The Guardian today reported that an investigation by the paper had uncovered a fake vaccine programme in Abbotabad, the town where Osama bin Laden was reported found and assassinated earlier this year, which was conducted by local doctors in an attempt to get his family’s DNA. A local doctor, one Shakil Afridi, was one of a number of people arrested by the ISI (the Pakistani security police) and the only one still being held. The programme started by offering a free dose of the Hepatitis B vaccine, which is normally given in three stages although in this case only one dose was given, in a poor district of Abbotabad before moving onto the wealthier district where Bin Laden lived. It is not clear whether they succeeded in gaining any of the Bin Ladens’ DNA. (More: Maggie Koerth-Baker @ Boing Boing, Maryn McKenna @ Wired.)

If true, this scheme is grossly irresponsible; it endangers the credibility of vaccine programmes throughout the world, particularly in the Muslim world where conspiracy theories about vaccines have circulated for decades, usually based on claims that they are laced with chemicals to reduce men’s fertility. It also bolsters the position of anti-vaccine activists in the west who can now claim that vaccines can be used for information gathering purposes. Surely they know that chances to eradicate polio have been missed because of such theories, much as the incidence of measles in the west rose after take-up of the MMR fell because of fears about autism.

The scam should be condemned in the strongest possible terms, yet I have not found any leader or opinion columns that even mention it in today’s British papers, and Google’s news search does not turn up any. Curbing the spread of disease should take precedence over all but the most essential security concerns, and getting rid of Osama bin Laden certainly does not fall into that category (at least, not in 2011). It is reported that Dr Afridi has been arrested for collaborating with the CIA, but any case against him should emphasise the damage he might have done to people’s health, and there must be an investigation into this in the USA also.

The above article lays out some of the conspiracy theories people in France entertain about why the former head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has been arrested and charged with rape in the USA. It seems that nobody wants to admit that the reason someone accused him of trying to rape her is because he might have actually tried to rape her, rather than because she is a tool of some grand anti-French conspiracy. In Wednesday’s Guardian, Isabelle Germain, a French journalist and “founder of the online pro-parity magazine Les Nouvelles News”, wrote about similar attitudes among the French establishment and in their media.

Strauss-Kahn is indeed innocent until proven guilty, but the question must be asked why it is assumed that a politician accused of rape must be the victim of some kind of conspiracy. The man is a banker and politician and was an intending presidential candidate for the French Socialist Party, which is an established centre-left party much like Labour in the UK or the German Social Democrats. It was understandable that people thought the accusations against Julian Assange were politically motivated, because he had caused the establishment a lot of embarrassment and threatened to continue doing so. He did not have elective office and was not seeking any, and to be accused of having an affair would not have harmed him in the slightest. The same is not true for a politician. I don’t know about France, but I cannot remember any politician being accused of rape, but I can remember an awful lot of stories about extra-marital affairs which led to the resignation of the man (as I remember, it has almost always been men) involved.

In Friday’s Guardian, Kira Cochrane noted that Strauss-Kahn has a reputation in Paris in particular as someone who likes to chase women, or as they call such men there, a lapin chaud (hot rabbit). He has also been accused of attempted rape in the past, by a family friend who is a well-known journalist, but when she was interviewed about the incident on French TV in 2007, Strauss-Kahn’s name was bleeped out whenever she said it. She also noted that excuses have been made to the effect that Strauss-Kahn does not fit the profile of a rapist (when no such profile exists, and in any case, a man with a history of aggression towards women would surely fit it if there was), but overwhelmingly, the reaction seems to be indignation that one of theirs has been accused of a serious sexual offence, with articles by such men as Bernard Henri Levy who seemed to think he should not have been treated like “a subject of justice like any other”, which is, of course, exactly what he is at the moment. Suzanne Moore also notes that he defended Roman Polanski, the case against whom is much clearer. The Daily Beast, a blog based at Newsweek, notes that the French press have named the accuser and given details of her private life as well as speculated on her physical appearance and how attractive she might be. As for Bernard Henry Levy, Nick Cohen accuses him of selectively championing women’s rights in the Islamic world while denying them at home (well, his idea of championing Muslim women’s rights is to deny headscarf-wearers an education).

