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Al-Qaeda cleric, Abu Qatada,
To my shame as a UK citizen, I have had to witness the UK become the laughing-stock of the West for its failure to responsibly confront Islamist-inspired terrorism.
Melanie Phillips has written about this unnatural blindness of successive UK governments to the dangers posed by such religious extremism.
Much of Europe is in a similar state, of course, but as Melanie Phillips wrote in Londonistan: How Britain is creating a terror state within, there is a persistent state of denial by the British establishment, both on the left and on the right, in UK universities where Islamism is rife and growing, and in the mainstream media and our religious bodies, of the dangers which it presents to the freedom of ordinary UK citizens, Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Most recently even the UK Home Secretary has had to kowtow to the dictates of European Court of Human Rights’ ruling that the Al-Qaeda cleric, Abu Qatada, should be granted bail even though he poses a serious threat to UK national security. The irony here, of course, is that Qatada, in true demopathic fashion, makes use of the UK and European democratic systems to gain his release, although he and other such extremists despise those values.
Of course the Human Rights spokespeople have had a veritable field day, and this would be justly so were this not about an open supporter of terrorism, who in October 1999, according to The Guardian, “effectively issued a fatwa authorising the killing of Jews, including Jewish children”. I would wager that none of the members of the Human Rights organisations who campaigned for Qatada’s release gave a second thought to the human rights of the Jews that Qatada had encouraged his followers to kill.
Melanie Phillips wrote Londonistan in 2006, the year after the 7/7 attacks on Londoners on their way to work by British-born Islamists. Two years later, Nazir Ali, then Anglican bishop of Rochester warned of “no-go zones” in predominately Muslim areas of the UK, and was roundly condemned by political and church leaders as well as by spokesmen for Muslim advocacy organizations.
In 2010, however, we saw the open and blatant realisation of Bishop Ali’s grim prediction, and the Islamist “state within a state” which Melanie Phillips envisaged now exists formally in Tower Hamlets in London, UK, (see also here) where gays are beaten, women are threatened if they dress immodestly and a man was beaten when he smoked in the street during Ramadan. The Metropolitan police, frozen and immobile in the grip of misguided political correctness, intervene minimally where at all. There are other “no go areas” in large cities all over the UK.
The UK government persistently ignores this growing elephant in the room – indeed it feeds it. The main-stream media rarely reports hate crimes committed by Muslims on non-Muslims, preferring rather to refer to the perpetrators euphemistically as “Asians.”
Two rare exceptions occurred recently, however. One was the concerted threats against gays in the vicinity of the Jamia mosque in Derby, which were orchestrated and carried out by Muslim males, three of whom were subsequently convicted. The other was the conviction of nine “radical Islamists” charged with plotting a Mumbai-style attack on the London Stock Exchange and other terrorism charges.
Are these the tip of the iceberg? Although, thankfully, the perpetrators were caught and punished we should not be under any illusions that the broader lesson was learned. I doubt that it will change the behaviour of would-be terrorists waiting in the wings. For in spite of the consensus of opinion that threatening and insulting gays, Jews, Christians and others is not acceptable in the UK, such radicals who mean us harm are given mixed messages by the UK government and mainstream media. The former shake their puny fists (as Melanie Phillips so eloquently put it in respect of Foreign Minister, William Hague) whenever they apprehend the danger but actually DO little or nothing to prevent it, whereas the latter, with very few exceptions, heap misguided sympathy onto the perpetrators and stoke the flames of their misplaced discontent.
Apologists for such extremism find supportive surroundings in media such as the BBC and the Guardian which are conducive to their view of themselves as victims. The Guardian regularly gives column inches in its online blog, Comment is Free toIslamists and their fellow travelers, and devotes an egregiously disproportionate amount of (overwhelmingly critical) coverage of Israel.
The rot in the media may, it seems, come from above in certain cases. On 1st August 2011, Peter Wilby wrote in the New Statesman:
When an attack comes from people with brown skins, we know what to make of it. It is an example of “Islamic terrorism”, and part of a worldwide conspiracy to overthrow civilisation as we know it. Brown-skinned folk must be closely monitored. Islam’s holy book and the statements of Muslim leaders of all sorts must be scrutinised for anything that appears to encourage or excuse violent acts.
