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B u t t e r i n g U p t h e M u s l i
m V o t e
BARBARA SMOKER probes the terrorist mind-set
and puts the Mohammed cartoons in perspective
The
Political Limits of Free Speech
OUR Government's policy to pander to the religious lobbies and
substantially increase the proportion of subsidised "faith"
schools has continued, unabated, even since the London suicide bombings
of last July, though the Government has reacted to those atrocities, in
knee-jerk fashion, with other draconian responses.
These have included not only legitimate moves against terrorists and
would-be terrorists, but also the erosion of many hard-won civil rights,
even extending to the centuries-old principle of habeas corpus - which
England, from the time of Magna Carta, taught the rest of the civilised
world. The Prime Minister stubbornly tried to get it suspended, by the
Terrorism Bill, up to a monstrous 90 days, during which suspects could
be kept in prison without charge. In the event, that attempt was
defeated by Parliament, with the aid of rebel backbenchers of his own
Party - though even then the period was substantially extended to 28
days, which is draconian enough.
We were told by politicians and mealy-mouthed functionaries that it was
politically incorrect to call the perpetrators of the London July 7
terrorists Muslims - but, of course, everyone knew they were Muslims, of
the most zealous.
They were British-born Muslim youths, three of whom - all dead - were
quickly identified. However, the identity of those who recruited them
and supplied their explosives has, apart from the hate-preacher Abu
Hamza, yet to he discovered.
Since the belief of a typical suicide bomber in a blissful after-life
for "martyrs" is unshakeable, what we need perhaps is a
revered ayatollah to proclaim, with Koranic support, that suicide
bombers will actually go to hell!
For eight years, at Finsbury Park, Hamza was allowed to preach violent
hatred and incite young men to commit murder, before the Crown
Prosecution Service started its criminal proceedings against him in 2004
- and only then because the US was demanding his extradition to their
country to be tried for crimes against it.
Of course Britain must take care to avoid a violent backlash against the
mostly peaceable British Muslim community, but succeeding governments
have in the past carried the exoneration of Muslim law-breakers too far.
When Islamic extremists held their big protest march in
London in May 1989 to demand the death of Salman Rushdie for
"blasphemy", I was foolhardy enough to stand at the side of
the route holding a banner that read, simply, "Free Speech".
Physically attacked by a surge of marchers yelling "Kill, Kill,
Kill!", I was saved from serious injury by a plain-clothes
policeman. On the same occasion, 123 of the demonstrators were arrested
for injuring policemen, but all were released the next morning without
charge - obviously in accordance with a misguided Home Office directive.
At that time, even on mainstream television, hard-line Muslim spokesmen
began advocating the murder of Rushdie, and even offering bribes for
carrying it out. Naively, we expected them to be prosecuted for the
age-old common-law offence of
incitement to murder - but nothing happened, of course. This crime was
apparently immune from prosecution if committed in the name of Islam -
and the hate-preachers were naturally emboldened by the pusillanimous
immunity.
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Animal Wefare
The Farm Animal Welfare Council - an official advisory body - has
repeatedly recommended that an end be put to the Jewish and Muslim
exemptions from the law requiring pre-stunning for the slaughter of farm
animals; but no government has had the courage to introduce this reform.
Predictably, the religions that oppose pre-stunning are up in arms at
the prospect of having to obey the general law of the country, and
insist on their "religious rights" in this matter. But what
about animal rights? And, indeed, the rights of meat-eaters of other
religions, or of none, who are given
no opportunity to avoid cruelly slaughtered meat. Since orthodox Jews
eat only part of the animal, the rest is sold, unlabelled, in butchers'
and supermarkets. And many of the state schools in areas of the country
with a sizeable Muslim population now serve only halal meat.
If the shechita and halal methods of meat-slaughter are
not cruel, then the general law that demands pre-stunning in
non-religious abattoirs should be repealed. Otherwise, the same British
law should apply to all, and people who choose to come to settle in
Britain should be prepared to accept it. After all, they have the
alternative of turning vegetarian.
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Free Speech in British Universities
As president of the National Secular Society for 25 years (from 1971), I
was constantly invited to take part in university debates all over the
country on religious motions, and, in the hope that I might help a few
young people to start thinking for themselves, I accepted whenever
possible. It was a foregone conclusion that my atheistic side of the
debate would lose the subsequent vote, as such bodies as the Student
Christian Mission were always disproportionately represented in the
debating chamber; but it was more important to me that we should win the
argument.
