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10 years have passed since the greatest terrorist atrocity in history. A decade is a long time. In a decade our kids look different, they pass from one stage of life to another.
In a decade, we become experienced in whatever we do professionally. We garner credibility and experience which grants us wisdom and we even may reconsider some our our past follies in light of the new experiences. We grow, we enlighten. The alternative is aging bitterly, succumbing to dogmatic entropy where self reflection is absent and the blame game is ever growing according to the new Democratic Party
The Guardian didn’t grow, didn’t evolve.
The Guardian re-asserted its defense of Islamic grievances, its dislike of any effort made by America to counter the terror and the ideology which produces the terror, Islamism.
As the anniversary approached they rolled out their worse offenders. Seumas Milne was back defending his post 911 essay which blamed the attacks on the West.
They also invited Inayat Bunglawala to contribute to an anniversary piece. This guy called Osama a “good Muslim” not long before the attacks and has been representing an organization which not only defended terrorists but also supplied the ideological indoctrination to British Muslims, the MCB. 
Mehdi Hasan was also staged once more, lecturing us about tolerance despite a dozen videos outing him as a hateful fanatic and bigot who calls non Muslims dogs and cattle.
Or George Galloway who is nothing more than the 21 Century version of Oswald Mosley, being the propaganda agent of a hostile regime, one, like the one Mosley promoted, planning another (or as they would say the first and only) final solution to the Jewish problem.
I stumbled upon a post in CIF by Edward Said which appeared on Sept 16th 2001. Edward Said is the guru of the so called progressive left when it comes to dealing with the affairs of the Middle East, Islam and the supposedly American / Western/ Zionist inspired clash of civilizations.
Said was a great influence on Barack Obama and he embodies the Guardian World View where Israel, its lobbies and American capitalism are the causes of terrorism emanating from an “oppressed” Muslim street which is a victim of imperialism, Zionism and American capitalism.
Obama removed references to terrorism and radical Islam from the 911 ceremonies.
Said wrote in 2001:
You’d think that ‘America’ was a sleeping giant rather than a superpower almost constantly at war, or in some sort of conflict, all over the Islamic domains. Osama bin Laden’s name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any his tory he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funnelled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is going on, an imperial power injured at home for the first time, pursuing its interests systematically in what has become a suddenly reconfigured geography of conflict, without clear borders, or visible actors. Manichaean symbols and apocalyptic scenarios are bandied about with future consequences and rhetorical restraint thrown to the winds.
Rational understanding of the situation is what is needed now, not more drum-beating. George Bush and his team clearly want the latter, not the former. Yet to most people in the Islamic and Arab worlds the official US is synonymous with arrogant power, known for its sanctimoniously munificent support not only of Israel but of numerous repressive Arab regimes, and its inattentiveness even to the possibility of dialogue with secular movements and people who have real grievances. Anti-Americanism in this context is not based on a hatred of modernity or technology-envy: it is based on a narrative of concrete interventions, specific depredations and, in the cases of the Iraqi people’s suffering under US-imposed sanctions and US support for the 34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Israel is now cynically exploiting the American catastrophe by intensifying its military occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. Political rhetoric in the US has overridden these things by flinging about words like ‘terrorism’ and ‘freedom’ whereas, of course, such large abstractions have mostly hidden sordid material interests, the influence of the oil, defence and Zionist lobbies now consolidating their hold on the entire Middle East, and an age-old religious hostility to (and ignorance of) ‘Islam’ that takes new forms every day.
These paragraphs say it all. As if no other creative writer ever existed at the Guardian. Said is the prophet and the rest of the contributors must only repeat versions of his visions.
Most writings on this conflict are, in one way or another versions of this narrative. This is the Hadith the Guardinistas quote day after day. Like Pakistani children sitting on the floors of Madrassas, they chant these passages only changing the order by which lines follow each other.
America, arrogant, Zionism, lobbies, oil, Palestine, children of Iraq, children of Afghanistan (no mention of these children under Saddam and the Taliban), imperialism, colonialism, capitalism. The next day its Israel, America, imperialism, arrogant, Palestine, lobbies, Iraq, Afghanistan….you get the idea…
As if in a trance or in some Pavlovian experiment, these ideas and theories persist despite the world turning over to new chapters of history.
