Indigo Jo Blogs

Ben Macintyre wrote yesterday in the Times that, despite the occasional talk of a Muslim “fifth column” in Britain, there has been no scare remotely comparable to those surrounding German spies in the early years of World War II and the “Red Scares” of the 1950s:

The contrast with an earlier fifth column scare could not be more acute, or more telling. In the run-up to the Second World War, Britain was seized by a spy panic of astonishing virulence, inflamed by the press and politicians. Fifth columnists, terrorists and saboteurs were spotted everywhere, and nowhere; so many reports of suspicious doings flooded in to MI5 that the organisation came close to collapse. “There is a well-defined class of people prone to spy mania,” wrote Winston Churchill, who was not immune to the mania himself. “War is the heyday of these worthy folk.” Many reports were bogus and xenophobic; some were hilarious. One avid amateur spy-catcher reported seeing a man with a “typically Prussian neck”, and Robert Baden-Powell, the original Scout master, insisted you could spot a German spy from the way he walked. The spies were said to be poisoning chocolate, recruiting mental patients in asylums to act as a suicide squad, and sending agents into the countryside disguised as nuns, butcher’s boys and women hitch-hikers. One secret service officer became convinced that spies were communicating by leaving empty cartons of milk and other detritus in public places — a theory that was, in every way, a load of rubbish.

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Osama has been doing a good job, ma sha Allah, of keeping up with the story of Misbah Iram AKA “Molly Campbell” ([1], [2]), a combination of her nickname and her mother’s boyfriend’s name. Sarfraz Manzoor has an article in today’s Guardian media supplement (for some reason not online, but Islamophobia Watch reproduced it) about how what he calls the white media got it wrong - they automatically assumed that the girl had been abducted and that what awaited her in Pakistan was a false marriage, and they could not understand why someone would want to live in Pakistan rather than the Western Isles.

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In reply to last week’s Guardian article purporting to give a glimpse “behind the scenes” at the supposedly secretive Tablighi Jama’at, Emdad Rahman posts his observations:

Paul Lewis’ article contained a number of factual errors. Tabligh is not influenced by Wahhabism, and Saudi Arabia is one of the countries that does not support the effort, either morally or financially. Tabligh is not a formal organisation and amazingly there is not one paid member or participant anywhere in the world. The bedrock of the effort is based purely on the participant utilising their own health, wealth and time in the pursuit of moral and spiritual development. For many years some Muslims in the UK and abroad have accused Tablighis of being too passive and being out of touch with reality (with regards to current affairs) because of their shunning of all forms of politics.

The Thursday evening gatherings mentioned have been taking place in the UK since the 1950’s and this is not a new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination. The number of attendees and the popularity of the activities of the effort have increased ten fold, but the peaceful message of self rectification ant the call towards good remains very much the same.

Well worth reading (hat tip: Islamophobia Watch.)

BBC NEWS | UK | ‘Porn-link’ safety advert banned

This is a story about how an anti-child-porn website, ThinkUKnow, was advertised on the radio, leading one lady to type what she heard - thinkyouknow - and it led her to an actual pornographic site!

When I first read the story I thought “thinkuknow” was pronounced “Think UK Now”, so I wondered how she’d have typed “you” rather than U. It seems the people behind this website thought everybody had caught onto the “txt speak” thing whereby letters represent words they sound like, but this woman obviously hadn’t. Probably within a few years this fiasco will have made it into some media studies or business studies textbooks alongside “nothing sucks like Electrolux” (a vacuum cleaner).

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John Ware, the guy behind the anti-MCB documentary last year and a more recent one attacking charity support for Hamas-run schools, was interviewed for yesterday’s Guardian Media supplement (free registration required):

He says he is one of five journalists - the others are Martin Bright, the political editor of the New Statesman, Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail, the Observer’s Nick Cohen and the Times writer-turned-Tory MP, Michael Gove - who have been labelled by the MCB as “being in the vanguard of Islamophobia in this country”. “We don’t meet up like witches to discuss it,” jokes Ware. “We’ve all come to this view independently that - potentially - politics and Islam is an incendiary mix.”

He first attracted the wrath of Muslim groups after his Panorama film last year accused the Muslim Council of Britain of being in “a state of denial” about the scale of Islamic extremism in the UK. The MCB hit back by accusing the BBC of pro-Israel bias and dismissing the programme as “deeply unfair” and “a witch hunt”. If Ware, whose citation when he won the James Cameron Prize in 2004 praised his “moral vision and professional integrity”, is perturbed by the onslaught he has faced, he certainly does not show it. “This is just rhetoric and quite a lot of it is abusive rhetoric,” he says of his detractors. “They are aggressive and too rarely do they engage on the facts. In our programme last year, we manifestly did not accuse the MCB of being extremist. I don’t think the MCB are extremist. I know that their leadership is appalled by 7/7. What we said was that they didn’t completely ‘get’ the origins and the roots of extremism and that some of their own affiliates were kind of nursery slopes for extremism. And for them to suggest that extremism lives in a vacuum and doesn’t have some sort of connection with teaching and history is absurd.”

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