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.

The UK Supreme Court has ruled that a government ban on British citizens bringing spouses under the age of 21 from outside the EU to live in the UK, introduced under the Labour government ostensibly to prevent forced marriage, is unlawful. The court heard that two couples, one including a husband from Chile and the other with a bride from Pakistan, had been separated or forced to live outside the UK for extended periods, in one case resulting in the British spouse losing a university place. There was also a challenge from a British-Canadian couple, who were separated as the Canadian wife could not come to live in the UK and the British husband could not find work in Canada.

I’ve covered this issue before, and there are two separate issues at play here. One is that the former Labour government pretended this was about preventing forced marriage, spinning lurid stories about how “victims can suffer physical and emotional damage and can find themselves being held unlawfully captive, assaulted and raped”. The problem is that, during the research that led to this rule being introduced, victims of forced marriage and the organisations that represent them were asked whether a rise in the minimum marriage age would be helpful, and only one in six said yes. This clearly indicates that the reason for the measure was nothing to do with forced marriage and everything to do with eliminating back-home marriages in the Asian community, which were being blamed for everything from the 2001 Bradford riots to the 2005 London bombings. The anti-immigration pressure group “Migration Watch”, well-known for lurid tales of the disasters immigration would bring to the UK, had been agitating for a rise in the minimum age to rise to 24, in line with Denmark.

There are obvious inconsistencies in the law: it is aimed at people bringing spouses from developing countries, but also applies to countries like Canada; it allows spouses to be brought from poorer regions of Italy or Portugal, but not the USA or Canada; it also ignores the fact that many Canadians and Australians have British citizenship anyway, yet this penalises those whose spouse does not have a recent British ancestor. It also allows couples to settle anywhere else in the EU except the British spouse’s home country. 18-year-olds are adults in almost every country, and it was common, especially for women, to marry at that age until only a generation ago. My parents married when my mother was 19 and my father, 20.

The second issue is that the outrage over the white couple separated by this rule demonstrates that the right-wing in this country never likes it when social control measures are brought in which obviously target a minority group and turn out to apply to them as well. The same was true when a white man makes jokes about blowing up an airport, and finds that pleading “it was a joke” gets him nowhere — recent history proves that just as terrorism has no colour, it also has no religion, judging by the repeated incidence of white Nazis found with stockpiles of weapons. The outrage was solely based on the principle that a white businessman making that threat must be joking — those others, on the other hand, must be serious. They do not accept that the law cannot discriminate on that basis.

As for this judgement, the government have said that they will “come forward with [their] response in due course”, which may include forming legislation to re-introduce it, or appealing to the European Court of Human Rights if that is possible for them; they argue that other countries have found a lower age limit of 21 to be compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), but they also support scrapping the Human Rights Act which enshrines the convention in British law (making appeals by British citizens to the European Court unnecessary). The Human Rights Act is unpopular with the UK’s right-wing media, but so is this rule as it affects people far beyond its obvious target population.

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.

On Saturday I was reading a lot of tweets complaining about the “disablist” language being used, specifically the trend of calling Anders Breivik a madman or a nutter. One tweet I recall compared the use of anti-Muslim slurs with slurs related to mental illness (there is an article expanding on this issue at Liberal Conspiracy here). To me, the comparison does not hold, because the anti-Muslim slurs are (and were, in the hours immediately after the attacks before it became obvious who was responsible) accompanied by harassment of, and assaults against, Muslims in the streets. People know the mentally ill come in different types, that not all would commit mass murder, and (most importantly) are not all aligned with one another. If a Muslim did it, people would say “the Muslims did it”; if it was someone with mental illness, nobody would say “the nutters did it”.

More to the point, this insistence on calling someone who commits a heinous and perverted act a nutter seems to be an easy way of avoiding accepting the reality that evil exists, and people will do evil things while perfectly sane, whether for fun, or for personal gain, or out of some bizarre ideology as was the case here. I am not talking about calling someone’s politics mad, or calling them a “right-wing nut”, “Marxist lunatic” or something similar; I am talking about the assumption that the criminal must be “mental”, rather than evil. I have not read Breivik’s manifesto, but nobody who has done has suggested that it bears the hallmarks of mental illness, or even of extreme embitterment (for example, that of Marc Lepine, who carried out the massacre of women in Montreal), but of hard-set nationalism and bigotry, particularly against Muslims.

