Indigo Jo Blogs

Status of terrorism experts questioned (Education Guardian)

The Education Guardian casts doubt on the number of so-called terrorism experts who have gained prominence since 9/11, some of whom (like Evan Kohlmann) have been called to give evidence for the prosecution in terrorism cases, who have appeared out of nowhere, whose qualifications do not add up to much, whose independence is questionable due to associations with "rightwing or pro-Zionist organisations" (the four names they mention speak for themselves in that regard), and some of whom make false claims about their links to the intelligence services:

As with many trends, this one started in the US with academics - such as Dr Reuven Paz, director of the Project for the Research of Islamist Movements and the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya, Israel; Dr Matthew Levitt, member of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research; and Rita Katz, co-founder of the Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute - giving expert testimony. And where the US leads, the UK invariably follows. Last year, Evan Kohlman, a veteran of several US terror prosecutions, gave expert evidence that helped to convict Mohammed Atif Siddique, a British-born Muslim, for internet-related terrorism offences.

But just how expert is expert? Doubts have been cast both in the US and the UK about Kohlman's credentials. "He appears to have risen almost without trace," says David Miller, professor of sociology at Strathclyde University, who is compiling a Spinwatch database of "terrorologists". "With no expertise beyond an undergraduate law degree and an internship at a dubious think-tank, he has become a consultant to the US department of defence, the department of justice, the FBI, the Crown Prosecution Service, and Scotland Yard's SO-15 Counter Terrorism Command." Yet this is only half the problem. "The real issue is one of independence: many of the expert witnesses to have appeared for the prosecution have been associated with rightwing or pro-Zionist organisations. Under these circumstances, how can the expertise not be in some way contaminated?"

Posted by Indigo Jo at 7:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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 ...

Posted by Indigo Jo at 1:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (25) | TrackBacks (0)

Sister Kareema Hamdan, over at UmmahPulse.com, suggests a Muslim boycott of Dutch products in response to Geert Wilders' planned film insulting the Prophet (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam) or Islam, claiming that a similar boycott after the cartoons episode of a couple of years ago resulting in the subject of the boycott, the Arla food company, losing major contracts and had politicians scurrying around trying to mend ties with various Muslim countries. Kareema is one of the more astute writers at UmmahPulse, but I disagree with her about this. The problem with the boycott of Danish goods was that it was unjust and hit a target largely unrelated to the offensive cartoons.

Continue reading "We can't boycott everyone" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 9:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

Boris Johnson will be answering questions on the BBC London (94.9FM) drive-time show at 5pm this evening. If it follows the same pattern as Ken Livingstone's last week, the interview will happen at 6pm. The hosts are Eddie Nestor and Kath Melandri.

Boris Johnson has been challenged many times about his remarks about Africans (piccaninnies etc) and on one occasion told the interviewer he was sick of talking about it. However, nobody has challenged him about his record as editor of the Spectator. In response to the July 2005 bombings and to the riots in Paris and elsewhere later that year, he printed articles only from non-Muslims hostile to Islam: himself, Mark Steyn and Patrick Sookhdeo.

In particular, there was this one from Patrick Sookhdeo, on 30th July, this one, by the same author on 12th November 2005 after the riots, and this one by Johnson himself, published 16th July (the most offensive sections are on page 5):

Chief issues:

(1) "To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia -- fear of Islam -- seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke. Judged purely on its scripture -- to say nothing of what is preached in the mosques -- it is the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers. As the killer of Theo Van Gogh told his victim's mother this week in a Dutch courtroom, he could not care for her, could not sympathise, because she was not a Muslim." (Johnson, 16th July) So he generalises the extreme attitude of one murderer in Amsterdam and assumes that we all might think this way.

(2) In "The Myth of Moderate Islam", Sookhdeo alleges that one can pick and mix from the Qur'an to find peaceful or bellicose verses depending on what suits one. He alleges that the bellicose verses abrogate the peaceful ones as they were revealed later. He also suggested that the bombers might have been following a mainstream version of Islam rather than an extreme one.

