In a recent piece for the New Statesman, Quilliam’s Maajid Nawaz made the point that government should bypass Islamist front groups such as MAB, IFE and the MCB when engaging with Muslims. Rather Muslims should seek representation through their elected politicians, just like all other citizens, and Islamist inspired organisations should not be allowed to monopolise Muslim representation. Quite a straight forward argument you may think, who could possibly be upset with a challenge to anti-democratic means to representation and extremism?

Welcome to the world of Bob Pitt. Bob is an ageing and outmoded far-left blogger who has developed a reputation for making mind-bending and logic-stretching arguments in order to contort reality to his fit his cynical far-left worldview. In Bob’s world, Islamophobia is not a societal scourge to be challenged, but rather something to be exploited and manipulated for short-term political point scoring. His website www.Islamaphobiawatch.com’ is less about Islamophobia and more about attacking his political opponents, many of whom are Muslim.

It should, therefore, come as no surprise that Bob was not happy with Maajid’s piece.  In fact, he has an entire piece on his website attacking it. In his piece Bob claims that Maajid:

‘…presents an argument against the state having relations not just with Islamists of any variety but with any group claiming to represent any section of the Muslim community.

This is not of course a view that prevented Nawaz and his friends at Quilliam from accepting generous state funding under the last Labour government, on the spurious grounds that they represented a tendency within the Muslim community that could assist in the campaign against terrorism. And if the principle of rejecting co-operation with Ikhwan-associated political organisations were applied to foreign policy it would lead to the UK breaking relations with Tunisia and Egypt.’

Firstly, Maajid does not argue that the state should have absolutely no relations with Islamists or groups claiming to represent any section of the Muslim community. Rather, he quite clearly argues that government should not rely on such groups when engaging withBritain’s diverse Muslim communities because they don’t represent Muslims, they are not elected and they represent the more repressive and reactionary strands within Muslim communities. Secondly, Quilliam never claimed to represent any Muslim community nor any sections of it, this is made very clear from their website. Thirdly, Bob’s foreign policy analogy is simple laughable because in Tunisia and Egypt there have been elections recently and Islamists have won a large share of the vote. Hence, engaging with those governments is very different since the Islamists within those governments have a democratic mandate, which their counterparts in the UK lack. Also, co-operating with Islamists on issues of concern is very different to relying on them to represent the views of people they don’t represent and have had no contact with.

As a Muslim, I take offence to Bob, under the guise of tackling Islamophobia, attacking people who are speaking against attempts by Islamists to monopolise Muslim engagement, especially when the arguments made are so lame and badly argued. I appreciate sections of the left have been drifting aimlessly for a number of years but this really takes the biscuit.

Then again, Bob is rumoured to have belonged to Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party, which was known for having links with Saddam Hussain and Colonel Gaddafi. Healy himself was accused of sexually abusing female colleagues and enjoying a financially comfortable lifestyle whilst allowed fellow activists, who he lived off, to live in poverty. With roots like that its not surprising that Bob produces such lame nonsense.

Last week SpinWatch gave Bob Lambert space on their website to apologise for his “former” career as a Police spy. But that was then. It now transpires that SpinWatch has retracted its support for Lambert in a new statement. The reasons for their abrupt turnaround are these:

The delay of the publication coincided with the publication of the SpinWatch open letter and a comment piece by Lambert himself. This was followed by a flurry of stories in the Guardian featuring further details about his infiltration and the damage done by the 18 month relationship he pursued as part of his cover (for an overview see the Lewis and Evans’ Undercover blog).

Lambert’s past with Special Branch helps to confirm that the recently exposed police spies (such as Mark Kennedy) were not ‘rogue officers’. They were part of an unacceptable pattern of infiltration of environmental and other activist groups, which seems to have been condoned at the highest level. While Special Branch was undercover in London Greenpeace, the group was also infiltrated by private spies hired by McDonald’s – as was discovered in the McLibel court case. Intelligence gathered was shared between private spies and their corporate clients on the one hand and Special Branch on the other. This kind of cooperation continued until very recently – and may still be happening. The undercover units of ACPO, the supervisors of Mark Kennedy and other current infiltrators, shared information on climate campaigners with power companies and their hired spies, as the Guardian revealed in 2009.

Let’s look at the chronology of events here.

Reports of Lambert’s 18-month affair with a woman which he had while he was undercover, along with a number of other revelations, were published in the Guardian on the 23rd October. Lambert’s “apology” on the SpinWatch site came a full day after, on the 24th of October. Now SpinWatch are using these very same reasons, already published in full in the Guardian, as a pretext for distancing themselves from him.

Is there something SpinWatch isn’t telling us? Has David Miller woken up to the realisation that his outfit has been the subject of a ‘Bob Lambert Special’ (police infiltration and spying)?

Have the Jamaat Lobby groups which SpinWatch collaborates with through association with Lambert also been spied on? The Islamist groups close to Lambert have been very quiet on the matter. There have been no rambunctious defences of their favourite Police Spymaster since Uncle Daud’s effort.

