Islam

Sunday

David Blackburn

The burka is a symbol of division, but it should not be banned

On the face of it, Nigel Farage is right: “There is nothing extreme or radical or ridiculous” about banning the burka. It is a manifestation of many British Muslims’ indifference to society; it is an expression of wilful separation and a symbol of a nation riven with cultural division. In the sphere of private behaviour becoming political, the burka engenders intolerance – reactionary Islam’s intolerance of liberal democracy and vice versa. In this atmosphere, writers and politicians of all hues have drawn the same conclusion and there is capital to be extracted (perhaps cynically) by taking the seemingly sensible decision to ban the burka. To do so would be misguided as well

Friday

James Forsyth

The government caves in to the Muslim Council of Britain

The government has caved in its dispute with the Muslim Council of Britain. The government broke off relations with the group over its deputy director-general Daud Abdullah signing the Istanbul Declaration. Indeed, Daud Abdullah even instigated legal action against the then Communities Secretary Hazel Blears over her statements about what the declaration called for. But now Stephen Pollard is reporting that the government is bringing the MCB back in. A DCLG spokesperson tells Pollard that an MCB commitment to examine “their internal processes and ensure that the personal actions of all members, including senior leaders, remain true to the organisation’s agreed policies, avoiding a repeat of the issues which arose

James Forsyth

Fighting terror with the National Security Council

Since September 11, Britain has lost one war and is not winning another. But the question of why this is the case remains depressingly low down the agenda. There is remarkably little interest in why the “British army was defeated in the field in southern Iraq”, to quote Gordon Brown’s and David Miliband’s favourite counter-insurgency expert, David Kilcullen. Today, the Tories launched their green paper on national security with speeches by Pauline Neville-Jones and David Cameron. The document is a mixed bag. But the Tories deserve credit for squarely facing up to the fact that Britain is now an “incubator of extremism and an exporter of terrorism”. They are also

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Islam4UK: the clue’s in the name

Irony of ironies, proselytising liberal and convinced egalitarian, Anjem Choudary, told the Today programme that the banning of Islam4UK, al-Muhajiroun and their aliases is a ‘failure of democracy’. A further irony is that he is right, sort of. Alan Johnson’s decision is understandable but incorrect; the surest way to silence these repugnant extremists and reactionaries is through equality and free debate, even though they hold those principles in contempt. The members of Islam4UK abuse freedom to peddle their reactionary ideals and disregard their duties towards society, but that is no reason to proscribe the group. Unless it entertains something more tangibly serious than marches and hosting lunatics on its discussion boards, Islam4UK and its ilk

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Oh dear, Gordon’s done it again

The knicker-bomber must love this. Twice Gordon Brown has jumped on the bandwagon and bounced straight off on both occasions. Sky News reports that the UK did not pass vital information to the US, despite the claims of a Downing Street spokesman. Here’s the key section: ‘During a briefing to journalists today, the Prime Minister’s spokesman said: “There is no suggestion the UK passed intelligence to the US that they did not act on.” But Sky’s political correspondent Joey Jones said it had been an “awful” briefing. “He tried to clear things up but only succeeded in muddying the waters still further,” Jones said. “After he read Downing Street’s statement,

Monday

John Stokes

Overcoming America's intelligence woes

The failed terrorist attack on a North West Airlines plane last month has reignited the debate about just what can be done to improve the performance of America’s intelligence agencies. Despite spending close to $100 billion since the attacks of 9/11 nine years ago, it has become clear in the aftermath of the failed attack that all the old problems that were identified after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon still remain: Intelligence is not shared effectively and the analysis of available data remains weak. To the reformers inside the intelligence community, none of this is exactly news. As money poured in after 9/11 there was

Saturday

David Blackburn

Why profiling is essential

It is a truth, yet to be universally acknowledged, that the overwhelming majority of global terrorism is committed by radical Muslims. However, the Guardian reports that Whitehall has reached that conclusion and passenger profiling is “in the mix” of the latest airport security review. Thank God, sense prevails at last. The previous airport review, conducted in the aftermath of the liquid bomb plot, decided against profiling. What followed was a fatuous politically correct concoction. Even pilots’ toothpaste was examined; one pilot commented: “If I want to kill everyone (on board) I don’t faff around with plastic explosives, I point the nose at the ground”. Such determined absurdity should be behind us. Alas, not everyone gets

