A Jihad Watch reader pointed out to me today that the silly anti-"Islamophobia" site that criticized me for being unsophisticated has taken exception to my post here, in which I note the New York Times' January 2005 characterization of the now-disbanded Al-Muhajiroun as "Britain's largest Muslim group."
Now, this "Islamophobia" site generally isn't worth replying to: the writer there seldom if ever presents any evidence for his positions, and contents himself with presenting things that people like me and Daniel Pipes have written as if they were self-evidently false. So I am not posting this to refute him -- there's no there there, as Gertrude Stein might say -- but to point out his indulging in a particularly common type of smear.
Here is his post:
Britain's biggest Muslim group were Al-Qaida admirers – Robert SpencerRobert Spencer has words of advice for Tony Blair: "I'm sure many Muslims in Britain are indeed decent and law-abiding. But I see no indication that Blair has considered the implications of the New York Times' January 2005 assertion that the now-disbanded jihadist group Al-Muhajiroun was Britain's largest Muslim group."
Perhaps that is because Blair's advisers, unlike this self-styled expert on jihad and Islamic terrorism, are not so gobsmackingly ignorant as to believe that Omar Bakri's tiny band of Al-Qaida admirers was ever anything of the sort.
The link to the Times (which you can find above) is not in his piece. This indicates how gobsmackingly ignorant he must take his readership to be, in trying to pass off something the New York Times said as if it popped out of my own head.
Is the New York Times gobsmackingly ignorant? I don't think so -- not about simple matters of fact like that. I take issue with their analyses, as any regular reader of this site well knows, and with their selective portrayals of many incidents, but I find it striking how matter-of-factly they present this assertion about Al-Muhajiroun. It is, of course, inconceivable that the Times cooked this up out of "Islamophobia" or "ignorance."
This kind of sleight-of-hand is common. When I repeated on an MSNBC TV show Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani's 1999 assertion that 80% of American mosques were controlled by extremists, CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper, who was on the show with me, dismissed this as a fabrication of "hatemongers" like me. Never mind that I am not a hatemonger, and more importantly, that I did not originate the figure. Hooper wanted to deflect attention away from Kabbani's statement, and he largely succeeded, although I did get a chance to emphasize the real origin of the assertion.
In the same way, this "Islamophobia" character evidently hopes that no one will notice that it was not I, but the Times, that said this -- and tries to use it as an example of my "Islamophobia" in the process. He is constructing an edifice without a first floor. It is useful, I think, to note such flights from reality (moonward flights, no doubt) on the part of our Politically Correct friends, and not to let them get away with it.
Robert -- It is The New Duranty Times dont on parle, right?
"I'm sure many Muslims in Britain are indeed decent and law-abiding..."
-- from Robert Spencer's article above
One could be "law-abiding" --putting the trash out in the right bin, paying one's BBC licensing fee, not hiding income on which taxes should be paid, crossing the street within the zebra, slowing down one's car at the sleeping policeman or speed bump or speed hump or "camel" -- and now that this intra-dash phrase is becoming the Whipsnade Zoo, I shall close it up at once -- and still harbor hatred for the Infidels, still believe that the Infidel lands must someday belong, by right, to dar al-Islam, still misinform unwary Infidels about the contents of the canonical texts of Islam.
As for all of that still entitled one to be called "decent" -- well, you can decide for yourself if people come to live among you, do not agree with almost everything that makes your own society what it is and would, if they could, end it and replace it with something they believe has a perfect right to replace it, if these people further engage in taqiyya-kitman, out of sinister motives, or out of filial piety, or out of embarrassment, and even those "Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslims refuse to tell the truth about what Islam teaches, and we Infidels more and more come to realize that we can only rely, in the end, on what defectors from Islam, ex-Muslims, can tell us -- well, does that, in your mind, constitute what we mean by "decency"?
