Has beens and wanabees

This is a cross-post by Terry Fitzpatrick

There is an air of desperation about the announcement of a conference at The Camden Centre next Saturday the 5th of June. Announcements in the Morning Star and on Socialist Unity meant that the omens were not good and the line up of those speaking confirms that.

Islamophobia has, it seems, become the new Anti Semitism and anyone who criticises the more extreme elements of Islam who want to impose a caliphate, reduce women to the status of second class citizens and murder gays and apostates is routinely regarded as the modern day equivalent of a member of the Waffen SS, at least as far as the assortment of Trots, Stalinists and Islamofascists who will be gathering at Kings Cross next weekend are concerned.

There is the full range of the usual suspects all of whom have plenty of form for defending anyone and any group that wants to attack democratic institutions and I won’t look at them all. Of the Muslim groups there are several that warrant attention.

Unknown to most people there are now five Bangladeshi TV stations in this country serving an audience of anything up to a million across the UK and Western Europe. I have been interviewed on two of them, Bangla TV and Channel S and they are both forward looking stations.

The Islam Channel is anything but and a recent report (pdf) from the Quilliam Foundation was devoted to it. The report was titled Reprogramming British Muslims – A study of the Islam Channel. The introduction said this: “This report was created after three months of studying the most-watched progammes and identifies three recurring problems seen in all of the programmes monitored: the promotion of backward attitudes towards women, the intolerance of other religions and non Wahabi forms of Islam, and the promotion of extremism through featured individuals and terminolgy used in programming”.

So no surprise then that a senior official of the channel, Mohamed Ali, will be speaking at the conference. They could have approached someone like Ajmal Masroor, the former Lib Dem candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow at the last election.

He presents Channel S and is running a series of programmes for young Bangladeshis on the history of the East End. He interviewed me about the struggles of Bangladeshis, whites, Jews and African Caribbeans against the NF in the seventies as well running a programme about the Nazi bombing of the East End interviewing survivors. All good stuff but not what the organisers of this conference want to hear. They want to hear that the young Muslims sent down for the riot outside the Israeli embassy are victims of Islamophobia and have selected people who will tell them that.

Also scheduled to deliver some pearls of wisdom is Daud Abdullah. He is of course famous for signing the Istanbul Declaration which calls for attacks on Royal Navy vessels. A report in the Observer quotes Hazel Blears saying this about him: “We have particular concern about (sections) 11.7 and 11.8. Although the wording is not exact, it is clear that the intention behind them is to call for attacks on Jews throughout the world”. Abdullah threatened to sue and didn’t. Nice people to do business with as the Curry Motors ads used to say.

Next up on the ID parade are our old friends from the Muslim Safety Forum. They of course advise the police and the Home Office on a range of issues all of which have words like “diversity” and “inclusion” in them. Unfortunately they also have as members people like Azad Ali famous for, like Abdullah, calling for attacks on British forces.

When he sued the Daily Mail for an article that it wrote about him he claimed that the article tended to portray him as a “hardline Islamic extremist who supports the killing of British and American soldiers in Iraq as justified”. Mr Justice Eady slung the whole thing out saying that “It was bound to fail and had an absence of reality”.

I have a personal interest in Bro Azad. He lives in Tower Hamlets and is a govenor of Cannon Barnett school in Whitechapel. On the evening of his suspension from his job as a Civil Servant over the statements about killing British and American troops I received a tip off from one of my IFE moles that he was going to a meeting with senior IFE members in Stepney.

With a photographer I observed Ali and the former leader of Tower Hamlets Lutfur Rahman deep in conversation in the Halal Bite restaurant next door to Stepney Green tube. We got some good snaps which are on file and held in reserve. The building is also of interest as it is owned by IFE and upstairs is one of the madrassas, religious schools, that pump IFE’s particular brand of Islam into young minds.

I see old Tony Benn will be there as well. He is a veritable old lag when it comes to these sorts of shenanighans with form going back to the nineteen fifties. He should be tagged and on a permanent ASBO. Lindsey German, famous for dumping gay and women’s issues when the Stop the War campaign saw that there was a mass of Muslims to be recruited into what became Respect. You just can’t keep a good opportunist down.

Moazzam Begg and Muhamad Habibur-Rahman of IFE. Enough said I think but some of the others need a bit of comment. Jeremy Corbyn MP for instance. It’s worth looking at www.hurryupharry.org/2010/02/25/jeremy-corbyn-mp-for-rioters. This gives a good link to not just him but also some of the other suspects and contains footage of the riot for which the innocent young Muslims that are one of the subjects of the Saturday meeting. Allegedly all of this never took place and the whole thing is a conspiracy to, here’s that phrase again, demonize Muslims.

Next up in the dock Seamus Milne, unreconstructed old Stalinist and senior staffer on the Guardian. He is of course well known for long rambling articles on absolutely nothing and nobody pays very much attention to him but some of his past statements are worth looking at.

I have found a quote from him on the internet in which he says this. “Despite its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. Its existence helped to drive up welfare standards in the West, boosted the anti colonial movement and provided a powerful counterweight to Western global domination”.

If there is one thing that seems to unite all of these speakers it is a hatred of the very societies that have given them the freedom to say what they do and our final suspects certainly fall into that category. As far as I know Bob Pitt is one of Livingstone’s cronies who didn’t get the chop when Boris took over and is still working at City Hall.

He is widely suspected of writing in its entirety Livingstone’s speech in defence of Yusuf Al Qaradawi. Once again HP reported this, have a look at www.hurryupharry/2008/06/12/bob-pitt-master-of-sock-puppets. It is of course with this kind of pedigree entirely appropriate that he should be running Islamophobiawatch.

The rather strange Peter Oborne is also taking the stage. He has authored or co-authored two very suspect projects. One that I have read, “Muslims Under Seige”, is a saga of fairly minor incidents involving threats or attacks on Muslims in the UK. Nowhere does he mention that it is extreme Muslims of the kind he will be associating with on Saturday who support suicide bombers and attacks on British troops. The whole thrust of the document is that any criticism of any Muslim anywhere are grounds for screaming ” Islamophobia”. His other project, “The Pro-Israeli Lobby in England”, speaks for itself.

Our old friends from The North London Central Mosque are turning up with, no doubt, messages of peace and reconciliation. Formerly know as Finsbury Park Mosque it was home to old “Hooky” Abu Hamza. Eventually the authorities moved in and the whole place was supposed to be under new management. One of the new Trustees, Khalid Mahmood MP for Perry Bar in Birmingham resigned in March this year after his signature was forged on documents. Business as usual then.

I began by saying that there is an air of desperation about this whole thing and not just the charade which will be played out next Saturday. The extreme left in this country is in the worst shape that I can remember it in.

All of the grand campaigns that were going to transform British society have collapsed. Stop the War is a paper organisation that no longer pretends that it can mobilise more than a handful of people. Respect was trashed on election day and is now nothing more than a research project for social historians. As for things like the “Left List” and the “Convention of the Left” they are embarrassments that are no longer even referred to.

When the British far left got into bed with extremist Islam in Respect and StW they shed any remnants of a claim to moral authority on anything. Their opportunism has caught up with them as it had to. The only beneficiaries from this mess have been the extremists preaching religious hatred in Mosques and madrassas the length and breadth of the country. It would be good to think that at some point German, Corbyn, Milne and others might reflect on what they have helped to create, but their self righteousness and loathing of our society make that highly unlikely.