A decade has passed, yet no maturity, no self reflection, no remorse, no rethinking. The text and its dogma are sacred. Like the Koran which cannot be amended, re-interpreted as that would be sacrilege. The Guardian is like the Muslim street. Never would it re-assess its views or its mistakes or see things even in a slightly different light. It merely re-asserts its demands and view which blame everything on the civilization under attack by its co-religionists.
In this decade we saw more terror attacks. London, Madrid, Bali, Fort Hood, the attacks on Synagogues in Turkey, the attempts at more mayhem in the skies using liquid bombs and plots against the NY subway and the Frankfurt airport. We saw more “militants” in their videos calling for the world wide caliphate, sharia and the re-conquest of Spain and Palestine under the Ummah. Yet at the Guardian the attackers are us. We are the colonizers, we are the zionists and oppressors. No facts, no history will change that.
A religious dogma is defined as an unchangeable set of ideas transcending the tracks of time. They survive despite and not because of the changes in time. At the Guardian we are dealing with a religious dogma. A dogma which infused the Saidian version of history with the sour grapes hatred of capitalism in light of the fall of the communist block. The total rejection of the totalitarian imposed righteousness was the year 1989. The Guardian still didn’t acknowledge that. It still tries to depict the yearning for freedom by Eastern Europeans as a result of imperialist plots drawn up in the back rooms of MI5 or the CIA. In Islamism they found another righteous totalitarianism. Another totalitarianism which claims to fight for the oppressed. Though just like the USSR in its days, it is the most imperialist of ideologies around today. The Guardian is the place where atheists can become Islamists.
Just like during the Cold War when Anglo Saxons have proudly allied with the nastiest Russian Pan Slavic nationalism (Stalinism as others may know it) at the Guardian today we see Anglo Saxon Islamists. People who are not Muslims but subscribe to the ideological goals and myths of Islamism. Ignorant of the texts upon which their new allies founded their hateful vision, the Guardinistas fight on for their cause like the loyal little Communists under the pay of Moscow during the Cold War, attacking the institutions and ideas of liberty and freedom.
They merely see it through their own selfish prisms which have been formulated during the Cold War or during their spoiled middle class childhoods where disappointment in a selfish demand resulted in a nihilistic hatred of the one denying the demands.
“What I cannot have I will destroy” is the real motivation behind the “modern leftist”.
A decade has passed since 911. There are soldiers today in Iraq and Afghanistan who were children on that day. They played with toys, watched cartoons and wondered why their parents were glued to the TV for so many days following that evil morning. Today they are fighting the war which was launched by these attacks. They have grown, they have matured and they are aware of what we are facing.
Yet at the Guardian -
We saw more hate, more obfuscation and lies. Some blatantly repeated like Simon Jenkinswho claimed Palestinian solidarity with America on 911 despite decades of video evidence showing Palestinians handing out sweets and chanting in euphoria learning of the fall of the WTC. We see the same dogma not rejected or even questioned, but alive and well, ready to poison the intellectual space for another decade. In that decade kids born in 2001 will be adults. Those who lived through it will be even more wiser.
I fear that the Guardian staff will still be like those Pakistani children chanting on the floors of Madrassas repeating the same passages: America, Arrogant, Zionism, Lobbies, Capitalism, Imperialism, racism and Palestine…
This essay was written by Melanie Phillips and published in The JC
For a moment I thought it was a Purim spiel. The Guardian devoted an entire story last weekend to the claim that I was being investigated by both the Press Complaints Commission and the police. The Bedfordshire police.
My crime apparently lay in what I had written on my Spectator blog about the massacre of Udi and Ruth Fogel and their three children, 11-year-old Yoav, four-year-old Elad and three-month-old Hadas, who had their throats cut at home in the Samarian neighbourhood of Itamar while most of them were asleep.
I had written about the moral depravity of the Arabs who almost certainly committed this atrocity – and also the savagery of the Palestinian Authority whose institutions incite hatred of Jews and the murder of Israelis, and which honours such murderers by naming streets and squares after them.
The complaint was that I had thus accused every single Arab in the world of being savage and depraved. This was totally absurd. As was obvious from the context, I was referring specifically to those Arabs behind the atrocity and those who incite and glorify such deeds
The complainants also airbrushed out of the picture the unstoppable torrent of deranged, Nazi-style vilification of Jews which pours out of the Arab and Muslim world and which fuels the genocidal hysteria behind such attacks. All of this, plus the fact that the Arab world has been murdering Jews in the land of Israel for more than nine decades in order to drive them out, means that to refer to “Arab moral depravity” is more than justified.