I don't think the "vast majority" of Muslims in the U.K. or anywhere else in the Infidel lands are "decent" and "law-abiding" in the larger sense. Only those who, instead of pro forma denunciations, and those uttered only when they have been sufficiently scared for the position of Muslims to wish to quiet the Infidels down, tell the truth about Islam (if more in sorrow) to Infidels, merit the epithets "decent" and "law-abiding." And I have found very few, almost none, of those.
How about you?
Arguing that the majority of Muslims are not in fact truly decent and law-abiding will only harden the dominant PC Left and solidify their conviction that Spencer and Hugh and littlegreenfootballs and Mike Savage et the small minority of alia are akk right-wing fanatics outside the pale of discussion on this urgent problem.
The only hope to find a soft spot in their irrationality is to use logic: Even given that the majority of Muslims are safe and peaceful, we cannot discern the difference between the safe Muslims and the minority of dangerous Muslims -- and the dangerous Muslims are coming out of the milieu of the safe Muslims without any obvious way for us to spot where, how and when they will do so.
So, given that fact, NOW what do we do?
Al-Muhajiroun are known as Al-Looneyoun among most British Muslims. They are generally kept at barge-pole length by the mainstream 'brothers'.
Correction: were known as Al-Looneyoun.
Effractor,
Where are the thousands of Muslims hoisting British flags up their lengths of barge-pole, marching in the streets, condemning their fellow Muslim terrorists, and promising their fellow British that they will help root out the bad apples from out of their mosques and communities?
All I hear and see is silence -- or whining complaints about non-existent potential hate crimes against Muslims.
The muslims are in the minority now. They say they are shocked, Islam does not condone violence, etc.
How do you think they will behave when they are in the majority, or even a significant minority? For an answer, look at Pakistan and India. Violence doesn't even register on the muslims' radars -- it's a norm. They have no qualms of doing exactly what Islam instructs them to do. Don't condone violence? The Qur'an is full of it.
In one of the UK online newspapers, a muslim confided that "Behind closed doors, there are no moderate muslims."
I think the muslims in the West are held in check by their numbers, now still in the minority. And even so, they are already belligerent.
When they reach critical mass... there will no longer be any need to be restrained, and they will give full expression to the code, and all the violence, contained in their Islam.
Perhaps the only thing one can say about then is... God help us.
I already said that, from where I stand, Al-Mohajroun looked like your standard issue fringe group with a tiny membership and no resources. I do not underestimate, I hope, the hold of extremism - or rather, of violence - on the British Muslim community, but, unlike for instance the dangerous louts who ran (and I rather think still run, under a "moderate" disguise) the Finchley Mosque, these people never seemed able to bring together even a few hundred members, never seemed to control any mosque, and tended to make themselves heard by little mimeographed stickers placed on streetlights. I do not believe that they are the largest British Muslim group - not by a long shot - and I think that, that time, the New York Times was sold a pup. After all, the job of journalists is to learn in a few days, each time, about things they knew nothing of until then; it is hardly unheard of for them to be led up the garden path by an "expert" with an agenda.
A friend of mine working in Windsor has text’d me about a bomb scare. Can't see anything on the news at the moment. Hope it wasn’t real.
Some of the people just haven't got a clue. I am a British Muslim, I know more about the situation than you. Your claims are not even serious. I cannot understand the attitude from some of the people here.
Muslims and Islam will not disappear. That will not happen, you can make as much noise as you want, it doesn't mean anything. There were terrorist attacks here and now hopefully the extremists will be targeted more. I just hope now that extremists are exposed more aggressively by the Muslim community and that the authorities do something about it. That means deportations and arrests. The Muslims in the UK are peaceful, law-abiding citizens, attacking all Muslims is simply ridiculous.
The claim about Al-Muhajiroun being the largest groups is a big joke. Say that to any Muslim in the street and they would laugh at you.
Promoting rubbish like that doesn't help anyone. I see that some people wish to use the attacks last week to further their dangerous views, I think that is very sad.
Let us move forward, this is the chance for the Muslims in the UK to combat extremism and deviancy for the benefit of the UK (Both Muslim and Non-Muslim) let the UK be the light to the rest of the World. We Muslims will oppose terrorism and extremism.
