This article by Simon Baron-Cohen appeared in today’s Guardian and questions the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia given him by “independent” experts in a 1,518-page report this week. According to him:

This diagnosis … has surprised some people following the case because the 1,518 pages of Breivik’s manifesto do not appear to be the incoherent output of “thought disorder”, but instead read like a rather linear, carefully crafted tome. It is the work of a man with a single vision, a single belief that he wishes to prove to the world in exhaustive detail, and in a logical fashion.

That most people would find his reasoning deeply offensive, and his actions on 22 July monstrously horrendous, is a separate issue. The question remains whether a man who is so cold and calculating in executing his logical plan is sane or, as the court psychiatrists have suggested, insane. If this is confirmed, his thoughts and murderous actions are to be viewed as the products of a mental illness, requiring treatment in a hospital rather than punishment in a prison.

Baron-Cohen was interviewed in a Norwegian newspaper the week after the crime as he had just published the Norwegian translation of his book Zero Degrees of Empathy / The Science of Evil (the latter being the American title), which I reviewed here in June. He diverges into a discussion on cognitive and affective empathy; cognitive empathy (being able to discern others’ emotions and put yourself in their position) is impaired in autism, while affective empathy (being affected emotionally by others’ suffering) is impaired or absent in what he calls antisocial personality disorder, a subset of which is psychopathy. While not speculating on Breivik’s diagnosis, he writes that low affective empathy is necessary to bring about such an action, although it does not explain it entirely; his ideological convictions clearly played a part also.

Personally, I have a strong hunch that the diagnosis was intended to obviate the need for a trial, to deny him any opportunity to make political speeches, and to manufacture a pretext to keep him incarcerated for life rather than the 21 years which is the maximum in the Norwegian penal code, even for mass murder (as in most of Europe, and all of western Europe, there is no death penalty). A professor of criminal law, Erling Johannes Husabo, was quoted on state TV as saying, “Their conclusion that he is insane is commonly reserved for persons with a more disturbed grasp of reality resulting in, for example, hallucinations. It must be a very peculiar type of psychosis he is suffering from, when he can execute his plans so diligently”. It is quite odd that his supposed paranoid schizophrenia has not come to light before now, particularly as he was in possession of firearms and ran a business that sold well-known explosive material (ostensibly for agricultural purposes).

As Baron-Cohen himself points out, his manifesto titled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence did “not appear to be the incoherent output of ‘thought disorder’, but instead read like a rather linear, carefully crafted tome … the work of a man with a single vision, a single belief that he wishes to prove to the world in exhaustive detail, and in a logical fashion”. That people would find the views expressed in it offensive does not make the author insane, any more than Hitler’s Mein Kampf, also the work of someone who later went on to commit mass murder (although much later than in this case), makes a similar case for Hitler. Whether Breivik’s empathy circuits were impaired is immaterial; history is full of people whose empathy circuits functioned perfectly when dealing with people they respected, but somehow switched off when confronted with someone they regarded as inferior, or threatening. Whites in the American Deep South in the early 20th century are a classic example, as are Germans in ethnically mixed eastern areas when Hitler started his invasions.

This article was an obvious attempt to fit Breivik into Baron-Cohen’s airtight world view, in which every human action can be explained with reference to his theories of empathy and systemising. As with so many of his examples from his books, however, he is confusing ideologically-motivated crime or war crime with common crime committed for motives of lust or gain. When confronted with perceived enemies, one does not let empathy get in the way of doing what one considers to need doing, something which may lead someone who would not normally act violently to commit very substantial acts of violence. It does not mean there is any pathology that could be identified before the fact, or even after.

This article by former Tory peer, Baroness Shreela Flather, appeared in the UK Daily Mail on Friday, and consists of a broad-brush attack on Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim “migrants” (note: not all — perhaps not even most — Muslims of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin in the UK are migrants at all), accusing them of maintaining multiple families through polygamy so as to milk the state for benefits. The trick, supposedly, is to marry one wife under Islamic law (i.e. not officially) and another officially, so that one wife (and her children) gets benefits as a single parent, while another gets social security as a married couple.

Two articles have been published exposing the claims in Flather’s article: this one sheds some light on Flather’s background, while this one at Left Foot Forward notes that although birth rates among those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin in the UK are higher than average, they are “not so much higher as to assert there is a general culture of very large families”; according to a Runnymede Trust report published in 2005, their birth rates were both below 3, and thus “far too close to the replacement rate of 2.1 – or the mythical 2.4 children that was deemed to be the ‘normal family’ for most of the immediate post-war period, to be described as some epidemic of large families among these communities”. Furthermore, the rate had been in steady decline, year on year, since 1983. (Report in PDF here.)

