Indigo Jo Blogs

Johann Hari wrote this article in today's Independent, regarding the tendency of supporters of Israel to smear their opponents with accusations of anti-Semitism. Hari wrote an article last week about his travels in the West Bank where he witnessed, among other things, the discharge of untreated sewage out of Israeli settlements into Palestinian areas with predictable consequences for the water supply and local people's health, and has in response been compared to the likes of Goebbels and Ahmadinejad. The names of Melanie Phillips, David Aaronovitch and an outfit called Honest Reporting, which demands what amounts to pro-Israel bias in the media, come up. The victims have included people with opinions friendly to Israel but who aren't willing to go all the way.

Meanwhile, in response to Melanie Phillips's outpouring of dumb clichés in last week's Observer, the present edition has printed a letter from one John Draper Nordelph from Norfolk (England), which brings out the old chestnut that, while Israel is a historical nation, there never was a Palestinian nation before the present time; the name, he says, was derived from the kingdom of Philistines which was established by the Romans to punish the Jews for rebelling against them. That may be so regarding the origin of the name, but the use of the name in modern times appeared during the British Mandate and the Palestinians of today are called that because they were the natives of the British Mandate territory. It is as simple as that; most of the names of the modern Arab states are of relatively modern appearance, at least in terms of applying them to Arabs. The fact that there was no king or president of Palestine before the appearance of Israel is neither here nor there.

(More: Mere Islam.)

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As I am sure most of you know by now, London now has a new mayor, Boris Johnson. Johnson won on second preference votes, a circumstance one would have expected would have favoured Livingstone as he would have received many second preferences from people voting for left-wing and Green candidates, but no. (In fact, the results table shows that the other broadly left-wing candidates received huge numbers of second-preference votes, mostly from people who voted for Livingstone, or even Johnson. However, they were not counted as only people who are not eliminated in the first count benefit from second preference votes - and even then, where people vote for the top two in both their preferences, their second preference does not count.) I am somewhat worried by the prospect of Johnson being mayor, not only because of his Islamophobic record, which I do not need to reprise here, but because he is clearly a career politician; Livingstone never set his sights wider than London.

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The Spectator this week led with a "Happy 60th Birthday, Israel" feature by Melanie Phillips. Perhaps there is nothing unusual about that, given that it repeats a whole load of the usual pro-Israeli claims which seek to deny anyone else's claim over the land, but it displays a breathtaking ingratitude towards the western countries which are the country's main allies and have been for decades.

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Been wondering recently why you can't get The Ecologist in the Whole Foods shops in London? (These include the former Fresh & Wild stores.)

The reason is apparently that the magazine printed a feature a few issues back which was not entirely laudatory, stating among other things that the chain does not recognise unions. (In the UK, they have to recognise if there is enough support from the staff for the union.) There were a couple of letters in the current issue, one of them from an un-named current employee, who said that the "offending" issue had been removed from the stores, as was any member of staff who had to take time off for family reasons or who "exercised their freedom of speech". It also notes that the store throws out a huge quantity of food (perhaps inevitable with their huge buffets) and that a third of marriages between staff fail.

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Islamophobia Watch - Home - Stop pandering to Muslims says 'silent majority'

Last week an outfit calling itself "British Muslims for Secular Democracy" had their big launch party, attended by Baroness Kishwer Falkner and "former Islamist Ed Husain". This is after the group, and its rather shoddy website (text which gets bigger when you move the mouse over it, blue bars in the middle of the text), have been active for months, if not well over a year. Its chair is Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and its trustees include the infamous Taj Hargey, senior NHS manager Dr Shaaz Mahboob, a bloke called Imran Ahmad who wrote a book called Unimagined and has some sort of career in Information Systems in which he travels round the world, and Ghayasuddin Siddiqui (and that's only the people whose profile says other than that they are BMSD trustees). This list, while it may be said to be diverse, is hardly representative of the large body of Muslims that the existing Muslim organisations already represent.

