This piece by Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens is cross-posted from the Standpoint blog, Focus on Islamism
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This November, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) will be holding its course on political Islam and, like the last one, it is not without its controversial speakers.
I don’t have many fans in the SOAS political Islam Course; this is mainly because the think tank for which I work was instrumental in preventing the entry into the UK of one of its prominent invitees, Ibrahim el Moussawi. Moussawi, the head of Hezbollah’s propaganda station al Manar TV, was due to address the same course in March of this year until the Home Secretary refused him an entry visa at the last minute. SOAS, for their part, were more than happy to play host to a man who heads a TV channel which is banned in most of Europe because of its extreme antisemitism and promotion and incitement of violence.
The course, which is priced at just under £2000 per person, is aimed at police and civil servants who wish to learn more about Islamism. In the coming years, having police and members of the security services who are well versed on the history and ideology of political Islam will be absolutely crucial and the SOAS course is, in principle, a very important programme. It is a pity therefore, that the course convenors have wasted this opportunity by showcasing and paying a number of speakers who will be unable to provide an objective view on the subject.
Although this year SOAS have not attempted to hire a member of a terrorist group, and there are a number of very good lecturers, such as Joas Wanamakers, there are two speakers who should not be paid to teach government staff. The first is Kemal Helbawy, the former spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Europe, who has played a pivotal role in establishing the MB network in the UK. He founded both the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) and the Muslim Welfare House (MWH) in the 90s, with both groups seeing substantial success in propagating the MB ideology in the UK. He is also known for his support for Hamas terrorism and a month after 7/7, when Tony Blair stated that suicide bombing was wrong under any circumstances, including in Israel, Helbawy condemned him: “Well he is wrong. It is as simple as that! He is not a Mufti. He is a British Statesman.” More recently, he told a BBC Arabic interviewer that Israeli children were legitimate targets for terrorist attacks.
Helbawy will be joined this time by Noman Haneef, who is advertised on the SOAS site as undertaking a PHD on Hizb ut Tahrir (HT) and as a lecturer at Birbeck College and Royal Holloway. What the synopsis fails to mention is that Haneef is also, at best, an apologist for HT and their ideology. Formerly involved with the group himself, he is heavily critical of former HT members who have identified the HT ideology as a potential security and societal threat. On his blog he has also written a number of rambling and long-winded articles explaining that HT represent nothing more than harmless exponents of classical Islam.
In his paranoid attack on my co blogger Shiraz Maher, Haneef criticises him for writing that “Islamist terrorism does not exist in a vacuum. Like other social phenomena, it operates within a wider infrastructure, designed to achieve specific ends. In this case, that is the political ideology of Islamism, an idea distinct and different from Islam the religion.” Haneef’s response to this concise and correct identification of the root of jihadist terror is that “The issue is not terrorism but a concerted attack on the ideas of political Islam and specifically those concerning the Caliphate, Islamic Universalism and jihad.” For him, attempts to re establish the Caliphate and the concept of jihad are completely disconnected from jihadist terrorism; a claim that could only be conjured up by an apologist for a sectarian and supremacist ideology. What use then, is a man who refuses to accept the ideological underpinnings of Islamist terror? If anyone attending Haneef’s lecture at SOAS thinks they may not be able to make it, here is my synopsis of what I think he will say: “Political Islam, and in particular the perceived duty of re establishing the Caliphate, are the products of pure Islamic teachings and pose no threat to the secular world. Those who connect the terror threat with the Islamist ideology are Mi5 stooges and Islamophobes .”
As exponents and supporters of Islamism, Helbawy and Haneef are no doubt in a good position to teach about the subject and I suppose we could learn something from them. Using tax payer money to pay them for this service, as will be the case with many of the attendees, is absurd, as is the notion that their lectures will be of a balanced and objective nature.
22 Comments
Too right – this is like paying David Irvine to discuss the Holocaust.
Bang on.
Conditions for Muslims in Europe need to be made harder across the board.
The parallel with Irving is spot on.
I am little confused here.
Any academic course must include the opportunity to listen to voices with which one disagrees. In the end result, we must allow our students to make up their own minds.
If we genuinely find positions repugnant, we can neither allow a situation where their exponents are not allowed to air their vile views; nor can we assume that the students are so dim not to recognise such for themselves. Else, we are engaged in instruction and not education.
I would assume that most would understand these activities to be, finally, disposed to other ends.
“I don’t have many fans in the SOAS political Islam Course; this is mainly because the think tank for which I work was instrumental in preventing the entry into the UK of one of its prominent invitees”
that may be true, but it could also be because the head if your so called think tank is a rabid anti-Muslim bigot whose views are not far removed from the BNP.
Hey, why don’t you bite the bullet and open up a London franchise of Daniel Pipes’ Campuswatch? Since your so concerned about Political Islam on campus you could also start holding Islamoifacism Weeks as they did in the US? And why stop there, since your not far off from importing the vile hysteria of the American Right, you could start holding tea mornings at the SOAS canteen and start discussing whether Barack Hussain Obama is a raging closet Islamist.
LOL @ Rashid’s post. You have Spitoon down to a T.
Slow day at iEngage, Inayat?
