There really are far, far too many people sponging off the taxpayer right now with their fake or exaggerated disabilities and they’re one of the reasons we’re in the financial mess we’re in. … Every time the disability lobby squeals for more another few jobs are lost, another few basis points are lost from GDP growth. But these people don’t care; they know better than that: the government owns a magic money tree and its ability to distribute the fruits thereof is boundless.

The notion of ME being ‘fashionable’ goes back a long way — at least to 1992, when a paediatrician outside Tunbridge Wells diagnosed a sick and frightened 14-year-old girl named Lynn Gilderdale (left) with it and told her that she had a fashionable illness. As I think I’ve proven on here over and again, ME is not a “fake disability” which “makes you a bit peaky”, it’s a serious illness that can lead to very severe physical disability, ongoing sickness and severe pain. There is too much evidence of physical pathologies, including demonstrable damage to the central nervous system and other systems in the body, to entertain any theory about it being psychological either in origin or in continuation. If you develop severe ME, as about a quarter of sufferers do (like the already mentioned Miss Gilderdale), you might not be able to use your special parking space as you might well be bedridden. You might have to settle for a bedpan rather than a nice big disabled loo. You might not even be able to speak, which for the rest of us would be a good thing if it happened to him (as well as Ricky Gervais, Frankie Boyle and all the other miserable excuses for comedians who make a living mocking disabled people). Most of them would be only too happy to work (or to get an education, or to do the things the rest of us call fun). As someone I know who has severe ME said in reaction to Liddle’s rant, “if Rod Liddle really wants ME, he can have mine”.

The statistics have already been well argued over, and the fraud rate of DLA, by the government’s own statistics, is 0.5%, and the statistics referred to in Liddle’s piece (that 80% of those claiming Incapacity Benefit (78%, actually, as reported in the Mail) — or rather, Employment and Support Allowance as it is now called) are fit for work most likely refers to those found fit for work by ATOS’s test, and many of their decisions are overturned on appeal, so the real figure is probably much less than 80% or even 78%. ATOS has been known to fail people who are undergoing chemotherapy or are otherwise manifestly unfit by using a tick-box assessment, as this investigation showed. The Mail’s report at least acknowledges the criticisms of high appeal success rates and of seriously unwell people being wrongly refused; Liddle simply repeats the rounded-up 80% figure as fact.

Liddle concludes by claiming that “the people fraudulently claiming sickness benefits are doing a disservice to those who really deserve it: The people who really become disabled or ill. It has become easier to claim these benefits, partly as a consequence of the disablement (sic) charities who, out of their own self-interest, insist that an ever-greater proportion of the population is disabled”. First, over-emphasising the issue of fraud, for example by misrepresenting the number of people turned down by a government test (regardless of future appeal results) as the number of people fraudulently claiming the benefit, is an easy way to make sure that many of those who do really deserve it will not get it, because it will make disability more difficult to prove but this does not necessarily mean it is not there. Second, people tend to think that “real” disabilities are the very visible ones everyone knows about: blindness, paralysis and cerebral palsy, for example. Other conditions may not affect someone getting to the test on their own, but might result in them being unable to do pretty much anything for the rest of the week, or they might still hinder that person working (or finding employment) in a way the test might not allow for. These include employers’ prejudices, for example, particularly if the disability affects someone’s appearance or manner of speaking.

James Delingpole’s article puts the “disability lobby” among a number of causes which allow for taxpayers’ money to be siphoned off to “hard-left organisations like Friends Of The Earth and the New Economics Foundation” so that they “can campaign for more encroachment in our lives by the overweening state”. My own observation of the disability campaign is that it is non-partisan, and while its current campaign is against attacks on disability benefits by a Conservative-led government, it responded warmly when the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, supported their position (as with senior Tories in the House of Lords more recently). The campaign is about empowering disabled people to live independent lives as much as possible, not funding large charities to care for them on an institutional basis, as some of them once did. None of those I’ve worked with are charity bosses on “fat cat” salaries; they are severely disabled people who have worked very hard without remuneration, often at great risk to their own health (as the picture accompanying this paragraph demonstrates; it is of Sue Marsh, a co-author of the recent Spartacus Report, who was hospitalised with complications of her Crohn’s disease late last month).