Miller opens the letter with some boilerplate text about being firmly opposed to “the infiltration of activist groups by the forces of the state, corporations and the private security industry”:

Spinwatch has – from the very beginning in 2004 – been involved in investigating the infiltration of activist groups by the forces of the state, corporations and the private security industry.  One of the earliest cases we examined was the infiltration of London Greenpeace, with which you have reportedly been associated. Since then we have done extended work on the infiltration of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (The Threat Response Spy Files) and most recently on the 2010/11 case of police spy Mark Kennedy. We have done this work in close collaboration with the activists who have been infiltrated, destabilized and betrayed. Spinwatch stands in solidarity with the infiltrated.

[...]

Consequently, we think that you need to make a public statement confirming or denying the specific allegations so far made public.  In addition, if any of the allegations are true, you need to give an account of what you now think of your previous activities.  We repeat: In our view your current activities and your alleged past activities are not compatible.  If you now disavow any previous activities, you should also publically apologise to the activists who you allegedly betrayed.

But as you know, Bob Lambert has already confirmed that he was a member of the Special Branch when he was both ‘spy team leader’ and was himself involved as police spy when he personally inflitrated various left-wing groups including London Greenpeace. Have these salient facts passed over Miller’s head? Here, for Miller’s edification, is Lambert admitting as much on the pages of the Guardian:

Nor would I want to deny that the Met’s special branch undercover policing existed, or that it played a key role in countering political violence over a long period. Some of the bravest police officers I ever had the privilege to work with were undercover. Their work helped mount successful criminal prosecutions against groups and individuals engaged in a range of violent and threatening activities. And it is worth noting that the serious threats of violence many covert police officers face do not end with their operational deployments.

The undercover aspect of special branch work has been well reported byPeter Taylor in his groundbreaking BBC documentaries. What strikes me is the extent to which they record a shift away from counter-subversion in the 1970s and towards countering political violence and intimidation.

And yet, in spite of SpinWatch’s so-called credentials of opposition to police infiltration tactics, Miller is unusually keen to accept Lambert’s “apology” prima facie:

As part of my cover story so as to gain the necessary credibility to become involved in serious crime, I first built a reputation as a committed member of London Greenpeace, a peaceful campaigning group.

I apologise unreservedly for the deception I therefore practiced on law abiding members of London Greenpeace.

I also apologise unreservedly for forming false friendships with law abiding ctizens and in particular forming a long term relationship with [Name of person removed] who had every reason to think I was a committed animal rights activist and a genuine London Greenpeace campaigner.

I am grateful to Spinwatch for giving me an opportunity to apologise and also to begin a process on conflict resolution in this difficult and sensitive arena.

This will not be easy for any of us but as a result of the recent work I have undertaken with Spinwatch in defence of Muslim organisations, I am confident we can make progress.

So, there you go, SpinWatch seems to be perfectly willing to relax its principles on opposing police spying and Lobby groups in the case of Lambert. But why?

You only have to look at the East London Mosque website to find the answer. It’s an advertisement for an evening at East London Mosque for a 3-way book launch by these people. No prizes for guessing who the protagonists are:

Prof. David Miller
Professor of Sociology in the School of Applied Social Sciences, University of Strathclyde. He has written widely on propaganda, spin and lobbying and is a director of Spinwatch. His recent publications include: A Century of Spin: How Public Relations Became the Cutting Edge of Corporate Power (Pluto Press, 2008), Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy: Corporate PR and the Assault on Democracy (Pluto Press, 2007), and recently coauthored Cold War on British Muslims (Spinwatch).

Dr Robert Lambert
An academic with a police career in counter-terrorism (1977-2007), who in the aftermath of 9/11 established the Muslim Contact Unit to work emphatically and in partnership with London Muslims.
He is co-director of the European Muslim Research Centre at the Exeter University and lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, University of St. Andrews.

Rizwaan Sabir
A doctoral researcher at the University of Strathclyde, researching Islam in British and Scottish government policy with a special focus on counter-terrorism. In May 2008 he was detained for seven days as a suspected member of al-Qaida for being in possession of primary research literature. He was released without charge. In September 2011, the Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire Police paid
£20,000 in compensation to Sabir for his wrongful arrest and detention under the Terrorism Act 2000.

Now that Bob Lambert has been exposed as a police spy, will his name be entered into the SpinWatch database?  Also, it would be pertinent for David Miller to address the question on whether he will be entering his own name and that of SpinWatch into the SpinWatch database now that it is inextricably linked to validating and aiding the work of Bob Lambert.

If SpinWatch really did what it says on the SpinWatch tin, and if David Miller is prepared to eat his own dogfood, he would be doing exactly that.

The responsibility is on the US and Pakistan governments, together, to try and reduce the numbers of these deaths; a point made by Christopher Rogers of CIVIC:

In a recent study by the Campaign for Innocent Victims of Conflict (CIVIC), report author Christopher Rogers said: “It’s almost certain that US drone strikes are causing more civilian casualties than the US has thus far admitted”.

He told Channel 4 News “faulty intelligence” could be leading to civilian deaths.

He said: “In our research… in a number of instances there was no doubt that faulty ‘intel’ was to blame – hitting a pro-government peace committee member’s house, for instance. In other cases, though victims stated that militants were indeed killed in the strike, non-combatant civilians were hit collaterally. i.e. a militant car passing by a house that collapsed from the blast.”

