoke, without mentioning that the people chanting the slogans were from a group which pronounced the organisers of the demo as being “very close to becoming munafiqeen (hypocrites)”. I found all of this out when I asked about the incident at a subsequent demonstration in Whitehall organised by the same people, and people wondered why OBM was getting away with his outrageous behaviour when the likes of Abu Hamza and Abdullah Faisal had not. Discussion of him on one traditional Muslim forum I regularly visit was not friendly; the news of his plans to have a heart operation on the NHS was greeted with surprise from one contributor that he had a heart!

Two particular articles on the OBM issue have caught my eye this weekend. One was in Saturday’s Daily Mail, entitled Inside the Fanatic’s Lair, and told how “secret tapes obtained by the Mail give a chilling insight into the Sheik of Hate’s web of terror … and the wife who loathes us as much as he does”. You might wonder what’s in his lair, but they found nothing more sinister than a cat called Michy, some Islamic textbooks and some “well-thumbed political tracts by Muslim extremists”, three computers and, of course, Omar Bakri’s fire-breathing wife.

The wife is the subject of some preposterous statements. Apparently, when she goes to the school to pick up her children, aged seven, eleven and sixteen, none of the other parents knows she is OBM’s wife and that “she, like her husband, preaches a gospel of hate against this country and its people”. How long can you keep secret information about who your dad is? And further on, we find no evidence that she actually preaches hate against the British – merely that she doesn’t like them and has said so, on the telephone to a personal friend. And the article gives the impression that her friends don’t know that she has pretty, wavy hair. Nonsense. Everyone who knows about Arab and Muslim culture knows that women take off their hijabs in front of other women, particularly Muslim women (and, incidentally, that the sight of “her head closely scarfed” is not a sign that she is a fanatic).

The other article, by Rod Liddle in the Spectator, expresses his personal distaste for Islam itself, but suggests that the likes of OBM be left free to spew their rubbish. Actually, there are some good points in the article – observing that those most keen to criticise Islam are those most likely to agree with some of its moral standpoints, and that British tolerance “does not extend to people who challenge our social mores”. I don’t for a moment agree with his assessment of Islam as a “primitive creed”; I find it very coherent indeed.

I have two problems with Liddle’s article. One is its conclusion, in which he advocates banning hijab in the education system. I wouldn’t blog on this here, except for the discussion that ensued when I blogged it on my own site. I predicted that it would lead to a mass withdrawal of Muslim girls from state schools into home education, unless banning that is on the agenda as well. I happen to think home education is a very good thing – it’s certainly preferable to being shoe-horned into a bad school, which is what happened to me – but it hardly fits their agenda of integrating Muslim communities into wider society. An anonymous commentator calling herself “Kafir” suggested another possible result: that the law would be enforced and girls would be educated without their hijabs.

Besides the differences in political culture between the UK and France, I somehow don’t think the British government considers it worth taking the risk, because the results might also include disrupted lessons, riots and a spate of vandalism and arson against the education system. There is much goodwill at the moment between the Muslim community and society in general, despite the Iraq war. The first state Muslim schools have been incorporated under the present government, which has to date hardly interfered at all with the workings of mosques and other Muslim organisations. Whatever goodwill exists now would evaporate very quickly if the state turned to harrassing Muslim schoolgirls.

The other problem with this piece is the aspersions it casts on the Muslim community, specifically the mere existence of “moderate Muslims”:

The problem lies with the government and those Left-liberal multiculturalist commentators who continue to delude themselves that Islam as a whole is easily compatible with the Western notions of freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, democracy and equality. As a result, we now have a false dichotomy — between something called moderate Islam and this rogue creature, extremist Islam. Oh, 95 per cent of Muslims are moderate, we tell ourselves — and we are then rendered speechless with shock when the Iranians vote en masse for a fundamentalist headbanger as President and, worse, it is revealed that those London bombers come not from some dusty backward desert redoubt, but from England.

But the issue isn’t Muslims in Iran, who are not known to have had anything to do with the recent attacks in London. For one thing, Muslims in this country are not influenced by the Iranian state media and its propaganda, but even so, Liddle apparently doesn’t even consider the possibility that while westerners might consider him a “headbanger”, he might have some appeal to Iranians other than this – particularly given the Americans’ recent threatening noises. (Quite apart from the fact that candidature was restricted.) Iran is a totally different society to the Muslim community here; even in places where Islamists have stood, usually under the Respect banner, they have not been elected.

The mention of Iran in an article on Muslims in this country and whatever threat they might pose to public order is typical of something I’ve seen quite often in the British press since the bombings: the mention of an irrelevant fact in order to add scare value. Another example appeared in the Evening Standard on 1st Aug, in which Andrew Gilligan’s discussion of the low standards at a Muslim religious school in the suburbs of London kept going off on tangents about Kashmiri guerrillas, the Taliban and how an official at a madrassa in Birmigham was accused twice (and acquitted on both occasions) of terrorist offences. It’s ironic that Tony Blair, in his press conference of 5th August, told us that the mood had changed and people no longer talked of scare-mongering. Too right – they don’t talk of it, they just do it.