When a Nordic white supremacist kills scores of Norwegians in what may turn out to be Europe’s biggest single act of terrorism next to the Lockerbie bombing and the 2004 Madrid atrocities, our responses – or at least those of the media – are instinctively different. While any Muslim killer is potentially an al-Qaeda agent, Anders Behring Breivik must be an unhinged loner and misfit. The category “Christian terrorist” does not exist and so neither the Pope nor the Archbishop of Canterbury is called upon to dissociate himself. “Links” to the English Defence League are alleged, but though the league is considered racist and inflammatory, it is rarely presented as an existential threat to western liberal democracy.
Right-wing killers, it is assumed, are not internationally co-ordinated and do not attend jihadist training camps. They do not, therefore, present a serious danger to “our way of life”. Whatever the truth that ultimately emerges, Breivik should at least cause us to question those assumptions.
Extremists in our midst
We in Britain may have been spared a similar atrocity only by luck. Police regularly find white supremacists in possession of rocket launchers, grenades, pipe bombs and manuals on how to use them, and some senior officers have warned that elements on the extreme right would like to stage their own “spectacular”. Most people recall David Copeland, the former BNP member whose nail bombs, planted in London in 1999 and aimed at gays, blacks and Bangladeshis, killed three and injured 139. But how many have heard of Robert Cottage, Martyn Gilleard, Neil Lewington, Terence Gavan and Ian Davison?
Cottage, a former BNP candidate, was jailed in 2007 for storing explosive chemicals in anticipation of a civil war. Gilleard, an organiser for the British People’s Party, which has fielded candidates in local elections, was jailed in 2008 for possession of bullets, swords, knives, nail bombs, manuals on how to make bombs and sub-machine guns. Lewington, a neo-Nazi, was jailed indefinitely in 2009 after police discovered a bomb-making factory in his flat. Gavan, a former BNP member, was jailed on terrorism charges in 2010 after bombs, shotguns and pistols were found at his house. Davison became the first Briton to be jailed for making a chemical weapon in May 2010. His Aryan Strike Force recruited 350 people over the internet with the aim of establishing white supremacy in white countries.
None of these cases was prominently reported in the national media. Muslims, on the other hand, need only sneeze or download a dubious text from the internet to put the mass-circulation press on red alert.
This was written at the time of the shootings in Norway but how on earth could the writer compare Breivik’s actions, horrific and barbaric though they were, to the systematically planned attacks by Britain’s home-grown Jihadists?
As I write, the number of tragic killings of Muslims by radicalized Muslims are increasing exponentially all over the Middle East, and yet this author was trying to deflect criticism of the hideousness of the scale of Islamist terror, coldly and carefully planned by its perpetrators, by muddying the waters.
White supremacist attacks are, or course, as morally reprehensible as any other form of terror, but they are hardly comparable in scale or numbers targeted to the death tolls in the Sudan, Nigeria or elsewhere in the name of Islamism – an empirically demonstrated fact quantified by annual reports compiled by the U.S. National Counter-Terrorism Center.
Breivik was later found unfit to plead, a lone lunatic who, so far as can be ascertained, was not linked to any sort of network of white supremacists. And what on earth is the relevance of the Lockerbie bombing, widely believed to have been planned and perpetrated by Islamist terrorists, to this?
The media rot – the blurring, deliberate or otherwise, of the distinction between supposition and fact so as to feed into readers’ fears or preconceived ideas – may come from above. In the case of The Guardian most articles about Islamism reflect the post-colonial inspired Western guilt of many of its editors, although there may be the occasional, cursory nod to opposing opinions, particularly where Islamist infringements of liberal human rights are glaringly obvious.
It may not be a surprise that a very similar political orientation is evident in the New Statesman. Its senior political editor since 2009 is one Mehdi Hassan whose political stance on Jews, and antisemitism, may charitably be thought to be questionable.
For example, he has aligned himself with the extremism of the East London Mosque – the mosque with links to Anwar Al-Awlaki , who spoke there by telephone link in 2009 (see also here). The so-called underpants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was also connected with the East London Mosque.
