Saturday, January 02, 2010 

An alternative to the usual weekend links. Sort of.

The tradition is that on a Saturday I generally do a weekend links post. Frankly, there's so little worth linking to today, with probably this and this as honourable exceptions, that there isn't much point.

The other intention I had was that as part of the usual end of year, or in this case end of decade baloney, I was going to name the person of the decade as Katie Price, aka Jordan, for reasons you can probably guess. Then I noticed that Joan Collins in the Daily Mail did almost precisely that, calling her the non-entity of the decade. That is ever so slightly rich on two levels: Joan Collins is only notable these days for marrying numerous times, and secondly that she made her point in a newspaper which currently has the latest antics of said Katie Price as its top story on the Femail pages. If the very newspapers that perpetuate the likes of Katie Price suddenly stopped giving them attention, they'd soon fall from view. True, by the same yardstick an insignificant little nothing like me can be accused of hypocrisy for calling someone else the epitome of almost everything that was wrong with the last decade in cultural terms when I've hardly contributed to the wealth of the nation, but I like to think I don't contribute the same level of poison into the national spirit as the Daily Mail does every day.

I've spent some of the last week or so watching a load of old Have I Got News For Yous on YouTube, and it is instructive just how quickly we forget. Peter Oborne in the Mail today for example, and he's usually quite good, bemoans the "moral decline". I was only 13 in 1997 and even I can remember back then the usual suspects saying exactly the same thing, just as I remember the "Back to Basics" desperation which Major had come out with a couple of years previous. This naturally drove the gutter press on to expose as many adulterous MPs as they could, and there sure were a lot; we also now know that the prime minister himself, even if his affair with Edwina Currie had finished some time previously, had given in to the temptations of the flesh. Oborne goes on to complain:

For Cameron it is more complex. New Labour brilliantly used the capture of political power in 1997 to establish the dominance of the liberal Left across vast swathes of public life.

It now has key placemen and women in the civil service, the voluntary sector, the legal profession, the arts world, the intelligence services, the BBC and the quango state which has passed outside democratic control and yet controls so much of our public life.

These quangos are run, almost without exception, by New Labour placemen.


And were things any different back under Major? No, the quangos then, even if there were fewer, were also almost uniquely ran by Tory placemen, often the wives of Tory MPs. Will Cameron actually cut them as he promises, or will he just install his own placemen? You can bet it's more likely to be the latter. Already we've seen Boris Johnson trying to put in place Veronica Wadley, ex-editor of the Evening Standard and whom cheered him to his ascension as London mayor as chair of the London Arts Council.

As usual though, Oborne is nothing as compared to Amanda Platell, who's finally decided after years of criticising immigration to actually become a British citizen herself (complete with low-cut Union Jack dress, something she has previously criticised others for wearing). Her vision of British society and how as a selfless gesture she's becoming a citizen mainly so she can save the nation from itself is so different from mine that it's clear that we may as well live in completely separate countries. This is her summary of the best of what we have to offer:

The only areas where Britain excels - indeed, we're top in Europe - are drunkenness, drug addiction and teenage pregnancy.

Yet the nation which the Mail and the others are always encouraging us to look towards - America - is about the only other place that has a worse record on certainly the latter and more than likely on the other two as well. And she complains:

Today, too often, crude vulgarity prevails on our TV screens and on the street.

Nothing, naturally about when "crude vulgarity" appears in our national newspapers. Such as when a certain Amanda Platell blamed "equality" when a young woman tragically fell into a river while on a skiing holiday and died, for which the Mail eventually had to print a "clarification" letter from one of her friends about. And could this Amanda Platell that is always banging on about how essential marriage is possibly be the one that admits in the opening of today's piece that her husband departed long ago? No, of course not.