He added: “In the end, it’s for the US and Pakistan to demonstrate and prove that such low civilian casualty rates are indeed being achieved – the responsibility is on them.”

This is true in spite of the fact many cluebots of the far-left and Islamist variety will be using these deaths to score political points based on the “imperialist” and “kuffar” war waged by the US. They tend to forget that Pakistan has as big a role to play as the US to provide the necessary intelligence for drone strikes to be made.

Here Tarek Fatah is interviewed by Brian Lilley on Sun TV, a Canadian tv channel, on the Al-Quds rally held in Queens Park in Toronto which was little more than a racist hatefest, where President Obama was referred to as “this Black man in the White House” and there was talk of raising an Islamic Army to wipe out Israel.

The same phenomenon is happening in the UK. Politicians such as Ken Livingstone will kowtow to Islamic Jew hatred propagated by “representive” Islamist political groups because it will win them a handful of votes from their South Asian constituents.

the latest blethering from the egregious dr miller is that the “conservative thinktanks” policy exchange and the centre for social cohesion are soft-pedalling the racism and violence of groups like the bnp and edl because it “might deflect attention” from islamism – defined by him as:

“the catch-all term for politically active muslims”

now i carry no particular brief for either of the thinktanks he mentions, but this is breathtakingly brazen doublespeak: come on, dr miller – everyone knows what is meant by the term “islamist”. are the muslim brotherhood, jamaat-i-islami, tablighi jamaat islamists? of course they bloody are! are the quilliam foundation, of british muslims for secular democracy “islamists”? are the muslims who work for csc or policy exchange, “islamists”? or, for that matter, the muslim authors at the spittoon? of course not. there is no reason muslims shouldn’t be politically active – either as muslims, or as british citizens, but there’s plenty of reason to be rude about people who are pushing extremist, clerical fascist, racist and homophobic agendas – unless you’re a doctrinaire leftie, that is.

it gets worse – dr miller now appears to be attempting to suggest that by attacks on islamists bolster islamophobia, which ultimately results in things like the breivik atrocity in norway. this is an outrageous caricature – the sort of thing we’d normally expect to see coming out of exeter, not strathclyde! as any regular reader will know, we are not exactly fans of the bnp or the edl.

on the other hand, as we know very well here at the spittoon, “spinwatch” is not exactly careful with its analysis:

http://www.spittoon.org/archives/9428

perhaps we should not be surprised that dr miller can’t tell the difference between islamists and liberals; it seems to be a bit of a theme on the left these days.

i have for some time been aware of the powerful analytical frameworks for bio-psycho-social systems developed by the american psychologist dr clare graves and systematised for practical application by don beck and chris cowan in the excellent book “spiral dynamics” (i’m not affiliated with anyone concerned, incidentally). at the risk of sounding like somewhat of a “fanboy”, as i believe it is called on teh interwebs, i am convinced it constitutes an important piece of intellectual real estate for the understanding of complex socio-political systems, particularly in behavioural terms.

you can read more about the basics of spiral dynamics here and here - and i strongly encourage you to do so, but perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate its unique way of enabling insight into human nature is by a review of the various behaviours that have been exhibited during the riots. in the table below you will see a number of different types of responses and the messages associated with them, which you will have seen reflected by the proponents of these value systems in the various media channels. the vast majority of these types of response can present in either healthy or unhealthy forms – thus “C-P” (“red”) behaviours and messages were used both destructively (wanton destruction) and constructively (arresting looters) – in both cases, the behaviour was the demonstration of dominance and power, with corresponding public messages (a cartmanesque “RESPECT MY AUTHORITAAH!”) sent to the media.

you’ll see that whilst most of the operational trouble has functioned at C-P/red systems level, most of the discussion and analysis has been conducted by politicians and the media at blue (mostly “societal breakdown”, good-and-evil) orange (intellectual, opportunistic and tactical) and green (communitarian, progressive and inclusive) levels – and if the reactions are to be systematic, they will have to be a combination of green, blue and orange solutions appropriate to the situation, just as identifying looters using website photos (orange), communally organised clean-up squads (green) and attempts to strengthen traditional family structures (blue) have already been used. i note that ed miliband (who i usually have little time for) has supposedly come out against knee-jerk reactions and i think he’s correct in this at least; david cameron will not get very far if all his responses are couched in “blue” terms to appeal to the “respect for society must be restored” brigade and executed in “orange” technocratic action plans by community workers who are uncomfortable with anything which doesn’t take account of “green” inclusion. if he is serious about the “big society”, he will need to understand that the big society needs *all* these things, it is not a blue, orange or green concept, just as it needs “red” defences and alternative “purple” clan and kin affiliations than those of gang, patois and skin colour – and that includes the purple affiliations of the non-rioters, too! the “big society” could be second-order policy thinking and leadership, but that needs a shift in both our understanding of the situation and the strategies we use to manage it.

in all these cases i would say: if you want to find a constructive, insightful way of discussing the value systems that led to the events of the last couple of weeks, you would do worse than to look at how spiral dynamics sheds light on the tensions, relationships, structures and messages involved.

all comment and discussion welcome.

