This is a guest post by Lucy James, a research fellow at Quilliam
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Last month, on the back of a paper entitled In Defence of British Muslims: A response to BNP racist propaganda (pdf), I called for Muslim communities, and the British public as a whole, to take a more united ideological stand against the BNP; one that systematically undermines their arguments in the British mainstream.
Last week we heard about Noor Ramjanally, a Muslim community leader in Loughton, who was allegedly kidnapped from his home late at night and taken to Epping Forest at knifepoint, where he was ordered to stop holding prayer meetings. A BNP campaign which distributed leaflets saying ‘No mosques in Loughton’ was held responsible for creating the tensions that led to the crime.
The local BNP councillor Pat Richardson bizarrely defended allegations of BNP violence saying ‘’Firebombing is not a British method. A brick through the window is a British method but firebombing is not a way of showing displeasure”.
Yesterday, however, we heard that Ramjanally had been arrested on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. Today he has been charged and is due to appear in Harlow magistrates’ court later this month.
I strongly believe in the principal of innocent until proven guilty. The BNP appear not to, however. Even before Noor Ramjanally was arrested they had issued a statement that dismissed his story as a ‘fantasy driven by a desire to stir up racial tensions’. As soon as he was arrested the BNP issued another statement calling Ramjanally a ‘fantasy “Muslim abductee”’ and saying that they had known this all along given the ‘cursory’ nature of his facts and calling it a ‘smear’ against them.
The outcome of the case is irrelevant to the BNP. Whether he is proved guilty or innocent, it will provide valuable fodder for those racists who seek to portray Muslim communities as unethical.
Today, on the back of this debacle, we hear that the BNP are going to hire lawyers in order to change their admissions policy—the very backbone of their ideological structure—or, Griffin has remarked, face being ‘utterly crushed’. This follows the taking of the BNP to court by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission about the ‘whites-only’ nature of their admission policy. ‘Adapt or die’ declared Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, in a statement this morning. The BNP are in a financial crisis and obtaining the £80,000 needed to challenge the EHRC in court is a serious challenge for their members.
Whether or not Ramjanally is found innocent, what members of the British public, Muslims and non-Muslims, need to do is constantly confront and refute the BNP’s weak arguments. The BNP’s racist ideology is facing a significant legal challenge. Fingers-crossed that it may self-destruct on the impossibility of the task in hand: changing an admissions policy against the very ideological principles that hold the party together. The likelihood is that it won’t, and the British public needs to step up their game and continue to intellectually and systematically undermine the BNP’s arguments along the way.
2 Comments
Although I strongly support legal action being taken against the BNP in relation to its illegal and discriminatory membership policies, what would happen if/when it loses? Even when it is forced to drop its ‘folk communities’ crap from its constitution, then what? The BNP is hardly about to see thousands of liberal pluralists and members of cultural minority groups join them – it will be the same old racist party. Being found guilty of unlawful discrimination will not damage the BNP. People vote for them, because they know it is a racist party. The judgement will do no more than confirm that fact.
I don’t believe in the ‘principle’ of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, when it comes of expressing my opinion, and neither do you
. You think that the BNP will be found guilty of unlawful discrimination, and so do I. We also both think that the BNP did, in fact, whip up hatred against Muslims on the back of Noor R’s quite reasonable desire to hold a quiet prayer meeting in a hall he had hired. We’ve seen the evidence, one piece of which is the leaflet you republish above. We don’t give the BNP the benefit of the doubt. Why should we?
Innocent until proven guilty is a principle of our legal system. Due process is required before punishment. But that does not mean a commentator cannot express an opinion on a controversy, merely because one day a trial might take place.
If Noor R has lied about being kidnapped, then he has behaved very badly indeed, and will have done significant damage to antifascist work in Loughton. Sadly, from what I have heard from antifascists in Loughton, there is reason to suspect that the report of the kidnap was untrue.
If Noor R did make up the kidnap story, then we should be angry. My anger at him is diminished, slightly, because I believe the man to have been under intense pressure, some of which arose from the racist campaign against his prayer room, and some of which was unrelated to it.
However, people should take a close look at how this local story became a national one. This was an issue that was being fought by local antifascists. Then Abdurahman Jafar’s Muslim Safety Forum stepped in. They issued a press release which – astonishingly – blamed the Government for causing the ‘Islamophobia’ which led to the kidnapping.
It was a childish and stupid attempt to score a cheap political shot off the back of Noor R’s predicament. It was Jafar’s MSF that mailed this story to the national media.
Because the MSF is dominated by Jamaati and MB supporters, we should not be surprised that it acted in this way.
This episode also demonstrates the amateurish nature of the MSF. They should never have promoted this story without properly assessing its probable truth. If they had spoken to local antifascists, they would have been told that the story was not a strong one. They should never have used the event as an attempt to bash the Government.
Still, what would you expect from a bunch of thick Hamas supporters?
What we really don’t need is more protests like this.