There were two brilliant articles about this incident published today, one by Charlie Brooker in the Guardian and another by Craig Murray on his own site. Brooker takes apart the ridiculous guesswork that made up the news coverage of the incidents on Friday night, while Murray notes that right-wing activists whose rantings may have inspired Breivik get an easy ride compared to Muslims who are suspected of links to terrorism:

Isn’t it extraordinary that right wing terrorists are seldom called terrorists, and are always said to have acted alone. Muslim terrorists, however, are always part of the international al-Qaida network, even when they and their motives were obviously homegrown. Any connection by any Muslim terrorist to any mosque or preacher is sufficient to condemn that mosque or preacher loudly in the media as an instigator of terrorism – even though they may never have heard of the terrorist. There are people in Guantanamo for approaching a decade just because they were at the same meeting as someone else. Yet exactly the same kind of links by Breivik to his right wing hate preaching US inspirers like Geller are simply glossed over by the mainstream media.

This may, of course, be because during the past decade, the majority of successful terrorist attacks have been by Muslims; far-right terrorism was known of before (Oklahoma, Soho nail bomber) but although a number of incidents have happened such as neo-Nazis stockpiling weapons, they have carried out no successful attacks which have caused anyone’s death. This has now changed, and one hopes that there will be less tolerance for the “Eurabia” conspiracy theories and allegations that there is some sort of Muslim/leftist plot to take over Europe. This kind of theory about another religious minority has already led to one genocide in Europe, and we know that many of those responsible for this propaganda against Muslims are Jewish, and almost all of those who are not are vehemently pro-Israel, so they have no excuse to plead ignorance. Regardless of whether they knew anything about Breivik or support his action, as “Flying Rodent” at Liberal Conspiracy notes, the potential of their rhetoric for inducing violence should have been obvious:

Melanie Phillips and the gaggle of paranoids that make up the internet’s nutty ‘Counter-Jihad’ movement are loudly insisting that they don’t advocate acts of violence or terrorism.

For now, let’s assume that’s true and move on from there.

What, exactly, do they imagine it is that they are advocating?

I ask because the message they’ve been sending out loud and clear is that Europe is under threat of imminent enslavement, and quite possibly genocide, at the hands of a sinister cabal of Marxist fifth-columnists in cahoots with one of our largest ethnic minority groups, the latter of which they portray as irrevocably violent and totalitarian.

Unsurprisingly, they’re stridently in favour of “resisting” this theoretical dictatorship.

That being the case, what kind of “resistance” do they expect the urgent threat of Nazi-Commie-Jihadist European domination to inspire in their readership? A sudden upsurge in the creation of idiot blogs?

… I think that now, more than ever, fingers need to be pointed squarely at those who have been disseminating this poisonous cack, and searching questions need to be asked.

First up – What the fuck did you think you were doing?

The enthusiasm Breivik showed for the so-called English Defence League led to them being put on the defensive, and Jeremy Paxman attempted to interview Stephen Lennon, AKA “Tommy Robinson”, on Newsnight on Monday evening. Lennon gave the obligatory condolences to the people of Norway and insisted that his organisation condemned violence and all forms of extremism and that they were called “naive fools” by Breivik, but then insisted that there was an “undercurrent of anger” that could not be swept under the carpet. In other words, a veiled threat from the same political tendency: if you don’t listen to us, there is going to be violence. The EDL are already well-known for violence, and despite the rhetoric from Lennon/Robinson about “extremism”, the language we hear shouted at their rallies is aimed at all Muslims, and Islam itself (such as “Allah, Allah, who the f*** is Allah?”), the EDL itself having been formed in response to al-Muhajiroun’s demonstration at the soldiers’ parade in Luton. The practice of throwing the behaviour of individual Muslims, or small groups of Muslims, at the entire Muslim population is common on the British right, and not only the far right (note this example in Standpoint from September 2008).

For the entire period since 9/11, there has been a steady stream of propaganda against Muslims in the west, not only in the right-wing blogosphere but also in the mainstream right-leaning press in the English-speaking world and probably beyond, and much of it has consisted of outright lies — claims that Muslims are somehow taking over Europe when they are under-represented in all major political parties (and thus parliaments) in Europe, the proof offered consisting of occasional concessions to Muslim sensitivities, often by commercial organisations seeking to please customers, and many of the alleged concessions (to do with piggy banks or tinted swimming-pool windows) are false, or distortions of the truth, anyway. The American right no doubt resented the French and Germans for staying out of Iraq, but they are certainly not being “taken over” by Muslims but passing repressive legislation against their respective Muslim communities.