I’m pretty sure I will pray to God as I’m rushing through my city, guns blazing, with 100 armed system protectors pursuing me with the intention to stop and/or kill. I know there is a 80%+ chance I am going to die during the operation as I have no intention to surrender to them until I have completed all three primary objectives AND the bonus mission. When I initiate (providing I haven’t been apprehended before then), there is a 70% chance that I will complete the first objective, 40% for the second, 20% for the third and less than 5% chance that I will be able to complete the bonus mission. It is likely that I will pray to God for strength at one point during that operation, as I think most people in that situation would….If praying will act as an additional mental boost/soothing it is the pragmatical thing to do. I guess I will find out… If there is a God I will be allowed to enter heaven as all other martyrs for the Church in the past.

Andrew Sullivan identifies this as articulation of what he calls Christianism and, not surprisingly, it reads like the text of a suicide video lovingly prepared by a jihadi terrorist.

Notice the absence of real faith, which would recoil even at the very thought of killing innocents, but the pragmatic, cold-blooded use of faith as a psychological mechanism to enable mass murder. Bin Laden, we should recall, had been a very Westernized rich kid before he became a “believer.” Breivik – who killed a greater proportion of Norwegians than bin Laden did of Americans on 9/11 – has the same internal conflict. It is his fear of his lack of real faith that propels him to pragmatically embrace the psychological structure of religion to murder his cultural enemies, to reify “Europe” or “Christendom” or “the Church” in order to defend them and give some meaning to his life. He also needs to reify Islam into a purely political and cultural entity that exists solely as an existential threat to Western freedom and in which every Muslim is therefore suspect.

My point is this: this was about as far from an act of meaningless violence as you can get. It is an explicitly articulated, carefully argued conclusion from a mishmash of every current far right platitude out there. Breivik does not merely claim influence by someone like Robert Spencer, he quotes him and so many others at great length as part of his manifesto! It’s a pastiche of vast tracts of the far right blogosphere. None of this delegitimizes sane, vital critiques of Islamist intolerance, violence and ideology; none of it makes these cited ideologues and fanatics guilty of murder or in any way being accomplices to murder, or in any way connected to his crime. But it does seem to me to prove beyond any doubt that Christianism is indeed a phenomenon in its own right, and that its evolution into neo-fascist violence, like Islamism’s embrace of neo-fascist violence, is now something that cannot be denied.

And then are Breivik’s links to key members of the EDL:

Scotland Yard was investigating Breivik’s claims that he began his deadly “crusade” after being recruited to a secret society in London, and that he was guided by an English “mentor”. David Cameron, who was being kept updated on developments, said Breivik’s claims were being taken “extremely seriously”.

Breivik wrote of having strong links with the EDL, saying he had met its leaders and had 600 EDL members as Facebook friends.

Mr Hobson said in an online posting that: “He had about 150 EDL on his list … bar one or two doubt the rest of us ever met him, altho [sic] he did come over for one of our demo [sic] in 2010 … but what he did was wrong. RIP to all who died as a result of his actions.”

Whether Breivik acted as a “lone wolf” or as part of an organised group is yet to be uncovered. But more to  the point, Breivik certainly ingested and regurgitated large amounts of writings of right-wing ideologues: Theodore Dalrymple, Robert D. Kaplan, Lee Harris, Ibn Warraq, Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer, Walid Shoebat, Bat Ye’or, Mark Steyn, Melanie Philips, Pamela Geller et al are all quoted and get a name check. Their ideas were the intellectual padding employed to justify his narcissistic journey to Christianist nationalism. His manifeso makes much reference to the “Vienna School of Thought” promulgated online by the ‘Gates of Vienna’ blog and the far-right Norwegian blogger, Fjordman.

This mind-boggling act of mass murder is the ultimate and logical conclusion to the “Eurabia” conspiracy thesis which has been developed into a keystone of European far-right ideology. Sane people of the political centre must debunk this idiotic conspiracy theory once and for all if they are to oppose the rise of the European Far-Right. Opposing far-right fascism can only be achieved with the same principled and well-informed rigour that has been applied to tackling Islamist extremism – by identifying key individuals and groups rather than employing spurious generalisations.

Breivik has been universally condemned, of course, and although it is encouraging to see proponents of the far-left commentators condemn this act it is difficult to ignore the glaring note of hypocrisy. Although the far-left blogs have been robust in their criticism of  the horror in Norway, Islamophobia-Watch used the opportunity to score cheap tribalist points by attacking, once again, moderate Muslims and organisations opposed to Islamic terrorism. There is an irony at play here: the great pity is seeing so many people who are now (correctly) condemning the terrorist atrocity in Norway but who have previously never been able to bring themselves to condemn Islamic terrorism in, say, Pakistan or Afghanistan with the same moral outrage.

h/t: Potkin

It has also exposed The Spittoon, a McCarthyite operation run by members of Centre for Social Cohesion in collaboration, for a while at least, with members of the government funded Quilliam Foundation.[25] This expose was not well-received by the interests behind The Spittoon. The website first tried to intimidate the Powerbase researcher who had made the discovery with threatening emails, followed by a smear campaign, which was coordinated with an allied attack blog, Harry’s Place.[26] Shortly afterwards a similar smear campaign was also directed against the founder of Powerbase. Several neoconservative operators have also tried to use legal threats to shut Powerbase down. In June 2010, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens of the Centre for Social Cohesion, a frequent contributor to The Spittoon, successfully pressured Powerbase’s British domain name registrar to temporarily shut down the website.