Read the rest of the essay, here.
Oh! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive!
(Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, 1808)
The recent publicity surrounding the acceptance of funding from the Libyan dictatorship by the London School of Economics, and the subsequent resignation of the university’s Director, brings once more into the spotlight an issue which has largely remained under the radar of public attention, despite the fact that there has been ample information on the subject available for some time.
A full two years prior to these latest dramatic events, the Centre for Social Cohesion published an extensive report entitled ‘A Degree of Influence’ which detailed foreign funding of British academic establishments and the consequences of accepting donations from some of the world’s less free, and frequently human rights abusing, regimes.
As stated in the report, areas of concern include:
“Censorship of issues pertaining to Islam – There are examples of some aspects of issues dealing with Islam that universities have chosen not to discuss. Members of university staff have publicly stifled discussion on how terrorist networks are funded, and there has been an occasion where a university has been forced to censor a Saudi artist’s work for fear of offending Muslims.”
Attempts to influence the teaching of strategically important subjects – Several undemocratic foreign states seek to influence the teaching of subjects designated as ‘strategically important’ by giving money to universities. This has serious consequences for academia and for the UK as a whole. The most alarming cases examined in this report show university management committees having their personnel selected and appointed by the donors.
Human rights – Universities are accepting money from un-democratic states with poor human rights records. This lends respectability to these regimes, and at the same time raises moral and ethical questions for universities that accept such money.
Propaganda/PR – Through donations, foreign states and individuals are using British universities as vehicles for international diplomacy and are attempting to cast their nation in a favourable light.
Some of the universities named as recipients of foreign funding in the report include Oxford (not least the Middle East Centre at St. Antony’s College), Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Exeter (Arab and Islamic Studies), The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and the London School of Economics. Neither is this phenomenon a new one: the report shows that in some establishments, foreign funding began as early as the 1970s.
In light of the fact that The Guardian quite frequently commissions opinion pieces for its ‘Comment is Free’ website from British academics, I thought that it would be interesting to see how many of its columnists and contributors on the subject of the Middle East are employed by or studied at universities which have accepted donations from Middle East dictatorships with dismal human rights records. The following list is not exhaustive, but it surprised even me.
Oxford: Abdel Razzaq Takriti, Hussein Agha, Avi Shlaim, Seumas Milne, Tariq Ramadan, Karma Nablusi, Daphna Baram, Brian Klug.
Cambridge: Ben White.
Edinburgh: Rachel Shabi.
Exeter: Ghada Karmi, Mick Dumper.
SOAS: Gilbert Achar, Arshin Adib Moghaddam, Soumaya Ghannoushi.
LSE: Victoria Brittain.
Although the Centre for Social Cohesion does not cover the subject of foreign patronage of student bodies in the above linked report, it is notable that ‘Comment is Free’ has also provided a platform for officials of the ‘Federation of Student Islamic Societies’ (FOSIS) such as Faisal Hanjraand Nabil Ahmed. FOSIS is a Muslim Brotherhood-linked organization, as shown in an earlier report by the Centre for Social Cohesion entitled ‘Islam on Campus’.
Whilst it should be theoretically relatively easy for most readers of ‘Comment is Free’ to recognize the fact that the opinion pieces on the subject of the Middle East by contributors such as Abdel Bari Atwan, Inayat Bunglawala, Tariq Ali or Azam Tamimi may be somewhat lacking in objectivity given their records and associations, the public may be less inclined to question the motives of seemingly neutral academics from prestigious British universities.
The LSE’s ‘Ghaddafi-gate’ will hopefully open the eyes of the public to the fact that a symbiotic relationship exists between various Middle Eastern despots and several other British academic institutions too, and that the Guardian is facilitating the seepage of purchased influence from beyond university walls into the realm of general public opinion by commissioning articles from some of these academics whose objectivity must now be scrutinized as a result of the choices made by their institutions.
The bottom line, both for the human rights abusing dictatorships and for the Guardian, is to mould political opinion and influence policy decisions within Western society. How disappointing it is to see that so many once esteemed British universities have allowed themselves to become pawns in that tangled web of grubby propaganda.