Thursday

Daniel Korski

The “sleeper issue” of 2010: Yemen

As Melanie Phillips says in her article for this week’s issue of the magazine, the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab highlights the role of other, less frequently discussed, countries in Islamist terror. One such country is Yemen, where Abdulmutallab is thought to have trained at an Al Qaeda camp. The US believes there may be a few hundred al Qaeda fighters in Yemen, centered on a group of key network leaders who are operating a number of camps.   Yemen has slowly been getting more international attention. A few weeks ago I was meant to go on Al Jazeera, but my appearance was cancelled at the last minute because, I

John Stokes

The failures of American intelligence

The terrorist attacks on 9/11 succeeded because US intelligence failed to bring the various pieces of information together to prevent them. The attempted terrorist attack on a North West Airlines plane headed for Detroit almost succeeded because US intelligence failed to bring different pieces of information together that would have prevented the bomber getting on the plane. Between 2001 and today, the US has spent around $40 billion on counter terrorist improvements and even more on trying to improve intelligence. And yet, nothing much seems to have changed. In the current case, there was intelligence that the Yemen branch of Al Qaeda was using a ‘Nigerian’ as a bomber. There

Wednesday

James Forsyth

The NYT: The Detroit bomber was radicalised in London

It is a depressing fact that the Detroit bomber appears to have been radicalised in London. Today, the New York Times takes an extensive look at the bomber’s radicalisation in London. As the paper, which is not prone to hyperbole, says: “Investigators are now, in fact, turning a sharper and retrospective eye to the passage in Mr. Abdulmutallab’s life that began immediately after his summer in Sana, Yemen, in 2005, when he enrolled as a $25,000-a-year mechanical engineering student at University College London. In recent days, officials in Washington and London have said they are focusing on the possibility that his London years, including his possible contacts with radical Muslim

Tuesday

Martin Bright

What on earth was Daud Abdullah doing on Channel 4 News?

What a bizarre decision by Channel 4 News to invite the Muslim Council of Britain’s Daud Abdullah on to talk about the attempt to arrest the Israeli politician Tzipi Livni for her involvement in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. And even more peculiar that Jon Snow tried to stop the Jewish Chronicle’s Stephen Pollard raising the issue that Abdullah had signed the Istanbul Declaration calling for attacks not just on Israel and but on British forces perceived to have supported the .  The Deputy Secretary General of the MCB is currently the reason his organisation is out in the cold. Communities Secretary John Denham is sympathetic to the MCB, but

Monday

Daniel Korski

What do Muslims think?

Coffee House readers sometimes complain that we do not talk enough about Muslims and Islam. I have certainly shied away from the subject, fearing that emotion and prejudice, rather than argumentation and empirical data, would dominate the debate. I don’t write about Christians, Jews or Buddhists, so why focus on Muslims? At any rate, I don’t like talking about collective groups, much as I prefer not to be talked about based solely on my heritage. But now a new study called Muslims in Europe allows for an empirically-based debate about sentiments across a number of Muslim communities. Based on interviews and surveys in 11 European cities, it presents some interesting

Friday

Martin Bright

Rediscovering Paul Berman

Six years ago I wrote a review for the Observer about Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism, a quite brilliant polemic about the way the legitimate liberal desire to overturn the conventional or the bourgeois can so often turn to murderous terror. I recognised at the time that it was an extraordinary book, but I couldn’t quite accept his final conclusions, which seemed to elide different forms of barbarism so that Palestinian suicide bombers became equated with the genocide of the Nazi death camps. I still think it is important to make distinctions between the geographical, cultural and historical specifics of individual patterns of atrocity. This is not to say there