I find its central claim about “migrants” being able to bring wives not officially married into the UK to be suspect. In Pakistan, Shari’ah law is the law as regards marriage; any marriage of Muslims within the Shari’ah (that is, up to four wives) is recognised. This is not the case in the UK, which is what would result in the wife being able to claim benefits as a single mother; but this raises the issue of what basis the wives use to migrate to the UK when they have no legally recognised relationship with any British citizen or resident. The man can only bring one wife, and the first wife (should any jealousy arise) could easily claim that she was the “real wife”, by British legal standards, as she was the first woman he married, as all such marriages are recognised in Pakistan. The marriages would have to be conducted in the UK for the second wife to be the official wife, yet how did either of the wives get to the UK? (I should make it clear that I am aware of similar scams being perpetrated by Muslims in the UK and USA for years and in fact some Muslim speakers and bloggers have condemned it. However, this does not explain how anyone can get a second wife into the country on this basis.)

What irks me most about this article, however, is the suggestion that Flather was “brave” to be making it. It’s not brave for a member of the Establishment to be making broad, unsubstantiated claims about an unpopular minority group in the popular press. Bravery requires that there be some risk of personal harm or loss (such as when an ordinary person speaks out about abuse going on within a powerful organisation), not merely the possibility of public censure. It seems that every time someone makes a public attack on Muslims, however ridiculous or insulting the claims are, the reputation for violence Muslims picked up during the Rushdie era (and that was more than 20 years ago) is exploited, when in fact nobody has ever suffered serious harm in the UK for making this sort of public statement and Flather has no more reason than anyone else who has done this (and there are many) to expect it to happen to her, given her long-standing middle-class status and lack of any real connection to the two communities she attacked. Her attack was not brave; it was cowardly.

Ths image is from the Spectator, the British political magazine, and represents what passed for journalism on the European and American right during the post-9/11 era. The occasion for this was a series of riots involving youths of Middle Eastern origin in several cities in northern Europe. As you might notice, the crescent runs from Nantes (wrongly labelled as Rennes which is inland), passes at its thickest point through southern Germany, where there were no riots, and ends somewhere near similarly unaffected Arbroath, on the Scottish east coast. “Eurabia” refers to the theory that Muslims were collaborating with “useful idiots” on the Left to somehow destroy European civilisation; some outbreaks of violence among the youth, most of them not particularly religious, was the chief evidence in this case. The editor of the magazine at this time was none other than Boris Johnson, then a Conservative MP and now mayor of London. The contributors include some of the worst contributors to this literature, including Mark Steyn and Patrick Sookhdeo.

I’ve written about the ludicrous, transparent lies peddled in that magazine here in the past. I’ve not seen Patrick Sookhdeo’s articles in the mainstream press for a few years, but he appeared regularly in the right-wing press around 2005. His accusations were baseless and in some cases ludicrous — in one case he accused the Muslim community in the UK of attempting to sacralise whole neighbourhoods, such as Birmingham, by means of marches and processions, a claim that betrays such obvious ignorance of basic British geography that it beggars belief that it got past the editor. It also has no basis in Muslim doctrine or practice: there is no ritual march of any sort in Islam (the only ritual that involves a procession takes place at the Hajj, which cannot be done in Birmingham), and no such thing as sacralising a neighbourhood. There is a custom of marches to celebrate the birth of the Prophet Muhammad in some sections of the community, but after the march is over, the streets revert to their normal function as thoroughfares for traffic.

Mark Steyn’s thesis was that America was going to stand alone after the nations of Europe have caved in to their Arab and Muslim minorities, and that American conservatives would keep having children and thus perpetuate their civilisation, while decadent Europeans would be outnumbered in their own countries by said immigrants. The interesting thing here is that he displayed some sort of respect for Muslims’ values, claiming that Muslims were bound to triumph over Europe because we kept to our traditional values and kept having children, unlike white Europeans whose birth rates were collapsing. Muslims, of course, do not really see high birth rates as a solution in itself: there are hadeeth in which we are told that the Muslims will be many in number but powerless, and indeed Muslims do not control a single town or village anywhere in western Europe. Christopher Hitchens has noted that anti-Semitism also displays some admiration and respect for the “enemy”, portraying the Jews as guileful and clever rather than simply lowly (as with, say, anti-Gypsy or much anti-Black prejudice). Still, Eurabianism portrays Muslims as more powerful than we actually are, particularly in Europe, and makes every concession to Muslim sensibilities look like a capitulation to Muslim power even when it is a business accommodating the needs of its customers. Much of Europe is a very hostile place for Muslims, far more so than the USA even after 9/11, with anti-Muslim rhetoric common and specific anti-Muslim laws having been passed in several countries, and yet they allege that America stands alone against Islam.