"Muslims and Islam will not disappear."
--- from a Muslim poster above
No one expects that. What one expects is the following:
1) Muslims will continue, wherever they rule, to make life so unpleasant for non-Muslims that those non-Muslims will slowly or rapidly leave.
In 1914 Constantinople was non-Muslim, at a time when the Western powers had for many decades been able to exert pressure on the Ottoman Porte. Today that figure is about 1%. The same kind of decreases took place in Alexandria (where there was a considerable population of Greeks, Jews, Italians, and other non-Muslims, many of whom were descedants of families that had lived there for generations -- both Ungaretti and Seferis were born there) and Cairo.
All over the Muslim-controlled parts of the MIddle East Christian populations have been steadily declining, where -- at the time of the Arab invason -- everyone was Christian or Jew in the lands comquered by formerly paga Arabs. In Iran, the Zoroastrians also steadily declined in numgbers. Some fled to India (their descendants are the Parsees); about 150,000 according to official figures remain in Iran where their lives are most unpleasant (see Mary Boyce, the historian of the Zoroastrians who also lived among them in recent times).
Now, among the Christian Arabs of the territories handed over to the control of the "Palestinian" authority, such as it is, there is flight -- flight into Israel, where possible, flight to Australia, Canada, Europe, America, anywhere so as to avoid Muslim control. Bethlehem ws 60% Christian and in a few years has become 30% Christian. This is what happens everywhere in the Middle East.
The only counter-trend is that the most morally and intellectually aware are, here and there, in Algeria for example, are converting to Christianiy. Whether that is out of despair at the violence, or reflects a choice of Berbers wishing to opt out of the Arabist supremacist ideology contained within Islam, is unclear.
2) In the Muslim-controlled countries, everything is done to make life hell for non-Muslims. In 1947 15% of the population of what is now Pakistan (until 1971 West Pakistan) was Hindu; only 1% is now Hindu. In 1947, 35% of the population of Bangladesh (until 1971 East Pakistan) was non-Muslim; now it is 8% and falling. In the meantime, the percentage of the population in India that is Muslim steadily rises. Why? The Christians in Indonesia have bee murdered, and only in the case of East Timor have they been rescued from outside. Those in small communities, or even in more substantial ones in the Moluccas,are always under assault. In Malaysia, on the other hand, the Muslims who at independence were less than a majority have become a majority, and the Bumiputra system (which forces non-Muslims to economically support all Muslims, in a kind of disguised jizyah, makes life difficult for the Chinese and Indians). The steady pressure even of Muslims who are 10% of the population -- as those in Thailand massacring Buddhist monks and villagers and terrorizing Buddhist schoolteachers -- is one more example. And they could be multipllied. There is no place on earth where a Muslim population sufficient to either have control of an area, or sufficiently large to attack, or make life extremely unplesant, expensive, and dangerous for the non-Muslims among whom those Muslims have come to settle, but not to offer loyalty nor friendship (by the Qur'an itself, one cannot offer friendship to non-Muslims; a specific passage instructs Muslims not to "take the Jews and Christians as friends, for they are friends only with each other.") To the extent that some Muslims are "Muslims-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslims, and hence do not follow what the Qur'an tells them, and are unobervant or negligent or bad Muslims, to that extent they may fit in. Otherwise, it is not possible; for a true believer, loyalty is to the umma, the Community of Believers. And that's it.
3) Given this record, which most non-Muslims have yet to think about clearly, and given the immutable texts of Islam, what would be a reasonable course of action for non-Muslims not yet swamped by a Muslim population, to do?
Surely limiting the number of Muslims by stopping all Muslim immigration, in one thing. Then, removing all those Muslim non-citizens from one's midst is another act of minimal self-defense. Yet another act of minimal self-defense would be to examine the whole concept of the oath of allegiance that one takes, at least in the United States, and to see if, of necessity, any Believer must be perjuring him or herself because loyalty to an Infidel nation-state cannot possibly be meant. Finally, there is no reason for private citizens to make their own countries more welcoming to those whose mere presnce is a danger, present and growingl There is no reason to make the economic conditions and prospects of those who carry within themselves an ideology or belief-system that one finds extremely disturbing and threatening, better rather than worse.