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Brendan O'Neill interviews the British Nazi Party trying to win hearts and minds in Stanmore (with all the Jews!) and runs into a chick from Croydon bleating about how out of place she is in her own country:

Housewives in jeans and short-sleeved tops talk animatedly about the beautiful weather. Charlotte Lewis, a 35-year-old unemployed woman from Croydon, is wearing a loud gold lamé jacket and black jeans. She speaks with a south London twang: "Sometimes I get on a bus and I'm the only white person on there," she complains. "It's a bit distressing."

As someone who used to live in Croydon, and who travels there regularly for work and sometimes even for social purposes, I can assure everyone that as a white traveller in Croydon you are quite unlikely to be the only white person on the bus (or tram). Most of Croydon's population is white (perhaps most of them drive or walk?) and there are only two main bus routes out of Croydon (the London and Whitehorse Roads, which go up to Thornton Heath) where you are likely to run across lots of non-white people, let alone a majority. Even there, most people are white. If you are the only white person on the bus in most parts of Croydon, the bus is likely to be nearly empty.

So it's another case of the BNP using outright lying as a campaign tactic. It's not surprising that Charlotte Lewis is involved, because she isn't just an ordinary south London housewife but rather she stood as a candidate for the St Helier seat on Sutton council in 2006. Lewis was exposed for claiming to live in Sutton when she actually lived in Thornton Heath, which is in Croydon borough, which meant she was not actually eligible to stand for the council as she had neither lived nor worked in the borough for the necessary twelve months. She was not the only one to do this - the council in neighbouring Merton borough reported two incidents of BNP candidates falsely claiming to live in the borough, and two more did the same in Barking and Dagenham, an east London borough. (Hat tip: lefthandpalm.)

Was there not enough time for Brendan O'Neill to investigate who this "ditzy woman with a chip on her shoulder" was, or not enough space in the magazine?

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Be very afraid: Zoe Williams on the possibility of Boris Johnson as mayor of London | Politics | The Guardian

I know it's a bit late as the polling stations are about to close as I write, but I found this article in today's Guardian as I enjoyed my coffee and it's hilarious. It also gives the actual context for Boris Johnson's "piccaninnies" remark and it really doesn't mitigate against the charges of racism:

His views on Liverpool were remarkable only because they led to his sacking; I'll wager he feels the same about anywhere that isn't Mayfair or the Highlands, pretty much. His line on Africa he gave out in 2002, when Blair visited Congo: "No doubt," he said, "the AK47s will fall silent and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird." It ought to beggar belief, oughtn't it? Not that this self-satisfied creature of privilege should hold such views, but that he should be able to spout them and then have us all instantly forget about it. What are we, idiots?

Williams reckons that his "speaking his mind" about Scousers, or Africans, or anyone else, doesn't mean that "the fire of truth burns so brightly within him that he can't snuff it out", but that he really does despise them. There are four pages of anti-"Boris" opinions (I use the quotes because I'm really not familiar enough with him to be on first-name terms, thankfully), and some choice quotes. Notably, they go to town on his aversion to gay marriage while including three lines on Muslims, despite the fact that his magazine printed pages and pages of bile against Muslims in 2005, including several pages of Johnson's own. Insha Allah they should be getting a letter from me shortly.

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Are there some people we shouldn’t invite onto WHYS? « BBC World Have Your Say

Ros Atkins (presenter of BBC World Have Your Say) on how she booked Ed Husain to appear on her programme on the BBC World Service, only to have him pull out because a spokesman for Hizb-ut-Tahrir had also been invited. He also professed disgust that Dr Azzam Tamimi, a known Hamas sympathiser, was invited onto a panel discussion about the Middle East:

'It's fine for you to create nice comfortable conversations in your studio but I know the real impact. It can consolidate radical opinion. It offers publicuity and kudos. i can remember when I was in Hizb ut-Tahrir, we got a real kick whenever one of our guys got attention in the media.'