Strauss-Kahn’s prior remarks are also somewhat incriminating: in an interview with the French newspaper, Liberation, he suggested that “money, women and [his] Jewishness” could be used against him, and that he could be the victim of a honey-trap involving “a woman raped in a car park and who’s been promised 500,000 or a million Euros to invent such a story”. Again, why suppose that he would be accused of rape, as opposed to having an affair or perhaps sexual harassment? It seems odd that he would make such an accurate prediction about something that rarely happens, except to men who abuse women, which he knew he did all the time anyway … and if anyone wants to make sure he doesn’t become the next president of France, it’s not out of anti-French sentiment and it’s unlikely to be anyone outside France.

This story is about an incident in which two supply teachers decided to show a film called The Middle Passage, about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, to a group of fourth graders (minimum age: 9). Three parents complained to the school board as their children were distressed by the content, which included references to suicide (and of the decapitation of their bodies) and rape. The author contends that “a Black parent cannot afford to wait to teach their child about racism, because their innocence will not protect them against those that are determined to either see them fail, or have them grow with an understanding that they are less than human”.

As a child I learned about the slave trade; I did learn about it in school but I got most of my knowledge about the subject from a children’s book entitled “The Slave Trade”, which had the stuff about people being kept chained up in the hold (complete with the top-down diagram) but left out the rape stuff, because presumably the authors thought their audience didn’t know about that kind of thing, and perhaps their parents wouldn’t want them mentioning it to their kids before they had, or before they were sure they were quite able to handle it. If they had, the book would have been unlikely to end up in a school library.

Renee alleges that “unlike White children, childhood is short lived for children of colour. Before their 10th birthday, it is almost assured that a racial act will occur that will burst the precious bubble of innocence”. So, because a child of colour is likely to experience “a racial act”, which is very unlikely to be rape, or anything else as serious as what is depicted in The Middle Passage, a parent has no right to object when material that is not age-appropriate, in his opinion, but has a racial subject (and not one that resembles anything that is happening to anyone today), is shown to his child without any prior discussion. (As if nothing might happen to a white child that might force them to grow up quicker than might have been expected.) True, the children in this school live a relatively sheltered lives (the place where it happened - Winnetka, Illinois, is one of the wealthiest communities in the USA with a median household income of over $160,000) but that still does not mean the families have no right to object to their pre-teen children being shown this kind of material.

A commenter called Katie Mariie alleged that the father’s concern to protect his daughter from stories about rape showed him to be “naive and privileged” because the “‘safety tips’ of rape culture are taught to girls as soon as they can walk. Adults might think they’re clever by masking it in phrases like ‘stranger danger’ and ‘someone might grab you,’ but little girls get the message that sexual violence is a constant threat”. I was actually taught about “stranger danger” as a child in infant school myself — the girls and boys watched the video together — but although the video we watched, from an adult perspective, clearly gave the message that the girl could have been raped (and perhaps if it was shown to older children, that is the message they would have got), the message of not talking to or taking sweets from strangers was given to girls and boys alike, because all children are at risk. And they certainly didn’t use the word ‘rape’. All we needed to know is that we could “go missing” and that something awful could happen to us.

The problem with this incident was that the video was shown without any discussion with the parents by a supply teacher who either was on a mission of his or her own, or was just stuck for something to do, or did not consider the audience and whether it was appropriate. It had not been approved by the school board and presumably had not been discussed with the school staff or the parents either; as this report notes, it was shown by the supply teachers at the direction of one permanent teacher, while the latter was elsewhere in the district. As was mentioned in the comments, some of the children could already have suffered abuse, something the teachers apparently did not consider. There are so many ways children can learn about the slave trade, but there is a lot that children have to learn (about things that are happening today) but we find appropriate ways to teach them when they are that age.

