Polly Toynbee and the “Islamophobia awards”

Posted on 18th August, 2004 by

Polly Toynbee, an anti-religious liberal who writes regularly in the Guardian, mentioned today that she had been labelled the “Most Islamophobic Media Personality” of 2004 by the Islamic Human Rights Commission. I had not heard that this organisation gave such awards, let alone with a ceremony (in London’s Shi’ite mosque in Maida Vale), and I’m quite surprised by some of the people chosen for them. George W Bush gets the “Islamophobe of the Year” in preference to Melanie Phillips, and Chirac and Sharon are preferred over “Islam” Karimov. I’m sure Nick Griffin would consider the award a compliment, but Toynbee doesn’t like being lumped in with such people. Her point is that “whichever way they turn, they find themselves at risk of alliances with undesirables of every nasty hue”. Toynbee said she had challenged the idea of making criticising a religion a crime akin to racism. Who has been calling for this anyway? What is currently being proposed is aimed at “incitement to religious hatred” and not at criticism. I have not heard of Muslims even suggesting that English law be changed to make criticism of Islam illegal; what is suggested is that incitement to hatred of a group based on a religion that cuts across national and racial lines (like Islam, or indeed Christianity) be put on the same level as the same talk against a religion closely associated with a nationality (like Jews and Sikhs).

In at least two cases, it has been demonstrated that the mere teaching of a religion can be grounds for prosecution. Muslims have been prosecuted for preaching which involved the hadeeths about future wars between Jews and Muslims, and for teaching the Islamic position on a man hitting his wife. As I have stated here before, a lot of those who protest about Islam giving a man the right to hit his wife will most vigorously defend the right of grown women to hit defenceless one- and two-year-old children. Certainly nobody would get prosecuted for suggesting it. The conclusion is that an affront to a grown woman’s dignity is a greater offence in these people’s eyes than an actual assault.

Later on in the piece Toynbee repeats her attack on religious schools, claiming that “if the government really wants to foster religious harmony, it should abolish all religious schools, not build more”. She laments that “it is getting harder to argue against the hijab and the Koran’s edict that a woman’s place is one step behind” (I’ve not heard this edict myself - can anyone give me chapter and verse?), and offers Turkey as “a coherent non-Islamophobic position”. Well, to take people’s taxes and give them a one-size-fits-all type of education may be the way things are done in Europe, but it’s not the Anglo-American model. Some religious schools are bad and some are good, and the same is true of non-religious schools. The non-religious special school I attended was dreadful, while I still have some fond memories of my Catholic infant school. And yes, I did get the religious education and needless to say, I saw through it. Some lefties (like Nick Cohen) don’t credit the human race with this capability once they’ve had a religious education. As for the hijab, well what of it? It’s a piece of cloth which means a lot to the girls who wear it and should mean nothing to others, except perhaps that she’s not “available”. As for Turkey, its “model” is sustained by continual coups and maneouverings against the elected government by the military. In other countries, this is called treason. The punishment for treason in this country until recently was death by hanging; I’m sure I can’t be prosecuted for suggesting that it should be the same for Turkish military officers.

“Women are always the main victims, since extreme religions express their identities through male priestly supremacy and disgust of women,” she claims. I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but women have been the main victims of secular fanaticism which bars them from education - and worse. In Algeria at one point, women were threatened with violence from “Islamic” terrorists if they did not wear hijab, and from state terrorists if they did. The main reason religious fanatics in Islam attack women is because the only models for an Islamic state anyone knows today are Saudi Arabia and Iran, both of them miserable examples. I don’t believe that the last true Islamic states are even living memory today, and the contempt secularists show for believing Muslim women easily exceeds that of the Saudi “religious police” who have been reported as harrassing Muslim women in al-Madinah (see Yusuf al-Rifai’s book, Advice to our Brothers, the Ulama of Najd).