(3) Sookhdeo, in the November article, claimed:

"Islam is a territorial religion. Any space once gained is considered sacred and should belong to the umma for ever. Any lost space must be regained -- even by force if necessary. Migrant Muslim communities in the West are constantly engaged in sacralising new areas -- first the inner private spaces of their homes and mosques, and latterly whole neighbourhoods (e.g., Birmingham) by means of marches and processions. So the ultimate end of sacred space theology is autonomy for Muslims of the UK under Islamic law."

The claim about marches and processions is a plain falsehood, since the streets marched on become normal streets within hours of the march ending. On top of this, only Bareilawis march for religious reasons, namely mawlid, which is not a central part of Islam. Only dedicated mosques are sacred space. So Boris allowed someone to print falsehoods about Muslims in order to incite alarm and hostility to the whole community.

This man must be challenged! The number for the station is 020 7224 2000; email eddieandkath at bbc.co.uk or text 07786 200 949.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The two faces of Amis - Features, Books - The Independent

Johann Hari interviews Martin Amis ([1], [2]) for the first time since the controversy over his "adumbrations" to Ginny Dougary. He tells us that he had three Muslim girlfriends, one of whom was just beginning to Westernise and whom he broke up with after just one kiss (another was South African and had no problems in that area). He loves his "thrillingly multiracial" city. However, Hari reminds him of his endorsement of Mark Steyn's rantings about Muslims somehow outbreeding others everywhere except America, and Amis really has no defence. Whatever you think about Hari, it's a very revealing read.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Michael Nazir-Ali, bishop of Rochester (previously: [1], [2], [3]), has been given another bit of space in the Sunday Telegraph to write an Islamophobic article (also see front-page feature here). This time, he's alleging that Muslims have set out "'no-go' areas where adherence to this ideology has become a mark of acceptability". This is not the first time a publication of the Telegraph group has made this accusation: it is part of Patrick Sookhdeo's stock-in-trade of accusations. Nazir-Ali today claimed that this resurgence of "the ideology of Islamic extremism" accompanied the loss of "confidence in the Christian vision which underlay most of the achievements and values of the culture" and a "novel philosophy of 'multiculturalism'". (More: Osama Saeed, Abu Eesa, Kashif @ Peace, Bruv, Suspect Paki.)

Continue reading "Why Rochester is not a no-go area for Michael Nazir-Ali" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

In early 2007, a one-horse town in Quebec passed a code of conduct for new immigrants, particularly Muslims it seems, which in its intial drafting (PDF; some of this is said to have been removed from the final document, although the original is still on the municipality's website) included demands that newcomers refrain from circumcising, stoning to death, burning alive or throwing acid at women, and insists that they accept that women may sign cheques and drive, and that people drink and that trees are decorated towards the end of the year. This was apparently a reaction to the supposed excessive accommodations made to Muslims and other minorities, such as the orthodox Jews for whom gym windows were blanked out in Montréal. While many municipalities in Quebec rejected the Herouxville code, a further example of French Canadian Islamophobia appeared last month, with three major labour organisations in the province calling for a "charter of secularism", similar to the province's charter for the French language, which among other things bans public servants, including teachers, wearing garments such as headscarves which give their religion away.

Continue reading "The straw men of Herouxville" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Guardian Unlimited: To believe in a European utopia before Muslims arrived is delusional

Gary Younge (regular Guardian columnist on race issues) on the tendency of the European chattering classes to ascribe all sorts of negative characteristics to Muslims, without looking at their own tendency to manifest these things. These include anti-semitism in Germany and riots in France.