Monday

Alex Massie

The American Way of Empire

Actually, the existence of any such imperial ambitions is generally denied, even though the US has been an expansionist power almost since its inception. The inter-war years of “isolationism” are the great exception, not the natural way of things. At least not in Washington. Still, we are where we are. Two recent columns, by Thomas Friedman and David Frum respectively, are worth considering when one ponders the state and fate of the American Empire. First, Friedman writes about the anti-American “Narrative” that dominates muslim opinion. This, he says, is most unfair since: Yes, after two decades in which U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

A game of chess

Fascinating details dominated PMQs today. Instead of the usual custard pie-fight this was a game of chess. Things began with talk of downpours and sandbags. Both leaders were concerned that the sodden folk of Cumbria are receiving enough hot soup and blankets. The PM reminded us that he’d recently popped up there to squelch around in his wellies shaking people’s hands and nodding sympathetically. Then Cameron pulled out a firecracker. He accused Brown of shambolic incompetence in allowing public money to flow into the hands of a front organization for Hizb ut-Tahrir, an extremist group whose constitution denounces non-Moslems in virulent terms. ‘They are combatants in the battlefield. Their blood

Anthony Sattin

The last five hundred years

In the aftermath of the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center, an elderly Arab from the Gulf told me that he thought it was the work of American agents. In the aftermath of the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center, an elderly Arab from the Gulf told me that he thought it was the work of American agents. The claim, however fantastic, seemed perfectly logical to him, for it gave the US an excuse to intervene in the Middle East and Asia’s oil-rich regions. Eugene Rogan’s book explains why that Arab, and Arabs generally, feel so suspicious of the West. There has been a plethora of books about

Friday

David Blackburn

There are moral absolutes: aspects of Sharia are barbaric

Credit where credit’s due, Peter Tatchell wrote an article for the Guardian describing Sharia law as being “especially oppressive”. He says: ‘Its interpretations stipulate the execution of Muslims who commit adultery, renounce their faith (apostates) or have same-sex relationships. Sharia methods of execution, such as stoning, are particularly brutal and cruel – witness the stoning to death this week in Somalia of a 20-year-old woman divorcee who was accused of adultery. This is the fourth stoning of an adulterer in Somalia in the last year. Somalia is an extreme example of the Sharia oppression that exists in large parts of the Muslim world. As ever, Muslim women are often the

Monday

David Blackburn

Raving lunatic hails Major Hasan a ‘hero’

It’s worth noting this find that Harry’s Place has made. Anwar al Awlaki describes Major Hasan’s atrocity as ‘the right thing to do’. Al Awlaki is the former Imam of Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Great Falls, Virginia, where Hasan was a congregant. I maintain that it is too early to assert whether Hasan is or is not a ‘jihadist’ in the strict sense, but that his rapid freefall into homicidal madness would suggest that that he is a lunatic who happens to be a ‘devout’ Muslim; although in no way does that make him a victim.  Al Awlaki’s spiel highlights the absence of any moral objectivity to archaic, intolerant and

Friday

Daniel Korski

In Afghanistan, more of the same won’t do

Gordon Brown says Britain must not walk away from NATO’s Afghan mission. Yet 73 percent of Britons told YouGov that they want British troops withdrawn. Even more probably think they will fail even if they are allowed to stay on. Yet what to do if you believe, like I do, that the allies cannot simply withdraw without creating a catalytic effect on worldwide Islamist extremism and a regional vortex of violence, which will end in sectarian strife, refugee flows, President Karzai’s toppling, Pakistan’s further destabilisation and irreparable damage to NATO? One last heave, won’t do. Clever initiative, like my own idea of creating an ANA Army Corps of Engineers, will

Sunday

Daniel Korski

Freedom of expression is Rose's war

Last week, Denmark discovered that two US-based men were plotting a terrorist attack against Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that outraged hard-line Muslims by publishing the infamous Muhammad cartoons in 2005. Allegedly, the two men planned to target cultural editor Flemming Rose and cartoonist Kurt Westergaard.  The mild-mannered Flemming Rose is back in the spotlight. Asked if he regretted publishing the cartoons, Rose insisted that bowing to such pressure would not yield less extremism, but more. He went further – the cartoons have not been re-issued, which amounts to the sort of self-censorship that moved him to commission the cartoons originally. Rose’s target was neither Islam nor Muslims. He wanted to