Hasan, however, is a mere bit player, content with covering for Islamism from the sidelines, but we can witness what he really thinks of non-Muslims here, and here - and there is this, which shows him to be at least confused as to what he stands for and against.
Finally, two questions: Firstly, would Peter Wilby have dared to write anything other than what he did, given the unmistakably pro-Islamist credentials of the New Statesman’s political editor, and secondly how could Mehdi Hasan be appointed to a position of such influence in a publication claiming a liberal orientation?
One of CiF Watch’s signature posts is “Why was this deleted” and, alternately, “Why wasn’t this deleted”?
We spend quite a bit of time monitoring comments beneath the line at ‘Comment is Free’ observing what precisely runs afoul of their “community standards”, and have documented scores of examples of pro-Israel comments being deleted, while some of the most hateful anti-Zionist vitriol remains.
Beyond the narrow issue of deleted comments, however, there are some commenters whose apostasy has rendered them in a state of pre-moderation – where CiF Moderators review, and then release, on a case by case basis, only those comments deemed acceptable.
The last strike for unruly CiF commenters is to have their user privileges permanently suspended due to an especially egregious violation, or pattern of violations, of their norms.
We recently documented two cases in which such a ban was employed – one commenter for merely questioning whether an essay by Sunny Hundal was consistent with Guardian editorial guidelines, and another for simply asking CiF Moderators why his/her comments, noting the Islamist (pro-Muslim Brotherhood) sympathies of CiF contributor, Wajahat Ali, were being deleted.
While the latter example seemingly demonstrates that the Guardian is not about to have their consistent licensing of pro-Islamist voices – who espouse views they evidently deem consistent with “liberal” thought – questioned, the former suggests an institution which is, at the very least, remarkably thin-skinned.
In light of this propensity by CiF Moderators to ban users for content they deem offensive, the following comment, beneath the line of Ranj Alaaldin‘s CiF essay on Dec. 22, “Iraq must divide to survive“, which has not been deleted, nor resulted in the commenter being banned, is especially curious.
Is there any question this commenter is referring to Tony Blair? And, further, is there any doubt that the commenter using the moniker “ChanceyGardener” is suggesting that Blair be killed?
Here are a few CiF standards, from their ‘Community standards and guidelines‘ page, which would seem relevant when assessing comments calling for murder:
We understand that people often feel strongly about issues debated on the site, but we will consider removing any content that others might find extremely offensive or threatening.
We welcome debate and dissent, but personal attacks (on authors, other users or any individual), persistent trolling and mindless abuse will not be tolerated.
…we do ask users to find ways of sharing their views that do not feel divisive, threatening or toxic to others.
So, the suggestion that a former British Prime Minister should be executed: “divisive”, “threatening”, or “toxic”?
You think?!
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- CiF comment, justifying antisemitism as normal reaction to Zionism: 74 “recommends” & not deleted (cifwatch.com)
- CiF commenter banned for noting that Sunny Hundal essay is inconsistent with CiF “standards” (cifwatch.com)
- Unintentionally comical CiF reader comment of the day: CiF moderators are biased IN FAVOR of CiF Watch (cifwatch.com)
- Why weren’t these deleted? CiF essay about Rosh Hashana elicits antisemitic comments (cifwatch.com)
- CiF reader comment of the day: Bashing bankers, bashing Jews (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian readers claim leading Zionists during WWII rooted for Hitler. Comments not deleted by CiF Moderators (cifwatch.com)
- Comment is Free moderators delete my comment pointing out the moral hypocrisy of Medhi Hasan (cifwatch.com)
- Anti-Zionist CiF commenter accuses CiF Watch of the insidious tactic of trying to “sway” opinion (cifwatch.com)
“You’ve come a long way, baby” was an album by British musician Fatboy Slim, released in 1998.
The title was taken was from a slogan for the cigarette brand Virginia Slims, introduced in 1968 and marketed to young professional women and meant to appeal to the themes of feminism and women’s liberation in the 60s and 70s. The ads often featured anecdotes about women in the early 20th century who were punished for being caught smoking, as compared to the time of the ads when more women had more rights.
The Virginia Slims ad came to mind when I came across a brief story from the Malta Times, titled “Fresh Graduates”, which featured this photo from Gaza.