He also quotes a figure which traces back to the Family Resources Survey, namely that 11 million people in the UK — “that’s a quarter of the adult population” — qualified as disabled. However, this figure was for the whole population and included those of pensionable age; the figure for the working age population was half that. The problem is that these figures do not estimate those who are entitled to claim benefits, let alone those who actually do — they include anyone who has anything that could be termed a disability. For example, 1.5 million people reported incontinence, which does not always occur alongside other physical disability and need not impair someone’s ability to work. (You can see the DWP’s breakdown of these statistics in this PDF, and you might notice the substantial “Other” section in “Disability prevalence disaggregated by impairment” — this would include sight impairments, for example.)

It is, in any case, not “fake disabled” people who have “crippled the economy”, but bankers and others in the financial sector who bankrupted several large banks with their irresponsible lending practices, and the rich and large corporations who find ways of getting out of paying their taxes while expecting the rest of us to pay for at least some of their healthcare and other public services. The small number of “fake disabled” are an unfortunate consequence of making sure that real disabled people are not forced into beggary, indignity and early deaths; we need some means of detecting them but not at the expense of making sure those who need the support, get it. As for ME being fashionable, I’ll believe that when I see a woman in lilac pyjamas with a nasogastric tube and dark glasses being carried on a stretcher down a catwalk in Milan. Until then, that’s just a bad joke.

Cait Reilly is currently suing the government after the DWP forced her to leave a voluntary work placement in a museum to do one of their unpaid “training” placements in Poundland (for overseas readers, this is a chain of shops that sells everything for £1) which turned out not to be training at all, but two weeks’ unpaid shelf-stacking and floor-sweeping, something anyone can learn to do in under an hour. Ms Reilly had worked in retail before, as have I, and even till work does not require two weeks’ training — in my case, it took one working day to give us the “customer service” pep talk and to train us on the tills.

There have been a number of moronic, mean-spirited responses to her campaign from the right-wing media; Reilly speaks of how Vanessa Feltz “attempted to humiliate [her] on air” and having listened to her atrocious show (she is a columnist on the Daily Express, by the way) I can well believe that. There was also a piece by Jan Moir in the Daily Mail, which accuses her of exhibiting a “sense of entitlement” which might not endear her to future employment, and ridiculing the human-rights angle of her legal claim by comparing it to ten years’ in Guantanamo Bay:

I would argue that doing a little unpaid work in return for benefits is not a breach of your human rights, it is actually a bonus. See it as a life lesson — and you might get more out of it than you think.

I would argue that a little perspective might not go amiss, even from a typical 22-year-old graduate who knows everything and has big ideas about what she wants to do in the world.

I would also argue that her stance is deeply insulting to those whose jobs actually do entail sweeping floors and stacking shelves. And who do so without complaint to feed their own families and to help to pay Cait Reilly’s benefits allowances. For nobody owes this girl a living. Least of all those who work for a living.

To start with, I think her Job Centre’s insistence that she take part in this placement was a bureaucratic error: she did not need retail work experience (she already had it) and was already in work-related activity, i.e. her ongoing museum work experience placement, which she had shown the initiative of organising for herself. Work experience placements do have a place: for a prospective employee to demonstrate their suitability (over a short period) with an offer of a job if they are, or for a teenager to get a glimpse into some sector of industry, or for someone inexperienced in recent work to gain experience without a great deal of risk for the employer. It is more agreeable that the employer be a small enterprise or a charity, and that the placement be a learning process of some sort.

This type of “work experience” involves doing menial work which requires little or no training that the employer could be paying someone to do, for free, which is a disincentive to them to actually pay people to do the same jobs. Much the same could be said of council work such as bin collections, but public sector jobs are often heavily unionised and employing unpaid menial labour on a routine basis would result in industrial action, and rightly so (while the retail sector has fairly weak union representation). Supermarkets, in particular, nowadays require fewer till staff as many of them use self-service tills which require only one or two for a bank of six or more. When the beneficiaries are enterprises the size of Poundland or Tesco, there is also enormous potential for corruption.

