Jack Straw reveals more about his own particular ethnicity-bias than he probably wants to when he makes comments as cretinous as this:

“But there is a specific problem which involves Pakistani heritage men … who target vulnerable young white girls.

“We need to get the Pakistani community to think much more clearly about why this is going on and to be more open about the problems that are leading to a number of Pakistani heritage men thinking it is OK to target white girls in this way.”

To which Christopher Dillow’s reaction is suitably irritated:

My problem is that this sort of claim bundles up trivially true statements with contentious ones. It’s trivially true that sex crimes, however rare, are a problem. And it’s trivially true that some Pakistani men are sex criminals, just as some whites are. The question is: why bring ethnicity into it? Are men of Pakistani heritage more likely to commit sex crime than others?

There is a reasonable motive for asking this question. Maybe Islam’s different attitudes towards sexuality and women create a different predisposition among  Pakistani men towards sex crimes.  This is a reasonable hypothesis, to be tested against the facts. But there’s also an unreasonable motive – the outgroup homogeneity bias generates an unreasonable double standard: if a white man commits a rape, he’s just a rapist but if a Pakistani does so, he’s a Pakistani rapist. You wouldn’t ask the “white community” to look into itself if a white guy commits a sex crime, so why ask the “Pakistani community” to do so if a Pakistani does so?
And herein lies my irritation. Straw gives us no statistics to justify his claim.

Those that do exist seem to undermine his claim.

Dillow links to some data (pdf) if you want to see why Jack Straw ought to be making these comments in context – from the pages of the Daily Mail.

Table 5.4b of this pdf shows that, in the latest year for which we have data, Lancashire police arrested 627 people for sexual offences. 0.3% of these were Pakistanis. That’s two people. 85.5% were white British. In Lancashire, there are 1,296,900 white Brits and 45,000 Pakistanis. This means that 4.163 per 10,000 white Brits were arrested for a sex crime, compared to 0.44 Pakistanis. If you’re a journalist, you might say that the chances of being arrested for a sex crime are nine times greater if you’re white than Pakistani. If you’re a statistician, you might say they are 0.037 percentage points greater.

Real data is almost always bad news for duplicitous populists whose motivation is to use terms such as “ingrained” and “easy meat” when discussing sexual offences perpetrated by youths of Pakistani heritage.

Mohammed Shafiq of the youth group Ramadhan Foundation demonstrates how it is possible to be appreciate of the problem without resorting to the crass Daily Mail soundbites:

“I first raised this issue two or three years ago and I got a lot of stick within the community from people who said I was doing the work of the BNP and stigmatising them.

“Most people didn’t realise the seriousness of it. But now, after a series of court cases, things have changed. I have had a lot of support.

“There is a perception that some of these young men do not see white girls as equal, as valuable, of high moral standing as they see their own daughters, and their own sisters, and I think that’s wrong.”

But he added: “These gangs that operate are criminals. There’s nothing in their culture, there’s nothing in their religion to suggest that this sort of thing is ingrained.

****

Suleman has always known that he was attracted to men. He would wear his mother’s saris when she was out of the house and put on his sister’s make-up in the belief that this is what men found appealing. Suleman also knew that he wanted to be a religious leader, an imam. He joined a madrassa (an Islamic religious school) where he began rigorous training. Small in stature with an imposing black beard, he is dressed in a white kurta pyjama with a matching white mosque hat, the ubiquitous uniform for the men of Allah. He is predisposed to following everything up with religious references.

‘Imams have a lot of responsibility. The Malik (Lord) has chosen me, even with all my flaws, to follow him. If I can fulfil even the slightest one of his wishes, then Allah is pleased.’

At age 32, Suleman leads the five daily prayers and also the Friday jumma at one of the largest mosques in Dhaka. His dry, husky voice, a result of the fiery sermons he delivers, has a cheerful twinkle buried in it.

Suleman made the decision to become a religious leader partly in the hope that it would bring an end to the desires he had for men, something he thought at the time to be outside of the bounds of religious acceptability.

As with the other Abrahamic religions, the story of Lot and the destruction of Sodom, used by some Muslims to condemn homosexuality, was something he was more than familiar with. Suleman tried controlling his feelings by praying and fasting obsessively, ironically in the process excelling in the eyes of the scholars at the madrassa. However, to his dismay he found that his urges did not diminish. If anything, as he grew older, they became worse.

‘All night in the dormitory, my eyes would see no sleep. I wanted to be able to care for a man, marry him and give him physical pleasure,’ he remembers.

One day Suleman reluctantly shared his feelings with a friend, a fellow student. They ended up having sex. Afterwards, he was meticulous about following the guidelines on fornication set out by Islamic scriptures. He had already recited a prayer before they slept with each other; afterwards he washed his entire body, his mouth, hands and only then did he go to sleep. In the morning he prayed for forgiveness and read the Qur’an.

This was a pivotal moment. For the first time in his life, it dawned on him that what he had done was not wrong. He remembers saying in his prayers that day, ‘my friend and I needed and wanted to do this. It gave us peace of mind and body. Is this so wrong?’

Suleman is hardly the norm in the conservative world of Bangladeshi Islamic orthodoxy. I ask him whether he believes what he did was ghuna (sin)? In Islam the sin is in the act and not at the level of the feelings or thinking.

He has given this much thought. ‘Love between men, even in the days of the Prophet, has always existed and always will.’ He asks me if I know the worst sin a person can commit. I don’t. He replies that it is to give koshto (pain) to another. Giving koshto is the equivalent of destroying one of Allah’s mosques.

Read the rest of the article in full.

The Park51 debate has now spilled over into the doomed territory of visceral offence taking. The opportunity to have this debate on issues such as the American Constitution’s provisions for freedom of religion and Islam’s obligation to universal principles in the USA may have been lost for good. Nevertheless Manji takes a crack at articulating a set of questions and demands expected of Imam Rauf should Park51 ever get built.