Besides being pretty unforgettable in itself, the name of regular ‘Comment is Free’ contributor Inayat Bunglawala will be familiar to anyone who has read Ed Husain’s 2007 book ‘The Islamist’.
In the book Husain describes his associations with the Islamic Society of Britain (ISB) and in particular, one of its members, with whom he attended weekly meetings.
“Inayat introduced me to the murabbi, or instructor, a middle-aged, clean-shaven Palestinian called Abu Luqman….
…..Abu Luqman told us that, during his youth, he had been a student of the firebrand Palestinian cleric Shaikh Ahmed Yasin. One of the reasons these gatherings were so valued was because we believed Abu Luqman was a true Palestinian, trained by Shaikh Yasin and a member of Hamas. Abu Luqman’s deep and powerful hatred of Israelis and Jews was unmistakable. Many time he promised destruction of the state of Israel and the return of Muslim control of the Holy Land. I sat there and accepted this. The Palestinian hatred of the Jews, as occupiers of Palestine, that I had detected in Nabhani was equally strong in Abu Luqman. Neither Inayat nor myself questioned any of this. Jew bashing was an acceptable part of the Islamist curriculum though not necessarily accepted throughout the ISB…
….Among Islamists I was a ‘brother’. I was not to dispute our unquestioned perceptions: hatred of Jews, Hindus, Americans, gays, the subordination of women…..
…every Wednesday night Inayat would pick me up and drop me off after a session of Koran recitation, religious discussion, anti-Semitism, and good food.”
Ed Husain may have moved on since those days in the latter half of the 1990s, but Inayat Bunglawala remains one of many who have embraced that peculiarly British form of Islamism which has evolved – due in no small part to the naivety and negligence of the British government and society – over the past few decades.
British Islamism is able to function and grow largely unfettered within broader society in part because of the fact that many of its proponents are British born, educated, eloquent people who understand the system and know how to use it to their advantage. Without such attributes, they would have been unable to achieve the level of entryism into government-funded think-tanks and commissions, universities, community organisations, political bodies, media and other mainstream institutions which is all too evident today.
But alongside their ability to play the system like a virtuoso with a violin, British Islamists continue by definition to remain loyal to an ideology which rejects many of the basic values of the society in which they function.
Inayat Bunglawala is a prime example of this phenomenon. Despite his values being revealed as anything but liberal once one scratches the surface, he is provided with a platform to spread his views by the Guardian and other British newspapers because he makes the ‘right’ noises on specific subjects such as democracy. As media secretary for the Muslim Council of Britain – a self-appointed body which has been the recipient of considerable amounts of public money – Bunglawala is part of an organisation which tells the British public what it wants to hear on subjects such as the 7/7 terror attacks, but at the same time objects to Holocaust Memorial Day, campaigned against the law on the glorification of terrorism on the grounds that it was “unfairly targeting Muslims and stifling legitimate debate” and opposed the publication of the ‘Danish cartoons’.
The legacy of Bunglawala’s days with the ISB is all the more evident when one examines some of his own writings. In fact, one could almost feel sorry for a man who is so obviously consumed by an obsession with Jews, Zionists and ‘Jewish power’ that he appears to see them behind every tree. Nowhere is this pathology more apparent than in Bunglawala’s virulent opposition of many years’ standing to one journalist and writer to whom he appears to relate as though she were some kind of evil arch-enemy from a Bond movie.
Here is Bunglawala writing about Melanie Phillips’ review of Ed Husain’s book:
“Upon the book’s official launch, there appeared a number of very positive reviews of Husain’s book from the likes of Melanie Phillips, David Cohen of the London Evening Standard and David Aaronovitch of The Times.
Melanie Phillips, in particular, was especially fulsome in her praise:
“Muslims like Husain need our support, encouragement and protection… ‘The Islamist’ should be sent to every politician at Westminster, put on the desk of every counter-intelligence officer and thrust under the supercilious nose of every journalist who maunders on about ‘Islamophobia’”
Phillips is, of course, renowned for her pro-Israel tirades, her anti-Muslim bigotry and her loopy belief that Iraq really did have WMD’s except that they managed to spirit them away to Syria just in time so that the Americans could not find them. Now what would cause such a staunch Zionist like her to display strong support for Husain’s book?”