Most people would not mind doing a voluntary position for a charity, or a brief work-experience position with the promise of a job (or at least a reference) afterwards. Increasingly, young people have found themselves doing one “internship” after another, never receiving a wage and leaving them unable to move away from their families’ home. This is not work experience; it is exploitation and benefits nobody except the employer, and serves to make some professions inaccessible to anyone whose families cannot afford to support them for extended periods after leaving school or college. Nobody is talking about the world owing anyone a living, except the Mail with their straw-man headline (“It is my human right not to work for Poundland”). Most people want to work, but if I’m going to sweep floors for nothing, it had better be for a good cause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rod Liddle displays some very basic ignorance, and it is a mystery that the paper’s editors did not pick it up before publishing it. Surely, before an article is published on a scientific topic, it should be run past the science editor? Do they not have one? Liddle claims that Wessely “believes the illness, which results in debilitating tiredness, aches and pains and so on, probably has a neurological basis”, while his opponents insist that it is caused by a virus. This is simply not true. It is his opponents that regard it as both viral and neurological, while Wessely regards it as primarily psychological, i.e. “in the mind”. Neurological means a physical disturbance to the nervous system (which means the brain, spinal cord and peripheral nerves). How could they publish an article which contains such a basic scientific error?

In his opening paragraph, Liddle alleges that the ME Association “helps people suffering from what used to be known as ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’ but now, for politically correct reasons, is known as myalgic encephalomyelitis”. This is also simply untrue. The term myalgic encephalomyelitis was coined in the 1950s by senior doctors treating nurses who fell ill with it in London. They did not believe it was in any way psychological and believed that a virus was responsible. They initially called it benign myalgic encephalomyelitis, but as Dr Elizabeth Dowsett noted in an interview with Jane Colby in 1996, it was found not to be benign and the illness came to be known as ME. The term chronic fatigue syndrome was coined in the 1980s by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, and Hilary Johnson noted that the term was preferred because it did not indicate any viral etiology:

For the next several years the euphemistic, benign-sounding name suggested a trivial, volitional disability, one that could be shrugged off with vitamins, aerobic exercise, stress reduction, a good night’s sleep, or sheer willpower. … More profoundly, the name camouflaged the nature of the illness itself: the fatigue in “chronic fatigue syndrome” was merely a symptom and, compared to the neurologic dysfunction resulting from the structural damage to the brain in the early phases of the disase, a sometimes unimportant one at that. Diseases, after all, are not primarily identified and defined by universal qualities they share with other diseases but rather for the qualities that distinguish them.

Historically, the name myalgic encephalomyelitis is fairly specific and well-understood, while CFS means different things depending on who is using it: some use it to mean a principally psychological condition (like Wessely), while others use it to mean ME as a physical illness (their understanding is somewhat different to the British model of ME, uses a wider set of selection criteria, and is more likely to entertain autoimmune causes and a wider range of viral causes). There is some evidence the term ME has been used to mean something more akin to CFS, and inappropriate treatments prescribed accordingly: the graded exercise treatment prescribed to Lynn Gilderdale in 1992, who had been diagnosed with ME and not CFS, being a classic example; she became progressively sicker and more disabled while taking the therapy, not less.

Liddle then brings up Wessely’s complaint that patients are more keen to be diagnosed with “some sort of weird retrovirus” than “a neurological disorder for which there is at least a form of palliative treatment” (again, confusing neurological with psychological). There is nothing weird about it; it is a retrovirus, like HIV and the HTLV viruses which are associated with some forms of leukaemia, but one must ask why the British media are so reluctant to even mention XMRV. As for the patients, they are already physically ill, and want to know which agent causes their illness so that some treatment can be developed for it, not so that they can just stay sick. The reports seem to make out that everyone in the ME community is clinging onto XMRV as if it was the only hope; this is true of a lot of people, but there are other avenues of exploration including enteroviruses (which are particularly relevant to outbreaks of ME) and herpes viruses.