4) And one must consider, in the end, that one has a duty not only to the present inhabitants of Infidel lands,but to the cultural or civilizational legacy they have inherited, not entirely understanding either in what that legacy consists, or how long and how difficult it was to arrive at it. Those who know more about Paris Hilton than they do about the Bill of Rights, or more about hip-hop than about the history of Western music, or more about the kind of "conceptual" art or video art or all the rest of it that sells so well to the stupidest and often the richest of philistine and uneducaed collectors, are not likely to be too aware of how Islam is completely incompatible with that Bill of Rights, Islam bans music, and scultpure, and paintings of living creatures. The fact that some plausible, well-off Muslims do not adhere to the rules proves nothing. Infidels have to judge Islam on its own terms, not on the basis of those who, because they may have lived or studied in the West, and are past masters at presenting it falsely to Infidels eager not to believe the truth (those Infidels never quite grasping how widespread and deep is the need even among the most sophisticated Muslims to lie about what Islam teaches, out of filial piety or embarrassment or in some cases, out of real ingorance).
And if one has a duty that transcends one's own time, to preserve and transmit something of that tattered civilization (American universities, in the education industry, are not exactly distinguishing themselves in that regard), then one may take a harder approach.
In 1946 the Czechs, the most advanced and tolerant people and polity in all of Eastern or Central Europe, had had enough. They had experienced the full weight of the Nazis. They remembered how, before the war, the Sudeten Germans, 3 million of them, had been a classic fifth column, and their leader, Konrad Henlein, had taken directions from Adolf Hitler. They had staged riots in order that the Czech police would suppress them, so that they would be depicted as "oppressed" people in the Western newspapers, and so it was. The London and Paris dailies were full of articles about the horrible behavior of the horrible Czechs. Munich, the war, the rest you know. The Volksdeutsche everywhere were given special privileges by the invading Germans, and everywhere they collaborated and worked actively for the greater good not of the non-German countries they lived in, but for the Third Reich.
After the war, Czechoslovakia was not alone (Poland did the same, so did other countries on a smaller scale) in expelling its ethnic Germans. But what bears noting is that the Czechs expelled fully 3 million people, whose ancestors had lived there, in some cases, for 600 years. Yet no one in Czechoslovakia, nor outside of Czechoslovakia, dropped a tear. No one thought the Benes Decree (by which these people's expulsion was decided) morally wrong. No one does today, either, given the entire circumstances of that war and the loyalties, and acts, of many (but again: not all) of those Sudeten Germans.
People who adhere to a belief-system that tells them quite clearly how to behave toward, how to treat, all those who do not so believe, people whose belief-system divides the world uncompromisingly between Believer and Infidel, between dar al-Islam (the lands where Islam rules) and dar al-Harb (the lands where Infidels still rule, as yet unsubjugated by Islam), people whose entire history, from Spain to the East Indieas, over a span of perhaps 1350 years (if we are to accept the Muslim idea that Islam began in the early 7th century, which may not be completely true), shows a remarkable similarity in the treatment of all the non-Muslims who were conquered in their own lands, and then either killed (60-70 million Hindus during the Mughal rule), or converted (out of fear, or the desire to escape intolerable conditions), or forced to endure a condition of humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity that the term "second-class citizen" does not begin to convey.
Given all this, what should Infidels do? What should they think about doing to protecdt themselves, and whatever it is that they wish to preserve, or think they have a duty to preserve for others?
Is the New York Times gobsmackingly ignorant? I don't think so -- not about simple matters of fact like that.
Isn't it a little suspicious that this claim that "Al-Muhajiroun was Britain's largest Muslim group" has not been repeated since it was made, either in the NYT or elsewhere?
Meetings organized by this group tend to attract only handfuls of attendees, see for example:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2215163.stm
I really doubt that Al-Muhajiroun were anything like the largest Muslim group.