The influence of the brazenly dishonest anti-terrorist public speakers and “consultants” such as Walid Shoebat, who has given lectures to police officers in some US states only very recently, persisted there long after it appears to have waned in the UK. I am not sure how much influence explicit “Eurabian” thought ever had in the UK, where the “political correctness gone mad” nonsense coming from the tabloids fills that gap; it was, after all, a “believable”, toned-down version of the same thing and levelled against a whole range of minorities (Gypsies and Travellers are another common victim). It plays much better to American audiences, which could be persuaded that Europe had let them down in their “hour of need” and had done so to curry favour with Arabs or appease Islamic fundamentalism. In the UK, where a huge section of the population opposed British participation in the post-9/11 wars, such accusations had little currency. Some of its authors were clearly playing to an American audience and relying on their ignorance of British (and general European) political realities and, again, geography. A clear example was Melanie Phillips, mentioned in the FT article above, whose book Londonistan alleged that “district after district seems to have become a distinctive Muslim neighbourhood”, a complete untruth as almost all the areas of London where there is a strong Muslim presence are actually mixed, with Muslims just a large minority. Much of it was aimed at American Jewish audiences, with it being noted in the JC (formerly Jewish Chronicle) that American Jews had formed the impression from Phillips’s writing that life was becoming extremely difficult for Jews in the UK and Europe due to Muslim and left-wing anti-Zionist agitation.

As Simon Kuper says, the popularity of Eurabianism is waning. There are factors he does not mention in that article: one is that the coalition that formed after 9/11 had already began to split even before 2008, with the libertarian and conservative wings in the blogosphere splitting over the Terri Schiavo affair. The split became irreparable when some of the former began to associate with European anti-Muslim extremists like Geert Wilders and more recently the EDL, something the likes of Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs could not entertain. Two further events have weakened the cause of anti-Muslim bigotry in the UK in particular: the massacre in Norway by someone heavily influenced by the writings of such bigots, including Melanie Phillips, causing huge embarrassment to them, and the riots in England last month in which Muslims largely distinguished themselves by not participating and by attempting to defend their neighbourhoods from it, losing three young men in the process (three of the five fatalities that occurred during the riots). Whether the last two months or so represent a serious change in popular press attitudes to Muslims or simply a lull (while they attack disabled people as bogus benefit claimants at the behest of the government) remains to be seen, but the tone of the coverage after the riots suggested that Muslims have come to be seen as law-abiding and peaceful people, at least in the UK; the unscrupulousness of the British popular press cannot be underestimated.

This article is Douglas Murray’s treatment of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque controversy, in which he smears Muslims by equating them with al-Qa’ida, praises Newt Gingrich as a “responsible” politician for doing pretty much the same thing, calls the building itself a “mega-mosque” and a “mega-centre”, and sneers at Muslim imams for failing to turn up to a debate with him in London. As we will see, there are quite good reasons not to bother debating with someone like this.

He begins:

What was your first reaction back in May when you heard of plans to build a mega-mosque near the site of the Twin Towers in New York? Did you assume it was a tasteless joke? Did your jaw drop? Or did you think: “What a good idea. No better place.”

My bet would be that most readers (including self-described liberal readers) had a touch more of the former reaction than the latter. Some people even said so at the time. A number of families of 9/11 victims spoke out against the building and for a few weeks the idea of a 13-storey mosque complex beside the World Trade Centre craters, due to cost £68 million yet with no known financial backer, seemed a dead duck.

This term “mega-mosque” has its origins in the Abbey Mills mosque project in London, which seems to have died a death for the time being but was proposed as a Muslim worship and education centre by the Tablighi Jama’at. As I’m sure anyone familiar with the New York skyline will know, 13 storeys is not “mega” by Manhattan standards. Furthermore, the building is not going to be “beside” the WTC crater but several streets away, and if building a mosque there is some sort of sacrilege, then surely much of what already goes on there (including strip clubs) should be stopped as well.

He also conveniently omits to mention that there was a Muslim prayer centre in one of the twin towers and, needless to say, that did not survive the tower’s collapse. There were Muslims among the direct victims of the 9/11 attacks, not just the backlash afterwards.

Murray then accuses the New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, of “the now decade-long tendency to believe that al-Qaeda meant whatever you want them to have meant when they destroyed the Twin Towers” by claiming that “Three thousand people were killed because some murderous fanatics didn’t want us to enjoy the freedom to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams and to live our own lives”. Well, this tendency has been much more the preserve of the right than the left; it has always been about their hating freedom or the equality of women, and never about American interference in the affairs of various Muslim countries and partisanship for Israel. Perhaps 9/11 was not about destroying American freedom, except that they might have intended to force Muslims living in the west to choose sides, but it wasn’t about what Murray and his friends like to think it was about, either.