He further alleges that “some sufferers cling with grim and livid determination to a non-existent biomedical explanation; they assume, one supposes, that if it is primarily a mental condition then they have sort of brought it on themselves, and are in some way to blame for their affliction (which is a nonsense, of course)”. This conveniently ignores the reality some ME sufferers face, which is precisely of being accused of faking or causing their illness, or that their parents caused it or facilitate it. True, mental illness is not generally thought to be the patient’s fault, although some recreational drugs play a part, but people with ME are often not treated as either mentally or physically ill people normally are, but as malingerers or people who can make their illness better themselves, despite ample physical evidence to the contrary.

Liddle finally compares the attitude of the ME community to “the reaction of some parents with autistic children who resist with fury the suggestion that this distressing condition might have been brought about partly as a consequence of assortative mating, as suggested by Prof Simon Baron-Cohen, rather than through mercury floating around in the atmosphere or the water pipes, or indeed the MMR vaccine”. Yet another example of gross ignorance on his part. There is so much criticism of Baron-Cohen’s methodology beyond this; the fact that he dabbles in genetics for the purpose of his pop psychology books rather than having actual expertise in it, makes bizarre leaps of logic and cites myths in support of serious propositions, and emphasises autism as an “extreme male brain” rather than as a disability. I dealt with this in a recent entry, and there has been much comment from actual autistic people as well as parents. He occupies a similar position in the world of autism to Wessely’s in ME: a first person to call for the media, yet heavily criticised in the community they think he represents.

The interview with Simon Wessely is extraordinary in what it leaves out. The interviewer, one Stefanie Marsh, does not consider for a moment the possibility that criticisms of Wessely have some basis; she claims that although he is “the most hated doctor in Britain”, he is hated not by his peers nor “by the thousands of patients he has helped to treat throughout his career”, but by people who have never met him but rather work on the basis of what others have written about him. He is, she says, “Britain’s foremost authority on ME, or chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) as it is also known”:

It is quite possible that without his research people struck down by the illness would still be objects of ridicule, regarded as victims of some sort of self-imposed dosser’s depression. For it was his research that proved ME was not, as the general public, many doctors and certainly all employers once imagined, “yuppie flu”.

All utterly ridiculous. ME was not called “yuppie flu” until the media (specifically, Newsweek) invented the term in the late 1980s. Until then, ME was regarded, by those who had heard of it, as a neurological illness, albeit one that occurred in small outbreaks, mostly in tight-knit communities and in hospitals.

He discovered that by combining cognitive behavioural therapy and light exercise a third of patients make a full recovery.

Before his work, the standard treatment for ME was rest, with the result that many patients were left incapacitated. Many health professionals agree that he has done more for the sufferers of ME than any other individual, not just in Britain but worldwide.

The “third of patients” would be those who do not have ME but have some fatigue syndrome or another, possibly as a part of depression. Those with ME who have tried GET reported that it did not work or was harmful. Numerous surveys of patients with ME show this, as well as a welter of individual patient reports. Cases of ME patients collapsing when trying (often on doctors’ orders) to exercise more than they are able to are legion — here (reproduced here). The statement — “the standard treatment for ME was rest” — is an oversimplification, in any case; the treatment was, and remains, appropriate pacing of activities and rest, and not over-exerting oneself, which to the very severely affected may mean rest most of all of the time, but not for those with moderate ME. As for why “the people who loathe him — so much that they often send him threatening letters wishing him dead — are themselves incapacitated with ME”, this may be because they became more incapacitated by following graded exercise programmes that were inappropriate, or tried to “pull themselves together” when a doctor told them they were not ill, or only trivially so.