But for all the restless offense I feel, I step back and force myself to think. As I wrestle with the issues, I realize that an opportunity exists for something more constructive than anger.

Namely, accountability. If Park51 gets built, thanks to its provocative location the nation will scrutinize what takes place inside. Americans have the opportunity right now to be clear about the civic values expected from any Islam practiced at the site.

That means setting aside bombast and asking the imam questions born of the highest American ideals: individual dignity and pluralism of ideas.

• Will the swimming pool at Park51 be segregated between men and women at any time of the day or night?

• May women lead congregational prayers any day of the week?

• Will Jews and Christians, fellow People of the Book, be able to use the prayer sanctuary for their services just as Muslims share prayer space with Christians and Jews in the Pentagon? (Spare me the technocratic argument that the Pentagon is a governmental, not private, building. Park51 may be private in the legal sense but is a public symbol par excellence.)

• What will be taught about homosexuals? About agnostics? About atheists? About apostasy?

• Where does one sign up for advance tickets to Salman Rushdie’s lecture at Park51?

These questions aren’t gratuitous. I, for one, remain haunted by the 300 Muslims chanting “Death to Rushdie” on Sept. 10, 2001. They gathered outside a theater in Houston, Texas, to protest a visit by the novelist—the target of a 1989 death warrant from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. One Muslim told reporters, “The fatwa is valid even if the Iranian government no longer supports it.” Another warned, “We have not forgotten about him and his evil act.” That man affiliated himself with Houston’s Islamic Education Center. Education or indoctrination? The question deserves an honest response.

Through engagement that emphasizes questions like these, Americans of all faiths and no faith at all may very well make the colorful neighborhood around Ground Zero host to the most transparent, most democratic, most modern Islam—ever.

As a proud New Yorker as well as a reformist Muslim, I think, and not just feel, that this would be a fitting salute to the victims of 9/11. It would turn the tables on the freedom-hating culture of al Qaeda. And it would subvert the liberty-lashing culture of offense

Family members of victims of the bomb attack at Lahore’s Data Ganj shrine grieve over their loss

The broad Sunni-Shia division does not explain all of it

• Most Sunnis adhere to the Hanafi school of jurisprudence. Only 5 per cent of the country’s population belongs to the Ahle Hadith sect or Wahabis.
• The Sunnis are subdivided into the Barelvi and Deobandi schools of thought
• The Deobandis and Wahabis consider the Barelvis as kafir, because they visit the shrines of saints, offer prayers, believe music, poetry and dance can lead to god
• Barelvis constitute 60 per cent of the population. Deobandis and Wahabis together account for 20 per cent
• Another 15 per cent are Shias, again considered kafir and subjected to repeated attacks
• Since 2000, the Sunni-Shia conflict has claimed 5,000 lives
• Others considered kafir are the religious minorities—Christians, Ismailis, Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Ahmadias, etc, who account for 5 per cent of the population
• So, 20 per cent of the population effectively considers the remaining 80 per cent as kafir

***
Renowned Pakistani writer Khaled Ahmed points to the irony: “Within Sunni Islam, the Deobandis and the Barelvis are not found anywhere outside India and Pakistan. The creation of these two sects was one of the masterstrokes of the Raj in its divide-and-rule policy.” He says the Deobandi school took roots in India in 1866 as a reaction to the overthrow of Muslim rule by the British. This school believes in a literalist interpretation of Islam, and apart from Wahabis, considers all other sects as non-Muslim who must be exterminated. “That’s why they work side by side, from politics to jehad,” says Ahmed, adding that though the Barelvi school of thought is the dominant jurisprudence in Pakistan, “it is not as well politically organised as the Deobandi school.”

It was the Deobandi-Wahabi alliance, says Rehman, which pressured President Gen Zia-ul-Haq to declare the Ahmadis as non-Muslims. At a stroke of the pen, thus, a Muslim sect was clubbed with other religious minorities. Under the Constitution, they can’t call themselves Muslim or even describe their place of worship as a mosque. Wary of disclosing their identity publicly, the Ahmadis were dragged into the spotlight following devastating attacks on two of their mosques in Lahore that killed over a hundred people.

But ‘Muslim’ status doesn’t insulate even mainstream sects from murderous attacks. Ask the Shias, whose Muharram procession in Karachi was bombed in December 2009, killing 33. The Deobandis regard Shias as kafir, claiming their devotion to the clerics and grant of divinely inspired status to them as heretical. The history of Sunni-Shia conflict is as old as Islam, but this has become increasingly bloody in the last decade—over 5,000 people have been killed since 2000—because of the war in Afghanistan. Since Iran had backed the Northern Alliance there, the Deobandis have taken to retaliating against the sect in Pakistan. They also accuse the Shias of assisting the Americans to invade Iraq.

Says historian Dr Mubarak Ali, “One consequence of the war in Afghanistan is the fracturing of Pakistan’s religious patchwork quilt. Whereas once the faultlines lay between the Shias and Sunnis, these have now spread to the Barelvis and Deobandis, who are both Sunni.” Since the Barelvis are moderate and against the Taliban, the Deobandis look upon them as the state’s stooges, who as heretics should be put to death anyway, Ali argues.

Perhaps the complicity between the state and the Deobandis deterred the latter from targeting the Barelvis till now. Lawyer and columnist Yasser Latif Hamdani says, “There is this potent mixture of Pashtun nationalism and Deobandi Islam. Somehow, there is something intrinsic to the very nature of Deobandi doctrine which the Pakistani military establishment is promoting to advance its so-called geostrategic agenda.” Yet, simultaneously, under US pressure, the state had to crack down on the TTP, which, in pique, has taken to wreaking vengeance on the hapless Barelvis.