It should surely be expected now that any future incidents of racists stockpiling weapons or conspiring to launch acts of terrorism or “war” will be treated as harshly as if they were Muslims training for jihad or raising money for such, and that violent provocations by the EDL or any spin-off will not be tolerated. The EDL, however, are not the Islamophobic right’s brain trust, by a long shot. It remains to be seen whether the mainstream journals of the British and American right will be somewhat more responsible about commissioning articles by conspiracy-minded bigots like Patrick Sookhdeo and Mark Steyn. They must not be treated as a pressure valve for a groundswell of anger against an over-powerful Muslim community, because such a thing does not exist. They are dangerous propagandists, trading on demonstrable falsehoods, whose rhetoric could, given the right circumstances, cause terrible violence. Free speech or not, no purportedly responsible journal or politician should touch them.

Stephen Schwartz wrote this article for Comment is Free (run by the Guardian) on the subject of the “burial” given to Osama bin Laden’s body after his killing last week; it was reported that it was thrown into the sea after some kind of burial ritual was performed. It has been widely commented that burial at sea is not appropriate for a Muslim (presumably this only applies to one who has died on land, as it is not very healthy or practical for ships to be transporting dead bodies for long voyages, and certainly wasn’t before very recently and in hot climates). Schwartz claims that bin Laden was not entitled to an Islamic burial because his beliefs put him outside Islam.

Schwartz is right that the argument that his grave would have become a shrine is mistaken, as Muslims of his stripe are opposed to shrines and are more likely to destroy them than build them. Indeed, there have been a number of incidents in Pakistan where the local “Taliban” — vigilantes or militants of an extreme Deobandi or “salafi” tendency — have destroyed shrines of popular Sufi shaikhs. However, he then says he believes Bin Laden had apostasised from Islam:

I believe Bin Laden had apostasised from Islam by his denial of the sinful nature of terrorism. He planned and took responsibility for atrocious acts, which were those of an enemy of Islam, by the tongue, the pen, money, and the sword. These deeds were public and he boasted of them. Rejecting the judgment of the sin of killing innocent people is a repudiation of Islam.

Schwartz also suggests that “journalists should ask moderate Muslim scholars whether they consider Bin Laden to have died in a state of Islamic belief”, which raises the question of whom he considers to be moderate. Certainly, the mainstream of Islamic scholarship has always shied away from pronouncing people to be unbelievers unless they deny something necessarily known of Islam or show obvious contempt for the religion. For example, it is necessarily known (this is generally defined as “even a nine-year-old madrassah student would know that”) that drinking alcohol for its own sake is forbidden, but some scholars allow its use for such purposes as clearing one’s throat if it is the only thing to hand; they do not, though, allow it for alleviating extreme thirst, as it is a diuretic. However, if someone erred on the wrong side here, without saying that drinking alcohol in general was allowed, they would not be regarded as a disbeliever.

It is also necessarily known that killing is impermissible other than in self-defence, or in war, or in punishing a crime, or certain other limited circumstances. Deliberately killing innocent people, even in war, is forbidden as well, but the Kharijites of old made numerous excuses for killing those they regarded as enemies simply because of sometimes very minor disagreements that were not over matters of doctrine. The only Kharijites that were declared not to be Muslims, however, was one group that regarded Sura Yusuf, a chapter in the Qur’an, not to be part of the Qur’an. As this passage was universally regarded as being part of the Qur’an, they were excluded from being Muslims. Terrorists justify their actions by making excuses for why certain people are not “innocent” (such as that they pay taxes to the enemy state, voted for its leaders or are in their army, even if not on active service — a common justification for terrorist acts in Israel) which are rejected by many or all scholars, but without declaring them to be out of the fold of Islam because they do not make the killing of innocents in general lawful.