The photo included the following text:
Palestinian women and members of Hamas security forces marching in formation during a graduation ceremony for new recruits in Gaza City, yesterday.
So, I then began imagining a new Virginia Slims ad to appeal to the unique brand of Palestinian Islamist feminism:
I mean, really, who needs such bourgeoisie women’s rights as the freedom to dress as they please, or legal protection from forced underage marriages, wife-beating and honor killings, when you can enjoy the more sublime freedom of marching in a military drill with automatic weapons, while receiving the most up to date training on how best to defeat the Zionist entity?
(Editor’s Note: In 2010 Hamas banned women from smoking water pipes, so the Virginia Slims campaign may have to be tweaked a bit before going into production so as not to run afoul of of Gaza’s “community standards”.)
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Back on Oct. 3, a Guardian report about an arson at a mosque in Israel included this headline.
In the first passage, we learn who the culprits of the arson most likely were, despite no definitive claim of responsibility:
“Arsonists torched a mosque in an Arab village in northern Israel Monday, setting off protests by residents who clashed with police. Graffiti sprayed at the site suggested Jewish radicals, suspected in other recent mosque fires, were involved.”
On Dec. 25, however, a Guardian’s story about a series of deadly terror attacks against Christians, targeting Nigerian churches on Christmas day, which resulted in dozens killed, avoided any mention of the perpetrators in both the headline and sub heading.
The above headline is even more interesting in light of the fact that the first passage in the story notes immediately that the “Christmas Day bombs” didn’t target the churches without assistance:
“A militant Islamist group [Boko Haram] has claimed responsibility for a series of co-ordinated attacks on Christmas Day services at churches in Nigeria, one of which killed at least 35 people.”
Further, a proper contextualizing of the attack would necessarily include the fact that Boko Haram is a Sunni Islamist movement, and that Sunni extremists, per the U.S. National Counter Terrorism Center’s (NCTC) website, were responsible for approximately 70% of all terrorism related deaths worldwide (9,092 out of 13,186) in 2010. (A good summary of the official U.S. report can be found here)
In contrast, Christian extremist groups were responsible for 321 terror related deaths in 2010 worldwide.
The remaining attacks were committed by secular, political, or anarchist groups.
Here’s a graph (from the NCTC) you’ll never find among the Guardian’s ubiquitous charts, graphs and “interactive” maps.
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- Are UK Archbishops leading their Christians into the Coliseum? (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian buries story of Israelis murdered by Palestinian terrorists, highlights revenge attack on mosque (cifwatch.com)
- Tunisian Islamist Cognitive Dissonance Watch: Jewish freedom edition (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian’s Jonathan Steele accuses Tunisian Muslims who oppose radical Islam of Islamophobia (cifwatch.com)
- CiF piece by Brian Whitaker on “why media believes worst about Iran” draws on conspiracy blog (cifwatch.com)
- What the Guardian won’t report: FBI Hate Crime Stats again disprove claims of rising Islamophobia (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian’s “democratic” Islamist leader: Kill every last Jew on earth (cifwatch.com)
I wrote here last year about fantasy ideology, a term employed by Lee Harris, to describe the delusions which he argued drive the political terrorism of Al Qaeda and other Islamist entities. Harris argued that Islamist terror has no rationale as we might apprehend it; rather, its essence is unpredictability and confusion and its violent aspects are deliberately promoted by Islamist leaders as a means of gaining political supremacy.
The key marker of a fantasy ideology, according to Harris, is
“… that there must first be a pre-existing collective need for this fantasy; that this need comes from a conflict between a set of collective aspirations and desires, on one hand, and the stern dictates of brutal reality, on the other — a conflict in which a lack of realism is gradually transformed into a penchant for fantasy….”
The above can also describe the essential ingredients of the reactions to the so-called “Arab Spring” by the West as well as in the Middle East.
Key among those ingredients is the lack of realism – it rapidly became plain that although the demonstrators in Tahrir Square, for example, wanted “democracy” and “freedom” they had little idea of what they wanted to bring about, much less a plan as to how to do so. Nevertheless there was and still is certainly the collective need for such a fantasy. The fantasy aspect lies in the apparent belief that freedom and democracy would somehow happen if enough students and others demonstrated in favour of it but without their having actually to do anything else to bring them about.