As long as powerful sections in the establishment persist with their goal of bringing the Pashtun Taliban back to power in Kabul, they will continue, says columnist Imtiaz Alam, “digging the grave of a democratic Pakistan”. Sectarianism and jehadi terrorism will be its consequent wages, he insists. No doubt, the enraged people of Lahore took to the streets protesting against the attack on the Data Darbar, but what’s of greater urgency is that the state must do some really deep thinking.

Earlier this month he was one of three men arrested in Ontario, Canada:

Three Canadians arrested in an alleged terrorist conspiracy had bomb parts and plans and posed a “real and serious threat”, Canadian police have said.

The trio, arrested this week, were charged with supporting terrorism.

Hiva Alizadeh and Misbahuddin Ahmed were jailed following a court appearance on Thursday.

In 2008, Khurram took part in the auditions for Canadian Idol, where he performed the Avril Lavigne song, ‘Complicated’:

As Khurram told the judges at Canadian Idol, he is from Pakistan and enjoys acting, music and hockey.

Warning: Social cohesion it is not. But don’t worry, no ‘black Muslim Puerto Rican types’ were physically hurt in the making of this video.

This is a take of it from gawker.com :

Both supporters and opponents of the “Ground Zero” “Mosque”—a proposed community center—held rallies in lower Manhattan today. Can you guess which side started chanting “no mosque here” at a black guy wandering through the crowd?

While you spent your Sunday trying to teach your cat to go to the bathroom on a human toilet, a group of brave, freedom-loving Americans gathered in New York City to express their extreme disapproval with the Park 51 project, an al-Qaeda plot to build a community center featuring a swimming pool and auditorium on the very site where a Burlington Coat Factory once stood.

As you can see in the video above, at some point during the rally, a dark-skinned man wearing an Under Armor skullcap and what looks like a necklace with a Puerto Rican flag walked through the anti-”Mosque” crowd. The crowd, astutely recognizing that he was on his way to build the mosque, began to chant “NO MOSQUE HERE” at him. In the video, someone says, “run away, coward.” The man turns around, perturbed. “Y’all motherfuckers don’t know my opinion about shit,” he says. Au contraire, my friend: You are a black man wearing a skullcap, after all! You are definitely a pro-Mosque, anti-freedom Jihadist! Why, aren’t you, in fact… Osama Bin Laden??

No, actually, according to the guy who uploaded the video to YouTube, the skullcap-wearing gentleman’s name is Kenny and he’s “a Union carpenter who works at Ground Zero.” Kenny is also—as he points out several times in the video—not a Muslim. (No word on whether or not he voted for Obama, as one of the very reasonable and intelligent-sounding anti-”Mosque” protestors speculates.) But I’ll bet you Kenny has been totally convinced about the truth of the Burlington Coat Factory Desecration Community Center. Who wouldn’t be?

A Bangladesh court has ruled that people cannot be forced to wear skull caps, veils or other religious clothing in workplaces, schools and colleges.

This ruling comes after reports emerged that a college in the north of Bangladesh forced women to wear veils.

The high court also ruled that women cannot be prevented from taking part in sports or cultural activities.

The court said that wearing any form of religious clothing, for students and employees, should be a personal choice.

It has also asked the authorities to explain why it should not be made illegal to prevent girls from taking part in sports and cultural activities.

In April this year, the court ordered schools and colleges not to force women to wear the burqa, a garment that covers the entire body except the eyes and hands.

Mahbub Shafique, one of the lawyers who filed the latest litigation, told the BBC how this ruling goes a step further.

“The difference between these two is that, this particular ruling today doesn’t apply only on females it also applies to males as well.

Barring the enforced veiling of women or the enforced wearing of skull caps is is a welcome legislation and acknowledgement of the fact that women and young men are forced to wear clothing and other outward symbols of religiosity.

Alex Massie’s comment on the “Ground Zero Mosque” is spot on:

One of the recurring arguments against the plan is that, however well-intentioned its backers may be, it represents an unfortunate and unnecessary “provocation”. Even if those involved mean no harm and don’t mean to “provoke” they should have been wise enough to appreciate that their proposal was bound to provoke a hostile reaction. Which means they should think again.

That’s certainly an argument; I just don’t think it’s a very good one. It is a familiar one, however. Cast your mind back 20 years and remember the rumpus that erupted when Salman Rushdie had the temerity, the gall, the bare-arsed effrontery to publish The Satanic Verses. There were those – including plenty of so-called liberals – who effectively sided with the book-burners and maniacs who protested against Rushdie (and the Penguin group) calling for the book to be banned.

Rushdie, you see, should have appreciated that publishing was bound toprovoke people and, this being so, he should have been wise enough to pulp his novel. Yes, yes, of course we all believe in the right to freedom of expression but, in this instance, is it really sensible to insist upon it in such a provocative fashion? If there’s a backlash, well, poor Rushdie has brought it upon himself hasn’t he? He should have known better.

It was, as Christopher Hitchens has often argued a telling and not-so small moment that showed how willing many soi-disant liberals were to abandon liberalism as soon as that liberalism was tested. Liberty must be trimmed or even abandoned for fear its expression might upset someone else. The “right” not to be offended trumped all other more ancient and worthwhile rights.

But no-one has the right not to be offended and to try and insist upon such a right is a) absurd b) wrong and c) deeply inimical to the values of the kind of society we like to think we may, in our better moments anyway, be.

As with the Rushdie case, so with this “Ground Zero Mosque”. You can be as offended by it as you want to be but the mere fact that you may be offended does not trump other, more vital, considerations and nor does it give you any kind of moral, let alone substantive, veto over proceedings. Your outrage is not persuasive and nor does it shift the fundamental aspects of the matter.