Hey, folks, I think Robert's point was and always has been that outfits like Al-Muhajiroun will make inflated claims (how unIslamic of them) about membership, etc., and some journalist will take those claims as prima facie evidence.
ia???: I thought you'd promised us that you were going to go away and leave us alone. I don't think any of the anti-Islamist/jihaddist bloggers on this site believe that Muslims are going to suddenly pick up and go back to the mothership, but rather they are asking our legislators and policing authorities to wake up and smell the coffee, ...connect the dots, and take effective measures to safeguard the public.
Instead of bothering us, why don't you pick up a back copy of Al-Sharq, Al-Awsat and read what the editor, Tariq Al-Humayd, and columnist Amir Taheri had to say about the responsibility of the broader Muslim community.
For your convenience, here's excerpts, in English, courtesy of MEMRI.org:
that the incitement to Jihad in London had been visible but was never stopped: "In London, we have seen, and are seeing, the money being collected in the streets, and the conventions under various titles, and everyone is inciting to Jihad in our Arab countries and cursing the land of unbelief in which they live. When you express amazement [at this], they tell you that this is freedom. Has freedom no responsibility? No one answers.
"The incitement in London could have been read and seen, all in the name of freedom. Today, London will do a new accounting. It will open the files and reread them, as have the countries that were previously arrogant and that said that they were distant from the terrorism. The view of some of the countries is that as long as bombs aren't exploding and not a single shot is fired, they are safe from the evil of terrorism…
"In London, they talk of the lack of freedom in the Arab world, of the repression, and of the security tension in the Arab countries… But when you tell them, Stop being so tolerant of the incitement that comes from your country, from your skies, and from your Internet, and when you tell them that anyone who denies my freedom and declares me to be an apostate, [i.e. the Islamists] will, due to this freedom, deny your freedom in the future - [when you tell them this], they turn away. And what happened today? The terror struck London, indiscriminately…
"Those who are fighting in the name of Islam are distorting its image, and those who are defending them in the name of freedom are making the individual the victim of their defense. For the sake of the freedom of all of us, stop the ones who are attacking our freedom." [12]
In a similar vein, columnist Amir Taheri wrote in the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat that suicide bombers were a weapon created by the propaganda against the West, through the Arab media, the Islamic associations, the Islamic schools, and the mosques, all over the world and in London as well: "The real reason for this tragedy is the message that divides humanity into 'believers' and 'infidels,' and arouses hatred among believers towards other religions…
"The London attack is not the work of a small group of people. It is the bitter fruit of a religion that has been hijacked by a minority of extremists, while the majority looks on in concern and amazement. Until we hear the voices of the Muslims condemning attacks of this kind with no words [of qualification] such as 'but' and 'if,' the suicide bombers and the murderers will have an excuse to think that they enjoy the support of all Muslims. The real battle against the enemy of mankind will begin when the 'silent majority' in the Islamic world makes its voice heard against the murderers, and against those who brainwash them, believe them, and fund them." [13]
Posted by waterdragon52 at July 14, 2005 09:28 AM
"The real reason for this tragedy is the message that divides humanity into 'believers' and 'infidels,' and arouses hatred among believers towards other religions…"
-- a quote from Amir Taheri, in a posting above
Amir Taheri is a strange case. He very often tells something close to the truth about Islam. But then, every so often, he also backs away from that truth, and prefers to pretend that it is not Islam, but something other than real Islam. He has been taken to task, and properly raked over the coals, by the tireless Ali Sina, who does not miss a trick when it comes to sniffing out the ever-so-slight-but-still-detectable apologetics, of those who like Amir Taheri, an educated, sophisticated, probably entirely likeable exile from Iran (just like Ms. Nafisi, for example) who doesn't want to recognize that Islam tout court is the problem. He and others like him, whose memories of Islam are of tolerant Tehran under the Shah, where non-Muslims never had it so good, may have colored his view of Islam, or even of Iranian history. But the forced conversion of Jews and Armenians ordered overnight by Shah Abbas, the monstrous treatment of Zoroastrians, the punishment -- incluidng beating to death -- of Jews even well into the second half of the 20th century for going out in the rain which as "najis" creatures they were forbidden from doing (and Laurence Loeb, the sociologist who lived with Iranian Jews, testified to this happening), all of this makes one suspect that Taheri believes that what happened under the Shah, or his father, was par for the Iranian course, and Ayatollah Khomeini has no roots in Persian Islam. But he does. Khomeini was a learned theologian. A great many events in Persian history show the ferocity with which non-Muslims were treated. And it was all according, not to Hoyle, but to Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira.
