Throwing mud at Muslims

[Briar]

Throwing mud at Muslims

Branding moderates as extremists will have disastrous consequences

Madeleine Bunting

A campaign is being orchestrated through the media to destroy the credibility of many of the most important Muslim institutions in Britain, including the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). The impact of this campaign - in the Observer and particularly in John Ware's Panorama documentary last night - will be a powerful boost for the increasingly widespread view that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim: underneath, "they" are all extremists who are racist, contemptuous of the west, and intent on a political agenda.

A legitimate and much-needed debate among British Muslims about a distinctive expression of Islam in a non-Muslim country has been hijacked and poisonously distorted. Journalists need to be very careful: we are entering a new era of McCarthyism and, if we are not to be complicit, we need to be scrupulously responsible and conscientious in unravelling the complexity of Islam in its many spiritual and political interpretations in recent decades.
The central charge of the campaign is that the MCB, its secretary general, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, and some of its most important affiliates - such as the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, the Muslim Association of Britain and the East London Mosque - condone or even actively promote ideas which, as Ware claimed in Panorama, "feed extremism"; such ideas are a "slippery slope", which "people who become extremists start to go down".

This reflects a growing paranoia evident on the pages of tabloids and in government about "preachers of hate" and "hate literature". It's a paranoia which chooses to ignore that the main inspiration for British Muslim extremists is not their local mosques but television footage of Palestine and Iraq.

...

What is deeply troubling is how exacting British society is becoming of its Muslims. A new set of "cricket tests" are being imposed on British Muslims - they are expected to sign up enthusiastically to every aspect of western secular society and to jettison any part of their intellectual heritage that is critical of the west. They are expected to keep their faith entirely out of politics (yet faith plays a crucial role in US politics). Set the bar high enough and all will fail - the consequences of that on the streets of Luton and Bradford will be disastrous, and not just for Britain's 1.6 million Muslims.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1553704,00.html

[Dogmudgeon]

1. The whole world has gone insane

When Sir Iqbal is accused of promoting terrorism, you can almost hear the call go out for a new Crusade to take Jerusalem from the heathen Musselmen.

I wonder -- is this the Dark Horse or the Pale Horse?

--p!

[Briar]

2. It certainly has something of the horse about it

if not the (k)night. I can't imagine what John Ware thought he was doing.