Which is why the sub-Augustinian stuff we’ve been hearing lately is so depressing. Grant me religious tolerance lord – and a respect for the Constitution! – but not here and not yet, not now! That, you must understand, would be too hard.

To oppose the building of GZM on the grounds that it is “offensive” or a “provocation” or “controversial” is puerile and reactionary. The depressing fact is not so much that plans for a religious edifice near the site of “Ground Zero” could be shafted lest it offend anyone, it is rather that there is a large contingent of Americans today for whom building a mosque almost anywhere in the USA is an affront.

It is not “anti-American” to make this observation, nor does a mosque have to be in the vicinity of the World Trade Centre in south Manhattan to be considered an offensive “provocation”.

Take a look at the anti-mosque antics in Sheboygan Wisconsin, where:

a few Christian ministers led a noisy fight against a Muslim group that sought permission to open a mosque in a former health food store bought by a Muslim doctor.

At one time, neighbors who did not want mosques in their back yards said their concerns were over traffic, parking and noise – the same reasons they might object to a church or a synagogue. But now the gloves are off.

In all of the recent conflicts, opponents have said their problem is Islam itself. They quote passages from the Quran and argue that even the most Americanized Muslim secretly wants to replace the Constitution with Islamic Shariah law.

Not every opponent of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” is an anti-Muslim bigot with arguments rooted in prejudice. But if I were opposed to the GZM, I would be very keen to distinguish my set of reasons for opposing it from those by reactionary demagogues like Bill O’Reilly or Raheel Raza or even from a bunch of redneck farmers from Sheboygan, WI. Because at the moment, they are hardly indistinguishable at all.

If the reasons for opposing the mosque come down to not much more than being “offended”, then the response proffered by Stephen Fry in a conversation with Christopher Hitchens is without peer.

“So, you’re offended? So fucking what?”

Update: Good post from Gene at HP

The problem with feminism is feminists. [...]

Feminists like Dr. Aisha Gill, friend of Gita Sahgal, who worked tirelessly on the pr in support of the islamophobic attack on Amnesty International.

The wording is inexact but the unscrupulous motivation is obvious. Is the writer suggesting that Gita Sahgal and Aisha Gill are “islamophobic” [sic] or is she making that accusation of the “attack” on Amnesty International? Either way, how does she come to this conclusion and what is her evidence?

Of all the accusations and smears made of Gita Sahgal by her many detractors after she took the matter of Amnesty International’s partnership with the jihadist pressure group Cageprisoners to the public, the charge of “Islamophobia” has been the most baseless. Unfortunately, it also is the most pernicious since it requires little or no evidence for the smear to stick.

By accusing Sahgal or Gill of being “Islamophobes”, earwigca is suggesting that there is no political or cultural distinction between mainstream Muslims and Islamist jihadists such as Moazzam Begg. This could easily lead to the incorrect conclusion that all Muslims are jihadists in one form or another. In fact this conclusion is happily drawn, for totally divergent reasons, by both the far-right and the Islamists. Finally, there is also a third camp who fail to make this distinction, and that is the regressive left. Nevertheless, whatever the political motivation, this kind of reductionism is anti-Muslim bigotry, pure and simple.

With these accusations earwigca places herself squarely in one of these camps or is at least symptomatic of anti-Muslim bigotry.

Now I am quite sure earwigca’s personal grievances against feminism could have been made without including this irresponsible and incorrect slur. But now that she has made it, her accusations would be much more credible if she would elaborate how and in what way Sahgal’s or Gill’s motivations were “Islamophobic”.

I personally know many Muslims who supported Gita Sahgal in her dispute with Amnesty. Some of them include Sara Hossain, Ansar Ahmed Ullah, Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, Tehmina Kazi, Sandra M Kabir, Tahmima Anam, Amina Ali, Aisha Shaheed, Dr Ahmed Zaman, Rayhan Rashid, Waliur Rahman, Syeda Nazneen Sultana, Dr Irfan Al Alawi, Dr Rafikul Hasan Khan amongst many others, including myself, many of whom worked with Gita and supported her cause.

The question to now direct at Pickled Politics is this – are all these Muslims Islamophobic? If so, this would be akin to calling them “Uncle Toms”, the racist provenance of which needs no explanation.

Personal decency dictates that earwigca publish a clarification. Failing that, a retraction and an apology would be in order from Pickled Politics to Aisha Gill and to Gita Sahgal’s many Muslim supporters.

The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato. Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

h/t: Kisan

Islamist ideology certainly needs to be challenged. The question is whether its nonviolent form should included in an anti-terrorism strategy.

But does the Guardian actually challenge Islamist ideology at all? In the last two days two articles have appeared in both its print and electronic channels which suggest that far from challenging Islamist ideology, it has dropped all pretence of providing any critical evaluation of  the exponents of Islamism.

Both articles involve a briefing document by the Quilliam Foundations sent to Charles Farr, director of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, with recommendations on counter-terrorism policy. The report was for Farr’s eyes only but has been leaked.

Quilliam’s document contained a list of organisations, all of whom have aligned themselves with Islamist ideologies and with known links to publicly identified extremist groups.

Following the leak, there were the usual responses from Muslims sympathetic in one way or another to these groups:

Yahya Birt:

I don’t think its very revelatory except to show up the intense competition for access, funding and recognition that the Prevent policy created, as well as government sucking in several (Muslim) community advisors who seem to be working against each other….

Inayat Bunglawala:

This is just like something straight out of a Stasi manual.
The Quilliam document is really quite staggering in its scope and the range of recommendations it makes about UK Muslims – several government departments are given specific policy recommendations.

All very predictable, I’m sure you’ll agree. Particularly the hysterical hyperbole from Bunglawala (‘Stasi manual’ indeed!).