Newt Gingrich, he claims, was “not as distrustful as Bloomberg was of popular sentiment”, saying on air in August, “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington…We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbour”, which opened the way for other mainstream politicians to oppose the mosque project. However, the Muslims seeking to build the mosque in Lower Manhattan are not “Nazis”, nor are they the same people who carried out the 9/11 attacks, so the comparison is completely inappropriate. There are around a billion Muslims in the world and al-Qa’ida are a tiny (and dwindling) fringe group. The mosque is not the equivalent of a “Nazi sign” near the Holocaust museum but of a Lutheran church. I doubt anyone would object to that. Similarly, a Buddhist temple near Pearl Harbour would hardly raise many eyebrows. Japanese are, after all, not the only Buddhists.

He goes on to claim that America is “not as blackmailed by history” as Europe is, as the mass of opposition to such a project in Europe would be dominated by skinheads and anyone seeking respectability would avoid it. The problem is that no atrocity involving Muslims has happened in Europe on anything like the same scale as 9/11, so we do not know how Europeans would react. We could compare it to a Catholic church being proposed near the site of an IRA attack, but any IRA attack on the British mainland almost certainly happens in a place with a large Catholic population and near to at least one Catholic church. There were Muslims in New York well before 9/11, and if ordinary white American Muslims cannot grasp the difference between local Muslims and a group of extremists who came from outsiders to attack everyone, it shows that they are ignorant and bigoted, and protecting people from the tyranny of an ignorant and bigoted majority is what we have laws and constitutions for.

In his account of a televised debate involving Faisal Abdur-Rauf (the intending imam of the new mosque), his wife Daisy Khan, and various figures on both sides (Robert Spencer appearing on the anti side), he uses a selective quote to make it seem like Daisy Khan said that people were “throwing her into the arms of al-Qa’ida”. When I googled this phrase, I found this CBS report in which she was reported as actually saying this:

Khan said that moderate Muslims like her must lead the fight against extremists in their religion.

“This is what we Muslims want to do, but you have tied our hands,” Khan said. “You don’t allow us to do this because you brand somebody like me as an extremist and throw me into the arms of al Qaeda.”

So, she was talking about moderate Muslims in general; they were being expected to take sides, either with their bigoted opponents or with al-Qa’ida. It was a rather hyperbolic way of saying it, but that seems to be what she meant. Ayaan Hirsi Ali appeared by video-link, accusing Daisy Khan of posing as a victim, to which Khan responded “I am not a victim, Ayaan, stop calling me that. You’re the one running around with a bodyguard”. Still, what was Ayaan Hirsi Ali doing on there anyway? She made a name for herself making outrageous and false claims about Islam while selling a distorted version of her own, and her family’s, histories. There is no reason to have her on there other than to add sensation and heat to the debate rather than anything constructive. Still, the threat that Hirsi Ali is under is not from American Muslims, least of all anyone involved in the Park51 mosque project, but from the fanatics in the Netherlands.

He then goes on about how America has fallen into a “European mistake” of thinking that the solution to “bad Islam” (in which planes are flown into buildings” is to promote a “good Islam” in its place. However, since Park51 is not seeking government funding, only permission to put up a building, this argument is totally misplaced. Promoting hand-picked “moderates” such as Maajid Nawaz in the UK is counter-productive, since they are generally mistrusted by the community at large; indeed, even when someone only appears to be supported by those with an anti-Muslim agenda, they are likely to be seen (rightly or wrongly) as tainted, as in the USA where “Rand Institute Muslim” has come to be used as a slur. Whether the government is “promoting” this project as a counterweight to al-Qa’ida is irrelevant because al-Qa’ida have no base in New York (the nearest thing to it is a small group of loud-mouths in Brooklyn); it is to be used by ordinary local Muslims, both local residents and commuters, who should not have to answer for the misdeed of a group of outsiders who came from Germany to cause mayhem nearly ten years ago.

Murray then gives us an account of a debate he had at New York University on the motion “Islam is a religion of peace” with Ayaan Hirsi Ali on his side and Zeba Khan and Maajid Nawaz, both of whom he describes as “exemplars of the moderate Muslim government game”. He wonders why neither Faisal Abdur-Rauf nor any other “cleric” or imam showed up to the debate. One possible reason is that they said “Douglas who?”, but perhaps they had no wish to get into a debate that would almost certainly not be conducted entirely honestly and might well be peppered with cheap shots. People like Murray (and others of his stripe, like Daniel Pipes) can only be rebutted by going through their writings with a fine-tooth comb and refuting them and exposing the distortions; it can’t be done as quickly as in a face-to-face debate, but it has to be done. A debate can be lost because a lie can be tossed in which is unfamiliar to those on the other side. Any honest person debating a dishonest or bigoted person is at a disadvantage and there is not much point entering into it.