The sycophantic interview allows Wessely to claim persecution yet again, and to allege that “it’s just because I is a psychiatrist” without asking why ME sufferers are resistant to psychiatric involvement, and the reason is that patients have suffered such harm and abuse in the past, during the time of Wessely’s involvement. He claims that he is accused of throwing a boy into a swimming pool; this happened to Ean Proctor in the late 1980s and was in fact not Wessely’s own doing, but happened after Proctor was sectioned (committed) by Wessely (for more on that incident, see here and here). Psychiatric hospitals do cater for patients with conditions other than organic psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, including some with autism when their condition cannot be managed in the community, but psychiatric units have proven themselves, time and again, inappropriate places for people with ME and particularly severe ME. Furthermore, psychiatrists and even other types of doctor are often enthusiastic to rule out or overrule diagnoses of ME or CFS and substitute “pervasive refusal syndrome” in children, or school phobia, or some other psychological cause. Sufferers also sometimes face perverse disbelief, such as the attempt by doctors in Sussex to blame Lynn Gilderdale’s skin disorder (which was in fact ringworm, acquired from her cat) on “dermatitis artefacta”, or self-inflicted skin damage; the fact that she had been diagnosed with ME automatically led them to assume that her complications were self-inflicted or psychological. The problem is simply that many doctors simply do not believe in ME, and the role of Wessely in this is worth examining since he is quoted as saying, in the early 1990s, that ME simply a belief that one has ME. The interviewer did not put any of this to him.

Nor did the interviewer put to him the matter of the range of pathologies which have been found in ME sufferers and particularly those wtih severe ME, none of which can possibly be in the domain of psychiatry: the fact that brain injury can be found on SPECT and PET scans, as Byron Hyde describes it, “as if a cobweb has been thrown across the brain”; Dr Hyde noted that there was measurable brain dysfunction in his ME patients as well as shrunken thyroid glands, abnormally high rates of thyroid cancer, cardiovascular disease (“which we do [find] all the time”), oligoclonal banding similar to what is found in MS patients, and connective tissue disorder similar to Ehlers-Danlos disorder.

It is not as if the very real physical effects of ME, and particularly severe ME, are not known to the media, a year and a half after the Gilderdale case made it public knowledge in a way it had not been before, and just four months after Kay Gilderdale’s book was published. The Times reported on the case, as did the rest of the British media, so they have no excuse whatsoever for not even mentioning it to Wessely during this interview, nor asking how his psychological theories, or “a cultural phenomenon”, might account for a condition as severe as hers. It is, of course, proper that Wessely should be allowed to state his opinion, but little airing has been given to his critics, who are not all conspiracy-minded lunatics but include doctors and other professionals, patients as well as advocates who have a long experience of the condition. There is no balance here; a whole wave of stories has suggested that the patient community as a whole has an irrational hatred of those who try to treat them, which is not the case. The general ME community feels that Wessely has a lot to answer for, and he was not expected to answer for any of it in that interview. As for the matter of his likes giving up their “research”, I’m sure many ME patients and advocates would appreciate it if Wessely would leave them and their illness alone.

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.

However, when I was setting out on my work journey this morning, the cab radio was tuned to LBC, a commercial London talk station that I don’t normally listen to; I normally listen to BBC London. The callers and texters were coming out with the most outrageous things, insisting that the closure, and the works that were going on to make the bridge safe again, were all just “jobs for the boys” (i.e. they are just making work for the sake of it). I’m sure I heard mention of men standing around in yellow jackets doing nothing, and the repeated insistence that the people who had taken the decision to close the road did not know what they were talking about. One guy said he had seen the bridge and there wasn’t a scratch on it.

I don’t know if any of these people had seen it up close, or had done a thorough inspection of the fabric of the bridge, because whoever did decided to build another bridge underneath the present one to support it, as they had never seen a bridge that badly damaged in a fire. I understand that everyone is frustrated by not being able to use the road, but surely it’s better than the whole thing collapsing and people driving into a concrete ditch at 70mph. Why is it that people cannot accept that sometimes people know more than they do, even when they make unpopular decisions?

I don’t watch al-Jazeera English (although I can get it, part-time, on Freeview) but saw this clip of David Frost interviewing Taj Hargey and Salma Yaqoob over the recently-introduced ban on the niqaab in France on YouTube. The debate in this clip goes for the first 11-and-a-half minutes of the YouTube clip; I can’t guarantee that it’ll be kept up. Salma Yaqoob is a RESPECT party councillor from Birmingham (David Frost introduced her as the party’s leader, but there isn’t much left of the party nowadays), while Taj Hargey is a wannabe Muslim community leader whose ideas largely seem lifted from the anti-Islamic “Qur’an alone” school of thought.