The Guardian then ran the first of its Quilliam-bashing reports with a wretched piece by Vikram Dodd, titled ‘List sent to terror chief aligns peaceful Muslim groups with terrorist ideology‘. The descriptive phrase “peaceful Muslim groups” is ambigious if not wholly fallacious, as we shall see.

The document sent to Farr is entitled “Preventing terrorism; where next for Britain?” It lists alleged extremist sympathisers, including the Muslim Council of Britain, the main umbrella group in Britain for Islamic organisations. It also claims that a Scotland Yard counter-terrorism squad called the Muslim Contact Unit is dominated by extremist ideology.

Other groups include the Muslim Safety Forum, which works with the police to improve community relations, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, and even the Islam Channel, which provides television programmes for Muslims on satellite.

Then came this confused nonsense from Brian Whittaker on Cif. In it he pays lipservice to the idea that Islamist ideology must be challenged but produces a piece which fails to evaluate the organisations named on Quilliam’s list. Whittaker writes:

That, to varying degrees, is what governments of Muslim countries do already – appointing senior clerics who will toe the official line, vetting sermons, etc. Quilliam seems to be proposing something similar for Britain by dividing Muslim organisations into those that have a seal of approval and those that don’t (and are consequently to be shunned).

The phenomenon of “government clerics” does indeed happen in certain Muslim countries. However this analysis completely misses the mark and is little more than obfuscation of the function of the Quilliam Foundation or indeed its remit. The Quilliam Foundation, in this case, is not proposing a list of acceptable government theologians, vetted and ‘health-checked’ for public consumption in order to tow the official line.

In this case, Quilliam were alerting the Home Office of organisations who have known links with extremist groups and are in the business of advocating Islamist ideology. This is in any case, exactly what they were set up to do and exactly why they receive funding from the government!

Let’s take a look now at the organisations who have been named and shamed on Quilliam’s list and see if they are the “peaceful”, middle-ground Muslims that Yahya Birt, Inayat Bunglawala, Vikram Dodd and Brian Whittaker would have us believe.

The Muslim Safety Forum – This is a body which is presently headed by Azad Ali. Azad Ali has been identified by Channel 4 and The Telegraph as having praised Al Qaeda theorist, Anwar Al Awlaki and has said that he is “working his socks off” to create a Caliphate. He brought and lost a libel action against the Daily Mail, relating to his comments about killing British troops on his blog. Ali is a senior official of the fundamentalist Islamic Forum of Europe – which works, in its own words, to create an Islamic state under sharia law in Europe. The IFE and the MSF share the same offices. Here he is threatening an undercover journalist who had filmed him on the Channel 4 Dispatches exposé.

The Islam Channel – This is a television station whose hosts include Hizb ut Tahrir speakers. It is headed by a Mohammed Ali Harrath, a Tunisian previously wanted by Interpol on terrorism charges. The New Statesman’s Mehdi Hasan has attacked the Islam Channel in the Guardian for broadcasting preachers who advocate hatred of Shia Muslims. According to an internal document, Mohammed Ali Harrath is also a trustee of Inayat Bunglawala’s organ iEngage.

The Muslim Association of Britain declares itself to be close to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

The Cordoba Foundation is also close to the Muslim Brotherhood, and is run by Anas Altikriti, the son of Iraq’s Muslim Brotherhood Leader. Identified as a problematic Islamist organisation by David Cameron, the Cordoba foundation sponsored an event in the Kensington and Chelsea town hall which was to showcase a video sermon by pro-al-Qaeda preacher Anwar al Awlaki.

The Islamic Human Rights Commission is aligned with the Islamic Republic of Iran. It issues appeals for those convicted of serious terrorist offences, but has little to say about the denial of human rights in Iran.

None of this information is apparent from the evidence-free journalism of either Vikram Dodd or Brian Whittaker. Dodd writes:

Other groups include the Muslim Safety Forum, which works with the police to improve community relations, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, and even the Islam Channel, which provides television programmes for Muslims on satellite

Note Dodd’s phraseology; “even the Islam Channel” is named on the list as if to suggest that it is beyond any charge of extremism, without providing any critical evaluation whatsoever. Whittaker makes a big song and dance about Quilliam’s funding from Prevent but fails to mention that the Cordoba Foundation was also in receipt of Prevent funds and the MCB have long been recipients of government funding.

Nevertheless, there is a happy ending that can be gleaned from Dodd’s piece:

Senior Tory party figures are sympathetic to such views. One source with knowledge of Conservative thinking on security issues told the Guardian that the briefing document is “quite in line with what Quilliam and the Conservatives have been thinking for years.

Good sense prevails then, in spite of smears from Muslims pretending to be of the “radical middle ground” aligned with journalists with agendas and axes to grind.

Updates: All of this is said much more prosaically by Max Dunbar.

Andrew Gilligan with a write up on the Guardian’s latest “challenge” to Islamist ideology.

We’ve already seen two articles by its readers editor, Haroon Siddique who, firstly, came up with this miserable tosh urging Muslims to boycot Israeli dates this Ramadan but which was little more than an advocacy piece on the pro-Hamas Islamist group, Friends of al-Aqsa . This was then followed by an outrageous piece of dishonest reporting and outright fabrication packed into this article about a poll conducted by the Islamist group iEra.

You might have though that from here things could only get better. Wrong.

Earlier this week came this piece of absurd reductionism by Priyamvada Gopal – a fashionable, post-modern, post-colonial, feminist response to this image of the Taliban’s violence against women in Afghanistan published by Time.

Gopal’s article is quite easily the most despicable piece of relativist horseshit I have read on the Guardian. It contains deplorable, crudely argued passages like:

“Misogynist violence is unacceptable, but we must also be concerned by the continued insistence that the complexities of war, occupation and reality itself can be reduced to bedtime stories. Consultation with child psychologists apparently preceded Time’s decision to run the image, but the magazine decided that in the end it was more important for children (and us) to understand that “bad things do happen to people” and we must feel sorry for them. The WikiLeaks revelations of atrocities and civilian deaths are evidence of some rather terrible things that are done to people but are bizarrely judged not to provide a “window into the reality of what is happening”.”