Finally she comes to another old canard about Muslims not doing enough to disassociate themselves from extremists. The people she talks of are, and always have been, a tiny minority who recruit mostly at the universities rather than in mosques. The mosques they frequent are well-known (and avoided by a lot of Muslims). They have a high profile because the media draw attention to them, and even solicit their views, time after time. In the Muslim media, Al-Muhajiroun in particular are criticised vigorously - in one article in Q-News the group were called on to stop putting their posters on bins and start putting them inside the bins, and were called morons. They sometimes draw attention to how western policies in the Muslim world help to stir up this type of extremism. But they don’t condone it, which is more than can be said for the left in relation to American actions (under both Clinton and Bush jr) in the Muslim world in the last few years.

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  • George

    As a person with no real religious beliefs at present, my reaction on seeing a Muslim woman in hijab is not “She must be oppressed”, but rather “How beautifully feminine!” I’m wondering: aside from fear of Islam, is this perhaps another reason why Western ‘feminists’ hate hijab? After all, let’s face it, the Western ‘feminist’ movement is at its core an anti-femininity movement.

    Yusuf replies: I agree, in fact, that was one of the first things I noticed when I started looking into Islam back in 1993. The abandonment of femininity is something which has got worse since I got out of boarding school in 1993 and started really seeing women (I mean that literally, not in terms of getting girlfriends, which I never did, not for want of trying). The traditional long skirt or dress was very common then, and is very rare now.

  • deteodoru

    Below is an impression I would love to share, particularly with Jewish members on this list. It is a most disturbing impression that can only be ameliorated through collegial discourse, in my view. So I offer it to this list in hope of promoting discussion instead of slander. Reason can change my views as they are fraught with alarm that would appreciation pacification.

    The “Big Red Scare” days of the Cold War were heady days, especially for the once Leninist neocons turned anti-Red propagandists publishing in CIA sponsored media directed at the Left. But those days are gone and many rich careers made in the Conservative Movement fighting the “Red Menace” came to a crashing end. Trade names for think-tanks, publications, publishing houses and other assets could be bought for a nickle on the dollar as the Corporate Establishment and CIA ceased funding of the “Red Scare” propaganda machine and the well payed “experts” had to scramble in search of real jobs.

    Many proved to be as good at scholarship and writing as at their past trade of scare propaganda and they found a niche for themselves in academia. But for the neocons it proved business as usual, for they were able to move from the “Big Red Scare” to the “Big Green Scare.” Green is the color of Islam and the neocons managed to parley venture capital from right-wing Zionist extremist entrepreneurs into a “War on Terror” fighting the new Islam scare. Indeed, deeming the Cold War “World War III,” they declared “World War IV” on Islam: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/podhoretz.htm

    To be sure, the internationally waged Zionist campaign to label all Islamists “Jihadists” is not new. In its desperate effort to impede global recognition of the Palestinians as a people with national aspirations, the Israeli Government funded lavishly with American aid-funds all sorts of front organizations that depicted every act of terror a tactical battle in the GLOBAL Islamist War on the West. Recently, Israeli operative Bernard Lewis was honored on his 90th birthday as the first to warn of a new war of the worlds— to the death— between Islam and Christianity which they say he dubbed, a Clash of Civilizations, not Huntington, the author of a book by the same name. Nowhere was his past personal history as agent of an interested party ever mentioned, after all, a basic tenet of this operation is the “Don’t show, don’t tell” inability on the part of us “dumb goyim” Christians to recognize the bias behind his “scholarship.”

    To be sure, the neocons would be quick to point out, 9/11 has more than signaled the existence of such a “clash of civilizations.”— but with ALL of Islam? Here again, as in their past Cold War propaganda, the neocons relied on their true and tried tactic of “don’t show, don’t tell,” for we are deemed “dumb goyim” who will not look behind the blaring slogans. The fact is that we, the Christian World, came to Islam to conquer it after it had collapsed as a power, not the other way around. And, armed by Stalin, European Jews created out of nothing the state of Israel. Instead of making the Germans pay for the Holocaust, we, in fact, made the Arabs pay and pay dearly; the most helpless Palestinians, according to Benny Morris, the Zionist historian, suffered a cruel invasion that caused some more idealistic Israelis to name it “Zionazi” for its exterminationist tactics of ethnic cleansing. That 1948 event is, right or wrong, at the root of 9/11, as well as our imperial protection of our “cheap oil” through corrupt regimes we back and protect against their own subjects.