Although he did not explicitly advocate banning the niqaab, he alleged that it was “un-Islamic” because it was based on pre-Islamic (Byzantine and Persian) customs in which men kept their “possessions” under wraps, and is “un-Qur’anic” because the terms burqa and niqaab do not appear in the Qur’an itself. This is, of course, a totally spurious argument, because even if the terms do not appear in the Qur’an, it does not mean that they were not present among the Muslims in the time of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam), but narrations from that time demonstrate that face-covering was in fact common among the female Companions, and that some of them in fact remained in their homes most or all of the time.

He also persistently alleged that the custom as practised in the West is only due to Saudi, Wahhabi and Taliban influence, yet face-covering is common in many other parts of the Muslim world where Saudi influence is minimal, such as parts of Kenya, Zanzibar, Morocco, Hadramaut and eastern Indonesia (particularly Sumbawa). Hadramaut is a well-known centre of traditional Sunni scholarship which has always resisted Wahhabism. The Wahhabis or “salafis” are well-known for their opinion that there is no such thing as good innovation in religion, yet their women are to be found wearing the modern three-layer niqaab, rather than a cloth tied round their head and across their face as was the custom in the time of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) and which is still to be found in some of the places I mentioned earlier; Hargey is thus applying a parody of their position by saying that the niqaab or burqa is un-Islamic because the female Companions did not wear it. As for the Taliban, they enforced a type of veiling that is not known anywhere else except Pakistan, i.e. places were Pashtuns are dominant.

He insisted that Muslim women who wear it in the West should “be honest” about the reason they wear it, and stop claiming that it is about religion when it is in fact a “tribal rag”. This disrespectful language echoes his friend Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s comparison of the rising popularity of hijab to swine flu, but it is also inaccurate. The niqaab is in no sense tribal to a woman of Jamaican heritage, is it? While the Arabian peninsula is indeed tribal, this simply means (in an Arabian context) that people know their ancestors going back generations; it’s not another word for a small national or ethnic group as it is sometimes used in Africa or the Americas. Much of the Arab world is tribal in the same sense as the Arabian peninsula is (Libya was recently described as such by the Gaddafi faction), but niqaab is not seen there. Calling it “tribal” also contradicts the claim of Byzantine or Persian origin, since those empires were not tribal.

He dismisses the religious argument by claiming that it is all made up by male scholars, based on hadeeth which were themselves, he said, written 300 years ago (also by male scholars) and contain an awful lot of hear-say and fabrication. The argument about male scholars is false, because a large proportion of the scholars and those who transmitted the hadeeth in the early generations of Islam were in fact female, including A’isha (radhi Allahu ‘anhaa), the wife of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam), and one of the major teachers of Imam Shafi’i named Nafisa. The Qur’an itself is not, as Hargey would know if he bothered to read it, a modern feminist text in any case, but Muslims never have based their religion solely off it — it clearly states “obey Allah and His Messenger”, and without the hadeeth, that command becomes something of a dead letter. A further point against Hargey’s rejection of the hadeeth-based parts of Islamic law is that the major scholars of law were much closer to the time of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) than the major collectors of hadeeth, and took narrations from those they regarded as trustworthy, and they knew of the problem of people who fabricated hadeeth (they were mainly sectarians). It is not a case of modern scholars starting from scratch based on the Bukhari and Muslim collections.

The fact is that women who choose to wear the niqaab, regardless of any consideration of whether it is a socially wise choice, are do what Muslim women, particularly in cities, did for generations, from the first generation until colonial times, and are doing what is held to be compulsory by strong opinions in all four mainstream schools of Islamic thought — indeed, it is only not regarded as mandatory today because the majority of women do not wear it; that was not true in the great cities of the Islamic world until very recently. They are also not mostly “Wahhabis”, contrary to what some might imagine (and what some repeatedly claim). Anyone posing as an imam should be defending them, not slandering them to the media. Salma Yaqoob did defend the women who wear niqaab on the basis of free choice, but did not even begin to tackle his baseless claims about hadeeth, although it might have been too complicated an issue to get into.