Among his conclusions are that “there are rights which people have which are nevertheless not pursued because they will cause grievous offence and upset to others”, so even though it may be a legal right to build a “vast Islamic complex alongside Ground Zero”, it should not be done because of the hurt and offence it would cause, much as he would not burn a copy of the Qur’an outside a mosque for the same reason. If the mosque was to be built on a plot opposite Ground Zero itself, if there had been no Muslims killed in the attacks (other than the perpetrators) and no Muslim property destroyed, if the attacks had been the work of local Muslims rather than those who came for the purpose, then this argument might have some validity, but none of these conditions are fulfilled, so the American public (the section of it that is normally more than willing to dismiss New Yorkers as stuck-up liberals and not quite Americans anyway) will have to swallow it, and it is the job of the state to uphold the rule of law regardless of any manufactured outrage. It is not a case of confusing the “offender” (Muslims) with the “offended” (Americans); the only people offended here are the Muslims being expected to shoulder the guilt for an atrocity they had nothing to do with.

The Telegraph published an interview with Marine Le Pen, daughter of the French far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, and yesterday followed it up with a leader in which they claim that her party is not a suitable model for a British political party, but that there is a danger of a populist party gaining popularity due to anti-Muslim feeling which they claim stems from an “Islamisation that threatens the freedoms of ordinary Britons”.

Apart from Muslim women supposedly trapped in ghettoes, they do not explain how anyone’s freedom is threatened. They claim that the Muslim population has grown by 74% since 2001, based on two Pew Forum reports, one based on the 2001 census and the other not. The second estimate is much less reliable, since not everybody was asked (I certainly was not), although the first is likely to have been an underestimate as not everyone actually put their religion in that census as they did not have to, so the increase is likely to be exaggerated. Furthermore, the last major wave of Muslim immigration happened during the civil war in Somalia, which started in earnest with the ouster of Siyaad Barre in 1991, six years before Labour came to power. How more than a million more Muslims than that arrived after 2001 is not explained. There would have been a natural increase, some conversions, and some arriving on temporary visas and for marriage, but this could not possibly bring in 1.2million people.

They also make various claims about the supposed tendency of Muslims to “support Shari’ah”, based on opinion polls including some solicited by them. Again, these polls are not reliable as they would have been based on a pitifully small sample which, if broken down among the various different Muslim communities in the UK, would have amounted to a mere handful in each population. Still, “supporting the establishment of Shari’ah” does not explain what they actually intend to do, beyond establishing private tribunals to settle marital and (some) business and property disputes, something the law already allowed before Muslims arrived and did not become controversial when any other religious community used it.

They then bring in the matter of the Saddleworth by-election having been triggered by the use of “dog-whistle” anti-Muslim campaigning by Phil Woolas, the winning Labour candidate. Woolas’s offending flyer attacked immigrants generally by linking them to home-grown extremists, who are not immigrants. However, the Telegraph earlier reported that the judge whose verdict led to the by-election found that Woolas’s tactics were an attempt to appeal to “white Sun readers”, which gives a clue as to how the resentment against Muslims is being engendered. For years, particularly since 2006 when Jack Straw made his anti-niqaab comments, there has been a succession of anti-Muslim stories, including claims of Muslims demanding or getting special treatment, claims of terrorist plots that turned out to be exaggerated or non-existent, front-page stories about the tiny Muhajiroun remnant groups, claims of “what Muslims want” based on small-sample opinion polls, and so on. The Telegraph has used the “opinion poll” tactic, while the tabloids have focussed on the other types of stories. Only today, the Sun admitted that its story about al-Qa’ida threatening Coronation Street (?!) was false (there was increased security — which could have been because the producers wanted to avoid story leaks — but no specific threat).

The “special treatment” stories have been a staple of the popular press for decades, and the recent anti-Muslim stories are a convergence with the “dhimmitude” accusations which were a staple of the US right-wing blogosphere after 2001, with every concession to Muslim sensibilities, including by commercial entities to please customers, being presented as one more capitulation, one more victory for the Islamic hordes that were supposedly at the gates. I do not think that those who circulate these stories in the British media really hate Muslims, unlike those right-wing bloggers; I think they are simply amoral, motivated only by money. They have enormous power — consider how the government leapt after they shouted “jump” over undeported foreign convicts a few years ago — and show no desire to use it responsibly. There is nothing to appease by clamping down on Muslims on the basis of these manufactured stories; the papers will simply choose another target. The only thing for it is to clamp down on the profiteers who peddle these stories.

I’ve written about the Doncaster tweet before. In both cases, it’s arguable that the content did not justify the authors being arrested, since terrorist attacks on airports (let alone aeroplanes) do not generally come from dissatisfied customers but from politically-motivated terrorists, and a single person cannot stone someone to death: it takes a crowd to do that. Still, if a dissatisfied customer threatened to burn a restaurant down, that would be taken every bit as seriously as this, if not more so. It is only to be expected that threats to bomb airports are taken extremely seriously, because there have been attacks, and attempted attacks, on planes in the very recent past, and unlike in a train or car accident, if one blows up in mid-air, you have no chance. People are just that much more nervous about threats to air safety.