The riots are still going on and Egypt looks likely to descend into an abyss of Islamism which will put freedom and democracy, however they might choose to operationalise it, further out of their reach.
The fantasies that freedom and democracy could be achieved first by announcing that they wanted it, and then by rioting rather than thinking about how it could be pushed rapidly forward, also spread throughout the Middle East, no doubt again because of the collective need for the fantasy rather than because the main drivers of it could engage in reality-based means/ends analyses of to how to bring it about.
Initially in Tahrir Square, the collective aspirations and desires for “freedom” and “democracy” took little or no account of the stern dictates of brutal reality, ie that such drastic change cannot come about suddenly or quickly or without an infrastructure whereby it can be maintained.
By contrast, when Lenin returned to Russia he had an organisation in place to control and guide the revolution he wished to bring about. Years of planning and underground work had gone into his preparations. However, as I have already described above, the young bloggers and others in Tahrir Square had no organisation and no plan. The only two groups in Egypt that were organised and had a firm plan were the Muslim Brotherhood and the military leadership.
As a result of this, the post-Mubarak era presents Egyptian demonstrators with an infinitely more threatening brutal reality – that of Salafism and the Muslim Brotherhood who are frighteningly adept at stepping into the vacuum left by mayhem and uncertainty and appearing to provide answers. In fact their agenda is enslavement and brutality of a far different sort in the name of Islamist supremacy. Elsewhere in the Middle East, particularly in Syria, the same stern dictates of brutal reality described by Harris have been very much in evidence as the death toll of protestors in the grip of their own fantasy ideology rises steadily at the hands of Assad’s forces.
Arguably the greatest impact on the West’s imagination, however, was made by events in Tahrir Square.
Particularly interesting was the almost immediate disconnection from reality of Western governments and their media when they reported it – it became, in effect another fantasy ideology for them (which they peddled relentlessly to their viewers and readership) as they tried to analyse those events and predict outcomes. The Tahrir Square uprisings provided a vehicle for the media to exaggerate the import of what, after all, were little more than the sort of expressions of discontent we had been witnessing in Muslim countries for decades, albeit on a very much smaller scale.
There seems little doubt that this belief in and the promotion of an “Arab Spring” (the name is borrowed directly from the Prague Spring and is a curious misnomer because that led to years of repression after Dubcek’s failed attempt to bring in democratic rule) met a pre-existing need in the West to perceive Islamic countries as being essentially “just like us” in their needs and aspirations.
The media fell almost en masse into cognitive egocentrism – and mistook, as it so easily does, what it wanted to happen (ie its own hypotheses and expectations) for reality and truth. Because of that much of the brutality of the crowds towards each other in Tahrir Square was either skated over in the Western media or not mentioned at all, perhaps because it did not fit with the story which underpinned the collective need for the fantasy. One notable example of brutality (which, so far as I know was not replicated in the demonstrations in Prague and elsewhere in Eastern Europe) was the sexual assault on CBC’s Lara Logan by a mob in Tahrir Square. Sexual assaults on other female journalists in Egypt were also reported.
In spite of repeated and verifiable reports which showed that the “Arab Spring” represented a fundamental category mistake by the West and its outcome was unlikely to be anything like that of the Velvet Revolution of Vaclav Havel, which is what most of the demonstrators and the media and western governments seemed to want, the majority of the media persisted in their optimistic portrayal of it for an unconscionably long time.
Riots spread across the Arab world, but it took Ian Black in The Guardian until 13th December 2011 to admit that the fate of the region still hung in the balance. Yet we also had an article on 16th December, again in The Guardian, – and it seemed not to be able to prevent itself from mentioning Israel in a poor light – which persisted with its cock-eyed optimism – that a “lost generation” had “found its voice!”
Whether or not that is the case, it seems to suit the Guardian and other media not to spell out that Islamism is inimical to pro-democracy protest or indeed to democracy itself as they might apprehend it. Hamas was “democratically elected” in Gaza, after all, and promptly disposed of its opposition and has held no elections since.
This should scarcely be surprising given that the essence of Islamism is submission to authoritarianism.