The upshot is that we do not pronounce takfeer, that is, that someone is not Muslim, unless they declare themselves not to be Muslims, or show obvious contempt for the religion (such as by desecrating a copy of the Qur’an) or adopt a belief which is against a well-known unanimous consensus. This means that, as in most religions, the majority of criminals are entitled to a proper burial in Islam (although it is not always up to to the local imam or the whole community) as long as they did not regard the crimes they committed as being in line with Islam. Schwartz does not list any “moderate scholar” who has actually declared Osama bin Laden and other members of al-Qa’ida to be outside of Islam; the majority, I believe, regard him as being a criminal who justifies his acts with spurious arguments, much as was the case with the Kharijites of old, but still a Muslim. This, of course, means that Muslims should know that they do not have to be loyal to anyone who purports to act in the name of Islam or in defence of Islam, and that we may still condemn a person’s or group’s actions and disassociate from them even if we cannot say they are outside Islam altogether.

Two things in particular make this story look extremely suspect. The first is the apparent prompt disposal of the body. It is understandable that they do not release them for public viewing, but surely there are trusted intermediaries (not just politicians) who could confirm that they had seen the pictures and that they were of Osama bin Laden’s body. It sounds like a child who tells his teacher that he has done his homework, honest, but that the dog ate it. There is no hard evidence that the person killed was Osama bin Laden, unless we accept the Americans’ version of events at face value.

Then there is the excuse given for disposing of the body: that it would have become the focus of a shrine, a place of pilgrimage. Any expert on Islam could have told them that his main followers are Wahhabis and they do not believe in shrines. They do not build them and have destroyed them on a number of occasions; they bury their dead in unmarked graves, including major figures like the last king of Saudi Arabia and their chief scholars such as Abdul-Aziz bin Baz. (They are strongly opposed to Bin Laden’s methodology, but have the same theology.)

Finally, it seems most bizarre that the whole thing was done with a live video feed to the White House. Surely, any such feed would have been a security risk, regardless of whatever security measures were taken (and encryption would have drastically reduced the quality of any live feed). I cannot believe they jeopardised the security of a military operation simply for the president’s personal entertainment. If they did, of course, then they would surely have a recording of what they transmitted. They don’t have to show Bin Laden actually taking a bullet, of course, but there is surely much else they could release, at least once the operation has been cleared up.

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.

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.

They call this an independent inquiry; they need to contact the independent organisations that have expertise in Islamic radicalisation and in the history of Islamism, people such as the Quilliam Foundation and I would have hoped to have Student Rights consulted as well; the Centre for Social Cohesion; they’re all people with great background and great knowledge of radicalisation on campus.

Student Rights seems a bizarre name for a group which has as its main aim “tackling extremism” (as they see it) rather than, say, campaigning for better funding for student welfare and lower (or no) tuition fees, which is what student rights meant when I was a student in the mid-1990s. A look at who’s on their advisory panel reveals that they are anything but independent:

• Robert Halfon, MP for Harlow, who has held consultancy roles for the Conservative Friends of Israel
• Daniel Johnson, editor of Standpoint magazine which is published by the Social Affairs Unit, a right-wing think tank, and is noted for hostile reporting on matters related to Muslims
• Dr Alan Mendoza, executive director of the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society
• Shiraz Maher, best-known for boasting of having joined Hizb-ut-Tahrir after 9/11 and left them, to become a media-friendly HT-basher, after the London bombings in 2005.

Their recommended books include Infidel and Nomad by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Celsius 7/7 by Michael Gove and Londonistan by Melanie Phillips. The groups they recommend, similarly, are not independent: the Centre for Social Cohesion is based out of the same offices as Policy Exchange, a known Tory-aligned think tank, and is known for its spying antics around various mosques in London and producing inaccurate reports as a result. The Quilliam Foundation may not be linked to one political party or other, but it is also a group which attempts, like all the others mentioned, to police the ideologies espoused by Muslims, to denounce anyone who does not fit their agenda as an extremist or a radical. In the recent past, such ideological policing on left-wing ideologies would be called McCarthyism.

It’s dishonest to play on non-Muslims’ fears of extremism and terrorism to suppress ideologies you dislike for your own reasons, particularly when you do not have the evidence to prove a real connection. Islamic societies have guest speakers once in a while, and even if they promote a particular view of Islamic history or politics or convey anti-gay or anti-feminist or anti-Zionist views, half an hour of that is hardly likely to lead to someone going and bombing an aeroplane. To talk about someone “being radicalised”, in any case, takes the blame away from the person who committed a terrorist act and assigns it to someone else who may not even have the same views as he does and may have never spoken a word to him in person; the terrorist may have made his own mind up by reading various websites or by speaking to people he knew, at college or outside, or even well before he got there. He can have access to these people and website all the time, rather than for half an hour every few weeks at an ISoc event; he could easily have been biding his time and keeping his views and intentions a secret for at least some of the time he was at UCL.