Then, in the early 1980s, there was a sudden switch from
fundamentalist Christian to fundamentalist Muslim opposition, and it
became obvious that Muslim student bodies, not the faculty, were
organising the debates and bringing Islamic orators in to oppose
secularism, though the events were still officially under the university
auspices. After one debate, I remember, a non-Muslim undergraduate came
up to me to say he had had no idea how biased the set-up would be, and
was horrified by it. Members of the faculty, however, were seen only
fleetingly, even when I had specifically asked them to monitor the
event.
I accounted for the number of Muslim students by assuming that they
included many from other universities and elsewhere. More recently I
have learnt that a number of committed Muslim A-level students would
decide jointly on their choice of university, so that they could form
the nucleus of a Muslim student body there. And it is reported that they
often spent time on it when they were supposed to be attending official
lectures and tutorials.
Early on in my acquaintance with the Muslim students, sex segregation
became the order of the day. One time, a friend of mine turned up to
support me by joining the audience, and,
arriving early, chose a seat near the front of the hall. He was
approached and told that that side of the aisle was for women, not men;
but, as the hall had begun to fill up and there were no good seats left
on the other side, he refused to move. In fact, dozens of male students
had to stand throughout the lengthy debate, though half the seats on the
female side were vacant. Leaving early, my friend was pursued menacingly
out of the building and spat at.
I took to writing to the university secretariat prior to each debate,
asking them to rule that sex segregation was unacceptable in British
universities, but they always replied that I could put it to the
students to choose, before the debate. When I did so, the vote - on both
sides of the hall - was overwhelmingly in favour of segregation. Later I
understood why the women students would prefer it: because many of the
sex-starved young men took to groping if they found themselves near a
woman.
The Muslim undergraduates invariably declared that democracy and free
speech were contrary to the will of Allah, though they would support the
principle of democracy when it suited them, as in the matter of the
seating vote - and I could hardly go against it myself after agreeing to
a vote being taken on it. They also liked to declare that Britain was
destined, with their help, to be the first ever true Islamic state. When
I cited Pakistan as an existing Islamic state, they said it was not
truly Muslim, and they were confident (no doubt encouraged by the
official reluctance to prosecute Islamic crimes) that Britain would soon
become the first.
On many of these occasions, sophisticated video
equipment put in an appearance, and I was asked, politely, if I had any
objection to the debate being filmed. I had no objection, but noticed
that the equipment was often switched off while I was speaking; and it
dawned on me that the main reason I was invited to take part in these
debates was to provoke the Islamic spokesmen to higher flights of
rhetoric, mainly for the sake of the videos - which, I now realise, were
then to be used as training material for future extremist preachers and,
possibly, terrorists.
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Political Appeasement 2005/6
Meanwhile, Labour politicians - notably, one recalls, Roy Hattersley and
Jack Straw - were leaning over backwards to butter up the Muslim vote,
which had always benefited Labour. They particularly sympathised with
the exclusion of Islam from protection of the blasphemy law - as though
ridicule and satire had not always been important concomitants of
freedom of social comment.
The National Secular Society thus foresaw that when the Labour Party got
into power it would be even more committed to the multicutural myth and
more conciliatory to Muslim extremism than the Conservatives were. Ours
was almost a lone voice among liberals at that time, warning of the
social menace of immigrant religious extremism, with its opposition to
free speech and its totalitarian hold on those under its thumb -
particularly their women.
I vehemently support the rights of minorities to be different, provided
it does not harm others; but the most vulnerable of all minorities, and
the one therefore most in need of support, is the smallest minority -
the individual.
Because, as NSS president, I frequently warned politicians of the
dangers inherent in their propitiation policy towards Islamic
fundamentalism, and waged a campaign against the Muslim abuse of their
own girls and women, I was dubbed a "racist". When Ken
Livingstone was writing a regular column for the erstwhile London
Evening News, he devoted most of one edition to denouncing me as a
racist because of my campaign at that time against the oppression of
girls and women among the London communities of Hassidic Jews and
fundamentalist Muslims. There was no newspaper space, of course, for my
reply that race and religion were different and that ethnic groups
should not be exclusively represented by male interests.
Suppose the majority of Muslims in Britain were to demand the right to
obey the sharia injunction to chop off a hand of members of their own
community found guilty of theft? And to stone to death women - but only
their own women, you understand - found guilty of adultery? Would New
Labour connive at this situation in the name of multiculturalism?
In the wake of the threats against Rushdie in 1989, the
Labour Party's pledge of appeasement to the Muslim community was
enshrined in an official policy document entitled Multicultural
Education. Their promise of more faith schools went along with
support for the Muslim demand for "parity" of protection
against disrespect through an extension of the old blasphemy law, which
(though rarely used these days) still shields the Church of England.