She suggests that any Western consideration of violence perpetrated by Afghans on their own people should be “concerned by the continued insistence that the complexities of war, occupation and reality itself can be reduced to bedtime stories”, because these “bedtime stories” are merely symbolic.

“The mutilated Afghan woman ultimately fills a symbolic void…”

How exactly are instances of real violence “symbolic” to the victims? Gopal does not answer this question because she is happier spinning words to construct her “miserable evasion” (h/t Prof Geras). In short, Gopal simply argues against any war effort to strengthen the right of Afghan women to claim their own destiny.

I can only agree with Shiraz Socialist, who writes:

And, by the way, it’s not necessary to be pro-war to be revolted by the reality of this image, and by Ms Gopal’s filthy, relativist equivocation: coming, as it does,  from a privileged woman in academia, who stands no risk of having her nose and ears cut off by clerical fascists, even in the foul, racist “West”.

From the Huff Po:

Speaking on Governor’s Island, misty-eyed New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg praised a decision to allow an Islamic center to be built near Ground Zero.

Bloomberg choked up during his delivery, which highlighted the spirit of religious tolerance and freedoms once sought by New York’s earliest settlers.

“We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That’s life and it’s part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11,” he said.

“Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11 and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values – and play into our enemies’ hands – if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists – and we should not stand for that.”

George Readings, of the Quilliam Foundation, made some essential observations about the findings made in the report. Firstly he argued that anti Muslim bigotry in Britain has been fuelled by extremists from both the far right as well as the far-left, but also in addition, from the Muslim (Islamist) far-right. He has also identified a root cause of anti Muslim bigotry – perpetrated by the British press, when it makes almost no distinction between ordinary Muslims and extremist Muslims, their political groups and their beliefs.

Unfortunately, neither outlet looked into the people who commissioned the poll – the impressively named ‘Islamic Education and Research Academy’ (iEra) – and whether they might have their own agenda. Just a brief look at their website would have revealed that iEra are not exactly a moderate, impartial voice.

But Readings has looked further into the organisation who have produced the report:

Neither Sky nor the Guardian noticed, for example, that the home secretary has banned two of the eight advisors listed on iEra’s website (Zakir Naik and Bilal Philips) from the UK; Naik has been quotedas calling Americans “pigs” and saying that “every Muslim should be a terrorist” whilst Philips hasadvocated stoning people to death and public lashings, but “only [...] on Fridays”.

Benefitting from Islamophobia

In fact, if you take a look at the people behind iERa from their website, you will recognise a host of ideologues from the Islamist community. Notwithstanding the presence of such illustrious hate preachers as Zakir Naik and Bilal Philips on its board, its Chairman is none other than Abdur Raheem Green, who believes that gays should be stoned to death and has been banned from Australia.

Then there is the author of the report itself, who is Hamza Tzortsis who is linked to Hizb-ut-Tahrir, and who has previously said:

“We as Muslims reject the idea of freedom of speech, and even of freedom.”

Also sitting pretty on the iEra board is Haytham al-Haddad, who is on record for holding all manner of extremist views, but this statement is rather relevant:

Allah has warned us in the Koran, do not befriend the kuffar [unbelievers], do not align yourselves with the kuffar

That is rather curious from an organisation which purports to be concerned with Islamophobia and  the welfare of Muslims in Britain! Here is Haddad again discussing “so-called western values”:

Also on board is Hussein Yee who, not to be outdone by his fellows on the iEra board, has advocated wife beating (it’s Qur’anic!).

But it gets worse. The Guardian have picked up on the iEra report and used it to back up an article which seems to have made almost no critical investigation into the organisation behind it. Furthermore, it has even misrepresented and falsified the data, as Sunny Hundal has demonstrated:

You’ll notice that more people disagreed with the view that “Muslims are terrorists” than agreed, while 39% were neutral. The Guardian report lumps the agreed with the neutral to say “63% of people surveyed did not disagree…” which may be strictly true but misrepresents the stats.

The story also says 94% agreed that “Islam oppresses women” but as you can see above that’s actually untrue.

Predictably, Inayat Bunglawala’s iEngage website and Bob Pitt’s pro-Islamist organ Islamophobia-Watch have trumpeted the iEra report. This is not surprising since they are only too willing to champion Islamic extremists and their causes in the name of “grassroots representation” while downplaying the concerns and views of ordinary Muslims.

It is highly ironic that individuals who extol the view that the Western press is dominated by “Zionists” are hugely gratified by the credibility that a glowing Guardian article of their report affords them.

It now remains to be seen if the Guardian will issue a correction of the article and the shoddy and dishonest reportage of its writer Haroon Siddique.

Update: Andrew Gilligan has blogged on this story – The Guardian falls for an extremist lie:

The agenda behind these inflammatory lies can be found in about two minutes on Google. iERA’s advisers include Bilal Philips and Zakir Naik, both banned from the UK by the Home Secretary; Haitham al-Haddad, who believes that music is a “fake and prohibited message of love and peace;” and a number of other people with utterly odious, anti-democratic views. The iERA “researcher” quoted by the Guardian, Hamza Tzortzis, is, as I reported in January, deeply in bed with extremism.

It is not the first time the Guardian has done this. Earlier this year, it publicised a report which claimed to have found a rising tide of anti-Muslim violence in London – something simply not supported by the crime figures (which is presumably why the report coyly neglected to give any figures!) This report was co-compiled by a well-known sympathiser of Islamism, Robert Lambert, and funded by the Islamist Cordoba Foundation.