Besides, Umar Farouk spent nearly 18 months in the Middle East after leaving UCL, much of it in Yemen, and there are plenty of people there who could have persuaded him towards more radical attitudes than any he could have encountered in London. Also, as I believe I have said here before, university Islamic societies may change their positions substantially from one year to the next as a new committee is elected with a totally different stance to the old one, in some cases emptying out the prayer room book collection and completely replacing it with books of the new committee’s liking. Ordinary Muslim students may pay little attention to what goes on, just as long as they get the Friday prayers and the Ramadan and Eid refreshments organised properly. There may be a case for reforming the ISoc scene, but a tenuous and unproven connection between UCL and its Islamic society and a terrorist is not part of it.

The fact that UCL commissioned this report at all demonstrates that they bent to media pressure, given that in our time when any disaster happens, we ask “who is to blame?” (even if the answer is obvious, as in this case) and “how can we stop it happening again?” rather than “is there any reasonable way of stopping this happening again?”, “reasonable” meaning without sacrificing everybody’s freedom in the process, much as we do when one child in a class of 30 acts up on a school trip. He passed through UCL and ran its Islamic society for a while … so it had to be the fault of one or both that he ended up as a bomber. Uh, no it doesn’t. And the observation that “the risk of radicalisation cannot be ‘eliminated’ without altering UCL’s educational mission and character”, which seems to have been taken on in some quarters as meaning that UCL (and presumably every other educational facility) should do precisely that, seems actually to mean that they cannot reasonably be expected to totally remove the risk, and given that it’s not at all established that radicalisation at UCL is what happened here, they should not be expected to.

Chambers was given a space for a whinge in the Guardian yesterday. Blogger Shane Richmond on the Telegraph website compared his tweet to messages saying the authors wanted to kill or assault some politician or other, and pointed out that Chambers wasn’t at the airport when he sent the tweet. In the “New Review” in today’s Observer, David Mitchell also took Chambers’s side:

Certainly, the threat – and I suppose it is theoretically a threat, in the same way that an aspirin is a food and George Osborne a successor to Gladstone – was classified as “not credible” by the airport. I don’t know if that means they thought it was funny. Maybe these people sit in front of Morecambe and Wise, sides splitting, tears streaming down their faces, yelling “Not credible!” as Eric picks up André Previn by the lapels.

However, despite Chambers’s manifest lack of credibility, the security people were apparently obliged to inform South Yorkshire police, who arrested him a week later. They were obviously convinced he was a man of his word in terms of the week-and-a-bit timescale. With many plausible terrorist threats, they might have rushed straight round there. Or maybe they’re not morons and knew perfectly well that he had no intention of blowing up an airport but had decided to make an example of him.

It’s vindictive and it’s humourless. Could they not just have had a quiet word? Was bringing him to trial really in the public interest? Is a large fine, unemployment and a criminal record proportionate punishment for an irritated quip, albeit one made within the earshot of others? He didn’t actually send the message to the airport, written in letters cut out from a newspaper, wrapped round a raw liver and a holy text (Christian, Muslim or SMS).

The reason why, as Mitchell says, “we live in serious times” is because planes have been flown into buildings and on a few occasions nearly blown out of the sky, and because if you’re on a plane (as opposed to, say, a train) and any part of it blows up while the plane is airborne, the plane will be destroyed and you will die. People are nervous about flying at the best of times in a way they aren’t about car or train travel, because a plane is inescapable. That is why we take threats to blow up the air infrastructure seriously.

If the guy who had posted that tweet had turned out to have a Muslim name, regardless of the circumstances, there would have been no qualms about prosecuting him and giving him a much more substantial sentence than this idiot got. He may not be a Muslim and he may also not be a Nazi, but there have been quite a few cases of white guys having stashes of weapons found in their homes, intended for use in a race war. Just because you’re white and have an English name, it doesn’t mean you’re not a terrorist. As with the case of the English-Canadian married couple denied a visa because the wife is “underage” (19 years old), people whine about laws aimed at Muslims or other “foreigners” when “their own” people find that the rules apply to them too.