This is only the latest in a long line of incidents in which there is outrage at a law which, supposedly, should be getting used to keep “others”, be they Muslims, young Black men or “chavs”, in line being applied to middle-class white people. A few years ago, a commenter noted on the blog Samizdata that there was a tendency for well-to-do white women to run to the media with tales of outrage because they were arrested and put in a cell overnight for knowingly breaking the law, as if the law only applied to lesser mortals. The same was true of the outrage about the white British man who could not bring his 19-year-old white Canadian wife into this country, a law clamoured for by the anti-immigration lobby as a way of eliminating the Asian practice of bringing in young wives from “the village back home”; if the bride had come from a poorer country and had not been white, there would have been no such outrage even if she and the husband were well-educated.

A similar attitude can be found in some of the protests against intrusive airport security, such as the “naked body scanners”. I recently saw an article on the right-wing news website WorldNet Daily complaining about the scans in the USA, and two of those who complained mentioned that they were white or “as American looking as apple-pie”, as if that should excuse them from the same level of security as everyone else. What isn’t said is that it’s quite OK for this kind of harassment to take place when those travelling are Muslims, or have names that look like Muslim names (because of terrorism), or Hispanic or Black (because of drugs etc.), but perish the thought that someone who looks like an American goes through the same thing. Of course, Timothy McVeigh did not look or sound like a Muslim, nor did the Unabomber.

The article does mention that staff operating scanners in Nigeria had been reported as using them for what is essentially sexual harassment of passengers (who are mostly black, obviously), but the article clearly is not objecting to the sexual harassment of passengers in general, only when it’s white people, because white people are obviously not criminals or terrorists, an assumption that history does not bear out. They should accept that the law applies to everyone and exists to protect everyone and assumes nothing about what the threat looks like or where it comes from (that’s the theory, anyway), and if they do not like it, they should campaign to make it fair for everyone, not just exempt themselves by saying that it should apply only to everyone but them.

Some years ago Douglas Murray gave a speech in the Netherlands in which he called for sweeping restrictions on Muslims, among them an end to immigration from Muslim countries and a deportation provision for any number of speech crimes. In the present edition of the Spectator ([1], [2], [3], [4]), he whines that he has been shut out of the inner circle of the Conservative party on the basis of it. He complains that the current Tory party are basically self-hating, carrying old-fashioned prejudices against the “nasty party”. However, in the two examples he gives, he hides obvious and important facts.

He alleges:

A perfect example arose three years ago when the shadow minister of homeland security, Patrick Mercer, gave a newspaper interview in which he mentioned the fact that he had heard racist comments while he was in the army.

Even a cursory glance at the interview showed that Mercer was reporting — and deploring — these comments. But Cameron didn’t bother with a glance. Here was an opportunity to show the new Conservative party. So Cameron described Mercer’s comments as ‘completely unacceptable’, issued soundbites about the evils of racism, smeared and sent to the back benches a much better man than himself.

Well, a brief look at any news report at the time reveals that Mercer did not just mention that he had heard racist remarks; rather, he claimed that he had met a lot of useless soldiers from ethnic minorities who used racism as an excuse, that being called a “black bastard” was a normal part of Army life, and that in his regiment, most black soldiers would have reported that they had indeed been called a nigger at some point. While some might say that this kind of banter is to be expected, much outright racist bullying has been reported and Mercer’s remarks could easily be seen as giving comfort to those who think racist (or any other) bullying is acceptable and normal.

As for his own remarks that led to his being “blackballed”, he claims:

I was asked to address the question of what we should now do in Europe to deal with the increasingly problematic Muslim communities. I advocated a number of things. Among them was that mass immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop if the problems of integration were not to get worse. I advocated a tougher approach to self-appointed Muslim leaders and called for there to be no special privileges or protections provided in law or welfare for the feelings of Muslims. And I argued, as Nicolas Sarkozy and others have done, that if people plotted against the country into which they had come it should be possible for them to be sent back to their country of origin.

Apparently his speech was too extreme for the Social Affairs Unit, which has since deleted it from their blog, but various anti-Islamic sites still keep copies of it up, such as the “Militant Islam Monitor”. The speech was called “What are we to do about Islam?” and he did not bother making much distinction between Muslims in general and “militants”, delivered a standard diatribe against “dhimmitude” in which non-Muslims call our Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) “The Prophet” when they do not believe he is one and judges apologise for forcing a Muslim to court on a religious holiday. He complains of a war which the soldiers are winning on the battlefield but which is being lost at home, mentioning media disasters such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. This is very reminiscent of the “stab in the back” ramblings from an earlier era: the soldiers would have won the war but for defeatism at home.