Oh dear! All those Jewish names approving of Husain’s book: very suspicious in the weird world inhabited by Inayat Bunglawala.
“Still, it will no doubt be welcomed by the warmongering sections of the present government and perhaps even help explain how the book came to receive such generous plaudits from Melanie Phillips and Co.”
Admittedly, the prospect of delving into Bunglawala’s mind in order to try to understand just what gets him going about Melanie Phillips is not an attractive one, but the background provided by Ed Husain perhaps provides some clues.
Ms. Phillips is, of course, anything but the personification of a subordinated woman. She is highly intelligent, articulate and even delightfully feisty. One may agree or disagree with her ideas, but one cannot deny that she knows how to communicate them and is not afraid to do so. She is also a proud Jewish Zionist. Not only does she decline to conform to the prevailing politically correct social mores and the English way of ‘not rocking the boat’, but (horror of horrors!) she refuses to be ashamed of her beliefs, her identity and her opinions. In addition, Ms. Phillips is also a very well-known and highly successful journalist, writer and broadcaster.
For Inayat Bunglawala she must be the living proof of the fiction of ‘Jewish control of the media’ with which he was indoctrinated in his youth.
However, it would take nothing to persuade Bunglawala of that even if Melanie Phillips did not exist. In an article well worth a re-read written in 2007, Christopher Hitchens described Bunglawala as follows.
“…Blair’s government has appeased leading Muslim apologists by inviting them to join “commissions” to investigate the 7/7 attacks, and thus awarding them credibility well beyond their deserts. A preposterous and sinister individual named Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain and a man with a public record of support for Osama bin Laden, was made a convener of Blair’s task force on extremism despite his stated belief that the BBC and the rest of the media are “Zionist controlled.”
By this, Hitchens is referring to Bunglawala’s infamous ‘Tribe of Judah’ remark in which he stated that:
“The chairman of Carlton Communications is Michael Green of the Tribe of Judah. He has joined an elite club whose members include fellow Jews Michael Grade and Alan Yentob…[They are] close friends… so that’s what they mean by a ‘free media’.”
Such a ridiculous – if not downright medieval – statement is infinitely less incongruous in 21st century Britain if one considers the figures by whom people such as Inayat Bunglawala and those of his ilk are influenced – their role models.
According to The JC, quoting the Telegraph:
“In January 1993, Mr Bunglawala wrote a letter to Private Eye, the satirical magazine, in which he called the blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman “courageous” – just a month before he bombed the World Trade Center in New York. After Rahman’s arrest in July that year, Mr Bunglawala said that it was probably only because of his “calling on Muslims to fulfil their duty to Allah and to fight against oppression and oppressors everywhere”.
“Five months before 9/11, Mr Bunglawala also circulated writings of Osama bin Laden, who he regarded as a “freedom fighter”, to hundreds of Muslims in Britain.”
And here is Bunglawala employing his regular Guardian slot to chastise the British Home Office for excluding Islamist hate preachers from the UK- all in the name of ‘freedom of expression’.
Of course the type of preachers whom Bunglawala so earnestly champions are precisely the sort of people who lay down the racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic and misogynistic ideologies so prevalent among Islamists, but his professed enthusiasm for freedom of expression appears to come to an abrupt end when it is employed by a female, Jewish, Zionist, British journalist to describe the murderers of three Israeli children in a particular manner.
Then – and only then – Bunglawala feigns dismay and offence and promptly trots off to the Press Complaints Commission and the Bedfordshire police to lodge complaints against Melanie Phillips, with the Guardian in tow.
I am quite confident that Melanie Phillips is perfectly capable of looking after herself on this and other issues. I am also hopeful that the Press Complaints Commission and the police will view Inayat Bunglawala’s complaint with the necessary gravity it demands. As for Bunglawala himself, whilst he (like many who share his ideologies) is undoubtedly a product of a combination of British inertia and apathy mixed with unrestricted Islamist indoctrination, one cannot but stand in awe of this latest display of his remarkable ability to deftly exploit the system his ideology seeks to destroy.