I wasn't aware of the incident of Ashkan Dejagah, the German footballer of Iranian origin who refused to play in Israel on the grounds that it could bar him from future entry to Iran. Younge defends him from the charge of anti-Semitism, but fails to take up the idea of whether his reason for refusing was actually true. It is a fact that several Middle Eastern countries bar people from entering if their passports show an Israeli stamp; Dejagah could easily have been banned from returning to his country of origin if he was no longer a citizen, or arrested on any future attempt to enter Iran if he was. I would also add that the Germans do not regard Jews as a threat anymore precisely because their numbers were vastly reduced. Like the Jews before them, the Muslims are now the country's most visible religious minority, like the Jews mostly white and, if not ethnically homogenous, then in large part "not German" if born there.

(By the way, I do wish the Guardian would make available an online version of their comment pieces which does not feature the inane and bigoted users' comments. The comment thread on this particular article starts with an anti-Muslim jibe.)

Posted by Indigo Jo at 8:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Technorati Tags: christopher hitchens, martin amis, ronan bennett

Today, the Guardian printed a defence of Martin Amis, in response to Ronan Bennett's deconstruction of Amis's anti-Muslim remarks in his interview with Ginny Dougary. Entitled Martin Amis is no racist, the article took up the bottom half of two pages, with the top half empty apart from the headline. It seemed that a big gun had to be brought in to defend Amis - someone of Amis's own supposed stature - but the arguments were astoundingly flabby.

Continue reading "A "big gun" fires blanks for Amis" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Ronan Bennett on Martin Amis's threatening remarks about Muslims | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited

Ronan Bennett takes apart the attacks made by Martin Amis on the Muslim community, including that in the Ginny Dougary interview which were the subject of his dispute with Terry Eagleton. Among the issues discussed is the similarity of Amis's remarks about Muslims outbreeding people of other religions and of none with earlier expressions of bigotry, the fallacy of the facile claims that Islamophobia is not racist, the attempt by Amis to excuse his prejudices by admitting "little impulses, urges and atavisms now and then", apparently signalling to his audience that he might share them, and the reason why Muslims express anger and distress at undiscriminating (if disguised) attacks on us and our religion.

I find Amis's "adumbrations" remark interesting, because it seems to be an attempt to impress the public with his literary prowess by using long words on them. I've always thought myself a well-read type and people at school used to suggest that I had a "doctorate in English" when I was 13, but I've never heard this term - Merriam-Webster (you have to pay to search the OED) defines "adumbrate" as "to foreshadow vaguely" or "to suggest, disclose, or outline partially", so there you go.

Anyway, other expressions of bigotry would not be excused with these explanations. If someone had been mugged by a black man in the street and thereafter delivered a tirade about how f***ing n***ers are ruining the whole place and that the police should come down on them like a tonne of bricks until they stop robbing people, most people would rebuke him for it and some would dismiss him as a racist who showed what he really thought about Black people as soon as he was under pressure, regardless of how many Black friends he had. There is not much difference between this and Amis's remarks on Muslims and it's disturbing that the British intelligentisia did not see this.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Technorati Tags: policy exchange, extremism, wahhabism, denis maceoin, anthony browne, charles moore, mosques, deobandis

A report was published yesterday by the "Policy Exchange" alleging that so-called hate literature is widely available in British mosques (PDF), many of it subsidised by Saudi Arabia. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, this was published on the same day as a Saudi state visit. The report is written by Denis MacEoin, on whose letters to various newspapers I have commented here in the past. He is well-known for having anti-Islamic attitudes, having written letters to newspapers opposing Muslim girls' rights to wear hijab and on one occasion alleging that "multiculturalism gets you Northern Ireland", rather than invading someone's country and gerrymandering a state so that your planted minority can rule over a section of the majority population in that country. (More: Osama Saeed, Inayat Bunglawala, Sticks & Carrots, Gabriele Marranci.)