Nobody should deny, of course, that there is bigotry against Muslims in Britain. But all the indicators – racial attacks in Muslim areas, the BNP’s rout at the recent election – are that it is diminishing. And if some people do think Muslims are a threat to British society, then the views peddled by the likes of iERA are partly to blame.

The Supreme Court of Bangladesh has reinstated the measure banning Islamic parties. In a document of 184 pages presented July 26 last, the Court has demolished the Fifth Amendment of the 1979Constitution, including provisions that allowed the rise of Islamic parties in parliament during military regimes (1975 – 1979, 1982 – 1990). The measure, introduced for the first time in January, has been blocked for six months because of an appeal process demanded by Islamic leaders.

Using the Supreme Court ruling as its initiative, the Bangladesh government has banned religious political parties:

Shafiq Ahmed, Minister of Justice, said the measure will be a blow to the extremist parties that can no longer use religion to political ends.

“Secularism – said the minister – will again be the cornerstone of the constitution.” For the moment the court ruling does not provide for the cancellation of the Islamic inspiration of the constitution, but according Shafiq “thanks to the demolition of the Fifth Amendment, the modifications made during the military regimes can now be challenged in court.” Moreover, the measure outlaws all those who supported the regimes from 1975 to 1990. “In theory – adds the minister – all citizens of Bangladesh may now bring a lawsuit against the former military dictator. The repeal of the amendment would also limit the possibility of future coups. “

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said today that music is “not compatible” with the values of the Islamic republic, and should not be practised or taught in the country.

In some of the most extreme comments by a senior regime figure since the 1979 revolution, Khamenei said: “Although music is halal, promoting and teaching it is not compatible with the highest values of the sacred regime of the Islamic Republic.”

This makes it an opportune moment to cue up ‘Rock the Casbah’ by the Clash, which was about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s ban on music in 1979 soon after the Islamic Revolution.

But perhaps both these Islamist leaders should have reflected on the words of the 12th century sufi master Ali Al-Hujwiri, who wrote in Kashf Al-Mahjub (The Revelation of the Veiled – the first treatise on sufism in Persian) a passage which, translated, goes like this:

“Anyone who says that he finds no pleasure in sounds and melodies and music is either a liar and a hypocrite or he is not in his right senses, and is outside the category of men and beasts.”

You can’t say fairer than that!

Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, center, the former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, getting roughed up

What the Guardian’s WikiLeaks article is less voluble about is the extent of Pakistan’s complicity with the Taliban and the regional insurgency. What the leaked documents uncover is the existance of a rogue element, the ‘S Wing’ of Pakistan’s national intelligence services, the ISI , which has near-complete autonomy in Pakistan’s ungovernable tribal regions and the volatile border with India.

In the midst of these massive leaks emerges the name of General Hamid Gul who ran the ISI and who is profiled in this NYT report.

Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul ran the ISI from 1987 to 1989, a time when Pakistani spies and the C.I.A. joined forces to run guns and money to Afghan militias who were battling Soviet troops in Afghanistan. After the fighting stopped, he maintained his contacts with the former mujahedeen, who would eventually transform themselves into the Taliban.

And more than two decades later, it appears that General Gul is still at work. The documents indicate that he has worked tirelessly to reactivate his old networks, employing familiar allies like Jaluluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose networks of thousands of fighters are responsible for waves of violence in Afghanistan.

General Gul is mentioned so many times in the reports, if they are to be believed, that it seems unlikely that Pakistan’s current military and intelligence officials could not know of at least some of his wide-ranging activities.

For example, one intelligence report describes him meeting with a group of militants in Wana, the capital of South Waziristan, in January 2009. There, he met with three senior Afghan insurgent commanders and three “older” Arab men, presumably representatives of Al Qaeda, who the report suggests were important “because they had a large security contingent with them.”

The gathering was designed to hatch a plan to avenge the death of “Zamarai,” the nom de guerre of Osama al-Kini, who had been killed days earlier by a C.I.A. drone attack. Mr. Kini had directed Qaeda operations in Pakistan and had spearheaded some of the group’s most devastating attacks.

The plot hatched in Wana that day, according to the report, involved driving a dark blue Mazda truck rigged with explosives from South Waziristan to Afghanistan’s Paktika Province, a route well known to be used by the insurgents to move weapons, suicide bombers and fighters from Pakistan.

In a show of strength, the Taliban leaders approved a plan to send 50 Arab and 50 Waziri fighters to Ghazni Province in Afghanistan, the report said.

General Gul urged the Taliban commanders to focus their operations inside Afghanistan in exchange for Pakistan turning “a blind eye” to their presence in Pakistan’s tribal areas. It was unclear whether the attack was ever executed.

The United States has pushed the United Nations to put General Gul on a list of international terrorists, and top American officials said they believed he was an important link between active-duty Pakistani officers and militant groups.

General Gul, who says he is retired and lives on his pension, dismissed the allegations as “absolute nonsense,” speaking by telephone from his home in Rawalpindi, where the Pakistani Army keeps its headquarters. “I have had no hand in it.” He added, “American intelligence is pulling cotton wool over your eyes.”

Senior Pakistani officials consistently deny that General Gul still works at the ISI’s behest, though several years ago, after mounting American complaints, Pakistan’s president at the time, Pervez Musharraf, was forced publicly to acknowledge the possibility that former ISI officials were assisting the Afghan insurgency. Despite his denials, General Gul keeps close ties to his former employers. When a reporter visited General Gul this spring for an interview at his home, the former spy master canceled the appointment. According to his son, he had to attend meetings at army headquarters.

The point is that this is according to WikiLeaks from the horse’s mouth and if it is verified it is NATO validating the above conclusions from reporters like me who take (small but significant) advantage of the embed system of allowing reporters some limited access to the war.