I don't have a rose-tinted view of the country as it stands. Certainly, things could be a whole lot better; we have after all probably just came through possibly one of the worst decades, if not in living standards but in general unpleasantness and misery for quite some considerable time. To read the Mail and some other people though you'd think that the country was about to completely fall apart, or already had, that society had also broken down entirely and that the only good, decent people left, the middle class naturally, are too scared and threatened by what's going on around them that they daren't leave their houses. The police are politically correct loonies, except of course when they're shooting dead Brazilians who look like Asians and beating the shit out of peaceful protesters; the entire country, despite being ruled by decidedly conservative with both small-c and capital C individuals for the last 30 years is a liberalocracy where you can't say anything for fear of being branded either a racist or a homophobe or a bigot or a sexist, and to cap it all, the economy's gone up the spout, even though the obvious thing to happen after the longest boom in at least a hundred years was a lengthy bust. We can rejoice though: here comes Cameron's Conservatives, ready to mend our fractured land, as demonstrated by him mouthing cliché after cliché in an especially fatuous Sun article.

Here then is my highly controversial prediction for what the next decade holds: much, much more of the same old shit. Regardless of who wins the next election, by the time it's their turn to be ousted from power, everyone regardless of political affiliation, including Oborne and Platell will be saying exactly the same things about how rotten the country is. And yet again, they'll be wrong.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Share |

1/02/2010 07:45:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, July 07, 2008 

Responding to accusations of Islamophobia with Islamophobia.

Trevor Kavanagh, the Sun's ex-political editor, and still largely the real ideological power behind the paper due to his closeness to Murdoch, doesn't usually devote his weekly column to Muslims or Islam, preferring to spout the same right-wing rhetoric which has flavoured his pieces for years. Today however he dedicates his column to Muslims and Islam, with it headlined "Islamophobia... or cold, hard truth?"

His reasons for doing so are not immediately clear, or wouldn't be if the only news source you subjected yourself to was the Sun. The clues are however there:

This time, he [Peter Oborne] is making the argument that the British media is anti-Muslim.

He cites invented incidents which portray Muslims in a bad light and incite attacks fuelled by religious or race hatred.

...

The accusation that the media — with a few badly researched or unchecked stories — is fomenting race hatred is in itself a trivialisation.


Kavanagh doesn't feel inclined to inform his readers that these invented incidents and badly researched or unchecked stories, which can and do foment race hatred, appeared in his own newspaper. The Sun in fact is the newspaper most featured in the pamphlet published along with Peter Oborne's Dispatches documentary, entitled Muslims Under Siege (PDF). Not only does it draw further attention to the story of the Muslim bus driver who allegedly ordered his passengers off so he could pray, a story we now know to be completely untrue and one which the bus driver is taking legal action over, with the story removed from the paper's website, it dedicates the entirety of its first chapter to another well-known completely untrue story about Muslims which featured here and in the Sun: the myth of the "Windsor Muslim yobs." Even now one of the Sun hacks responsible for the piece, Jamie Pyatt, denies that it was wrong: rather the police were being "politically correct" for not admitting that Muslims had been responsible. That there was no evidence whatsoever to even suggest Muslims had been near to the house that had been vandalised, and that those who actually lived in the road were the more likely "yobs" to have vandalised the house the soldiers had looked at because they felt that they might lower the tone and at the same time lower house prices cannot be allowed to get in the way of a brilliant Sun scoop, even if it is one that potentially inspires hate against Muslims as a whole.

Even those two articles are not the only ones which the pamphlet flags up; it also mentions another untrue story about Muslim medical students in Leicester supposedly refusing to comply with new regulations requiring staff to wash up to the elbow and therefore putting patients at risk of infection. As there sometimes is with such stories, there was the very slightest kernel of truth to it: one student had asked about the new regulations, not even objected to them, and from this swirled the eventual Sun story. Some other Muslim students had also expressed reservations about being bare below the elbow, but not one of them had actually refused to comply with the regulation, and as the pamphlet makes clear, after following Muslim students around the hospital while they worked, all were doing as they were required.

