Islam

Tuesday

Martin Bright

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

From our UK edition

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 even he realises that Abdullah's support for violence makes it impossible for the British government to enter into dialogue with his organisation.

Monday

Daniel Korski

What do Muslims think?

From our UK edition

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 facts. It does not tell us what Muslims think, of course, but gives a statistically-relevant sample of views.

Friday

Martin Bright

Rediscovering Paul Berman

From our UK edition

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 is a hierarchy of such things.

Monday

Alex Massie

The American Way of Empire

From our UK edition

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.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

A game of chess

From our UK edition

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 is lawful, as is their property.’ One thing’s for sure.

Anthony Sattin

The last five hundred years

From our UK edition

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.

Friday

David Blackburn

There are moral absolutes: aspects of Sharia are barbaric

From our UK edition

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 main victims.

Monday

David Blackburn

Raving lunatic hails Major Hasan a ‘hero’

From our UK edition

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 hateful Islamism. It raises wider questions.

Friday

Daniel Korski

In Afghanistan, more of the same won’t do

From our UK edition

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 take too long to make an impact.

Sunday

Daniel Korski

Freedom of expression is Rose’s war

From our UK edition

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.

Saturday

Martin Bright

Should John Denham Shut Up About the Extreme Right?

From our UK edition

It's the perennial problem: platform or no platform, anti-Nazi campaign versus no oxygen of publicity. You'd have thought we'd have sorted this one out by now. I agree with David Blackburn that John Denham's comments comparing the English Defence League to Mosley's Black Shirts risk overstating the significance of this "organisation". It is always tempting to make a historical fascist comparison and they rarely work. The Communities and Local Government Secretary should probably have resisted. Denham may have been clumsy in this instance, but he is at least recognising that a strategy needs to be developed in response this particular historical instance of the rise of the extreme right.

Monday

Alex Massie

Oh No! The Muslims Are Coming!

From our UK edition

Sure as eggs is eggs, you can count on some folk being terribly exercised each time it is "revealed" that lots of boys named Mohammed, or some variation of the prophet's name, are being born in europe. This time it's the revelation [link fixed] that in four Dutch cities Mohammed is the most popular name for boys. Oh no! The Muslims are coming! Never mind that Mohammed is only the 16th most popular boys name in Holland as a whole, better by far to raise the spectre of an Islamic "takeover" of Dutch cities. Never mind that this sort of fear-mongering has become an annual tradition. Did you know, for instance, that Mohammed was already the second most popular boys' name in Britain? Clearly the Caliphate is on the march!

Monday

Martin Bright

MPs and Whistleblowers

From our UK edition

I'm delighted to see Tony Wright's Public Accounts Committee recognising what many of us knew all along: a "culture that encourages proper whistleblowing... is the best safeguard against leaking". The BBC has an outline of the findings here. The challenge is shifting that culture. Unfortunately, Britain still has an instinct for secrecy. The  introduction of whistleblower legislation and the Freedom of Information Act have made surprisingly little difference to this deeply ingrained taste for keeping the public in the dark. I sincerely hope that the PAC's proposal that civil servants are given a route of disclosure through parliament will make a difference. But I have my doubts.

Friday

Martin Bright

What Am I Supposed to Say About This?

From our UK edition

It was with great sadness that I left the New Statesman. I always said it was a privilege to work as its political editor. I wish anyone who writes about politics for the New Statesman well. It's a difficult gig, especially in the present political atmosphere. But Harry's Place has just published this recording of the magazine's self-styled Senior Editor (Politics) Mehdi Hasan.

Wednesday

Martin Bright

The 7/7 Conspiracy Theories Debunked

From our UK edition

Last night's edition of BBC2's The Conspiracy Files was a fine piece of television. It examined the conspiracy theories surrounding the bombings of July 7 2005 and if you haven't seen it, watch it again right now. At first I thought it was going to be another piece of gratuitous "what if?" television. But it was so much better than that. By taking the conspiracy theories surrounding the atrocities at face value, the programme makers gave the loons enough rope with which to hang themeslves. The theory that Israelis were somehow warned of the attacks in advance was forensically dismantled and the idea that the bombs were planted under the carriages of the trains shown to be nonsens.

Friday

Alex Massie

The Muslim Menace to Our British Nationality. For Real!

From our UK edition

Here's a disturbing report from one of the great institutions of the land: They cannot be assimilated and absorbed into the British race. They remain a people by themselves, segregated by reason of their race, their customs, their traditions and above all by their loyalty to their religion, and are gradually and inevitable dividing Britain, racially, socially and ecclesiastically... Already there is a bitter feeling among the British working classes against the muslim intruders. As the latter increases, and the British people realise the seriousness of the menace to their racial supremacy in their native land, this bitterness will develop into a race antagonism which will have disastrous consequences for Britain.

Thursday

Martin Bright

A Very Worrying Development

From our UK edition

Harry's Place reports that Al-Muhajiroun has reformed and it is already returning to its thuggish ways. A debate between Anjem Choudhary and Douglas Murray turned very nasty when a member of the audience insisted on not being segregated and sat with his female friends. Free expression does not equal the right to brutalise those who exercise their choice to sit where they wish, with whoever they wish in a public place. Horrible.

Thursday

Alex Massie

Obama in Cairo

From our UK edition

I have no doubt that Barack Obama's speech in Cairo today will not have gone down well amongst American conservatives. In fact many of them will be appalled by it. How long before someone in the right-wing blogosphere writes something about how terrible, if unsurprising, it was to see an American President protstrate himself in such humiliating fashion. All the right's worst fears have com to pass! It's like Jimmy Carter has returned to the White House! And, I guess, you could pull some lines from the speech that made it seem as though Obama was "apologising" for the United States while rarely putting as much emphasis on the sins of the muslim world. But that would be to miss the point: the arab and muslim worlds don't need to be lectured by the United States, they need to be engaged.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Barack Obama’s Super-Secret Desire to Impose Sharia Law

From our UK edition

Melanie Phillips is, of course, correct to point out that Barack Obama's statement that the US is one of the larger muslim countries in the world is an exaggeration - though also, I would say (though Melanie might not), an understandable one. However she then writes: Just what planet is this US President on? Or is this not a statement but an aspiration? This is intriguing and I'd be interested to learn how the President might make the United States an islamic nation. Surely this was something he should have mentioned on the campaign trail? Clearly, his reticence about this confirms the seriousness of his intent. All the most dangerous plots are kept secret, dontcha know? Only the bravest and wisest can penetrate the conspiracy and sound the necessary alert.

Thursday

Martin Bright

Libel: The New Jihad

From our UK edition

Let's make one thing crystal clear. When I refer to jihad in the headline of this piece, I mean it in the non-violent sense of "holy struggle", rather than the nastier "holy war" kind. This is an important distinction and I'm happy to make it straight away. You can't be too careful these days. I waded into serious "dar al-harb" (land of conflict - the Islamic scholars among you will understand) by taking issue with the individuals who signed a letter to the Observer calling on Nick Cohen to find another column to write. Their leader, Sunder Katwala of the Fabian Society, has always insisted that his intention was not to silence Nick.  But aren't there better things for the left to do?