I wrote a more comprehensive response to Murray’s speech at the Sharpener at the time (which you can read here), but the short version is that he proposes stopping all “mass immigration” from Muslim countries (in fact, there is no mass immigration anymore) with genuine refugees given asylum on a strictly temporary basis, while “Muslims in Europe who for any reason take part in, plot, assist or condone violence against the West (not just the country they happen to have found sanctuary in, but any country in the West or Western troops) must be forcibly deported back to their place of origin”, which may be the country of their parents’ or grandparents’ origin in the case of a Muslim born here. This would effectively prohibit Muslims living in the West (who seem to be assumed to be all immigrants or descended from immigrants) from freely expressing their opinions in the event of any dispute between any western power and any other country or faction anywhere (he does not even mention that it has to be a Muslim country or faction). This is far beyond removing any “special rights”, as if Muslims had any special rights to begin with; it is also far beyond removing all those who “plotted against the country into which they had come” as merely condoning a foreign party resisting an aggression from one’s home country is not the same as plotting against one’s home country, but in any case, we did not all come here, many of us were born here and have no other home country.

So, why is it that David Cameron and his inner circle won’t be seen dead talking to Douglas Murray anymore? Perhaps it’s because he has a coalition partner to keep, who certainly won’t be seen dead with Murray and his ilk? Or perhaps it’s because, in government, one has to keep an air of statesmanship, and that means not talking to bigots and extremists. Given his economy with the truth in the Spectator, one wonders why anyone would bother listening to him anyway.

The New York Times printed some pictures which have been shown at community meetings in NYC and which were released to the public last week. The frontage of the building is to entirely consist of some sort of lattice-like construction, except that it’s not a classical Islamic geometric pattern, rather it’s a collection of jagged shapes which, frankly, could scare small children. The building doesn’t really look like anything, least of all a mosque. Inside, people are shown walking in these eerie white rooms next to the windows in the fake-lattice frontage. There is really nothing Islamic about what has been shown so far, either the inside or the outside. Much the same could be said for the Abbey Mills proposal, which also deliberately avoided common Islamic architectural features apparently for its own sake.

Perhaps this is par for the course in New York, I don’t know. However, it fits the pattern coming up with an over-ambitious project at a sensitive time that stirs up a lot of bigotry and hostility when they do not even have the resources to build it. Apparently the Cordoba Project raised $18,000 from donations for their community centre (surely you couldn’t buy a poky one-bedroom flat in NYC with that money), but it needs $100 million or more to actually get the thing built, which means a whole lot of hostility has been raised and other mosque projects have been put in jeopardy across the USA and all because of a project that is not even concrete in terms of what will, if anything, actually be built (no architect has been hired for Park51 yet). It is, of course, possible that they might raise the money from Saudi Arabia, but this may well come with “strings attached” in terms of the donor’s name being on the building or his being in control of what goes on inside, although given the extremely liberal reputation of Faisal Abdur-Rauf, that might not be forthcoming anyway.

It becomes difficult for someone like me, who seeks to defend the Muslim community’s interests in writing, to defend those who propose these ridiculous, pie-in-the-sky, overblown projects. I’m not going to say the Muslims are their own worst enemies, but a lot of the time, our leaders, or those who seek to be our leaders, don’t really do us any favours. Muslims really want mosques and educational facilities like schools and libraries (both secular and religious); let’s leave swimming pools to the municipality, and interfaith prayer rooms where they belong — the airport.

The front page of today’s Mail on Sunday was dominated by the above story: the revelation that a number of entertainment venues, such as Royal Ascot and Wembley Stadium, and schools in the UK are serving halaal meat to their customers without telling them. The story is accompanied by pictures of people tucking into supposedly halaal food (well, the second picture seems to be of fish and chips, so that is halaal although I don’t suppose the Mail would be complaining about that), and of the posh private school, Marlborough College. As is so often the case, it seems like a lot of fuss about nothing, but it’s the second anti-Muslim front pager this weekend after the Express (Daily Spew) ran with “Muslim plot to kill Pope” yesterday; the “plot” turned out not to exist, and all those arrested were released without charge last night. (More: Sis. Maryam @ Mad and Loud.)

The Mail claim that their so-called investigation “will alarm anyone concerned about animal cruelty” because halaal meat supposedly means that which has been ritually slaughtered without the animal being stunned first. In fact, there are two halaal slaughter monitoring bodies in the UK, and only one of them insists on the animal not being stunned first (the Halaal Monitoring Committee, which is run by Indian Deobandis). The other, the Halaal Food Authority, allows stunning. The report seems to assume that any meat sold as halaal in the UK must be HMC-certified meat and must not have been from a pre-stunned animal, but this is not the case at all. A lot of New Zealand lamb is in fact halaal and is slaughtered in premises which supply the Gulf States with their meat, but the meat would not be acceptable to some Muslims in the UK as it is stunned, as religious opinion in the Gulf region tolerates stunning.