A quick run through the baseless lies and accusations made in this text are in order.

1) The Spittoon is a blog which accepts the writing of a group of friends and associates. The Spittoon has never been “run” by “members of Centre for Social Cohesion” nor by members of the “government funded Quilliam Foundation”.

2) No threatening emails have ever been sent to any Powerbase researcher by anyone associated with The Spittoon. If David Miller thinks there are, he is free to publish them and prove their existence.

3) The Spittoon has published a number of pieces on David Miller and the attack sites run by he and his team of “researchers”. It is not known what exactly David Miller’s motivations are for initiating these attacks via his sites: SpinWatch, SpinProfiles and the now defunct NeoCon-Europe; they also includes the blog PulseMedia, run by Miller’s protégé, Idrees Ahmed. They have consistently attacked and smeared specific Muslims (such as Ed Husain, Shiraz Maher and others) seemingly because they are opposed to anti-semitism or are opposed to Hamas and other theocratic genocidal Islamist movements in general. Perhaps Miller considers these attributes to be unacceptable, otherwise why would he employ lies and smears in his character assassinations of them on his numerous websites?

It is worth clarifying what David Miller’s definition of The Spittoon’s “smear campaign” entails. As far as we can tell, it has consisted of a number of articles by Shiraz Maher which reported the fact that someone on his team had cited the prominent neo-Nazi academic Kevin MacDonald, to explain the political behaviour of Jews.

They are worth reading again here and here.

Of course, in the gripes he lists against The Spittoon, Miller is careful to exclude this uncomfortable fact because he obviously knows only too well that this is exactly the sort of inadvertent disclosure that would do his academic reputation no credit. Perhaps Professor Miller’s gripe with The Spittoon has nothing to do with the baseless lies that he has fabricated but more to do with real facts that he has chosen to leave out.

But I do know that Salma Yaqoob’s snub of, military hero, Matt Croucher was perhaps the most tasteless action of a far-left politician in some time.

Mr Croucher was awarded the George Cross after he threw himself on a grenade to protect his colleagues. The man is an essay in bravery. His brave actions almost certainly saved his colleagues from injury or death, yet he amazingly survived the attack himself.

He was invited to the Council chambers of Birmingham Council, completely as a non-political actor. He was, rightly, awarded with a standing ovation from spectators and council members except Miss Yaqoob and her fellow hack, Mohammed Ishtiaq.

Salma Yaqoob’s defence is exactly what you would expect from a far-left nutjob. In a BBC Midlands interview, she said she was protesting at the fact the troops are still in Iraq and Afghanistan and the predominance of American policy in the region and the war.

Err, okay. Those are completely genuine grievances to have against the war. It’s not only people on the left who complain about the troop deployments in Iraq and the predominance of American policy but to take your frustrations out on this young man is wholly repulsive. A man who is on the receiving end on our foreign policy and has little influence on whether we should be in Iraq/Afghanistan.

There is no genuine justification for her actions. This was an act to specifically provoke and to stab the integrity of our soldiers and the armed forces which is perhaps the last remaining institution loved by the people.

The mindless actions of Salma Yaqoob are exactly the catalyst that breeds anti-Muslim bigotry and confirms suspicions of Muslims to the general public. She should be ridiculed for her actions and not be allowed to forget that the actions of our brave men and women in the theater of war are held in higher esteem than the ramblings of, a very ill-manned, dunce (to use a better word).

Our men and women in the armed forces sacrifice so much to preserve and defend our freedom and liberty. Their bravery is incomprehensible to many and they ask for little back.

If you can’t get behind our troops, feel free to get in front of them.

Meanwhile, the uprisings are curing the Arab world of an opiate, the obsession with Israel. For years, successive Arab dictators have tried to keep discontent at bay by distracting people with the Israeli-Arab conflict. Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in 2009 increased global sympathy for Palestinians. Mubarak faced the issue of both guarding the border of Gaza, helping Israel enforce its siege, and continuing to use the conflict as a distraction. Enough with dictators hijacking sympathy for Palestinians and enough with putting our lives on hold for that conflict.

I don’t see the British “liberal left” or advocates of British Muslim identity politics weaning themselves off that particular “distraction” anytime soon.

Over the last few years, entry level Islamist organisations, certain sections of the far-left, and a handful of academics and policy wonks have been advocating a theory, now commonly referred to as ‘Lambertism’, named after it’s most vocal proponent, Robert Lambert. This theory essentially advocates governments building closer ties with non-violent Islamist groups and hard-core Wahabis in an effort to defeat violent Islamist extremists. In essence, let’s work with non-violent extremists to defeat violent extremists. Advocates of this approach would argue that non-violent extremists are best placed to deal with violent extremists. In this article I hope to explore some of the implications of this approach and the motivations behind some of those advocating it.