Old habits die hard.
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On the same day the Tunisian assembly (led by a party the Guardian characterized as representing a moderate brand of Islamism) approved a new constitution explicitly banning Jews (indeed, all non-Muslims) from seeking the Tunisian Presidency, Al-Arabiya reported the following:
The story begins as follows:
“Tunisia’s moderate Islamist Ennahda party said in a statement Saturday that Jews living in the North African country were citizens with “all their rights and duties.”
Evidently, by “all rights” he meant to add: Except, of course, for the insignificant right of Jews to equally participate in the nation’s political system.
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November 27th saw the publication on CiF of yet another promotion of ‘moderate, democratic Islamism’, this time written by Wadah Kanfar who resigned from his eight year post as director general of Al Jazeera in September – but not before collaborating with the Guardian on the Palestine Papers affair last January.
Kanfar’s Muslim Brotherhood sympathies and affiliations are well known and indeed were the cause of the resignations of numerous journalists from Al Jazeera under his directorship.
It was also Kanfar who brought the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘spiritual leader’ Sheikh Qaradawi to Al Jazeera and gave him a regular slot where he promotes his anti-Semitic, homophobic and misogynistic ideologies.
The Guardian’s provision of a platform for Kanfar to extol the virtues and advantages of the work-in-progress rise of Islamists to power throughout the Middle East and North Africa is therefore akin to inviting the Master of the Hunt to write an article on how absolutely spiffing fox-hunting really is.
I’m not going to deconstruct Kanfar’s arguments here myself because as it happens, the Azure magazine recently published an excellent must-read article by Dr. Uriya Shavit – a lecturer in Islamic history and theology at Tel Aviv University – which explains at length precisely why Islamist rule is inherently incompatible with democracy.
“According to the Islamist worldview, Allah has given mankind a complete and perfect doctrine of life: Islam. Democracy and individual rights follow from and are mandated by this doctrine—and are consequently subordinate to its divine injunctions.
Since Islamists believe that the legitimacy of the political order is founded on a divine decree, they utterly reject any possibility of rebellion, whether in the name of democracy or individual rights, against other religious precepts. Hence, they would not allow a parliament to pass laws that contradicted the explicit commands of Allah, as conveyed to humanity through the Koran and the example set by the prophet. As al-Qaradawi and others have explained repeatedly, human beings cannot permit what Allah has forbidden, nor can they ban what Allah permits. For example, the Koran denounces abortion and the consumption of alcohol; consequently, a human parliament has no authority to grant them legislative sanction. Similarly, for particular offenses the Koran stipulates harsh penalties—capital punishment or amputation of a hand, for example—that no human legislator may repeal, nor may the prohibition of idol worship be overturned in the name of freedom of religion.”
…….
“Western observers therefore miss the point when they wonder whether the Muslim Brotherhood supports free elections and civil liberties. To predict the character of the regime that the Islamists will establish, if and when they are given the opportunity, only one question is relevant: Will Islamic democracy take the Koran as its highest authority, with religious scholars as its sole authorized interpreters? An answer in the affirmative—whether clear or implicit—carries within it the unmistakable seeds of theological despotism.”
……..
“The challenge facing the Arab Spring can thus be summarized as follows: Democracy without the Muslim Brotherhood is impossible, but so is democracy under its leadership. There is no doubt that the Brotherhood enjoys broad support in every Arab country that has undergone democratic revolutions or uprisings in the last year. Elections in which the movement is not allowed to participate will therefore lack popular legitimacy. Moreover, the Brotherhood’s liberal and democratic rhetoric will make it difficult for the legal establishment to disqualify the movement. The inevitable result of its electoral victory, however, will be the formation of a theocracy. It will not permit the scientific and technological revolution of which Arab societies are in such dire need. Simply put, the future of Arab democracy hangs by a thread: The Muslim Brotherhood must be permitted to run in elections, but not gain power.”
However, as we are already seeing across North Africa, the Islamists are gaining power and any hope of the emergence of true democracies from the upheaval of the ‘Arab Spring’ is fast waning.
Rather than confront that fact, the Guardian elects to sell out the real liberals in the MENA regions who risked their lives in the attempt to achieve genuine democracy and to bury its editorial head in the sands of the Islamist double-speak.
