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In "Right showing left the way on radical Islam," Martin Bright in The Guardian/Observer (thanks to Crickman) says: "It's fascism by any other name and it's time that all political factions joined forces to fight it." Well, that's what I've been saying for years. It's nice to see The Guardian getting close (very close) to the truth.
I am being feted by the right. As the political editor of the New Statesman and usually written off by conservative thinkers as a dangerous, pinko liberal, this is a novel and rather awkward position in which to find myself.Two weeks ago, Channel 4 screened a programme I presented concerning Whitehall's love affair with radical Islam. It was based on a stream of Foreign Office leaks first published in The Observer and the New Statesman which showed that mandarins were prepared to open lines of communication with organisations such Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. Since then, the right-wing plaudits for my work keep coming in, not just in this country but from America, too, where none other than David Frum, the neoconservative Bush adviser credited with coining 'axis of evil', has begun quoting my work approvingly. Neocon journal American Thinker ran a 2,500-word analysis of my findings. While any attention is always welcome, these offers of solidarity are also a challenge.
The programme was accompanied by a pamphlet I wrote for the centre-right 'Cameroon' think-tank, Policy Exchange, which identified an ongoing Foreign Office policy to develop links with Islamists abroad and in Britain. I argued that progressives on the left and right of British politics should view this with concern, especially in the domestic context, where mainstream voices were being kept from dialogue with government by groups ideologically linked to Islamists in the Middle East such as the Muslim Brotherhood and its south Asian equivalent, Jamaat-i-Islami. Chief among these is the Muslim Council of Britain, whose leadership has established sympathies for the Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Both the Brotherhood and the Jamaat believe in the creation of an Islamic state and the establishment of Sharia law.
Conservative commentators in Britain were also quick to take up the cause. Peter Dobbie praised the programme in the Mail on Sunday for 'lifting the lid' on the Foreign Office's dalliance with the radicals. Frank Johnson, Telegraph columnist and former Spectator editor, described the Policy Exchange document, rather generously, as 'one of the most important pamphlets for decades' and said that I had 'presided over a fine... documentary'. Writing in the Spectator, former Telegraph editor Charles Moore said: 'Sorry to praise the New Statesman in these pages, but its political editor, Martin Bright, has just produced an excellent pamphlet.' I realise that their reaction does not come without an agenda. There is no doubt that at it has fed into the perception in some circles on the left, encouraged by the MCB, that I am part of some Islamophobic campaign to 'divide and rule' Britain's Muslims.
It is depressing that so few on the left have been prepared to engage with the issue of the Foreign Office appeasement of radical Islam except to minimise its significance. In contrast, the responses on the right have been largely measured. Moore, for instance, fitted the Foreign Office's search for radical figures it could do business with, such as Muslim Brotherhood's spiritual head, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, into a wider historical perspective. In the 1930s, we adopted a similar strategy with the Mufti of Jerusalem to 'deliver' Muslim opinion. The Mufti went on to support the Nazis.
Read it all.
Posted by Robert at July 31, 2006 7:49 AM
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Parts of the BBC (the parts that taqiyya cannot reach - they do exist) are getting more vocal.
This was Panorama last night, following the BBC2 documentary Execution of a Teenage Girl on Thursday.
Two programmes do not a revolution make of course, and I would still like to get my hands on the controller of news one day.
Posted by: Granny Weatherwax![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at July 31, 2006 8:09 AM
Not really The Guardian that is asymptotically approaching or, to stick with the phrasing above, circling like the celebrated @ sign ever closer to some center, but rather The New Statesman. The Guardian occasionally will allow in one or two odd contributors, and it could hardly have turned down the editor of The New Statesman.
It would be nice to think that The Guardian under Alan Rusbridger was going to have a change of heart about the totalitarian belief-system of Islam. But will it, can it? The astonishing, clearly pathological or at least certainly irrational animus toward Israel, sometimes a reflection of antisemitism but sometimes merely reflecting decades of steady Arab propaganda and misinformation peddled by assorted Fisks, Simpsons, Guerlins, Pletts, Swallows, Muirs, and all the others whose antipathy toward Israel in their thousands of reports, is scarcely hidden, but self-assuredly drips from every malevolent phrase.
One recalls, from yesteryear, not only R. H. Crossman (in the pages of Encoutner), deploring the antisemitism of Bevin and the attempt by the British to throttle Israel as it was a-borning, and Goronwy Rees in the same pages, deploring the Zionism-is-Racism resolution, and at The New Statesman, the denunication of that same resoltuion by the then-editor, Paul Johnson, who because he later became a supporter of the Conservatives, was condemned to the outer darkness, accused of having become a whore of "The Americans" or "conservative think tanks" or "The Wall Street Journal editorial board" or any number of things in that same uncomprehending just-for-a=handful-of-silver-he-left-us-just-for-a-ribband-to-fix-on-his-coat vein.
There has always been a vicious antisemitic strain to be detected in Right and Left. On the left, it goes from Keir Hardie through Ernest Bevin and now has ended up with that obvious crook, George Galloway. And of course the anti-Israel brigade on the other side, consisting of so many Foreign Office smooothies and ex-diplomats who have gone into buiness, in the Raymond-Close manner we are so familiar with, in order to "recycle petrodollars" even if it means promoting the Jihad, in some form or other, to keep those Saudi, Kuwaiti, Emiratian dollars or pounds flowing in. Possibly someone will make the connection between being unable to see the Lesser Jihad against Israel for what it is, and the corollary conviction that the "root cause" of Muslim hatred of the West can be "solved" by throwing Israel to the Muslim wolves, with the failure, all over the Western world, of Infidels, wheatever their other political disagreements, to see Islam as a totalitarian belief-system offering its adherents a Total Regulation of Life and a Complete Explanation of the Universe.