Firstly, this approach is based on a high degree of moral relativism and those advocating it obviously have very low expectations for Muslims. There are many Muslims who are not Islamists nor Wahabis who can be used to tackle violent extremists and are highly capable of doing so. Why are they being ignored and side-lined? Lambertism assumes that all Muslims are extreme in one form or another so they just pick the best of a bad bunch. It’s as if they think ‘we can’t expect those backward Muslims to live up to universal human rights standards’. Again this completely undermines and alienates genuinely moderate Muslims who don’t view their faith as their primary identity marker and don’t wish to use their religion as a political tool.

Secondly, this approach is very colonial. Fighting extremism is about uniting people under common decent values and challenging those who seek to divide and cause tensions in communities. It is not about playing a chess game, where human rights and common decency are trampled on in the pursuit of short-term gain. This is exactly the game that was playing in Afghanistan in the 1980s and in British India in the 19th century and on both occasions it proved a spectacular failure.

Thirdly, it just doesn’t work. Non-violent extremists in many cases galvanise their violent fringe by confirming their worldview. Let’s not forgot that it is non-violent extremists who spawned violent extremists in the first place. Jihadism is merely a symptom of the failure of Islamists to achieve power. So do we really want to be mainstreaming Islamist thought when we know that there will always be a minority who will seek to achieve the vision through more violent methods? Promoting Islamism increases the pool from which violent extremists recruit.

In short this theory is akin to saying let’s fund and support the BNP because they are best placed to deal with more violent far-right extremism. What Lambertists fail to understand is that the threat we are facing from the likes of al-Qaeda, is not only problematic because it is often violent. Yes that is a key factor and makes most people take notice. We are involved in a battle of ideas. On one hand you have those that seek to suppress and subjugate all others through a theocratic state that doesn’t tolerate diversity of belief or lifestyle. And on the other hand you have those who are seeking to foster pluralistic, liberal and democratic societies. Also this is a struggle that has been taking place in the Muslim world for almost a century now and we in the West can’t afford to lend support to the regressive strand and alienate those moderate Muslims around the world who are struggling for freer, open and pluralistic societies.

So who on earth is advocating this insane approach? Essentially we are dealing with three types of people.

Firstly, non-violent extremists themselves, who are seeking government support and acceptance in the hope of mainstreaming their ideology. Secondly, loonies, sometimes with a background in far-left politics, who in some cases are funded directly by Islamist groups to spout this nonsense. Those on the far-left also believe that Islamists are their bosom-buddies in their struggle against the evil capitalist world order. They obviously don’t realise that they will perhaps be the first to be persecuted under an Islamist state, as happened in Iran in the 1980s. And thirdly, lazy colonially minded civil servants who can’t be bothered to reach out to mainstream Muslims beyond London. Such civil servants generally hold lower expectations for Muslims in general and adopt what has been referred to as the ‘zoo complex’, i.e. they view Muslims as ‘good monkeys’ and ‘bad monkeys’ rather than full citizens. Hence, they feel they should empower the ‘good monkeys’ since we can’t expect Muslims to be normal just like us. They are also generally clueless about this whole area and don’t really care since they will be given a different portfolio in a few months time.

All in all, this approach is racist, lazy, colonial and ineffective. Instead of preventing violent extremism it actually makes it more likely and galvanises support for the far-right and all those who promote the thesis that Europe is being over-run by marauding Muslims. All advocates should hang their heads in shame.

Expect to hear much more about this over the coming months.

recently, i gave up posting on pickled politics, partly because of the level of personal animosity i was facing, but mostly just in frustration at my apparent inability to get my point across. now, i suppose i have nobody very much to blame for that apart from myself, but i’ve never felt that was a problem before now. now, i think i’m starting to work out what it is that is bothering me; certainly, it’s not about the denizens of one blog, or even the blogosphere, or even the media. it’s not any one set of views, not any one person, but a set of trends, a collective movement i sense in wider society.

one of the things i like about the spittoon and my co-contributors is that they take a robust approach towards the cosy relationship between the left and the various apologists for, supporters of and partisans of islamist extremism. they take, of course, an equally dim view of other forms of clerical fascism, whether it be jewish, christian, or hindu, although, of course, we are often excoriated for not writing sufficiently on these subjects. and why is that? well, the answer that “they’re not as big a problem” simply won’t do. clearly, the activities of the likes of rss/shiv sena in india, or hardcore fundamentalists in the american south ultimately affect all of us. for me personally, the behaviour of both the extreme west bank settlers and that of rejectionist ultra-orthodoxy evokes both profound heartache and deep anger – just as the “as-a-jew” clique that only appear as jews in order to display their preening self-importance whenever an opportunity to attack israel arises. however, i would nonetheless argue that, from the perspective of wider UK society, these concerns are less immediate, in that these groups have no meaningful accommodation with either our government or the UK media, however influential they may be in the communities they come from. what bothers me, really, is what the effects of ongoing and intensifying fundamentalism on me, my family and community and wider society – in this, locally speaking, islamists are in the vanguard, as the leading proponents and practitioners of violence against my community specifically and, generally, against UK civil society.