There have been a number of cases (some of them under appeal) in which someone with Asperger’s has been convicted of a murder, but the one that springs to mind is that of Federico Arce Montes, the man convicted of murdering a British schoolgirl in France having acquired a string of convictions for attacking young girls and women in youth hostels across Europe. Those details are legitimate; what is less so is the detail that he had developed an obsession with personal hygiene in his teens, operating light-switches with a handkerchief and washing his food with mineral water (example here). This is irrelevant and serves only to heighten the sense that the man was a weirdo, which they also may do in anyone who displays that kind of behaviour. The fact is that this kind of behaviour occurs in many more people than those who sexually assault young girls.

There was no evidence in that case that Arce Montes’s actions were driven by mental illness. He was a criminal with a coincidental, mild mental disorder. We do not know if the person who carried out the Arizona massacre will be diagnosed with a mental illness (it does not seem that he has been already), but it is known that he was a pot smoker (and again, there are a lot more of those than mass murderers) and had various bizarre ideas, one of which formed the basis of a grudge against Congresswoman Giffords. But having ridiculous, ill-considered or vile political (or other) ideas is not mental illness. (Of course, when the offender is a Muslim, or is of anything like Muslim background, the assumption is that their religion was the driving factor, as with claims of “sudden jihad syndrome” or of Muslim attitudes to modesty making it OK to molest young girls, even if they are obviously mentally ill.)

It seems that some of us are not willing to accept that something is just evil — not necessarily that the person is, but that he or she acted according to desires, or misguided opinions, or a grudge they had been nursing for years, and did something that is just plain evil. In this case a lot of innocent people, not public figures at all (in one case a nine-year-old girl), were killed. To assume that someone who acted on the basis of ridiculous ideas is mentally ill, and when this appears in the popular press, it simply reinforces prejudice against those with the same conditions who aren’t murderers.

Image sourced from Wikipedia).

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.

There was a feature in the New Statesman this past week by Alice Miles (sadly not online) in which the author watched a programme in which Palin’s claim to be an outdoorsy Alaskan woman is laid bare — perhaps that might have the same effect as Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi being shown as incapable of unjamming his rifle. Miles wrote that, had she not seen the programme, Palin might have worried her. Still, she was a huge asset to Barack Obama in the last election, as some people who would otherwise have voted for McCain did not like the idea of Palin being a heartbeat away from the presidency. They are unlikely to vote for this ridiculous woman after this gaffe.

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.

Kevin Myers, a columnist on the Irish Independent (a paper whose website is suspiciously similar to the Independent in London) who has also written for the Telegraph in the UK, raises a fairly common Islamophobic cliché in his assessment of why an apparently peaceful Muslim can suddenly become violent: because apparently, the perception of the need for jihad can simply override the normal laws of Islam any time it occurs to someone:

But at bottom, jihad — the holy struggle — is the key liberator which enables the Muslim fundamentalist to depart from the rules of the society in which he is living.

Jihad can be formed as a result of the teachings of an imam, but it boils down to a personal contract between Allah and the believer, based on an extreme interpretation of Islam. This effectively declares: “If you feel very strongly that the rules in the Holy Koran about never injuring the innocent, and always respecting women and children, and respecting the rights of the kaffirs to remain non-believers, are subordinate to jihad, then these rules do not apply to you.

Moreover, if you feel specifically enjoined to break these rules in pursuit of jihad and martyrdom, the reward shall be paradise and all the blissful wherewithal of the heavenly hereafter.”

This notion of a personal contract with Allah, that authorises a believer to break even the most civilised and civilising laws of the Koran, is a sure-fire recipe for murderous irrationality and social anarchy.