What’s all the fuss about animal welfare, anyway? Anyone who is worried about animal cruelty such that they would not buy meat from an unstunned animal shouldn’t be eating meat, as the industrialised farming process in the UK necessitates an awful lot of cruelty and wastage, such as the mass slaughter of most of the male offspring of dairy cattle. You might read about some of this here on the Vegetarian Society’s homepage (and that’s just about cattle). Perhaps, if you’re in the States, you might read Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, Eating Animals (although I don’t doubt that much of what he says about the American food industry is true over here too). If anyone thinks unstunned halaal slaughtering is cruel, consider what happens to all the thousands or millions of fish that get choked to death for our consumption every day. They don’t get an anaesthetic.

The report claims that “more than 40 million cattle, calves and sheep and more than 850 million poultry are slaughtered every year in Britain”. Where are all these calves that are slaughtered for halaal meat — last time I checked, calf meat was called veal and I’ve never come across that being eaten by Muslims, certainly not in restaurants. Most of the calves that are slaughtered die simply because they are redundant, because only cows are required for milk — dairy herds and beef herds are completely separate and different breeds are used. Only a small fraction of the cattle slaughtered for human consumption in the UK are calves. While it is permissible to eat veal in Islam (if it’s slaughtered correctly), very few Muslims actually do and it’s not part of the traditional Muslim cuisine of any of the major Muslim communities in the UK. (Until very recently, most veal was white meat from a calf which had been reared in a dark crate, a practice which was unquestionably cruel and which surely would have been ruled impermissible by Muslim scholars. That is now banned in Europe as well.)

The report also alleges that much of the halaal meat being served is served alongside pork and that not all the potentially halaal meat is in fact halaal. This is important, since Muslims are only allowed to eat meat they know for a fact is halaal, and even then, not if it’s mixed with something that is not, e.g. previously halaal meat cooked in wine. Although fish is always originally halaal, if it’s cooked in lard that isn’t halaal (as is the traditional way of cooking it in Ireland), or in oil that has also been used to cook chicken that isn’t halaal, the fish is no longer halaal. So, when Whitbread admits that 80% of the chicken it serves up in its restaurants is halaal, some of it of Turkish origin, that actually means that none of it is halaal for Muslims because they don’t know whether the particular cut of it they’re eating it halaal or not.

Clearly, the food outlets that are serving halaal meat are doing so in most cases for economic reasons, not because of any demand from Muslims. Meat sourced from Turkey is likely to be cheaper than that produced in the UK, regardless of how it’s slaughtered, perhaps because the costs of production are lower there. On top of this, most non-Muslims do not much care about whether the meat they eat is halaal or not, or pre-stunned or not — you can see this by going into pretty much any Indian restaurant in Tooting or, for that matter, any number of London’s fried chicken outlets other than KFC. Those who care about eating a particular type of meat either stick to what is certified by a given monitoring committee, or they don’t eat meat. If you care about cruelty that much, don’t eat meat.

This is an article about the rise of the “Sweden Democrats”, a far-right party which has been increasing its share of the vote in its country over the past couple of years and looks likely to get seats in Parliament fairly soon. That is worth reading in itself, but there are also some myths that are popular in the right-wing press and blogosphere about how Muslims are “taking over” Sweden, as well as their supposed fondness for raping white Swedish women:

A 2008 government report, which drew entirely on the experiences of teachers, police and social workers, described a place where Islamic orthodoxy was enforced by young thugs; women were forced to wear headscarves and children segregated in religious free schools. There was a small riot after one of the 20 or 30 unofficial mosques in cellars was closed when its lease was not renewed, and nastier riots when the Israeli tennis team played a Davis Cup match in the city last summer.

But this isn’t Beirut or Baltimore. It isn’t even Tower Hamlets. I was told at Lund University that a foreign graduate student who lived in Rosengård for a couple of years couldn’t understand why anyone would call it a ghetto. He came from Liverpool. Certainly, I can’t think of another slum in Europe that has broad, well-signposted cycle paths on which stately middle-aged women in headscarves pedal their groceries home.

The houses are for the most part low blocks arranged in squares around playgrounds, on a familiar Swedish model. Even in Herrgården, where there are a few boarded-up windows, the play areas are clean and well-maintained.

And about those rape statistics …

In another publicity stunt, the party released a report claiming to prove, from government statistics, that immigrants were five times more likely than native Swedes to be convicted of rape. What the statistics actually show is that they are five times as likely to be investigated for rape, but experts point out that this may be due in part to racism in the criminal justice system, and that the absolute numbers are very small: when the Sweden Democrats claimed that 10% of the rapists convicted in their survey were Iraqi, they were talking about 12 men. If 0.04% of native Swedes are investigated for rape in one year, the corresponding figure for immigrants is 0.22%.

Read it all.