the question inevitably arises – who’s really worse? well, i think i would on balance come down in favour of the idea that wherever a particular group becomes influential and the closer they come to the levers of power, the more of a problem they are in a particular country. thus, in the UK, the utterly misguided, racism-of-lower-expectations the-west-is-ultimately-responsible-for-everything-bad-y’know attitude has allowed the entryism of islamist organisations and sympathisers everywhere from the police to government to the left-wing media. but would it be any different anywhere else? i expect not – militant fundamentalist christians are busily inching closer to the levers of power in washington, india has had already had one bjp government and i think we’re all aware of the subversion of mainstream democracy and the processes of civil society in israel by the religious parties and the settler lobby. we’ve got a lot of muslim fundamentalists here in the UK and, in a profound act of ignorance and credulity, we’ve allowed islamic education to be systematically outsourced to salafi and wahhabi dawa organisations for a generation, with entirely predictable results – i think we can say the same of many european countries, although i would fall well short of the apocalyptic and hysterical “eurabia” scenario – in fact, i’d be more worried personally about the behaviour of the catholic party in poland led by an anti-semitic priest and any prospective alliance of a russian political party with the orthodox church – not trend anyone jewish can afford to ignore.

of course, in europe particularly, this isn’t the first time we’ve been here. there was of course an “enlightenment”, which consisted in large part of reaction against the authoritarianism of various forms of christianity, whether by trying to eliminate it altogether and replace it with a sort of ersatz state paganism, as in france, or whether to regulate it as a sort of national industry, as in germany and scandinavia, or whether to simply satirise and philosophise it into a manageable social pressure and community support lobby, as in britain. the enlightenment taught that religion was nothing but a corrupt power structure which only the mad, the bad and the deluded would indulge. as we also know, removing religion simply forced the mad, the bad and the deluded to find other channels for their unpleasant attitudes and activities. we still see this outdated and reductionist position being reinvented for modern times using all the tools of modern cultural influence, from popular science to childrens’ books to comedy. religious people are portrayed as knaves or fools. there appears to be no middle ground, no compromise possible – religion must be rooted out, cleansed and exterminated.

of course, we’ve been there before too – modern fundamentalism, as karen armstrong (before she started to become part of the problem by sucking up to the goons at MPAC-UK) pointed out in her still masterful study of fundamentalism “the battle for G!D” evolved largely as a reaction against the enforced, clumsy and often brutal imposition of modernity on societies all around the world. the fundamentalisms we have today have reached their current forms because of the political, technological and social realities of the societies in which they evolved. their priorities and obsessions are driven by the battles they originally fought, against pluralism, liberalisation of dress, behaviour, increased social equality (or inequality), against practically irreversible geopolitical realities, against the aftereffects of wars and economic dislocation. those who give aid and comfort to fundamentalists are inevitably picking and choosing where they have shared priorities and obsessions – anti-imperialism, anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality, anti-israel, social breakdown, the emancipation of women, the legacy of slavery – but they are always at odds with fundamental features of the societies they criticise.

what i see developing, however, is a sort of multi-lateral polarisation in which the first casualty is moderation, the second is tolerance and the third is social consensus. the effects of this, however, touch all of us, but the effects are peculiarly corrosive on those of us who are able to combine amd integrate reason and religion and deal with the subtleties of creation, revelation and evolution. we are frequently at odds with obscurantists and bigots within our faith, but we are now fighting a rearguard defence against anti-religious forces, without any letup in the attack on reasonableness, complexity and dialogue that continues from reactionary fanatics. both sides, naturally, accuse us of giving aid and comfort to the other in its mission to destroy them – if we’re not with them, we’re against them – and no prisoners will be taken.

so, on one hand, we have the forces of militant anti-religion mounting attacks on everything from headgear to faith schools, on the other we have the walls of the ghetto being built anew, only with gun-ports this time. we can also see the social contract of the enlightenment renewed; previously, the deal was “give up your difference and you’ll get rights as a citizen” – this time, it’s “you’ve abused your rights as a citizen, we can no longer tolerate your differences”. the behaviour of religious fanatics, in their quest to dominate their own communities, has destroyed the delicate balance which allowed religion to be an integrated part of civil society. naturally, comes the response: they want all or nothing? fine – let them have nothing. but what of those of us who always wanted to co-exist? who prize our cultural and spiritual distincitiveness? oh no, distinctiveness is still allowed – but religion will no longer be a valid reason for it. diversity in sexuality, gender, disability, intelligence, talent, wealth – all these are permitted, but not religion. we are offered the choice – everything or nothing. well, we want neither.

i refuse to hide in the ghetto. i contribute to this society. i work. i pay my taxes. i don’t walk about naked, nor do i hide my face from the world. i will not assimilate, nor will i act as if i am living in another country or another century. i refuse to eat foods that are forbidden to me and i refuse to forbid those foods to others who may want them. i refuse to give up the sabbath, the festivals, the Torah and my other sacred texts – and i refuse to impose my vision of them on those who do not share my perspective. if i am attacked, i will defend myself. if i am insulted, i will respond in kind. i am not looking for a fight, but i will not shrink from one. i will not allow others to define what i am. the search for social consensus has been a long and painful one – and now it has been destroyed again, by the hubris and arrogance of religious and anti-religious fanatics. i do not know if we can put the pieces back together again, but there has to be a basis for us to live together – both enforced segregation and enforced assimilation are fascistic responses.

judaism has always been not so much a culture or a religion as it has been a 3000+ year-old argument. there is nothing so boring as loads of people violently agreeing with each other – except perhaps two groups of people refusing to concede anything that the other is saying has any value or validity. the counter-enlightenment is in full swing, without any sign that it has learnt anything from the enlightenment.