It's clear then what Kavanagh is really responding to: Oborne and his team so much as daring to question the Sun's brilliant public-service journalism. He can't however sow doubt in the average Sun reader's mind that its own stories lack credibility and in some cases have been completely untrue. Instead then he attacks Oborne in a typically roundabout way. He doesn't actually at any point demure from the fact that the media is anti-Muslim; he instead attempts to justify why some are Islamophobic.

What this amounts to in actuality is a list of generalisations, a couple of quotes and the most shallow allusions to what life is like for women in Middle East majority Muslim countries:

Hmmm. Well, what about my criticism of Muslim immigrants for their self-imposed isolation and reluctance to integrate? Wasn’t the same true for some Orthodox Jewish communities?

Maybe, I replied. But Jews — who are themselves increasingly the target for hate attacks — are not trying to bomb Britain.


Neither of course are 99.99% of British Muslims, and those that are abide by a twisted perversion of Islam that is being increasingly opposed by British Muslims themselves, but to say that might not justify the Islamophobia which Kavanagh thinks is perfectly OK. That Muslim immigrants have also historically not isolated themselves, rather that those around those where they have settled have "fled", is also not worth mentioning. Integration and isolation are two-way streets, and both communities have further steps they should take. Multiculturalism hasn't failed, there simply hasn't been enough of it.

In the past, I have also questioned the “provocative” trend by British-born Muslims to start wearing tribal costume and the hijab.

It's a good thing that Kavanagh places "provocative" in quotation marks, as hardly anyone can seriously argue that either is truly "provocative". Very few Muslims wear "tribal custume" apart from on Fridays when some do on the traditional day of prayer, and while the hijab is an issue of dispute within Islamic theology and is influenced more by cultural rather than religious issues, the headscarf, as much as even I dislike it, is a fact of the religion. If Kavanagh had called the niqab provocative then he might have something approaching a point, but again, only tiny numbers wear it, and there still has been little proof provided that those who do choose to wear it are doing so because their family or husbands demand it.

And I touched on the appalling fact that many women are treated as chattels.

All this, Peter Oborne concluded, amounted to “Islamophobia”.

Is he right? Does severe criticism of a creed or its teachings justify the accusation of hate?

Or is that just a way of shutting down the debate, just as critics of the EU are branded Europhobes?


It's instructive that Kavanagh invokes the EU, his other favoured hate target. It'd be nice if Kavanagh provided some examples of where critics of it are branded Europhobes however, outside the columns of Polly Toynbee, as almost always critics of the EU are referred to as Eurosceptics. The reality of course here though is that there isn't a debate, and there can't be one when the debate is so coloured by the very journalistic stories as those pointed out above, and especially when as the study by Cardiff University found, only 5% of stories involving Muslims discuss their own problems, and when only 2% make clear that Muslims support dominant moral values. Kavanagh also confuses Islamophobia with the definition that those accused of it hate Muslims; rather, it also infers that those accused of it are spreading fear of Muslims and also fear them. This is most applicable with the insane idea that Islamists are somehow plotting to take over Europe or will be within a century the majority in Europe: it spreads fear, and those that spread that fear often do hate Muslims.

Here then come the quotes:

In the wake of 9/11, the Muslim head of Al Arabiya TV, Abdul Rahman al Rashed, said: “Not all Muslims are terrorists but, with deep regret, we must admit that almost all terrorists are Muslims.”

Is he an Islamophobe?

No, he's just making a trite and ahistorical comment. Only recently have Islamic terrorists motivated by a millenarian Salafist ideology come to the forefront of current worldwide terrorism; beforehand Muslims may well have been terrorists, such as the PLO, but their religion was second to their nationality. It was the nominally Marxist Tamil Tigers that populised suicide bombings, which Hizbullah, then Hamas and Islamic Jihad and then finally al-Qaida co-opted. Terrorism goes back through the ages, and is also not just a tactic by individuals or groups, but can also be used by nation states, whether against their own populations or other countries.