What is disturbing about this incident is the Guardian’s continuing role in accommodating Islamists such as Bunglawala who do nothing to hide their disdain for the liberal values which are the footings of British society. That Bunglawala and his colleagues at the MCB identify with racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic and misogynistic role models such as Qaradawi or Zakir Naik should no longer come as a surprise to anyone in the UK. That the ‘world’s leading liberal voice’ should continue to provide such people with a platform which consolidates their claims to mainstream legitimacy should.
However, as Ms. Phillips herself has observed, we appear to live in a ‘world turned upside down’.
This is cross posted by Fraser Nelson at The Spectator
It’s a funny old world. I have now been contacted by two journalists informing me that Bedfordshire Police are investigating The Spectator. Why? Because of the Melanie Philips blog where she referred to the “moral depravity” of “the Arabs” who killed the Fogel family in Israel. CoffeeHousers can judge for themselves if they agree or disagree with her language and views – but should this be illegal? The Guardian has written this story up, claiming The Spectator is being investigated by the Press Complaints Commission. This is untrue. The PCC tell me that a complaint has been lodged, but that’s as far as it has gone. They investigate only if they believe there is a serious prospect that their code has been breached, and it hasn’t. Our blogs, as well as the magazine, adhere to the PCC code.
But all this raises an interesting point about freedom of speech. It baffles me why the Bedfordshire Police – who presumably have plenty real crime to solve – should have to sit down with a print-out of Melanie Philips’ blog and decide whether to prosecute The Spectator for printing her remarks. It’s not their fault: laws have been passed which means that (for example) Tony Blair faced a six-month investigation from the North Wales Police when they read in Lance Price’s memoirs that he had been rude about the Welsh. In a way, I felt Blair deserved it – because it was under him that such daft laws crept their way into the system. Under him that Britain started to become a country where people are prosecuted for what they say, rather than what they do.
Just over a year ago, the Crown Prosecution Service put out a statement saying that they had decided, on balance, not to prosecute Jan Moir for her remarks about Stephen Gately. This again conjured up another mental image: of CPS officials, all bent over a page of the Daily Mail and working out whether the author should be put in jail. Again, think of the other crimes going on in Britain – the other demands on the CPS time. How did we get to this point? The Bedfordshire Police are not expected to be a local Stasi. Last time I checked, this is not East Germany. To me, the idea of being imprisoned for what you say, or what you tweet, is deeply sinister. And one which should raise more protest than it does.
The Spectator is in the firing line quite a lot because we are in the business of serving up cask strength opinion – and have been for 183 years. We hire brilliant columnists, and give them freedom to say what they want. We were rude about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, we offended people calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1957 (ten years before it happened), hardly an issue goes by without some kind of controversy. We don’t sanitise, or homogenise. It is our columnists’ honesty that gives their articles force. When I meet readers, I head one plea more than any others: “don’t tone down Rod”.
We are proud to be associated with columnists of the intelligence and eloquence of Rod Liddle, Matthew Parris, Taki and far, far more. When Jan Moir was in trouble, Matthew Parris rode to her defence in The Spectator – you don’t have to agree with what she wrote to defend her right to say what she thinks. This is a British liberty. We are proud to have the greatest stable of bloggers of anywhere, and proud that Melanie Philips is one of them. Those who find her opinions not to their taste have the option of not reading her blog.
The last piece Melanie wrote for the magazine was about the freedom of speech. I recommend it to CoffeeHousers. We have no First Amendment protection in this country, and we’re suffering from it. Freedom of expression under attack in Britain, from our notorious libel laws to this new phenomenon of police forces being asked to investigate what people put on their blogs.
PS: The last time we really bowdlerised a Taki column was five years ago – he was telling tales about the depravity of one Jeffrey Epstein. And how true that story turned out to be.
PPS: CoffeeHousers should go easy on the Bedfordshire Police, they have probably filed this complaint in the same drawer as UFO sightings. But it’s interesting to see how easily the media is manipulated. Here’s how it goes:
1) Inayat Bunglawala, chair of Muslims4UK, gets angry about what he reads on Melanie’s blog.
2) Complains to the PCC.
3) Complains to the police.
4) Phones up The Guardian and says “The PCC are investigating The Spectator!! Story!! Police too!!
5) The Guardian duly writes it all up, on its website.
6) The Independent follows up The Guardian.
7) An inverted pyramid of piffle is thus constructed.