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.

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.

A local chairman and a financier of the Respect Party has told BBC London he is to resign and stop funding it. Azmal Hussain, chair of Tower Hamlets branch of the party in east London, said: “If anyone wants to continue, let them, but I am not involved.”

When asked about the future of his party, Mr Hussain said: ”For me it is over.”

“I will resign and will stop funding the party. Not a single penny.”

Happier days at the 'Salma and George Show'

Some unanswered questions linger in the wreckage of the failed experiment. Amongst them, what now for the coalition of the Far Left and a strand of British Islamic identity politics?

And more importantly, which mainstream political party will Salma Yaqoob now cross over to now that George Galloway is going to Hollywood?

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Fiction: Reported in the Globe and Mail: “I didn’t give any money to Hamas, I gave it to the ministry of health in Gaza to pay for the salaries of the doctors and nurses who hadn’t been paid. By the way, we’re talking about 20 odd thousand pounds, not millions. It’s a symbolic donation. I gave it to the ministry of health in Gaza and I’m proud to have done so.”

Fact: By Galloway’s own admission, broadcast on several Arab television stations: “I, now, here, on behalf of myself, my sister Yvonne Ridley, and the two Respect councillors – Muhammad Ishtiaq and Naim Khan – are giving three cars and 25,000 pounds in cash to Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. Here is the money. This is not charity. This is politics.” Not charity, but politics. Not to “doctors and nurses who hadn’t been paid,” but to the Hamas gangster “Prime Minister” Ismail Haniyeh who, in fact, is not and was not the Prime Minister of Palestine.

Fiction: Galloway’s Viva Palestina raised £1 million for the suffering Palestinians of Gaza. Fact: “However, based on information obtained from PayPal and the IBB, the Commission was able to identify only approximately £180,000 as having been raised for the Charity. If the website’s claims were accurate this raised concerns that approximately £820,000 was unaccounted for.”

Fact: Months before Galloway handed over three cars and a bag of cash to the head of a gang of clerical-fascist, Jew-hating lunatics who have pretty well strangled the prospect of a free Palestinian state in the womb – and Galloway has admitted to the British Charity Commission that this was “‘personal money’ that had been handed to Hamas” - the Government of Canada had already provided $4 million in emergency relief to the people of Gaza.

Galloway wasn’t banned from Canada, either. Section 34 (1) of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act specifically cites “engaging in terrorism” as grounds to prevent a person from entering Canada. Engaging in terrorism includes raising money for terrorist groups. In Canada, the death cult Hamas, the worst enemy the cause of Palestinian freedom has ever faced, is listed as a proscribed terrorist group.

If you are a triggerman or a bagman for a proscribed terrorist organization, you are normally considered inadmissible to Canada, and being a rich celebrity white guy with a British passport and a cult following in this country doesn’t mean you’re above the law. The Canadian High Commission showed Galloway the courtesy of letting him know that. That is all.

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Here is his partner, Yvonne Ridley admitting on camera that Galloway presented cash to the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniya.

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David T of Harry’s Place is being sued by George Galloway and one of Mr. Galloway’s collegues, Kevin Ovenden. They are demanding £50,000 for a comment left on another blog. The comment he made wasn’t nice or correct, but as Richard Bartholomew put it:

The legal threat seems to me to be badly conceived. I’m sure that Galloway and Overden are against the anti-Jewish hadith in Hamas Covenant, but while it’s there anyone who meets a Hamas governmental official risks being tarnished by association. Blame Hamas for that. And of course it’s annoying when a political opponent extrapolates a supposedly logical chain from one’s activities or position to the conclusion that in some deeper “objective” sense one is in fact supporting something else, but that’s life and to be allowed to do it is essential to public debate.

A lot of people have a lot of criticisms to make of David T and Harry’s Place. Fine. However, it is irrelevant in this context. The comment was clearly a joke, and should in no way be the cause of a libel action. Bloggers are only able to operate because of a modicum of freedom of speech, and for every frivolous libel action we fail to stand against, our future as bloggers becomes that bit grimmer.

I’m interested in the way a whole stratum of the liberal literati (Rushdie, to some extent Ian McEwan, A C Grayling, obviously Amis and Hitchens) – the very people you’d have expected to be guardians of the liberal flame of tolerance and understanding – have, at the very first assault, rushed into these caricatured postures driven by panic. I’m very struck by how those who are making ugly, illiberal, supremacist noises about the superiority of the west are precisely the sort of literary and liberal characters from whom you’d expect more imagination, openness and sensitivity.

Norm defeathers and skins that turkey most elegantly:

Coming from a longtime Marxist this is, if I may so put it, somewhat lacking in dialectical subtlety. What these figures are ‘making noises’ about is not the superiority of the West, but the superiority of liberal values and institutions. That being the case, there is nothing whatsoever illiberal about their not being tolerant or sensitive towards the assault on liberal values currently carried in, amongst other things, the fanaticism of belief, the violence against persons and the oppression of (including violence against) women that Eagleton would appear to want them to be more ‘open’ about.