    Through parthenogenesis (eg. self-replication) a plethora of organization was created by a hand full of neocons, much as they did as one time Leninists, to give the impression of a heterogeneous “united front” of view points. For them, 9/11 was not as much of a God-sent as was the coalition they managed to make with the Fundamentalist Christians who believe that the Day of Rapture will only come AFTER Israel comes to dominate the Middle East. Coalition with these “Christian Zionists” (though for reasons that can be considered nothing more than an extension of their anti-Semitic position) proved to be like a Stalinist Coup per the 1936 Dimitrov designed “united front” that, “neutralizes our enemies and brings them to the service of our cause.”

    Using the Cold War Era and the opportunist Senator Jackson of Washington State, who really thought the neocons would bring him to the presidency, (his hopes were dashed by a massive and fatal coronary) they campaigned for bigger is better strategic weapons and thus in an influence peddling scheme linked the massive American military-industrial complex— that Eisenhower was so weary of— with that of Israel. There was plenty of money to be made and, to date, none of the neocons nor their progeny suffers from poverty. But, the end of the Cold War seemed to put all that in jeopardy; that is, until 9/11 brought an end to the unachievable sure-fire ABM System and gave cause for a “transformation” of the US military into a global Christian Expeditionary Force chasing Jihadists all over the globe and promoting— they hoped— Israeli domination of the Middle East: http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/archive/1990s/instituteforadvancedstrategicandpoliticalstudies.htm

    But note, no sooner did we reach achievement of one such venture in our war on terror that we abandoned it unaccomplished for yet another. Hence, the masters of 9/11/2001 are still alive and free, today mid-2006, still directing alQaeda in its terrorizing of the world. After all, there’s little to be gained from ending the source of the scare!

    In the meantime, the “Big Green Scare” propaganda is in full swing. For example, the same neocon Hudson Institute that championed more-is-better nuclear armaments for the war against the Big Red Scare is now promoting “expert and great scholar” on Islam Bat Yo’er, an Israeli who lives in Switzerland (like many neocons living in “anti-Semite” Europe instead of the “safe homeland” Israel), from where she propagates the concept of “EURABIA,” which means that Europe has already been taken by Islam because of its inherent weaknesses: (1) anti-Jewish nature and (2) loss of Christian zeal to destroy Islam. Now if that doesn’t sound like an obvious attempt to kill two birds with one stone, I don’t know what does. As Anne Norton notes in her book, ” Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire,” Yale university Press, there is an ongoing a full-court-press anti-Semitic campaign against Arabs and Islam in general, run by the neocons, which I would dub the “Big Green Scare.”

    This campaign has yet another motive: fear that as more and more Islamics settle and succeed in America, they will acquire the economic wherewithal to match the “Israel Lobby” that Mearsheimer and Walt wrote about in their study— but this AIPAC with “I” for “Islam” instead of “Israel”— one seeking to sway Congress, not on Israel’s behalf as does AIPAC, but on behalf of Islam. Such “dumb goyim” are deemed the Christian Americans in Congress, that the neocons fear that, once the Arabs acquire a foothold in American politics, they will draw Congress away from Israel.

    It is most instructive to read how the Neocon Establishment responded to the Mearsheimer and Walt analysis of the Israel Lobby and what is fomented by these neocons— or through their “friends”— about Islam in order to feed the Big Green Scare; it is utter ANTI-SEMITISM!!!

    Here is one sample of the way the case is made: part 1 http://www.reportingwar.com/esman032006.shtml part 2 http://www.reportingwar.com/esman041006.shtml

    and below is the URL for the Mearsheimer and Walt article that caused such a stir: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01.html which was so vitriolically denounced by ADL as follows: http://www.adl.org/Israel/mearsheimerwalt.asp

    So, it would seem, Ye’or on “Eurabia” is O.K. but Mearsheimer and Walt on AIPAC is “anti-Semitic.” I leave you all to contemplate and further research what’s behind the BIG GREEN SCARE.

    Daniel E. Teodoru