The British media since the July bombings have been full of reports which are at best irresponsible and alarmist and at worst mendacious and possibly malicious. This trend has occurred right across the political spectrum – I’m not just talking about the right-wing corporate media. For example, Shiv Malik has been able to rehash the “conveyor belt” cliché on at least three occasions, claiming in last Sunday’s Independent that Zeyno Baran, who coined the expression, warned him of Hizbut-Tahreer producing “thousands of manipulated brains, which then ‘graduate’ from Hizb and become members of groups like al-Qa’ida”, giving the impression of Baran saying this to him personally. In fact, the words are quoted verbatim from an article she wrote in the National Review in April 2004.

Another example is the report in the Standard (9th Aug) of an alleged aspiring suicide bomber, Zeeshan Siddiqui, who was brought up in Hounslow and has recently been arrested in Pakistan. They print extracts from his diary, in which he writes of his distaste for the Pakistanis surrounding him and talks of martyrdom as “the only way I can be reunited with Mummy and Daddy”. The report mentions that his best friend at college was Asif Hanif, of Tel Aviv suicide bombing fame, without mentioning that Hanif was not known in Hounslow as a radical at all; what happened in Tel Aviv came as a shock to everyone. I visited Hounslow mosque a number of times and visited the Hanif family home also (the street name appeared in the newspapers after the Tel Aviv event); nobody in Hounslow has ever invited me to get involved with terrorism of any sort.

Or take the coverage on the BBC’s Today programme last Friday of the Muslim Boys, a criminal gang operating in south London whose members pretend to be Muslims and who have murdered people for refusing to “convert to Islam”, or rather, their version of it. It seems some people are more concerned about this gang’s potential to attract people to al-Qa’ida in the future, or (as mentioned in today’s Independent on Sunday) to get money through to al-Qa’ida, than about people being murdered by semi-automatic gun-wielding thugs on the streets of south London now. Or the Observer’s coverage of the Muslim Council of Britain’s “radical links”, which are actually to groups rather too conservative for Martin Bright’s liking.

One can never be sure whether these misleading scary reports are motivated by malice or some anti-Muslim agenda, or are simply the result of writers not knowing much and needing to pad out their reports. Certainly one Muslim commentator has gained the impression that hostile articles such as those by Patrick Sookhdeo, famous for his championing of the Christians of Pakistan but not so famous for championing those of Israel/Palestine, are attempts to foment anger against Muslims living in the west. (A lot of us will not quickly forget the affair of “Will Cummins”, the pseudonymous former teacher who contributed four inflammatory articles on Muslims and Islam to the Sunday Telegraph last July.) The upshot of this irresponsible, sensationalist reporting will not be any sort of drawing-together of the Muslim community, where it is isolated, with the general population; on the contrary, it will only increase suspicion and hostility.

I’d like to use my inaugural posting to debunk a few myths which have been circulating in the last two-and-a-half weeks.

1. Brixton mosque is a hotbed of Islamic extremism

The mosque we’re talking about is in Gresham Road, across the road from Brixton police station. The Standard, on page 6 of the 22nd July “West End Final” edition (headline “Get Them”), printed a story headlined “Anonymous mosque that is hotbed of radicalism”, with a picture of the Gresham Road mosque.

The story contains nothing whatsoever about the present administration of the mosque or its regulars. Instead, there’s the usual story about how Abdullah “el-Faisal” used to be its imam and how Richard Reid passed through there on his journey to al-Qa’ida and that aeroplane he tried to blow up.

Facts: Brixton mosque is controlled by the wing of the Salafi (Wahhabi) sect influenced by the Saudi scholar Rabi’ ibn Hadi al-Madkhali, which is opposed to all of the political movements which have attached themselves to Wahhabism since the 1950s. This is the same clique which runs Salafi Publications, based in Birmingham, and TROID (The Reign of Islamic Da’wah, based in Toronto). Their various websites contain myriad condemnations of Sayyid Qutb and his followers, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Gulf and Jordanian scholars who are influenced by them, and unequivocally condemn suicide bombing. In fact, the issue of Abdullah Faisal was raised by Abdul-Haqq Baker, the chairman of the mosque – the first time I heard him called “el-Faisal” was when I heard Baker interviewed on the radio, before the Times broke the story.

Having listened to a number of Faisal’s tapes myself, I can state unequivocally that Faisal is no longer associated with them. In his tape The Devil’s Deception of the Saudi Salafis, he states that the “worst Salafis” are those of south London, particularly Brixton mosque. He calls them “mega hypocrites” and accuses some of them of trying to deceive the Muslims about their piety with big beards and thobes (Arabian robes). His attacks on their black Saudi-trained preachers are vitriolic.