Inayat Bunglawala
H/T CST
Inayat Bunglawala, CiF contributor and chair of Muslims4UK, published a post on his own blog, Inayat’s Corner, recently entitled, David Cameron on Israel and Iran: Compare and contrast.
Bunglawala asks why British Prime Minister David Cameron “spoke out against any calls to punish Israel for its continuing occupation of Palestinian lands, its illegal Jewish settlements, its cruel and barbaric treatment of the besieged and repeatedly bombed people of Gaza,” while condemning Iran “which is not occupying anyone else’s territory and unlike Israel does not possess nuclear weaponry.”
Bunglawala’s answer?
This contrast in policies is determined by “financial donations to our main political parties by shady operators who use their wealth to undermine and corrupt our democracy.”
As if there’s any doubt who Bunglawala’s ugly invective is directed towards, he tagged his post with the terms “Zionism” and “Israel lobby.”
Comment is Free rolls out commentators such as Bunglawala so often, its likely that this loathsome thinly veiled anti-Semitism will go unnoticed.
However, it needs to be noted that the Bunglawala’s group, Muslims4UK, is an initiative of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPACUK).
In January 2009 Douglas Murray’s Centre for Social Cohesion issued a report about Asghar Bukhari, head of MPACUK; the Centre felt his comments on Facebook were sufficient to incite violence. This was referred to the police. Bukhari was quoted:
“Any Muslim who fights against Israel and dies is a martyr and will be granted paradise”; “There is no greater oppressor on this earth then [sic] the Zionists, who murder little children for sport…Zionists have a “crooked mind.”
MPACUK had been criticised by the CST for promoting the idea of a worldwide Zionist conspiracy and using material taken from neo-Nazi, white nationalist, and Holocaust denial websites. A report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Anti-Semitism also notes the CST’s assertion that “[t]he use of ‘Zionist’ as a replacement for ‘Jewish’ is common on the MPACUK website” and that MPACUK has articulated antisemitic conspiracy theories through the language of anti-Zionism.
The word “chilling” doesn’t begin to describe the dynamic whereby hate mongers such as Bunglawala continue to grace the pages of “the world’s leading liberal voice” with total impunity.
Hawkeye
Omar2
WellofSense
Medusa
The Alchemist
Louise
Tosca
Maimon
Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
Another adherent to radical Islam welcomed by the Guardian
October 10, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Comment is Free, East London Mosque, Inayat Bunglawala, Islamic Forum Europe, Islamism, Islamophobia, Nadiya Takolia, Roshonara Choudhry, Terrorism, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab | by Adam Levick | 17 comments
While the latest edition of the column, on Oct. 6th, curiously omitted any mention that the following day would be Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, even more worth noting is the fact that filling in for Butt this week was Nadiya Takolia of iEngage.
Who is iEngage?
Well, they claim to help empower and encourage British Muslims within local communities to be more actively involved in British media and politics.
However, iEngage’s idea of politically empowering Muslims has a very narrow and decidedly illiberal focus. Indeed, the group puts a significant amount of energy into opposing moderate and liberal Muslims , while defending radical Islamist organisations.
Per Harry’s Place:
Added Lucy Lips at HP:
In 2010, iEngage was appointed as the secretariat to a new UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia. As The Telegraph’s Andrew Gilligan noted at the time:
As Standpoint reported:
In July, 2011, after UK MPs voted overwhelmingly to drop iEngage as the secretariat for the all-party parliamentary group on Islamophobia, Inayat Bunglawala complained bitterly in a post at his personal blog, titled, “Israel lobby gloats over removal of ENGAGE from APPG on Islamophobia”, and dismissed evidence of iEngage’s support for militant Islam.
Bunglawala helped create iEngage, has acted as their CEO, and is an Advisor on Policy and Research for the group.
Of course, Inayat Bunglawala is also an Islamist who believes that the the BBC and the rest of the media are “Zionist controlled.”
Bunglawala is also a frequent contributor to Comments is Free.
As Israelinurse wrote on these pages back in March about Bunglawala and the problem of Islamism in the UK:
As with CiF’s licensing of Bunglawala, the decision by the Guardian to hand over a non-sectarian column devoted to reporting fairly on all religious happenings in the UK to iEngage’s Nadiya Takolia demonstrates again how proponents for militant Islam continue, under the veneer of human rights and tolerance, to avoid being held responsible for their reactionary, racist, and violent political agenda.
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