The "blasphemy" of which the imams accused Rushdie was a
satirical episode in his novel Satanic Verses obliquely referring
to the life of Mohammed. By contrast, the film The Life of Brian,
which had been made, and publicly screened, ten years earlier with
impunity - and has recently been chosen in a tv poll as the best film
comedy ever made - was a far more explicit and detailed satire on the
life of Jesus than Rushdie's novel was on that of Mohammed. Admittedly,
a century earlier the film would have landed the Monty Python team in
jail - but typical English opinions have become more liberal since then,
while those of Islam have, in obedience to Mohammed's injunction of
immutability, stood still.
It was assumed that if only Muslims were able to invoke
the blasphemy law through the courts of justice, it would help to
circumvent their resorting to violent protest; but surely the reverse is
likely: every time a judge dared to rule against a Muslim blasphemy
prosecution, that would be a direct invitation to mass violence.
Later, this blinkered political approach was reinforced by the birth of
New Labour under Tony Blair; and buttering up the Muslim vote became
even more important to the Party when the ill-judged Iraqi war cost them
a large slice of it.
Eventually, vociferous Muslims were to be mollified by the Government's
introduction of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. Fortunately, this
was watered down in the Lords, not only by making it more difficult to
obtain a conviction under it, but by signally restricting the proposed
crime to "threatening" words as opposed to mere "abusive
or insulting" words. However, when the amended version went back to
the Commons for ratification, Blair refused to accept this compromise,
so Labour MPs were "whipped" to reject the amendments. But
Blair was unexpectedly defeated by a sizeable bunch of his own
backbencher rebels - just as he had been two months earlier, on the
proposed 90-day suspension of habeas corpus.
The fact that his defeat this time was by only one vote and that he was
complacent enough not to be in the House to cast his own personal vote,
added to the gaiety of nations. However, even in its modified form, the
new incitement law encroaches on free speech - not least through
self-censorship, which had already, since the Rushdie affair, been
operating in deference to Islamic hauteur, to the detriment of the
public spread of knowledge and comment.
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Mixed Messages?
Paradoxically, this gives the impression that Muslims are an inferior,
down-trodden section of the British populace, unable to accept robust
criticism or to defend their own corner rationally - let alone to laugh
at themselves, which is a redeeming asset in British eyes.
The more moderate and percipient Muslims in this country recognise this,
seeing the continual propitiation of Islamic touchiness as patronising -
and probably the main cause of mounting islamophobia. However, because
the hard-line Muslim organisations make all the noise, they are falsely
regarded by the media, as well as the Government, as being
representative of their whole community.
Fundamentalists take themselves much too seriously, and their feelings
are too easily hurt. They really need to imbibe the traditional
playground retort, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names
can never hurt me."
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The Cartoons
At the end of January, all hell broke loose, fundamentalist Muslims
having maliciously spread the news among themselves internationally
that, some four months earlier, a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, had
published a series of twelve cartoons caricaturing Mohammed. One of the
twelve (innocently reprinted on the cover of the November Freethinker!)
depicted
him as a suicide bomber, his turban a smoking bomb. Even moderate
Muslims have described it as "insulting" to their
religion, though few of them have actually seen it. Anyway, since
suicide bombers are regarded as "martyrs", how can it be
insulting to depict the Prophet as a martyr?
We are told that Islam forbids the imaging of any human being, not just
Mohammed. In that case, why are so many imams willing to appear on
television and pose for photographs?
The fact is that hundreds of cartoons of the Prophet have appeared over
the centuries - some of them far more offensive than these recent ones -
with no retaliation from his followers. For instance, a German woodcut
print of 1481 shows a drunken Mohammed being scolded by one of his
wives. And there is a fresco from the same century in Bologna's church
of San Petronio, by Giovanni da Modena, who, inspired by Dante's Divina
Commedia, depicted Mohammed being tortured in hell. That piece of
medieval art did, however, attract Muslim wrath, when, in 2002, a
terrorist group was discovered plotting (rather belatedly) to blow up
the church.
Though the twelve amusing Danish cartoons were far less scurrilous than
the medieval ones, it is not surprising that devout Muslims failed to
see the joke. But the extent and violence of their reaction to the
cartoons was surprising.
A ferocious protest outside the Danish Embassy in Indonesia was followed
by similar outbreaks in many cities of Asia and Europe, including
London. It prompted newspapers in several western European countries to
reprint the cartoons defiantly in defence of free speech - but no
national newspaper in Britain dared to do likewise.
The same buttery Jack Straw, now promoted to Home Secretary, rushed on
to television to decry publication of the cartoons - apparently seeing
them as more reprehensible than the actual raining of bombs on
defenceless women, men, and children in Iraq - that being something
which, unlike the late Robin Cook, he had felt able to endorse.
Barbara Smoker February 2006
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