While I agree that unrepresentative extremists should not be given undue publicity at the expense of the community they claim to speak for (like Omar Bakri, and let us remember that Ed Husain was part of Omar Bakri's HT and left around the same time), both HT and Hamas are substantial movements and it is ridiculous to shut them out of any discussion, because you then end up with half the picture. It is dishonest to then pretend that this is the whole, even if you tell yourself that the "decent" bit is all that matters.

Clearly Ed is not interested in debate at all, only in censorship. (Hat tip: MPACUK; more: Peace, Bruv.)

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'A world of casual racism' exposed at BA - Home News, UK - The Independent

This was the front-page feature in the Independent yesterday: a former senior pilot with British Airways revealed that casual racism among flight crew was the norm, particularly among older cabin crew, who expected others like them to be on the 'same side' apparently without knowing them:

"There was the time when we set off for Los Angeles with a large party of Saudis on board, who had joined us at Heathrow direct from the VIP lounge," he added. "In the cruise, my captain suddenly embarked on an extraordinary rant about 'rag-heads'. He got the word out twice before I stopped him by explaining he was going to be short of a first officer for the return sector if he carried on." Mr Maughan, who lives in Dunblane, Perthshire, was on another flight when a fellow flight officer complained that there were too many Asians in Britain. "The captain turned to me and said: 'I don't suppose there are many of them up your way.' I replied: 'Well, there's my wife.' After that, they had the decency to fall silent," he said.

He said that this sort of behaviour is as common at BA now as it was in the RAF 25 years ago, and that management had not done much about it. Robert Fisk also has a dim view of the "haughty" company he thinks should be called Rendition Airlines.

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Harry's Place, a blog I read often but generally disagree with, posted this last week, about Yvonne Ridley winning a case for harassment, sex discrimination and constructive unfair dismissal against the Islam Channel. Since HP is currently on hiatus due to overshooting its data transfer allowance (as it seems to do for the last week or so of every month), I'm going to copy a whole load from the Google cache of it, because I agree wholeheartedly with it.

But before I do, I am going to add something which makes my blood boil about this case, which is that certain Muslim men, including some in authority, do not seem to realise that the prohibition of shaking hands with women outside their families applies to all women, not only Arab women, Pakistani women or women who obviously look like Muslim women. They would not dream of publically shaking hands with one of "their" women, so why on earth do they do it with a white woman (or a black woman, for that matter) who is well-known to have converted to Islam? It does not matter if you are suspicious of her motives or sincerity. If you feel you must shake hands with some women and one of them refuses because she is a Muslim and you couldn't tell because she wasn't in hijab, take it gracefully rather than getting offended. No, shaikhs and state muftis are not exempt.

I should add that, if you are a man and a woman offers to shake your hand, be polite about refusing and don't snatch your hand away and mutter in an offended tone, "I do not shake hands with women", because this can be really hurtful. Still, it would make things a lot easier for it to be as well-known that Muslims don't do this as it is that we don't eat pork or drink alcohol, and when Muslims in positions of authority break this rule and then publically humiliate those who try to keep it, it pushes this goal further away every time it happens.

The Harry's Place excerpt is under the fold.

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Peter Wilby, in last Friday's Guardian, posted this article exploding some of the myths about World War II which are commonly used to justify the war in Iraq, particularly the last justification used after all the others have been demolished: that it was all about good democrats getting rid of an evil, fascist dictator. I found parts of it painful to read (both of my grandfathers served in that war and this country would really be a very different place if it had been lost), but there are important points in it, among them that the war was not really a moral struggle against fascism but a war "to maintain the balance of power and prevent a single state dominating the continent" and to prevent a major rival to the USA appearing in the Pacific. I am not even convinced by this myself - the very survival of the UK was under threat and Japan had serious plans for an occupation of the western USA and Canada, and (perhaps unlike France) both countries could fight, so they did, and the obviously monstrous nature of Hitler motivated people to fight in a way that a resurgent Prussian or Hapsburg-type empire might not have done. However, the fact that the losing side in that war perpetrated the Holocaust amplifies the moral superiority of the victors (and perhaps invites comparison with atrocities such as Halabja), despite the fact that fighting the war prevented serious action to arrest the Holocaust, which (or something like which) the governments of the US and UK knew was going on.