The mosque has not always been controlled by the present group; it was set up initially by a Jamaican who had travelled to Ethiopia in search of Haile Selassie and was disappointed (not surprisingly as he had been overthrown). He subsequently became Muslim and opened his house to offer Islam to men who were coming out of prison. The mosque has seen many changes of control, with the Murabitun and the pseudo-Islamic Ansarullah sect at one point being dominant. But the present group were in control certainly by 1998 when I became Muslim.

2. Tariq Ramadan is a dangerous extremist who supports suicide bombings

The news that Tariq Ramadan has been invited to address Muslims (and others) in Birmingham has caused a predictable uproar in both the Sun and the Standard. Various accusations have been repeated over and over again despite having been proven false, or only half true, on more than one occasion.

Facts: Tariq Ramadan is accused of being “an Islamist” and some sort of extremist mainly because of his family heritage, being the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. He has a number of modernist ideas and is seen as liberal, in some cases too liberal, in the Muslim community. Apparently some right-wing commentators are better judges of who is a threat to public order than the Metropolitan Police.

The Standard managed to cram five factual errors into a report published on the 18th of July this year, which Tariq Ramadan answers for himself on his own website. Daniel Pipes, as one might expect, was at the forefront of anti-Ramadan agitation at the time of his invitation to teach at Notre Dame, subsequently prevented when his visa was revoked. In the aftermath of Pipes’ visa revocation, Pipes wrote on his weblog that the victory was not total, because it was based on his (supposed) links to violence and not his ideas – he hoped that “being an Islamist will in of itself – without necessarily having ties to violence – be grounds for keeping aliens out of the United States, much as being a communist was grounds for exclusion in an earlier era”, which opens up the possibility for some sort of inquisition of any intending Muslim visitor.

Scott Martens of A Fistful of Euros answered some of Pipes’ allegations in this entry last August. More coverage by Thabet of Under Progress here, and on my blog here.

3. Hizbut-Tahreer are an extremist, racist party and a conveyor belt for terrorism, and propaganda pieces for HT have appeared in the Guardian.

This has so far not made it into the Standard to my knowledge. It has merited comment by Mark Steyn in the Daily Telegraph. The buzz is that the Guardian employed, as part of its trainee scheme, a guy called Dilpazier Aslam who turned out to be a member of HT, who subsequently managed to sneak two propaganda pieces for HT into the paper, one of them an interview with Shabina Begum, the other a comment piece following the 7th July bombings. (The Times has also covered it, erroneously stating that HT were involved in the disruption in the run-up to the election. In fact, the group are believed to be an offshoot of the disbanded Muhajiroun.)

Facts (and an alternative view): An inappropriate action, that of authoring two pieces without having declared one’s interest, did take place. While the articles are conducive to HT’s positions, this does not make them propaganda pieces. The jilbab issue in particular is of interest to Muslims beyond HT. The conclusion to “We Rock the Boat”, published after the bombings, may give the impression of threat in the light of knowing Aslam’s HT membership:

The don’t-rock-the-boat attitude of elders doesn’t mean the agitation wanes; it means it builds till it can be contained no more.

But there is some truth in this, and “can be contained no more” does not mean “leads inevitably to a terrorist attack”. Remember that there have been riots in the north in the very recent past involving local Muslim youths.

Whether the conflict of interest is of sufficient weight to merit Aslam’s dismissal is a different matter. In cases where journalists have been sacked in the recent past, it has involved the fabrication of stories (as with Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley), which has not happened here. The Guardian eventually decided they didn’t want him around because they discovered an anonymous anti-Jewish tirade issued under the banner of HT, which although removed from their site, still existed elsewhere. Dilpazier Aslam himself is not a racist, but told the editor, Alan Rusbridger, that “he did not consider the website material to be promoting violence or to be anti-semitic”, which in the racial sense in which the term is correctly meant, it isn’t – and remember, we are assuming that the document is authoritative, when it has no name attached to it and is no longer on their website. HT was founded by a Palestinian in Jordan, a country in which hostility to Israel (and the experience of Jews in that part of the Arab world is dominated by experience of Israel) is widespread. This is not a case of Muslims rehashing the anti-Semitic propaganda of Medieval Europe, Tsarist Russia or Nazi Germany – as I have encountered certain other Muslim groups doing.

The campaign against Dilpazier Aslam has been tainted by prejudice, inaccuracy and hypocrisy. One of the campaigners, Scott Burgess of the Daily Ablution, misses no opportunity to nit-pick at the Guardian. (His application to the same programme in which Dilpazier Aslam was accepted was not made with the expectation of being accepted; it seems to be just another excuse to have a go at the Guardian, and not a grudge factor motivating his attacks.) In other cases, an anti-Islamist agenda is apparent or, indeed, clearly stated; one blogger even called Aslam an “Al Queda (sic) Columnist”, when in fact HT are not part of al-Qa’ida. As on so many other occasions, people only complain about inconsistencies in the media when weight is given to opinions other than their own; in this case, a paper has lost what could have been an important contact with the Muslim community, all because of a noisy group of bloggers who didn’t like his opinions.

(And no, I’m not a member or supporter of HT, and never have been.)