Had we the Vietnam era of wide and free-ranging access across Afghanistan then much more of this picture of confusion and off-hand civilian killing would have come to more strongly than it now has.

What comes across most striking is the catastrophic lack of human intelligence which is the single biggest factor as to why this war can never, ever, be won. I know that I go on banging this point home but it really cannot be said forcefully enough.

The endless picture in these dispatches is of an occupying army that does not know the land, the people, the language and thus understand either the motives of movements of those it seeks to subdue. So it is ever terrified, trigger-twitchy, unsure who is who.

The tragic shooting and wounding of a man running away in a village high in the Afghan mountains typifies this. It is almost poetic.

Special forces pile into a village and shout at a man who is running away. He ignores the shout. They fire a warning shot. He fails to stop. They shoot him. The man is deaf and mute.

They didn’t know, of course, they didn’t know. They didn’t know almost everything about his village, his people, their lives and their motivations and disposition.

They merely followed their procedure. The wounded man was given some provisions by way of “compensation. And the mission moved on. Moved onto another level of futility.

And it is the exposure of this, the lack of transparency from NATO about what its soldiers have been doing, day in, day out, which has now been laid bare.

Let’s get past the Guardian’s righteous indignation over this. The facts they have used to whip themselves and their readers into a frenzy is their business. The WikiLeaks are not the smoking gun they like to think it is. We know that there are thousands of unaccountable civilian casualties, that Pakistan’s intelligence agency the ISI is aiding the Taliban, that the Afghans by and large deeply resent westerners invading and occupying their land, that the Taliban have got their hands on deadly surface-to-air missiles, and so on.

What the WikiLeaks tells has exposed is that this war is being played by ear and fought on a wing and a prayer. This is not a winnable war and therefore NATO should now pull out ASAP.

The intellectual, Gheyret Niyaz, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for endangering state security, a vague charge that is often used by officials to lock up people they deem political threats. The sentence was especially severe given that Mr. Niyaz was not accused of taking part in the ethnic rioting. Other Chinese intellectuals have recently been slapped with the same sentence: Last December, Liu Xiaobo, a main author of a pro-democracy manifesto called Charter 08, was also sentenced to 15 years.

Mr. Niyaz, 51, holds what are considered moderate political views — he has not, for example, advocated for Xinjiang independence, a position held by some Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people that is the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang. Many of them resent the policies of the Chinese government, which is dominated by ethnic Han, saying that those policies are diluting the Uighur culture and leading to their economic disenfranchisement.

There is strong possibility that this is one story which will not be carried by Bob Pitt on Islamophobia-Watch nor will Gheyret Niyaz’s cause be supported by Andy Newman and his Trot friends at SocialistUnity. They will not be listed on NeoconEurope, a website run by a group of “academics” from Strathclyde University, for this omission nor for their support of the People’s Republic of China’s brutal crackdown of the Uighur in Xinjiang.

Their support of the PRC will preclude them from highlighting this story, from protesting this draconian sentence as a travesty of justice and from calling this form of Islamophobia, well, Islamophobia. This much we know.

Gheyret Niyaz

Support Gheyret Niyaz.

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Leader of Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat Mohammadi (TNSM), Maulana Sufi Mohammad

The local chapter of Pakistan’s Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) Islamist political party held a rally on April 19 in the historic Kissa Khwani Bazaar of Peshawar to protest the extremely low gas pressure and rolling blackouts that affect Peshawar residents up to 10 hours per day (for the shortages, see Daily Times [Lahore], January 18; Frontier Post [Peshawar], July 10). As leaders announced the end of the rally and protesters started to leave, a 14-year old suicide bomber ignited his suicide vest, killing 23 persons and injuring 50 others. The suicide bomber successfully targeted local JI leaders and police officers – among the dead were JI Peshawar vice-amir Haji Dost Mohammad and deputy superintendent of police Gulfat Hussain (The News [Islamabad], April 20).

Due to the fact that Deputy Superintendent Hussain was a Shi’a Muslim, it was initially thought that the suicide bomber had specifically targeted him. However, all other evidence suggested that the real target of the bomber was the JI leaders. Had it been by chance or mistake, they would not have continued to target more JI leaders later on. In order to downplay its differences with the Taliban and other jihadist groups, JI tried to blame the Americans for the bombing, with JI leader Hafiz Hashmat accusing private security firm Blackwater (Xe Services LLE) for the attack (Dawn [Karachi] April 20).

The suicide bombing of the JI rally was an attempt to widen the war that the Pakistani Taliban are fighting against the state of Pakistan. Although the bombing was not the only attack on JI leaders in recent months, it was the biggest, and such targeted attacks have continued. On June 16 the Taliban in Hangu assassinated JI leader Fida Saadi, a provincial executive council member (News, June 17). Soon afterwards they killed JI leader Haji Mohammad Khan and kidnapped his son in Darra Adamkhel on June 23 (Dawn, June 24).

The aim of the Pakistani Taliban is to establish an Islamic caliphate, one excluding the participation of all other Islamist groups. When the Afghan mujahideen found Kabul in sight after the fall of Dr. Najibullah’s regime in the early 1990s, they threw themselves at one another’s throats. The ensuing civil war gave birth to the Taliban movement. Recently, the Pakistani Taliban intensified their war on the Barelvi movement and Sufi Islam by bringing the conflict to Punjab. New fronts were opened against the JI with the April 19 suicide bombing in Peshawar and against the Ahmadi community with a suicide bombing in Lahore on May 28 (see Terrorism Monitor, June 12).

The enmity between the JI and different parts of the Pakistani Taliban is both ideological and political. Although both JI and the Deobandi groups among the Pakistani Taliban follow the Hanafi school of jurisprudence, JI places less stress on ritual and more on political Islam. The Deobandis abhor the JI leaders (some of whom wear Western dress) and accuse them of having a lust for political power.[1]

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