And this is what Ali Sina, at www.faithfreedom.org, carefully explained to Amir Taheri, and had the better of him. Yet we are all so eager for the "good" Muslim to tell us much of the truth -- let's say 80% of it -- that we too often exempt that "good" Muslim from coming to grips with Islam itself. We say to ourselves -- oh, let's leave him alone. Let's let him have, out of filial piety or embarrassment or civilizational self-esteem, the right not to go all the way, the right not to see what is so obviously there.
Unfortunately, that kind of sentiment is misplaced or diseased sympathy. Take what Taheri says when he exposes a connnection between the acts of Muslims and Islam (what a remarkable thing that this should be deemed remarkable), but remember, when he talks about those Muslims who seem to think that "Infidels" and "Believers" is the only distinction worth making, this is no "perversion" of Islam. This is Islam.
If Taheri does not believe in that stuff, that is because he is a good man and a bad Muslim. Okay. Fine. But don't trust him to tell us the final truth about Islam, for he too, and Kanan Makiya, and the others who are now tongue-tied on the matter, like the usually voluble Fouad Ajami, need not be listened to when they substitute their own unusual background, their own highly unrepresentative (as it may be) thoughts and understandings, for those of hundreds of millions of others living now, and other hundreds of millions who were Believers, and conquerors, and subduers, and imposers of dhimmi status on non-Muslims, in past centuries.
They need to preserve some self-esteem about the contribution of "Islam" and the supposed greatness of "Islamic civliization." We who are not Muslims have no such need. And the ex-Muslims, too, have no such need. xue xi Ibn Warraq, xue xi Ali Sina, xue xi Ayaan Hirsi Ali -- learn from them, learn from them, learn from them.
A note of clarification:
I don't have any apology to make for repeating a statement made matter-of-factly -- not "according to..." or "in the opinion of..." -- in "the Paper of Record," much as I disagree with its analyses in general.
It would, of course, be useful to know on what the Times based its statement, and what criteria it used. If the Times meant that Al-Muhajiroun had more card-carrying, signed-up members, the statement is almost certainly false. But if it meant something like "behind closed doors, there are no moderate Muslims," as a British Muslim says here -- http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/londonnews/articles/10329634?version=1 --
then for a variety of reasons I think that is eminently plausible.
Cordially
Robert Spencer
Hugh:
I'm aware of both sides of Taheri and his bout with Ali Sina, but I posted the above because much of what he said was valuable and it was addressed to Muslims, in their own media.
Of course, to him, "normal" is based primarily on his own experience, as it is with most of us, and the rest is an abberation.
The case of Fouad Ajami is fairly typical. I read his books with interest and found them useful, but I also noticed that he was basically saying that the repeated defeats of the Arabs at Israel's hands were the measure of their cultural failure; which implies that the kind of Arab nation he would like to see would have defeated Israel - with all that follows. His attitude to Israel is at least remarkably ambiguous; he does seem to deprecate crimes like that of the Jordanian border guard who murdered seven little girls, but on the other hand he finds the defeats hideously humiliating - rather than the fact that the Arabs went to war at all. He is rather like those Germans after the first world war, who were ashamed, not of having (all but) started the war, but of having lost it; and we all know where that kind of thinking ended up.
Hugh, as always you hit the hammer on the nail. Man I wish I was so eloquent when trying to convince my dad that his "all religions r equally fucked up" thinking is false.
YOUR FAN! (and Robert's too)
Tushar