Try watching Syrian-born Dr Wafa Sultan on YouTube as she challenges a furious cleric to name a single Jew or Buddhist suicide bomber.

“Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by killing people, burning churches and bombing embassies,” she storms.

Is she Islamophobic? Or simply spelling out the facts?


Simon C on the comments on Lenin's helpfully provides a number of links to others who habitually take it upon themselves to burn churches. The British colonial headquarters in Palestine was also for instance bombed in 1946 by the Irgun, a Jewish militant group.

Now we have the generalisations:

Muslim men are entitled to beat their wives and take more than one wife. Women are automatically suspect, banned in some communities from showing their faces or limbs because they are sexually tempting — to men. Visit an Arab country, or watch TV shows about them, and you will see plenty of men and boys.

Women appear rarely and, when they do, are covered head to toe. The rest are under virtual house arrest, living behind closed doors in ignorance and isolation.

We cannot interfere in the way other countries order their societies.

But such barbaric treatment of women has been imported and thrives here.


Kavanagh is producing the most extreme examples from the most extreme states, such as Saudi Arabia, and providing them as reasons for why Islamophobia is acceptable. That this is an attempt to smear Muslims as all the same, and ignores the vast cultural differences between such Muslim majority countries as Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan to name but a few, not to mention the differences between the different strands of Islamic thinking, whether it be Sunni, Shia or Sufi, again matters little. The irony is that the states which tend to be the most extreme are the ones which his newspaper, through its allegiance to America, helps to prop up. This is without pointing out that the Sun and female emancipation are far from being synonymous, unless you associate female emancipation with the freedom for women to get their tits out for the lads. Kavanagh realises that he can't claim the same happens here however, so he's forced to somewhat scale back his claims:

Forced marriages are common. Honour killings and beatings are far from rare. Women are refused education or a chance to learn English.

Yet again, that this is little to do with Islam itself and is much more influenced by cultural background is not mentioned. The idea that British Muslim women who have grown up here are refused education or a chance to learn English is completely risible, and for those who emigrated here is simply not backed up by even the slightest of evidence. Forced marriages and honour killings are a challenge which need to be tackled, but blaming Islam rather than the individuals themselves out carry them out is a typical hate tactic.

I receive emails from women Muslims crying out for help. One, Gina Khan, has written eloquently in The Sun about oppression of women in a male-dominated society through arranged marriages, polygamy and the veil. Is she Islamophobic too?

Or is she a lonely voice on behalf of millions of women who are being ignored and gagged by a politically correct establishment which is too timid to face the truth?


No, she's speaking out strongly on the behalf of those who are facing horrendous ordeals because of the family they were born into. This though ignores the point which Oborne and the pamphlet are making: they're not arguing against legitimate criticism of Islam, especially over the points which Khan has raised, which most certainly need to be dealt with. They're concerned with the casual way in which Muslims are treated as either a threat of something to be feared, and the ignorant, abominable and completely untrue newspaper coverage which fuels this. For being concerned for some of the most vulnerable in society, they're accused by Kavanagh of being a politically correct establishment. That the Sun, Trevor Kavanagh and Rupert Murdoch are also doyens of the establishment once again matters not one jot.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Roy Greenslade writing in the Guardian noted with approval that the Sun dedicated a leader column to a statement of the obvious, but one with a decent point: "Islam is not an evil religion," and people "must not play into the hands of racist bigots." Today, 3 years on from the 7/7 attacks, the Sun not only publishes an article by its ex-political editor defending Islamophobia, it also publishes this:

THE family of evil 7/7 bomber Shehzad Tanweer held a party at the fanatic’s grave – on the third anniversary of the London terrorist outrage today.

The sick celebration has been branded an “insult” to July 7 victims and their relatives.


