Last week there was a demonstration outside the US embassy in London against the desecration of the Qur'an by American guards in the Guantánamo Bay concentration camp. The group was organised by Stop Political Terror and other groups which oppose current anti-terrorist policy. It appears that a number of the Muslims in the demonstration shouted violent anti-American and anti-western slogans, as reported on the BBC and commercial news channels. As you might expect, commentators including Melanie Phillips have leapt on this incident:
With a war declared against the west by Islamists, here was a mob of their fanatical supporters breaking the law by inciting to violence, treason and mass murder on the streets of London with the authorities looking passively on! Surreal, or what? Has this country really got a death wish?
The slogans allegedly included "USA watch your back, Osama is coming back" and "Kill, kill USA, kill, kill George Bush" and were shouted through a megaphone. I didn't see this as I was working in north London that day (had I not been, I might well have attended the demo), but I have seen similar behaviour at a demonstration a few years ago. This was a counter-demonstration to a pro-Israel rally in Trafalgar Square which was addressed by, among other people, Binyamin Netanyahu and Peter Mandelson. This demonstration, was stuffed back into the road leading to Buckingham Palace to avoid any contact between it and the Jewish demo. At this demo, a number of youths dressed in "jihadi" gear started chanting "Hey, hey, USA, aeroplanes are on their way, down with the buildings". At this point, I left.
I'm quite sure the organisers of the demo didn't intend that it would lead to flag-burning and these ridiculous slogans. At the Paddington Green demo a few weeks back, they actually handed out flyers telling demonstrators not to do this, and to keep it orderly and take our litter home. I actually used to know Dr Adnan Siddiqui, one of the leaders of Stop Political Terror. He's a very reasonable man, a well-respected local GP. I don't believe he would encourage this type of behaviour. But they really need to tell these morons to stop using these utterly stupid slogans. They actually give the impression of being infiltrators - it is, of course, a time-honoured political trick, to infiltrate your opponents' demonstration and make them look bad. The sad thing is, I don't think they are.
All the same, I have no real time for Melanie Phillips' assessment of the demonstration. I think that the slogans were taunts, not threats or incitement. And I don't believe that an accusation of treason against a private citizen is particularly credible in a country where the state has abdicated from its responsibility to protect its citizens, by signing a one-sided extradition agreement allowing them to be handed over without evidence. Following the pattern set by right-wing extremist columnists in the USA, Phillips also casts suspicion on a Muslim organisation which is politically very well-connected - in this case, the Muslim Council of Britain, widely accused in the community of being a sell-out. The logical flaws here are obvious - the MCB may have helped organise this demo, but this is no evidence of them inviting the undesirable elements or stirring them up to chant the offensive slogans. This is, of course, a subtle attempt to smear the entire Muslim community.
Blaming the victim for Qur'an desecrations
HAROON SIDDIQUI
It is hard to believe but there are commentators who are berating those who protested the desecration of the Qur'an, not those who did the desecrating. This attitude of blaming the victims fits the tenor of the times. The colonial British and the French were also adept at holding the Indians and Algerians responsible for their own plight.
The pundits are being even more bizarre than the Bush administration, which skewered Newsweek for reporting the sacrilege, not those who committed it.
Even as the Bush administration continues its cover-up for presiding over one of the most shameful chapters in prisoner abuse, here is New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, reprinted in the Toronto Star no less, hectoring the Afghans and others for being stupid enough to take to the streets in dismay.
He is not alone, and he and the other new Orientalists are entitled to their views, as also their logical contortions to continue rationalizing the war on Iraq. But their myopia does cause concern.
Here are their arguments, with one person's response:Political opportunists in Pakistan and elsewhere hijacked the Qur'an incidents to whip up public fury.
Don't our politicians exploit every chance to advance their agenda and themselves, often at the expense of the common good? Aren't George W. Bush and other Republicans particularly adept at using religious and moral wedge issues?
Muslims should be up in arms about the killing of 17 fellow Muslims in the Qur'an protests.
Unlike the impression left of crowds lynching one another, most of those who died were killed in police shootings ordered by the pro-American governments of Gen. Pervez Musharraf and Hamid Karzai.
There has been plenty of criticism of that, which is not what Messrs. Friedman and others, shedding crocodile tears, are looking for. What they want is for Muslims to berate Muslims for being Muslim in a way not acceptable to America. Muslims must condemn "their culture of death," as demonstrated in the Qur'an protests and in suicide bombings, lately in Iraq.
Sure. But as a recent study by Robert Pape, professor at the University of Chicago, has shown, suicide bombings are not the exclusive preserve of Muslims. The Tamil Tigers, who happen to be Hindu, have been the leading user of that dastardly weapon.
More importantly, the Arab and Muslim world has had much to say, and with good reason, about America's "culture of death," as seen in the killing of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis in the last three years, and in the earlier deaths of an estimated 500,000 children in the American-led economic sanctions, and in American complicity by silence in Russia's butchering of more than 100,000 Chechens.
Why the soft-pedalling of such mass deaths but the frothy denunciations of the Muslim mayhem, which is minuscule by comparison?
All killings must be condemned. But honesty demands context and perspective.
Nobody mounts deadly demonstrations when the Bible or other sacred texts are violated.
This point has drawn two responses: the Qur'an plays a far more central role in the lives of Muslims than do the sacred texts for others, and, secondly, it's not the fault of Muslims if other believers, especially in the West, have lost their sense of the sacred (something the new Pope also complains about).
But that misses the greater principle: Having guaranteed freedom of religion, it is not for us to dictate how strongly some people might feel about their faith, so long as they operate within the rule of law.
The protests over the Qur'an episodes have been presented as the utterly incomprehensible actions of illiterate and irrational mobs. They are at one level. But on another, they are understandable â not justifiable but understandable â given the scandalous mistreatment of Muslims in America, Iraq and in Afghanistan, day after day, for more than three years.
Human Rights Watch, joining the international chorus of condemnation, confirmed this week that religious humiliation of Muslims has been widespread in American-run jails.
And Amnesty International, in one of its toughest reports yet, called Guantanamo Bay "the gulag of our times."
Yet the media mostly ignored those reports. They were busy baiting Muslims.
One longs for the day in the future when we will be ready to look back at this dark period and hang our heads in shame.
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Haroon Siddiqui is the Star's editorial page editor emeritus. His column appears Thursday and Sunday. hsiddiq@thestar.ca.
How can Melanie Phillips talk about loyalty and treason when practically all of her articles are about how much she supports Israel.
I don't understand how you can be a zionist and live outside of Israel. Thats like the equivalent of Khomeni staying in Iraq even after the revolution in Iran.
As salaamu alaikum
I wonder why there was no noise made here in the United States, as far as demonstrations go.
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