This entire notion has, of course, been invented by Myers for the sake of his column. While there is a notion of a connection between the Believer and Allah in Islam, the notion that this connection allows anyone to simply ride roughshod over any rules he sees fit in the name of ‘jihad’ is baseless. In fact, the idea that there are some individuals whose status entitles them to go against the Shari’ah has been widely discussed, particularly as there are some so-called Sufis who claim this, and rejected. There are rules to jihad and they do not include randomly killing a group of people who regarded you as one of them.

There was, for example, an incident in which a Sahabi had been from Madinah to Yemen, and the journey back required him to pass through Makkah, which was at the time under enemy (pagan) control. The pagans let him return to Madinah on the assurance that he would not fight them. He told the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) this, and it was agreed that he should not join the Muslims in the battle that followed shortly afterwards. Nidal Hasan was in much the same position; although he had, of course, not explicitly promised not to fight them, he was among those who believed he was a comrade regardless of his religion (or, at least, many of them did).

He goes on:

And these have become the defining feature of almost every Muslim society in the world. So where there are no Muslims, the problem of jihadist terrorism does not exist either. It is the most obvious statement imaginable, yet it is worth making. Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, Iceland, Japan, Mozambique, Taiwan: they do not have Muslim immigrants, and so do not have the problem of Islamic terrorism.

This reveals his ignorance. Chile and Japan do have Muslim immigrants (or at least workers and students, in the case of Japan; Chile’s Muslims are mostly Palestinian). Mozambique, although its single biggest religion is Catholicism, has a substantial indigenous Muslim population and it is widely agreed that it is named after a Muslim king called something like Musa Mbiki. Not every country which has a substantial Muslim minority has seen any kind of explosion of violence — consider Sri Lanka, in which the Muslims have remained peaceful despite pressure from both the Tamil Tigers and extreme elements in the Buddhist Sinhala population. Consider also most of West Africa, Nigeria excepted (and even there, Muslim extremism is not the only problem; there are also land disputes, ethnic disputes in which religions happen to differ, and aggression from Christians). Ireland also has Muslim immigrants, and so far has not had any problems with Muslim terrorism. So this belies the claim that Muslims’ “universal belligerence has no universal cause, other than in the universality of Islam, which seems so often to respond lethally to local conditions”.

He continues:

The barren and barbaric Hindu Kush is not the same as the perfumed court of the Ottomans. But somewhere inside the greater Islamic mind is an absurd sense of victimhood: and where there is no local grievance, why then there is always “Palestine”, as if those few disputed acres in the vast Islamic landmass of Afro-Asia merited the unanimous and indignant global furies of all Muslims, from Delhi to Dearborn.

This same querulous organ of self pity also resents Muslims becoming the subject of intelligence operations after an Islamic atrocity, as if it were reasonable and wise to subject Mexican laptop-dancers and Lapland reindeer-herders to equal levels of scrutiny and suspicion.

India has been the home of Islamic moral-secessionists for longer than anywhere else. And the Indian intelligence services are often almost paralysed in their hunt for Islamic-terrorists by the political power of Muslim “community leaders” who unfailingly denounce terrorism — but then equally denounce any action by Indian intelligence against members of the Muslim communities: for such actions, it is argued, are clear proof of the fundamentally Islamophobic nature of the Indian state, and the reason for the fundamentalists’ actions in the first place.

Anyone who knows anything about the recent history of India knows that Muslims there have better reason than any other Muslim minority to perceive the state as “fundamentally Islamophobic”. Hindu fundamentalists have been in power in several states in India this decade, and formed the government for part of it. We have all heard of the organised rioting and murder against the Muslim population in Gujarat. The government has much less to fear from Muslim “community leaders” than it has from Hindu ones, many of whom can rely on being able to draw a mob to go and rape and pillage and wreak general havoc when they hear of some offence to their sensibilities, and even Muslim community leaders will castigate the “offending” Muslims for being so stupid as to slaughter a cow.