Continue reading ""Hate books" that aren't" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 2:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

I came across a short film produced by the so-called David Horowitz Freedom Center, narrated by Nonie Darwish who is an anti-Islamic harpy who features on Townhall.com and a number of other American "conservative" websites. Entitled "The Violent Oppression of Woman (sic) in Islam", it consists of a laundry-list of the oppressions women face in various Muslim countries, or in the words of its promo article at FrontPageMag.com, "the fascist portions of the Islamic world -- arcing like a crescent from sub-Saharan Africa, through Iran, to north-central Asia and reaching into hidden pockets of the United States". (HT: Islamophobia Watch; update 23rd Oct 1859 BST: the video has been withdrawn by YouTube for "terms of use violations", alhamdu lillah.)

The film is basically a snuff movie, showing a public execution of a veiled woman by the Taliban, several dead bodies including the decapitated body of a young girl who was supposedly the victim of an honour killing, mobile phone footage of a public stoning, and indecently-exposed pictures of victims of female circumcision. This last shows her lack of genuine concern for the victim; I wonder how she would like it if somebody took pictures of her with her genitalia exposed and published them on YouTube? Perhaps someone could ask her, if they show it at one of their college appearances - she's speaking at UC Berkeley today at 7pm. (I'm not linking to the film itself, because such pictures of children - as I suspect this victim is, because the operation is not performed on grown women - are illegal to produce or distribute in the UK. However, the Front Page article has a link to it.)

Continue reading "Horowitz and Darwish's snuff movie" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Rebuking obnoxious views is not just a personality kink

This is an article by Terry Eagleton, who has been involved in a public argument with the novelist Martin Amis over the virulently Islamophobic tone of an interview he gave to Ginny Dougary in the Times in September last year. Having read accounts of the "spat" around the media and the blogs, I had no idea quite how extreme his suggestions were (hat tip: Islamophobia Watch):

"... the only thing the Islamists like about modernity is modern weapons. And they're going to get better and better at that. They're also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they'll be a third. Italy's down to 1.1 child per woman. We're just going to be outnumbered.... There's a definite urge - don't you have it? - to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order'. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation - further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs - well, they've got to stop their children killing people."

Here is a quote from the Eagleton article in yesterday's Guardian:

"Amis was not recommending these tactics for criminals or suspects only. He was proposing them as punitive measures against all Muslims, guilty or innocent. The idea was that by hounding and humiliating them as a whole, they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man's law. There seems something mildly defective about this logic.... "Suicide bombers must be stopped forcibly in their tracks to protect the innocent. But there is something rather stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment."

I wonder if Jasper Gerard, who in last Sunday's Observer (which has become the house journal of the Nick Cohen tendency on the left) alleged that Eagleton was of the type of academic who was solely employed for their Marxism and that Eagleton was "furious that Amis Jr attacks radical Muslims", will eat a bit of humble pie?

Posted by Indigo Jo at 5:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Bath Chronicle: Yobs attack mosque in Bath

Police have issued a CCTV image of two yobs who entered a mosque in Bath (England) on 11th July this year and urinated on worshippers' belongings (strangely, none of the news reports ([1], [2]) have mentioned that this happened nearly two months ago). The press release is here and the full-size picture (much clearer than that in the Bath Chronicle) here. (Hat tip: Islamophobia Watch.)

(Naturally, the BNP have already started using it to their advantage, accusing the police of issuing the appeal just to curry favour with the local Muslim community.)

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Today's Daily Mail carried a letter from Qasim Omar, a former Test cricketer, which mentioned that he had been attacked recently, with stones thrown at him by youths in the street, apparently in response to the terrorist attacks in Glasgow and London. He appealed to the Muslims in the UK not to undertake acts of terrorism because it would give the religion a bad name, and informed us that he was a British citizen and had pledged his total loyalty to the UK. (The same letters page also carried a letter from a half-Libyan, half-English woman who said she had also been attacked in response to terrorism, even though she was personally against it, and was giving up on the UK because of the disgusting behaviour of its people.)

Continue reading "No excuses for revenge terrorism" »

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)