The fact is that Hargey has no claim to be an imam, and Yaqoob should have said so — he’s the leader of a small group which conducts anti-Islamic publicity stunts for the media, some of which contradict things which are necessarily known of Islam. His status is not dissimilar to that of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown — someone with no claim to Islam due to the extremity of his beliefs, but who uses a Muslim name and a similar cultural background to pretend to be one in front of non-Muslims, peddling an “Islam” which bears no resemblance to the real thing, to the detriment of people who practise the real thing. One can understand the BBC making this mistake (at least once — even John Ware did not wheel him out a second time), but there is no excuse for al-Jazeera.

To their credit, the Keighley mosque where the assaults took place co-operated with the police and a man has been arrested (though since bailed). It’s still a mystery why younger boys were left in the ‘supervision’ of older boys who hit and kicked them and threw things at them. It appears that the man arrested is the teacher filmed hitting and kicking pupils during lessons (we were told they were Qur’an lessons), but I wonder if they have any plans to change the way boys are supervised during prayers, or the people hired to do the teaching.

The mosques weren’t so keen to face up to the problems behind the lectures that were shown in the Birmingham mosque. The young man was shown lecturing the children with derogatory jokes about Hindu beliefs and practices, suggesting they “drink cow piss”; another group are lectured about avoiding the customs of non-Muslims and that people with less than a fist-length beard are worse than snakes and that travelling with such a person is more harmful than doing so with a Jew. The school’s defence is that the individual responsible was a senior pupil who had since been expelled, that some teachers had been dismissed and that outside speakers had said things that were out of keeping with the school’s ethos. Really, blaming the underling (the pupil) is the oldest trick in the book; it’s how the Daily Mail reacts when people claim about an offensive poll or headline — they just blame some junior sub-editor; it’s never really the paper’s or editor’s fault, even if the offending phrase appears again and again.

This sort of talk is fairly common among Deobandi youth, so obviously it’s coming from somewhere and that kid giving the lecture got it from somewhere. I’ve not heard the comparison of men with shorter than fist-length beards to snakes or Jews before, but hostile attitudes to Muslims who don’t live up to the particular regulations they live by have been common knowledge for years. The fact that there are four madhhabs in Islam and only one of them has that ruling, or that many Muslims who don’t follow them come from places where growing beards and maintaining traditional Islamic dress is not possible for political reasons, is not accepted, particularly by their youth (and guess where they get their ideas from). The casual insulting of others’ religions, particularly Hindus’, is something anyone who has spent time in the community will have experienced from time to time, and it’s not always Deobandis and not always madrassa boys.

On the other hand, the wheeling out of Taj Hargey is unforgiveable. Frankly, the comment about beardless men and snakes could have been made about him specifically; he is a marginal figure with a tiny following whose mission seems to be to show up the rest of the Muslim community as “backward” in front of the media by staging plainly un-Islamic ceremonies as publicity stunts. The beliefs articulated on his organisation’s website, and in his letters and articles in various newspapers, suggest that he has anti-hadeeth leanings, as demonstrated here:

We need a reformation that saves Islam from foreign-inspired zealots. That reformation is already under way, with Muslims going back to the pristine teaching of the transcendent Koran, not taking on trust the hadith (a compilation of sayings of the Prophet Muhammad recorded some 250 years after his death by non-Arabs) or the corpus of medieval man-made Sharia (religious law). …

Although the Koran repeatedly declares that God’s revelation is conclusive and sufficient guidance for Muslims and that there is no need for any supplementary legal authority in Islam, the traditional Muslim clergy defies this explicit divine assurance. They falsely convince their flock that they cannot be true believers without the hadith. They falsely assert that this source of Islam is at the heart of being a real Muslim. Most Muslims have been told that the hadith are the sacred authentic words of the Prophet, but the plethora of fictitious and forged hadith poves otherwise.

He goes on to say that a hadith must pass a “rigorous” test, namely that it should not contradict the Qur’an and not contradict “reason and logic”. The first has no Islamic basis at all, since the words of the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) are regarded as a revelation in themselves, and can abrogate, and certainly qualify, a verse in the Qur’an. As for “reason and logic”, coming from someone like this it can mean anything he might say it means, paving the way for an “Islam” based on his and his friends’ desires, essentially a sort of Unitarian Universalism with the Qur’an used as a decoration. It would bear very little resemblance to Islam.