Furthermore, Muslims in the west do not (in general) object to the state pursuing the perpetrators of terrorism, or any other crime. What we object to is being harassed as we go about our business. This includes being stopped at border crossings, airports etc and being asked stupid questions by bigoted officials, which certain airports in the UK are notorious for.

This is a sealed moral system, an internal autonomy that is immune to penetration or logic. Fear of such accusations of Islamophobia — phobophobia — almost certainly prevented Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s superior officers from disciplining him for his public jihadist outpourings.

Pre-emptive action would certainly have been portrayed by the liberal media as Islamophobic discrimination against a patriotic Muslim, and would have enraged that reliable stock-character of media portrayal, “moderate Muslims”.

Thirteen genuine patriots are now dead as the price of such phobophobic appeasement.

To begin with, it is not known for sure whether the writings of Nidal Hasan on the web came from the same Nidal Hasan who carried out the shootings. Muslim organisations would have objected, as perhaps would more general civil rights organisations, if someone had been punished for expressing anti-American sentiment other than in the Armed Forces. Within them, it would certainly have demonstrated that he was not suited to be in the Forces, and his discharge would have been entirely justified. Whether the victims really are “genuine patriots”, or people who joined up because civilian life offered no prospects, or are unthinkingly patriotic white working-class provincial Americans, is unclear.

Finally:

More importantly, the US must now wake up to the consequences of its open-door immigration policy, just as Britain did four years ago after July 7. The subsequent pattern will presumably be similar. Watch now, as “victimised” American Muslims close ranks, the burka and the hijab become commonplace amongst their womenfolk, and the rest of the US asks in tones of awestruck horror: My God, what have we done?

This is an invitation to judge the entire Muslim community on the basis of the actions of a deranged or delinquent few. Muslim immigrants first arrived in the UK in large numbers in the 1950s; it took two generations for any group of these Muslims to commit any act of terrorism. The USA also has never had an “open-door” immigration policy, although it overlooked illegal immigration to a certain extent until after 9/11; most of those it let in as permanent residents were skilled workers and those with family connections. Similarly, the UK ceased to have an open-door policy in the 1960s. The comment about the hijab is also an entirely irrelevant statement of prejudice; hijab on various levels, including niqab, has been popular for years among Muslim women of various tendencies, most of which have no truck with terrorism, while the vast majority of terrorists are men.

While I don’t dispute that some Muslims have an over-developed sense of victimhood, the fact is that outright bigotry against Muslims has become the acceptable prejudice in the UK, certainly, in the last few years, much as it has in the rest of Europe. The fact that an inveterate bigot like Kevin Myers gets space to spout this kind of nonsense time and again, in both British and Irish broadsheets, is a case in point: he claims that barely a white face could be seen in BBC coverage of shopping in the West End (not true, and I go there a lot, although there are good reasons why there are many foreigners there, including the student and business populations and the fact that people visiting London from abroad are unlikely to make a detour to Sutton or Enfield high street while those places offer most of what the locals need) and that “huge areas of Britain have become foreign colonies, which demographically and culturally dominate the native populations” — an arrant untruth — which could happen to Ireland also because of the Common Travel Area; this is also obvious nonsense, particularly given that hardly any Muslims from the UK relocated there during the “Celtic Tiger” years and is even less likely to now that the financial system (on which Ireland dependent even more than the UK) has crashed and manufacturers, including Dell, are relocating to eastern Europe.

The biggest fault with Myers’s article is that he seems to think that the single common factor between the 2005 London bombings, 9/11 and the Fort Hood shooting — that Muslims were involved — is all that needs to be considered, and that it reflects on all Muslims. In fact, Nidal Hasan may have acted alone or possibly with two other people, and the groups behind the other two atrocities were small cells, not mass movements, yet he uses this as yet another excuse to throw mud at Muslims. I do not believe that yet another Holocaust is imminent, but the complaint of Anne Frank, that what a Gentile does is attributed only to that person but that all Jews are judged on what any Jew does, is echoed when I read what appears in the right-wing English-language press. It has become acceptable for “respectable” newspapers to print plainly false claims and for the popular press to scream the claims from the front page. It is quite understandable that Muslims are fearful and feel victimised.

