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.
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 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: British Muslims, Dispatches, It Shouldn't Happen to a Muslim, Muslim bashing, Muslims under Siege, Peter Oborne, Scum-watch, Sun-watch, Trevor Kavangah
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