Indigo Jo Blogs

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Melanie Phillips’ misrepresentations

by · 28th April, 2005

Every so often I get suggestions that I attempt to refute bloggers and columnists who peddle an unbalanced view of Islam in their writings, and the name of Jamie Glazov has come up twice so far, I think. Glazov is the managing editor to Frontpagemag.com and collaborator with David Horowitz on a number of books, who according to someone who wrote to me this morning, brings a sexual angle to his Islamophobia with articles like “Islam’s hatred of the clitoris” and speculations on how rife sodomy is in the Muslim world.

The problem is that I do not have the time, the energy, or for that matter, the knowledge to debunk everyone with a filthy imagination and/or an axe to grind against Muslims. There are a number of blogs dedicated to refuting bigoted bloggers and columnists - or calumnists - many of them linked to LGF Watch. The people who are of more concern to me are the likes of Melanie Phillips who, unlike Glazov or Horowitz, regularly gets an airing in the British press and even the BBC, yet she is not above writing Front Page-level drivel - including for Front Page.

Phillips is best known nowadays for her columns in the Daily Mail, but she has a website with a blog, sorry, diary and an archive of her articles. Her most recent FPM article is about the shenanigans in east London caused by George Galloway standing in opposition to Oona King. Let me make my views about this clear: George Galloway would not make a good representative for the Muslims in east London. He is not Muslim, and he is not local. He imagines he can get the local Muslims to elect him because of his “anti-war” (quite possibly pro-Saddam) stance and is desperate to find a seat - any seat.

I made my feelings about this temporary alliance here at Nick Barlow’s blog (first comment). Umm Zaid made remarks about Muslim alliances with communists (possibly of a different persuasion to the SWP, but not being familiar with the US left, I wouldn’t know) on her blog here. I don’t have a problem with other ethnic and religious minorities having members of the Commons to represent them, but the Muslims need one of their own as well and Bethnal Green is as good a seat for such a representative as anywhere.

Her article on the Bethnal Green saga is entitled The unholy alliance turns on its own. The whole thrust of the article is that the Muslim extremists responsible for the recent unpleasantness in east London have something or other to do with the Muslim Association of Britain. They have not. Hizbut-Tahrir are a political party which originated in Jordan, and its ideology was laid down by Taqi ud-Deen al-Nabahani, whose books can be purchased in most Islamic bookshops. The Muslim Brotherhood, to which the MAB is connected, was founded in Egypt. Its founders are equally well-known: Hasan al-Banna and, later, Sayyid Qutb. The Brotherhood is a huge international movement; the Tahrir party is much smaller.

Al-Muhajiroun are an offshoot of the British wing of HT, founded in the late 1990s by Omar Bakri Mohammed, who comes from Syria. Its membership, in the UK at least, is mostly British Muslim, i.e. of Pakistani origin. The people behind last week’s incidents appear to be members of offshoots of that group. So it’s not surprising that HT should threaten to sue Galloway for accusing them of having anything to do with violence in east London - their path differed from those responsible for this business eight or nine years ago. Phillips finds HT’s desire to “change people’s thoughts solely through intelligent discussion and debate” to be “nearly as reassuring as Respect’s ‘long history of fighting anti-Semitism.’” (punctuation error is hers), but however unpleasant she finds HT’s ideology, libel is still libel. The question is, did HT have anything to do with the disturbances at the east London meetings?

Phillips also draws attention to Oona King’s past history of pro-Palestinian sympathy:

King herself, however, would appear to have something in common with her tormentors: despite being half-Jewish and half-black, she once infamously compared the Palestinians in Gaza to the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. Bigotry, it seems, can make common cause between enemies, at least when the Jews are their common target.

The comparison between Gaza and the Warsaw ghetto is clearly inappropriate (although I will add that not everyone is familiar with the history of the Nazi ghettos and the fact that they were merely places of containment as preparation for mass murder, rather than places of long-term Jewish residence as were the old ghettoes). But the reason Muslims don’t jump on Oona King’s bandwagon is that the issue at this election is not Palestine, but Iraq. (There are campaigns to unseat pro-Zionist MPs of various parties elsewhere in London, notably Ilford, but not in Bethnal Green and Bow.) Muslims are unhappy that their tax money has been spent on assisting an American invasion of a Muslim country, for dubious reasons. Galloway hopes to capitalise on this in order to preserve what is left of his political career.

Even this, however, does not lend any relevance to Phillips’ conclusion that “there’s no appeasing bigotry once that beast is roused”. Galloway’s anti-war alliance, which led to the formation of Respect, has been formed not with a group of bigots, but with a mainstream Islamist group with a long pedigree. Any attempt to build alliances with Muslims in order to fight an election is likely to run into opposition from people like those who caused last week’s disruption, because they oppose the principle of Muslims voting at all in a non-Islamic state.

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