His claim that the Deobandis were running a system of “apartheid” is baseless; apartheid (like segregation, another term commonly bandied around for this purpose) is a system of legally enforced separation, not a situation whereby a religious community mostly lives and socialises together. Muslims are not as isolated as might be supposed, even if they do live in a primarily Muslim area. There are religious Muslims who work in the civil service and in every industry you can think of (except for things like alcohol).

The people “anonymously” speaking out about what is being taught in the mosques failed to convince, frankly. Clearly these were people who had already withdrawn their children from mosque classes and had made a stand, if they were for real. Perhaps they could not find anyone to speak because nobody wanted to take part in yet another television “exposé” based on dishonesty and spying? We have had nearly six years of this and people know the tricks very well, which may well be why they have to fall back on Hargey and Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, a chameleon who sheds one skin after another depending on whether he can make a name for himself as an Iranian stooge or a “progressive”.

The documentary presented a few problems that have been known about for years, and again pointed the finger at the Bridge Schools Inspectorate for possibly failing to do its job properly, but it presented a false alternative in the form of two foreign men desperate to find a community to lead here. The impression is given, with continual attacks on Deobandis generally, that this is typical, when in fact not all the institutions shown (not the one where the kids were being beaten, for example) were Deobandi anyway. At a time when tabloid media attacks on the Muslim community generally are a regular occurrence, the footage of the children being attacked could have been passed straight to the police, or to the local MP rather than being broadcast on national TV. The programme did expose some serious problems in some of our religious schools, but used it as an opportunity to promote two tired old hacks that nobody takes seriously even if they have heard of them, which means they did not have any real solutions.

We need to get the Pakistani community to think much more clearly about why this is going on and to be more open about the problems that are leading to a number of Pakistani heritage men thinking it is OK to target white girls in this way.

These young men are in a western society, in any event, they act like any other young men, they’re fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that, but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits and they are expected to marry a Pakistani girl from Pakistan, typically.

So they then seek other avenues and they see these young women, white girls who are vulnerable, some of them in care… who they think are easy meat.

As mentioned in a previous entry, the situation is a little more complicated than just Pakistani men grooming white girls anyway (as the authors of the original report — PDF here — have said publically), but the idea that a whole culture is contributing to the activities of these gangs seems somewhat dubious. It’s not whole communities, it’s particular gangs of men who are involved in other crime besides this kind of grooming, and when young men are “buzzing with testosterone”, they do not form organised gangs of this kind of structure. A young woman who had been targeted in this way spoke on a BBC panel discussion programme this morning, and said that she was initially befriended by younger teenage boys, and got passed up via a group of older teenagers to the men in their late 20s and early 30s who carried out the sexual assaults. So, the guys who are “buzzing” don’t get the sex. They act as apprentices and dogsbodies, much as younger recruits do in gangs the world over.

It may be true that there are men in these communities who are seeking sexual encounters with young white girls because they cannot conduct relationships with those of their own background, because the girls are unavailable and they themselves are promised in marriage to someone from the village back home (although this is less true now than it used to be, and people are more willing to insist on finding a spouse themselves, particularly if they go to college). Even if one may object to the attitude that the young white girls are “easy” compared to Pakistani ones, it is still not the same as forming gangs to groom and rape girls.

Also mentioned on the panel discussion was that Jack Straw might have been trying to influence a by-election in Oldham where there are a lot of Bangladeshis. What was left out was the resonance that portraying Pakistani men as sexual predators might have for Bangladeshi voters (in short, during the Bangladesh war of independence, a huge number of women in what was to become Bangladesh were raped by Pakistani soldiers). Straw’s last pronouncement on issues related to Muslims were disastrous, leading to a huge press campaign against Muslim women who wear the niqaab. Neither his voting record with regard to Bush and Blair’s wars, nor that incident, cost him his seat. Assuming he intends to contest the seat again, I wonder if this bit of race-baiting will cost him his Gujarati Muslim votes in Blackburn. (More: Osama Saeed.)

Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons.