Indigo Jo Blogs

New Statesman - Letters

My letter, regarding the portrayal of Croydon in Brendan O'Neill's article "What's Driving the BNP?" last Friday, got printed in this week's New Statesman. The letters pages seem only to be archived for a week, so here it is:

Rotten boroughs

As one who was brought up in Croydon and who regularly travels back there for work and social purposes, I must respond to the references to that borough in Brendan O'Neill's article "What's driving the BNP?" (5 May).

The northern part of Croydon has had a substantial non-white population for decades, but I have personally travelled on buses and trams there, and have rarely been the only white person in sight. Most of Croydon, incidentally, is predominantly white.

Charlotte Lewis, whom O'Neill portrays as a ditzy woman with a chip on her shoulder, is in fact a former candidate for the British National Party. She stood in the 2006 local elections for the St Helier council seat in Sutton, but was exposed for falsely claiming to live in the borough (a requirement) when she actually lives in Thornton Heath, in Croydon.

At least four other council candidates did the same during those elections.

Matthew J Smith New Malden, Surrey

I actually told them at the end that I had gathered this information from a simple Google search, and that Lewis was deploying a time-honoured BNP tactic, namely lying. But the gist of it got printed and so a reply to the lies of a stupid, amateur BNP agitator was made, alhamdu lillah. Surprise surprise, my letter to the Spectator didn't get printed (although an opposing letter to Phillips did), so I'm still waiting to see whether my reply to John Draper Nordelph's letter will.

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Are there some people we shouldn’t invite onto WHYS? « BBC World Have Your Say

Ros Atkins (presenter of BBC World Have Your Say) on how she booked Ed Husain to appear on her programme on the BBC World Service, only to have him pull out because a spokesman for Hizb-ut-Tahrir had also been invited. He also professed disgust that Dr Azzam Tamimi, a known Hamas sympathiser, was invited onto a panel discussion about the Middle East:

'It's fine for you to create nice comfortable conversations in your studio but I know the real impact. It can consolidate radical opinion. It offers publicuity and kudos. i can remember when I was in Hizb ut-Tahrir, we got a real kick whenever one of our guys got attention in the media.'

While I agree that unrepresentative extremists should not be given undue publicity at the expense of the community they claim to speak for (like Omar Bakri, and let us remember that Ed Husain was part of Omar Bakri's HT and left around the same time), both HT and Hamas are substantial movements and it is ridiculous to shut them out of any discussion, because you then end up with half the picture. It is dishonest to then pretend that this is the whole, even if you tell yourself that the "decent" bit is all that matters.

Clearly Ed is not interested in debate at all, only in censorship. (Hat tip: MPACUK; more: Peace, Bruv.)

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Harry's Place, a blog I read often but generally disagree with, posted this last week, about Yvonne Ridley winning a case for harassment, sex discrimination and constructive unfair dismissal against the Islam Channel. Since HP is currently on hiatus due to overshooting its data transfer allowance (as it seems to do for the last week or so of every month), I'm going to copy a whole load from the Google cache of it, because I agree wholeheartedly with it.

But before I do, I am going to add something which makes my blood boil about this case, which is that certain Muslim men, including some in authority, do not seem to realise that the prohibition of shaking hands with women outside their families applies to all women, not only Arab women, Pakistani women or women who obviously look like Muslim women. They would not dream of publically shaking hands with one of "their" women, so why on earth do they do it with a white woman (or a black woman, for that matter) who is well-known to have converted to Islam? It does not matter if you are suspicious of her motives or sincerity. If you feel you must shake hands with some women and one of them refuses because she is a Muslim and you couldn't tell because she wasn't in hijab, take it gracefully rather than getting offended. No, shaikhs and state muftis are not exempt.

I should add that, if you are a man and a woman offers to shake your hand, be polite about refusing and don't snatch your hand away and mutter in an offended tone, "I do not shake hands with women", because this can be really hurtful. Still, it would make things a lot easier for it to be as well-known that Muslims don't do this as it is that we don't eat pork or drink alcohol, and when Muslims in positions of authority break this rule and then publically humiliate those who try to keep it, it pushes this goal further away every time it happens.

The Harry's Place excerpt is under the fold.

Continue reading "Yvonne Ridley wins case against Islam Channel" »

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Five Chinese Crackers covers the tabloid response to the recent NUT faith education proposal. I did start writing a piece after reading the Guardian's write-up of it, by which account it seems to be a reasonable and moderate proposal, but didn't read the Express's website or the Mail's coverage. The Spew not only used the headline "Koran to be taught in schools", as if it were going to be taught in all schools to everyone, but they titled their on-line "Have Your Say" page on the subject "Should imams teach our children?" and accompanied it with a scarily-lit picture of Abu Hamza.

Continue reading "Idiotic response to a positive proposal" »

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Today's Sun (Murdoch-owned London tabloid) led with a front-page story about something Omar Bakri said about Amir Khan. Omar Bakri is the former leader of the disbanded al-Muhajiroun, who ran noisy demonstrations and street-corner stalls until they were banned in 2005; Amir Khan is a British Pakistani boxer. Apparently, "in an internet exchange with other extremists", Omar Bakri said that Khan was jahil, meaning ignorant:

Asked if Amir was setting a bad example by draping himself in the flag, he replied: "I don't think somebody should really look to Amir Khan as a good example for the youth.

"So now for him to be wrapping himself in British flag is another sign of somebody who is completely jahil. You give him the excuse of ignorance for living among the kuffar. So you can't call him kuffar but you can call him jahil and deviant person."

Continue reading "Omar Bakri expresses dim view of Amir Khan" »

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Over the weekend the government announced that it was considering banning the open display of cigarettes for sale, as is commonly found in any tobacco shop, whether a local corner shop or a supermarket. This would apply not only to over-the-counter cigarettes but also vending machines.

Now, I think this is a really good idea, and I would go further: get rid of brands of cigarette altogether. Just have generic cigarettes or tobacco for rolling, with no flavourings, no vanilla or menthol or anything else (an alternative, which I heard suggested several years ago, is to give all the brands stupid names like "jerk"). Advertising of tobacco products was rightly banned several years ago, because what it does - raise awareness of the availability of tobacco - is harmful. The open display of branded packets of cigarettes and cigars are the last bastion of tobacco advertising.

Continue reading "Tobacco display ban: beyond the easy parodies" »

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Charles Moore, well-known writer for the Telegraph and Spectator and known among us for articles like this one from 2005, calling for the Muslims to bring forward a Gandhi (my response here), gave a lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies Monday before last entitled "How to beat the Scargills of Islam". Arthur Scargill was the leader of the miners' union in the early 1980s who led a major, but unsuccessful, strike against coal mine closures; he is a byword, at least among British conservatives, for intransigent and unreasonable trade union behaviour. Moore's proposition appears to be that many of the alleged leaders of the Muslims in the UK today, like Scargill, have serious flaws in their legitimacy. You can read the lecture here (PDF) and an article based on it in the Spectator here.

Continue reading "Who are the "Scargills of Islam", then?" »

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It was reported today that a paedophile who was taken to Australia at the age of five (he is 61 now) has been deported back to England. He is not by any means the first person to be deported back to England from Australia or Canada; a few years ago we had Robert Excell dumped on us, who had also spent much of his adult life in Australian prisons for sexual offences against children, and in the early 1990s Canada deported a rapist who was of British birth but who had lived most of his life in Canada.

Of course, the same newspapers who made this man's deportation to the UK front-page news tend to be those who vigorously campaign for foreign criminals, including those who immigrated as children, to be kicked out once they have served their sentences, resulting in the "foreign prisoner scandal" of a couple of years ago and the craven, panicked, inhumane government reaction. When other countries deport British rapists and paedophiles, they don't like it. I wonder why?

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British Muslim Initiative: The Sun and Daily Mail withdraw unfounded allegations by Policy Exchange

Hot on the heels of the Daily Spew grovelling to the McCanns yesterday, the Sun and the Daily Mail (or Scum and Snail Trail as they're known around these parts) have withdrawn articles from their websites based on the Policy Exchange report of last year, which alleged that extremist literature was being sold in mosques in the UK. This happened after a Newsnight investigation demonstrated that much of the evidence on which that report was based was in fact forged, but not before several major newspapers had "given prominent and extremely biased coverage to the report"; the BMI had complained to the Press Complaints Commission about the coverage. The Sun also printed a letter from Muhammad Sawalha of the BMI and Mohammed Kozbar of the North London Central Mosque (i.e. Finsbury Park mosque). (HT: Islamophobia Watch.)

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The Daily Spew and Black Hole today printed front-page apologies to Gerry and Kate McCann, whose daugher Madeleine went missing in Portugal last year, for printing false and defamatory stories about them on numerous occasions. This recalls an incident in which the Snail Trail had to cough up to Hugh Grant for printing false stories about him based on "close friends/sources", a euphemism for someone who doesn't know the subject that well if at all, knows nothing and is making it all up. (Update: Brian Cathcart in the New Statesman writes that national newspapers should be queuing up to apologise as most of them have printed various speculative, defamatory stories "with no better grounding than the prior speculations of the Portuguese press (and sometimes not even that)"; also 5CC notes that the paper leads with a story raising suspicion about a much poorer parent whose daughter went missing and was found last week.)

I wonder if they plan to apologise to the Muslims, about whom they routinely print inflammatory stories based on rumours, opinion polls which always get the same sensational results (Muslims want Shari'a law in England etc.), and petty incidents involving dumb council jobsworths? Or perhaps the Gypsies, against whom they ran a hate/fear campaign around the time of EU enlargement in 2004?

Years ago, the BBC did a comedy based on the political career of its journalist Martin Bell, who stood as an independent in the Hatton seat in Cheshire in 1997 to get rid of the corrupt Tory MP whose name I've forgotten (he came round to my college at Aberystwyth and gave a speech, and had the hall in uproar by saying "I feel a bit of a fraud ..." about something other than his political career). The fictionalised Bell got to introduce a Private Members' Bill, and proposed that when someone gets libelled, he or she should get that amount of space to print whatever they like - a contradiction of the original story, an appeal not to buy the paper, "or a poem about squirrels". Anyone who wanted real cold revenge would pick the latter, of course, or worse, something in an obscure language such as an extract from the Bratislava phone book, which really would dent their circulation.

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BBC News report on abuse of soldiers

This morning, the BBC made a big fuss of a report about incidents of verbal of abuse of air force servicemen in Peterborough by people opposed to the war in Iraq. It was alleged that the culprits were Muslims, but I really took exception to the talk of "abuse from anti-war campaigners". I phoned up the BBC (020 7224 2000 in the case of the BBC London station) and, struggling to get a word in edge-ways while the woman on the other end tried to bid me goodbye and get me off the line, told them that I had been involved in anti-war campaigns myself and would never dream of abusing a soldier in the street, and that they should call these people what they are - yobs.

However, the above story contains a couple of useful comments from people who have been in the forces, who say that, contrary to the loud condemnations by senior politicians of advice not to wear uniform in public in Peterborough, actually the wearing of uniform anywhere is not a good thing in this country:

It's not like a police uniform where someone wears it to make it clear they are there to help. It's just a reminder of an authority and power we chose to overlook in this country and seeing a uniform in public reminds many of political instability around the world or in Europe's own history. For this reason there is a healthy mistrust of authority in this country and wearing a uniform can seem inflammatory and needless unless on duty as opposed to Japan for example, where uniform is very important and respected by many.

Whether or not they are responsible for the few incidents of abuse in Peterborough (none of which have been reported to the police), it's depressing but true that we Muslims have our fair share of yobs, just as the rest of society does. Many of us would not dream of abusing soldiers in the street, in or out of uniform, even if (for religious or plain personal reasons, or both) we would not think of joining the Army or other armed services, with or without the present wars.