Perhaps that will happen.
Quizas, quizas, quizas. As Arielle Dombasle likes to say -- even beyond the Mexique Bay.
Posted by: Hugh at July 31, 2006 1:43 PM
Further details on what the British Foreign Office has been up to here:
http://www.westernresistance.com/blog/archives/002679.html#more
This is a useful round-up and includes some more links. An exchange from the UK Parliament where a Conservative backbencher, Michael Gove, asks questions about the FCO's hiring of an "Islamic Radical", Mockbul Ali, but is stonewalled by an FCO minister of state, Kim Howells, is given.
A Sunday Times article where the FCO's hiring of this character who has, among much else that ought to be of concern, praised suicide-bombers is also linked. While, as far as I can see, a slow shift in the wrong direction seems to be taking place at the Telegraph, the Times and Sunday Times are now publishing some useful exposes and undercover investigations.
at July 31, 2006 5:15 PM
One can only hope that the US State Department, and that left/liberal elements in US academia and media read this and take it to heart.
Posted by: eve_anne_gelical at August 1, 2006 3:10 PM
Granny Weatherwax posted:
"Parts of the BBC (the parts that taqiyya cannot reach - they do exist) are getting more vocal.
This was Panorama last night, following the BBC2 documentary Execution of a Teenage Girl on Thursday.
Two programmes do not a revolution make of course, and I would still like to get my hands on the controller of news one day."
Were not quite seeing a seachange here in the U.K. MSM but there was a discussion on Newsnight last night where the 2 out of 3 panelists were pro-israel and for once were allowed to speak without interuption.
The pro-hizbollah panelist was plain hysterical and just because she was the daughter of painter Lucien Freud didn't to me give her the qualification of an opinion.
It is Still a case of who you know not what you know that gets you a voice in the media.
Also and my main point is that there is a documentary on channel 4 called "what muslims want"
which investigates the supremacist desires of even the most moderate muslim amongst us in there attempts to push the sharia down our throats.
Well I can tell you from personal experience of 10 years plus living in a muslim area that the sharia has been in full effect for a long time.
It remains to be seen but I sense a definative shift in journalistic reporting or I could just be being optimistic.
For such a documentary to be aired has got to be progressive whether or not they will ask the question not "what muslims want" more "shape up or ship out"
I sense a drop in arrogance on the muslim street and maybe they know the games up.
Lets hope so and I dont have to witness anymore scenes like I did the otherday.
A innocent Hindu guy dressed in his "sunday best" ridiculed and laughed at by muslim ghouls he had to pass in the street.
If arjun.sevak is reading this I have it on very good authority that the muslims of my area Derby U.K. have been actively intimidating and trying to close down the very small hindu temple for years.
This was an epihany moment for me and made my distaste for muslims grow.
All U.K. residents watch out for the channel 4 documentary "what muslims want"
Apologies but I didnt catch the exact time or day but it's within a week or so.
at August 1, 2006 5:58 PM
ovinesongs
please e mail me re the temple issue in Derby
heathen_henry@hotmail.co.uk
Posted by: heathen_henry at August 3, 2006 6:58 AM
Hi henry..; )
No offence but I dont feel safe communicating directly.
If someone from JW/DW could vouch for you then maybe.
Please dont take it personally i'm just keeping my paranoia at defcon 1.
I dont have specifics and it could be typical arrogant muslim bluster.
Bearing in mind this goes back a few years but my then neighbours a Kashmiri family were blatant and proud of the fact that low level intimidation had been going on for years to try to close down the Hindu temple on Normanton Rd.It was said to be common knowledge amongst the large kashmiri community.
Anyone who knows the area will know the temple but if you blink you will miss it.
Unlike the huge mosque now undergoing yet another expansion.
The guy I bought the house off was a Sikh who had already been "intimidated" out of the street but refused to sell the house to in his words "a paki"
So when a "whitey" turned up to buy he was over the moon.
I've also lived in Leicester which has a majority Hindu,Jains,Sikhs and the atmosphere is like night and day compared to a muslim area.
Why no one asks why is beyond me it has NOTHING to do with social deprivation as my muslim neighbours were very comfortable.
I like to think i'm affable and because I do building work too I ended up being quite popular on the street for odd jobs electrics and the like and was treated very kindly by the women who also made me food and at least once a week a pile of chappatis would be sent from a neighbour up the street.
This gave me access to information so to speak and a privledged position,some may say I was a spy but I was merely keeping my eyes and ears open and I'm very street wise.
Many conversations were had and the joooos and Hitler were mentioned in several which got my back up.
This is afterall 2 streets from where a jihadi lived who went to Israel and killed several in a murder bomb attack.
The thing that annoys me most is the bullshit view that these areas are deprived when it's actually the opposite.I grew up on a rough estate and I never used to see ferraris and porsches going up and down the high street.
It's a daily occurence here.
The only deprivation I witness is a deprivation of the spiritual which manifests itself in hateful behavior from muslims towards any non-muslims.
The sight of the happy faces that come out of the Hindu temple are a stark contrast to the scowling ghouls they have to pass in the street.
I just wish there were more Hindus and Sikhs.
I've long held the belief that muslim immigration is being sponsered and bankrolled by wahabbi money.
The problem is proving it.
regards.
at August 5, 2006 10:36 AM
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