It is shocking to see Muslims praising and calling Nidal Hasan a hero. According to to their own leaders and teachers, Nidal Hasan is a kafir. Anyone who joins the US military is no longer a Muslim. In fact Nidal Hasan is a murtad. Now all of a sudden he is a mujahid in prison. He is a hero. He is worthy of being praised.

Apparently, to these Muslims, you do not recite the shahada to be a Muslim. Apparently, to become a Muslim is to do something which they approve of. Now common sense tells me this just doesn’t make sense, but seriously, can anyone tell me how do Muslims think like this?

I’ve always wondered what this guy was doing in the Army myself; I woudn’t advise any Muslim in his right mind to join the armed forces in any western country. Since the outbreak of the Bush Wars, I have even turned down jobs which have involved dealing with the military. How anyone can stomach living on base with people hostile to their religion and even race is beyond me.

However, this type of shooting is a very American phenomenon. Suicide bombings did not originate in Palestine or Lebanon, but in Japan, and terrorist suicide bombers originated with the Tamil Tigers, who are actually atheists, before being picked up by the likes of Hezbollah and Hamas later. There is a very long history of workers in US companies, particularly the postal service (hence the expression), shooting at a number of their former colleagues in response to being fired, or to perceived victimisation. They can do this because guns are easily available in the USA, and are legal, and because unions are weak and workers don’t have much in the way of rights in most parts of the country. In this particular case, it is reported that Maj Hasan had complained of racist victimisation, and was on the point of being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, most likely with the very same people who he claimed had been victimising him. It’s the sort of thing that might make an Muslim go postal in a country where there is a history of people going postal.

The Marxist blogger “Lenin” (AKA Richard Seymour) offers one example, taken from Mark Ames’s book Going Postal (2002), involving someone who was a workplace laughing stock who was expected to work on a machine which was damaging his health, which nobody else was, and eventually had to take leave because of stress and found his pay drastically reduced when he returned. The book quoted one injured survivor as saying that he would have had more sympathy had he shot different people.

There was a post on this at FWD/Forward (FWD means Feminists With Disabilities), and contributor s.e. smith AKA meloukhia (regular blog here) made this comment:

I also think it’s really sad that numerous Muslim organizations in the United States have felt obliged to rapidly come forward with condemnations stressing that this man acted independently (and actually against) Islam, and that they love America. It really upsets me that every time a crime is committed by a Muslim, there’s an expectation that all Muslim organizations should immediately rush to apologize/condemn, as should individual Muslims. As though the actions of one Muslim are the fault of the Muslim community as a whole. Yet, when crimes are committed by people of other religious denominations, there are no such expectations.

I responded:

The Muslim organisations condemned it because it was a high-profile act by a Muslim against the American state. I think they were right to do so, for the sake of the American Muslim population. I don’t believe they should every time a Muslim, or a Muslim group, does something bad which may or may not have been in the name of Islam. We shouldn’t rise to the “condemn it or else” threats because these things are never enough for a lot of people. I came out and said on my blog that western Muslims should not condemn the Bombay attacks last November because they had nothing to do with us and we should not satisfy the demands of people who regard Muslims as guilty until proven innocent. But this is entirely different, in my opinion.

I hope everyone understands that there is no Islamic justification for this action. It is an action entirely in the tradition of American responses to workplace victimisation, not some kind of act of jihad. If Major Nidal Hasan had simply wanted to get out of going to Iraq, then rather than shooting at random soldiers, he could have simply gone AWOL, or attempted to flee the country, or simply refused to be deployed — he would have been subject to proceedings for insubordination and most likely have been discharged with dishonour, but would not have killed anyone, be paralysed and facing the death penalty, and have lain the entire Muslim community in the USA open to danger yet again.