First of all, who cares, especially as this is supposedly taking place in Pakistan and not the UK? Secondly, what is the point of this article, other than to inspire similar revulsion and hate? On a day which ought to be dedicated not only to remembering but also to fighting against the intolerance which helps to lead to such attacks, it also publishes these comments:

I doubt it. Infidels don't count so why would they be remotely upset about the terrorist attack? Loyalty is to Allah, and it is unfortunate for them that a Muslim had to die in committing his heinous act. Tanweer was brought up in the UK with this education, and it is why there are plenty more Tanweers about. It is a mistake to ascribe Western moral values to the way of thinking that creates Tanweers and his ilk. Political correctness now prohibits thoughts that people are actually different in their views.

Most Muslims proclaim horror at all of these types of attrocity but they do sweet FA about it - time to get off your butts and get your houses in order & stop playing the percecuted victims.

if u know where the party is held why don't u just bomb them back

Who are these sick people? The UK has become a haven for scumbags like this, if anyone protests they will say that they are being discriminated against, stupid laws that help them and let this country head for the gutter.

surely it is time for the socalled good muslims to tart to condemn these fanatics. if they do not then they are all as bad theres no wonder that there is racial tension. I read today that a group in england had sent the brother of one of these bombers to pakistan so that relations could be better. I wonder if he went to this so called party - if so he should bebanned from returning here and if he has returned he should have his passport taken away as well as his benefits.

The Muslims under Siege pamphlet concludes with:

We think we should all feel a little bit ashamed about the way we treat Muslims in the media, in our politics, and on our streets. They are our fellow citizens, yet often we barely acknowledge them. We misrepresent them and in certain cases we persecute them. We do not treat Muslims with the tolerance, decency and fairness that we so often like to boast is the British way. We urgently need to change our public culture.

The above is the Sun's response to the need for that change.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

7/07/2008 09:47:00 PM | | | links to this post

Saturday, July 05, 2008 

Peter Oborne on Islamophobia and Chris Dillow on James Purnell.

The ever reliable Peter Oborne has an excellent article on Islamophobia in the Daily Mail of all places, ahead of a Dispatches docu on Monday. He mentions the Muslim bus driver who "ordered his passengers off so he could pray", which you might recall from these couple of posts and on 5cc:

Take the story in a red-top newspaper (The Sun) earlier this year about a bus driver who apparently ordered his passengers off his bus so that he could kneel towards Mecca and pray.

It was taken up by those who want to exaggerate and exploit divisions in our society and added to the growing list of perceived outrages committed by Muslims in this nominally Christian (though largely secular) country of ours. Pictures of the driver on his prayer-mat went the rounds.

Except it didn't happen like that. The truth was that his bus had been taken out of service by an inspector because it was running late, and the passengers switched to the one behind - not an unusual occurrence by any means, as bus travellers know.

The driver, with his bus temporarily idle, took the opportunity of a break and used it for his prayers. Meanwhile, as CCTV cameras show, the passengers waited for no more than a minute before boarding the next bus and going on their way.

That is the explanation the bus company would have given if it had had the chance. Instead, the newspaper chose to believe its one informant, a 21-year-old plumber, who had arrived late on the scene, jumped to the wrong conclusion and seen the chance to make some money by selling the story.

In these disturbing times, when Muslims are seen as fair game for any mischief or mendacity, the newspaper jumped at it. 'Get off my bus: I need to pray', screamed its headline, and another Islamophobic nail was hammered into the coffin of inter-racial harmony in this country.

Not that Oborne has convinced the Mail's commenters:

The headline should read 'Is post war Britain anti-British?'

- Doris, Yorkshire, 4/7/2008 9:21

This is neither a phobia nor is it a prejudice.

- A Guy, London, England, 4/7/2008 10:01


Other essential reading is provided by Chris who destroys James Purnell and his proposed ultra-Blairite welfare reforms.

Labels: , , , , ,

Share |

7/05/2008 09:55:00 PM | | | links to this post

About

  • This is septicisle
profile

Links

Last posts

Archives

Email me
Syndicate this site (XML)
Powered by Blogger
and Blogger Templates