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An unusually perceptive Ziauddin Sardar finally delivers a dissenting view of the media's lionising of "Sir Edward Husain" and his clique in today's Guardian, on the grounds that it ignores those who always resisted falling into the hands of the extremists:

The embrace of former extremists is a slap in the face for Muslims who have worked tirelessly to build a British Muslim identity and foster inclusion by constructive community activity. It's another attempt at the marginalisation of the overwhelming majority who never had a moment's doubt that Islam gives no sanction for such murderous and misguided perversion of belief.

I am troubled by the fact that former extremists are seen as the only people who know how to deal with extremism. Just because you have been an inmate of a mental hospital does not mean you are an expert in clinical psychology. But former extremists are being lionised because they confirm the basic tabloid prejudice that violence is a natural part of being a Muslim. So whose ignorance is being vindicated? Certainly the potential of an open, unapologetic belief in Islam as a valuable part of British society is not on the agenda.

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Technorati Tags: ed husain, andrew anthony, david edgar

The key name, here I think, is that of Ed Husain.

If you can really view someone who leaves an imperialist, anti-semitic, anti-democratic, ultra-religious party like Hizb ut-Tahrir and comes out in favour of democracy and religious tolerance as a defector moving rightwards, then it shows your political - not to mention, moral - compass is in urgent need of repair.

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The recent issue of Red Pepper contains an editorial, written by Oscar Reyes, about the upcoming mayoral elections in London. Reyes notes that Boris Johnson, the Tory challenger for the position against Labour's Ken Livingstone, has hired the Australian strategist Lynton Crosby, who is known for running divisive "dog whistle" campaigns for the "Liberals" in his home country, winning them several elections, and trying the same for the Tories in the UK in 2005, when they lost handily. Johnson has also been much assisted by the London Evening Standard, which has run one front-page after another about what they presume readers will think his nasty friends, which last week were the Muslim Brotherhood and today the Sikh Federation UK.

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Smith invites moderate imams into UK to help Muslim communities fight extremism (from the Guardian)

Jacqui Smith, the new Home Secretary, proposes to invite moderate foreign imams (from the Indian Subcontinent) in an apparent attempt to fight extremism in the UK. The report mostly focusses on new anti-terrorist police jobs and kicking foreign terrorism suspects out, so there is not much room for discussing where these moderate figures are to come from, as in which institutions in the home countries.

I always thought that common thinking on the subject was that foreign imams were the problem, not the solution? Many of these imams do not speak English, at least not enough to deliver a meaningful sermon, much less personal guidance, and the proportion of Muslims in this country of Subcontinental descent who speak good Urdu has declined over the years (to say nothing of those who never spoke Urdu to begin with). The presence of imams whose English is not sufficient, or who choose not to use it "for the sake of the old folk", shuts out people who do not speak the language they use, which includes converts as well as immigrants from other Muslim countries. Meanwhile, the extremists and sectarians are only too willing and able to use English.

Surely the solution is to employ more British-born scholars as imams, whether they be trained in the Middle East or in the Subcontinent, while maintaining agreements with the governments in those countries to allow them to stay rather than kicking them out after every "security" (or security PR) panic. Perhaps also, religious institutions in the UK should be supported (they do not need to be founded anew, as was the Maynooth Catholic seminary in Ireland, founded by the British to dissuade Irish Catholics from going to Europe to study). This way, we end up with a form of religion which is relevant to the average Muslim in this country, rather than only to the Asians, or just some of them.

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