Unlike those balanced and objective zionist “experts” on political Islam like Harrys Place. Or using £1 million of tax payers money for the balanced and objective Quisling Foundation.
“Quisling Foundation”?
Unsuitable choice of epithet for the Quilliam Foundation.
More apropriate for Abdul Bari and his Jamaati friends at the MCB, for whom the term “Quisling” which is a euphemism for “collaborators of a genocide” really does hold meaning.
dawood
What even the ones who werent born at the time or involved in the fighting?
I think you learnt “sins of the fathers” from your zionist friends -it doesnt exist in Islam – we have “no bearer of burdens bears the burden of another”
[أَلاَّ تَزِرُ وَزِرَةٌ وِزْرَ أُخْرَى ]
And am not sure why its wrong in your eyes for the Jamaat to join forces against the Bengali Muslims but not for you and Spitton and the Quisling Foundation to support the zionists or other non-Muslims invading Muslim lands or collaborate with Muslim haters like Douglas Murray and Harrys Place. Clearly you only give a sh*t about Bengali Muslims (or more precisely those Bengali Muslims who agree with since a large part of your blog is demonising member of the Bengali Muslim minority in the UK)
“What even the ones who werent born at the time or involved in the fighting?””
Abdul Bari and friends weren’t born or at the time of the genocide by Jamaat and the Pak Military? I’ve heard some weak pretexts from Jamaati apologists, but that’s got to be in top 5.
Clearly you only give a sh*t about Bengali Muslims (or more precisely those Bengali Muslims who agree with since a large part of your blog is demonising member of the Bengali Muslim minority in the UK).
And clearly you don’t give a shit about Bengali Muslims or any other kind of Muslim who rejects your Islamist ideology.
You see, your trickery is very simple and very transparent. You insist that there is no difference between the average Muslim on the street and the politically organised Islamist groups like the Jamaat-e-Islam. Now, whether you like it or not, JI have the blood of millions of Bangladeshi Muslims on their hands, and you know that.
And you can try with all the moral relativism and whataboutery you can, but you simply cannot equate the crimes of Jamaat as an organisation, and by that I mean the loss of of 2 million Muslim lives, with the “Islamophobic” comments by Douglas Murray, even if they do make you cry into your pillow at night. The fact that you don’t even get this is the fundamental perversion at the heart of Islamism in the UK.
But as far as I’m concerned it’s you and the c*nts from the British far-Left, who have fed you a steady diet of pro-Islamist apologia and moral relativism, who conflate Muslims with Islamists etc, who are the real anti-Muslim bigots operating in Britain today.
Well put, Dawood.
‘But as far as I’m concerned it’s you and the c*nts from the British far-Left, who have fed you a steady diet of pro-Islamist apologia and moral relativism, who conflate Muslims with Islamists etc, who are the real anti-Muslim bigots operating in Britain today.’
You point to the far-Left, but I think most soft-Lefties of the Guardianista persuasion have a sweet spot for Islamism, or as they would rather put it, “downtrodden, marginalised brown people of the Islamic kind”. Just look at Sunny Hundal, for example. And Pickled Politics – my God! It’s now the home of every kind of left wing nutjob and Islamist cretin you can possibly imagine.
Which invasion of Muslim Lands are we supporting?
Please invade this “Muslim Land” shortly… night life is terrible here.
Would it be very Islamophobic if we were to turf out the Islamists out of East London Mosque in East End and Green Lanes Mosque in Birmingham, pull them down and replace them with 5-story casinos?
Good.
But it’s ok for Islamists to dream about invading non-Muslim lands.
Muslim
I think that is a very telling statement. You confuse the views of Zionists with a purported precept of the religion of Judaism (when, as eny ful no, not all Zionists are Jews) – and then directly confirm the suspicion that you are a raving anti-Semite by comparing Zionism (a political ideology) with Islam (a religion).
Go on, admit it – you just don’t like Jews – and the term “Zionism” is just a fig-leaf for your Jew-hatred.
Well, of course! The hordes of scimitar-waving jihadi have come to bring us all liberation from polytheism and pubs…
Just as Soviet tanks bought workers’ liberation and socialism in their wake, naturally.
Great site chaps. Thanks for articulating pretty much everything that most Muslims think and feel but were afraid to ask for fear of putting their heads above the parapet. Keep up the great thought provoking articles and the erudite comments. Knock it to the loony Islamists!
except, of course, according to you, that presumably wouldn’t apply to israeli children, unless you are intending to check the zionist affiliation of their fathers before approving of them being blown up for the crime of occupying “muslim land”, whatever that concept actually means. or am i wrong? were all those commuters in madrid liable for the crime of occupying the “muslim land” of al-andalus five hundred years ago? loophole much?
it’s an interesting statement this, however – could it not be understood as meaning that there is no such thing as collective responsibility? judaism, of course, considers that there *is*, for us at least – “kol yisrael arevim zeh-la-zeh” – all jewish people are responsible for one another. i presume it cannot mean there is no such thing as muslims having responsibility for each other and must, therefore mean that one muslim cannot be held responsible for another muslim’s crime, i presume with the proviso that he didn’t contribute to it in any way. would be interested in some sane thoughts on this.
b’shalom
bananabrain
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