As Dr. Shavit points out:
“For democracy to strike real and lasting roots in the Arab world, the United States and its allies must free themselves of the influence of multi-cultural and post-colonial theories and determine—first for themselves, and then for others—the distinction between truly enlightened regimes and their imitators.”
The Guardian remains mired in its own long tradition of failing to do precisely that, and therefore aids and abets existing and future religious tyrannies rather than being the beacon of liberalism it claims to aspire to be.
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Rached Ghannouchi
Yesterday we commented on a surreal essay by the Guardian’s Jonathan Steele which demonized Tunisian Muslims who supported a secular government as “Islamophobes” for opposing Islamist parties (in the Oct. 23rd election) such as the victorious Ennahda party (led by Rached Ghannouchi) – a quintessentially Guardian moral inversion.
We noted Ghannouchi’s quite illiberal support for the Iranian revolution, his support for violence against Americans, and that his politics was largely shaped by Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian whose ideology inspired Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda.
But, there is so much more:
Harry’s Place subsequently noted that Ghannouchi has been accused of incitement to kill a Tunisian author who wrote an “irreverent book” about Mohammed, has expressed explicit support for suicide bombing against Israeli civilians, and is an antisemite who believes in the “Franklin Prophecy“ – a notorious Nazi fraud which alleges that Benjamin Franklin warned Americans of the injurious influence of Jews.
Finally, Martin Kramer noted that Ghannouchi, several months ago, said the following:
“I bring glad tidings that the Arab region will get rid of the germ of Israel. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, leader of the Hamas movement, once said that Israel would disappear before 2027. That date may be too far off; Israel may disappear before that.”
So, it seems that Jonathan Steele’s expansive definition of the term “Islamophobia” includes those reactionary curmudgeons who stand in stubborn opposition to Muslim proponents of genocide against Jews.
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Seumas Milne or Ahmadinejad? Guardian warns attacking Iran would be ‘criminal aggression’
February 22, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: Comment is Free, Delegitimization, Guardian, Islamism, Seumas Milne, Terrorism | by Guest/Cross Post | 24 comments
Cross posted by Anne, who blogs at Anne’s Opinions
Float in Dusseldorf featuring Ahmadinejad
Guardian Associate Editor Seumas Milne, per George Galloway and other political fellow travelers, never met a dictator he couldn’t love and whose opposition to anything Western is visceral.
His latest column, Feb. 21, asserts that an attack on Iran would be an act of criminal stupidity.
However, Clarke does not make clear, as with Milne’s broader commentary, the difference between pre-emptive and preventative.
From Dictionary.com:
And as I have pointed out before, preemptive attacks are indeed legal in the face of not only imminent attack but also expected and threatened attack:
Note what was said about Israel’s attack on Osirak, the international condemnations and the later reversal of opinion (not that Israel ever received an apology for the original condemnations).
The threats emanating from Iran, with its parades of missiles engraved “Marg bar Israel” (Death to Israel), the regime’s Holocaust denial, the determination of Ahmadinejad to wipe Israel off the map (yes, he indeed did say it many times) - not to mention its permanent proxy war against Israel conducted by Hezbollah and Hamas – all amount to viable motivations for a legal pre-emptive attack, whether by Israel, the Western allies, or a coalition of them all.
Again, Milne:
Milne’s dismissal of Israel’s concern about an existential threat is characteristically Guardian: Detached moral posturing far removed from the crisis being discussed. He is not the one sitting here in the Middle East waiting for bombs to fall on his family. And, of course he does not care that Israel’s strategic edge would be blunted.
Anything that would weaken Israel is good as far as he is concerned, and similarly supports the potential that a nuclear Iran would limit US freedom of action in the Middle East.
It is biased and ideologically driven “journalists” like Milne who suffer from the real failure of imagination – those who cannot imagine the dire straits the civilised world will find itself in if Iran develops nuclear weapons, and who refuse to see the disastrous implications, some of which are already being played out today in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He also seems egregiously detached from the moral lessons learned from the 20th century’s previous wars: That when despotic regimes threaten destruction they usually carry out their threats.
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