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The last three working days in a row, there has been a man convicted for acts of violence against women. Last Thursday, it was Steve (or was his actual name Steven?) Wright, the man who murdered five prostitutes in Ipswich in late 2006 (more: Outlines). On Friday it was Mark Dixie, who murdered an 18-year-old aspiring model, Sally-Ann Bowman, in Croydon in September 2005. Today, it was Levi Bellfield, who was convicted of the murder of two women and the attempted murder of another, in the Hampton-Twickenham area of west London and is suspected of several other attacks, most notably the murder of the 13-year-old Amanda "Milly" Dowler, from Walton on Thames, in 2002. Wright and Bellfield were given whole-life sentences; Dixie got 34 years to life. The response from one section of the tabloid press has been to demand the reinstatement of the death penalty.

Continue reading "The death penalty in light of the recent murder convictions" »

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Last Friday the Times published a story claiming that "senior Muslim figures" had expressed shock that a number of Walkers crisp products had contained alcohol. The fact was "discovered" by one Besharat Rehman, the owner of a halal supermarket in Bradford, and taken up by the Eastern Eye.

Well, I am surprised that anyone didn't know that popular commercial food products contain alcohol, since its use as a solvent in food colourings and flavourings has been known of for years. There is a difference in opinion over the issue, with some scholars (particularly Shafi'is, a minority school of thought in the UK but common in south-east Asia, east Africa and parts of the Arab world) regarding alcohol, or ethanol, as impure on the basis of being the common denominator in wine, beer etc., which are themselves impure. Others disagree and regard only purpose-made alcoholic intoxicants to be impure. The chemical alcohol actually occurs naturally, including in fruit.

The bottom line is that if you consider alcohol impure, you simply should not eat commercial processed foods, end of story. (A few companies, like the Thornton's chocolate company, states on the packet when a product is alcohol-free.) However, rumours about alcohol in small quantities in various commercial food products go round all the time, and when product labels state the presence of "flavourings", the likelihood is that a solvent has been used, either in their preparation or in their extraction from source. That the Times have made this into news reflects another attempt to throw mud at ordinary Muslims (a point I tried to make on this Times blog entry, but they haven't got round to moderating it yet, nearly a full day after I submitted it).

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Technorati Tags: shariah, rowan+williams

Last Thursday the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, gave a lecture to an assembly of lawyers in London on the subject of Muslims in the UK whom, in his words, "relate to something other than the British legal system alone". The bit which has been picked up and made into front-page news is where he says, regarding introducing a "market element" in which a citizen can choose between different systems of law, that "if what we want socially is a pattern of relations in which a plurality of divers and overlapping affiliations work for a common good, and in which groups of serious and profound conviction are not systematically faced with the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty, it seems unavoidable", which people have widely taken to mean introducing state-recognised Shari'ah tribunals. The reaction has been mostly characterised by scorn, but has also transgressed into outright hostility. (More: Yahya Birt, Ummah Pulse, MCB Press release.)

Continue reading "Ignorance and bigotry unleashed by Williams speech" »

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BBC NEWS: Threats to 'no-go areas' bishop

Michael Nazir-Ali, Anglican bishop of Rochester, has complained of receiving death threats in response to his accusations about no-go areas defined by adherence to Islamic ideology in the Telegraph last month. His chaplain claims that the phoned-in threat came from somewhere in England, but the man himself says that his postbag has been overwhelmingly positive (I wonder if that came from mostly within England, or mostly from Anglicans).

He also laughably claims that he had been surprised at the scale of the debate his article caused. Pull the other one, bish. You made the claims in a major national Sunday newspaper, and it was promoted from the front page and also, prominently, on the paper's website. People who cause a controversy on this scale often get death threats, particularly when they cause offence related to religion or, less commonly, politics; these threats have never, in recent British history, led to someone actually being murdered. And when you cause controversy by using your position to make unfounded accusations about an entire religious community in a national newspaper, you really only have yourself to blame if this is the result.

That is, of course, assuming that the threat came from people offended, and not by one of his supporters ...

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