Writing in The Australian, Emma-Kate Symons notes how Britain’s commitment to “multiculturalism” (at the expense of a more vigorous policy of promoting assimilation, which tends to earn supporters the “racist” label from academics and a progressive intelligensia drunk on its own self-righteousness) is forcing many of its cultural spokesmen into the uncomfortable semantic position of having to deny what to just about everyone else is painfully self-evident—namely, that Muslims are, in fact, Muslim:
Leading Muslims from Leeds were among the first to send their messages of condolence and solidarity with the victims after the attacks. But once the bombers were revealed as from their own community, clerics and lay spokesmen were at pains to almost disown the killers as unrepresentative.
“This is nothing to do with religion,” said Zaher Birawi, chairman of the Leeds Grand Mosque. “They are terrible crimes and should be treated as such.”
The views were echoed in The Guardian. On Monday the Left-leaning daily published a front-page story headlined “Call them criminals, terrorists, but don’t call them Muslims”.
In his Sunday sermon following the bombings Paul Hawkins, of St Pancras Church, across the road from Euston station, cautioned his congregation against religious identification of the suspects. “There is one small thing that we can all do,” he said. “We can name the people who did these things as criminals or terrorists. We must not name them as Muslims.”
To some commentators, such remarks were unsuccessful, politically correct attempts to absolve Islam in Britain of any responsibility for the sheltering and education of extremists such as the bombers, and at the very least barely convincing in the opinion of novelist Will Self.
Writing in the Evening Standard, Self scoffed at the pussyfooting: “The move by Muslim clerics to deny that the suicide bombers are even co-religionists is facile . . . for fundamentalists of all stripes the Bible, the Koran or the Torah is God’s blueprint for the way society should be run.”
The well-intentioned relativism proliferated in Anglican circles. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams condemned the bombings but said it was false to assert that one religion is more prone to violence than another.
It was not only the identification of Muslim suicide bombers as Muslims that brought intense discomfort. The term terrorists also was too hot to handle for the BBC, which took the contentious decision to refer to the terrorists only as bombers. The BBC policy incited the derision of Gerard Baker in The Times: “The BBC was supposedly the model for the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and I can’t think of a better recent example of pure Orwell than this painstaking effort at rewriting the verbal record to fit in with linguistic orthodoxy.”
So why the reluctance on the part of some clerics of all creeds from Muslims to Christians and sections of the British intelligentsia to acknowledge reality? The extreme sensitivity to religious labelling was a manifestation of Britain’s attachment to multiculturalism.
I’ve been arguing for years now that a pervasive cultural fear of plain spokenness (as witnessed by the growing appeal, among those whose greatest fear is giving offense, of “tolerance” statutes and “free speech zones”—both feeble attempts to control speech, either by diluting it to the point of semiotic uselessness or by making it contingent on arbitrary logistics) is one of the greatest dangers facing liberal democracies, something now being thrown into sharp relief as British community leaders and politicians schooled on the kind of innate cultural relativism that multiculturalist dogma inevitably encourages struggle to frame the recent London terror bombings in a way that manages to negotiate both the semantic demands of their cultural philosophy and the facts on the ground.
Ironically, such problems cease to exist outside the balkinizing paradigm of multiculturalism, which, by empowering identity groups and ethnicities at the expense of individualism and nationalism, actually promotes factional disputes and leads, predictably and inexorably, to the very kind of scenario where a few individuals become representative of the cultural group that “produced” them—and where, in order to avoid tainting the whole group with the actions of a handful of its members, advocates of multiculturalism are forced, retroactively and unconvincingly, to sever ties to those individuals rather than surrender the fiction of a unified group identity.
Which is why identity-based cultural philosophies that encourage or coerce one identity group to speak of another only on its own terms, leads to the kind of PC nonsense that prevents us from clearly identifying and articulating a specific problem, should it happen that that problem falls within the protected space of the Other.
Remember that the next time you hear someone extoling the virtues of the “diversity” movement here in the states—a movement whose very essence undermines appeals to individualism in favor of a shallow, often strictly cosmetic appeal to group identity.
****
(h/t Stanley Kurtz, who links several other similarly-themed pieces)
****
update: Jay Reding has related thoughts.
Yup. They’re all alike until they’re not.
Interestingly, this is a feature of the modern left in general, not just multiculturalism. One of my greatest pleasures is watching a liberal tie himself in knots when two of his shibboleths are in conflict. It’s a beautiful thing.
SW, “fact.” Heh.
It is amusing to watch the same people who ‘celebrate diversity’ also affirming that we are all ‘one world’. As if amplifying differences creates a cozy sense of belonging.
Just found this on drudge:
http://www.sbsun.com/Stories/0,1413,208~12588~2969790,00.html
There are some great lines near the end.
And Jeff, to your overall theme, I’d add sadly that the left has done very well recently in abolishing certain forms of language and thought. The far right has had a good long ride in being the keeper of morality: witness ‘blue laws’ that still prevent the sale of alcohol in some states on Sundays. Why Sunday? Why alcohol?
But the right is losing it’s grip (and good riddance!) only to be replaced by a new set of morality police who dictate ‘protected peoples’ and so-called hate speech. I’d submit that the left would burn or ban as many books as the right, if given the ultimate authority to do so; maybe more. Incursions on freedom from either end of the spectrum is unwelcome and ‘chilling’ to real thought and human progress.
Since Haloscan doesn’t want to work, manual trackback.
I can’t get upset about this.
Is it ridiculously counterfactual to say Islam isn’t demonstrably more prone to violence? Yes. Does it really matter? No.
The fact is, these suicide bomber cells are vicious death cults, and the only god they truly pray to is Fascism.
Jeff, you’re really one of the best at expressing and elucidating the bankruptcy of identity politics. I assume such posts will be collected, edited, expanded-upon, bound, and made available to me at Amazon, at a nice profit to you. If such a book by you already exists, it’s time to reprint a “Collector’s Edition,” with some kick-ass South Park-themed cover art. If they don’t have funny covers, I lose interest in books.
I actually don’t think it’s bad for Muslim authorities to use disassociative language to distance themselves from Islamic radicals. The threat of such social and religious excommunication would be an important social stigma, which is sorely needed (and notoriously absent). However, there’s no value to the majority culture’s falling over itself to pre-emptively absolve Islam as a whole. That takes all pressure off the Muslim communities to properly stigmatize and ostracize radicals themselves.
But, then again, imagine how bad they’d hate us if we compounded their political disaffection with societal attacks on their self esteem. Then we’d REALLY have it coming.
Though, wouldn’t a couple “hate crimes” against the Muslim community generate some “why do they hate us” sentiments among the “reality-based” Muslim elites?
With all due respect Dave, while I’m sure you meant that metaphorically, the god they pray to is allah, and muhammad is his messenger. Comparisons to fascism notwithstanding, we need to keep our eyes on the ball. These actions all flow from islam itself. I’ve been following this stuff very closely, including doing extensive research on islam (I refuse to capitalize it) and its origins, the koran, the hadiths, sharia, and muhammad. It’s not a religion in any meaningful sense of the word. It’s a bloody death cult that was made up out of whole cloth by a murderous, deranged pedophile.
He cobbled together some bits from Christianity, some parts of Judaism, and some local pagan Arab traditions. He exhorted his followers to kill non-muslims. The world is divided into Dar-al-islam (The Land of Peace), and Dar-al-harb (The Land of War). The koran and the hadiths explicitly say that anything is acceptable in expanding Dar-al-islam, including lying, making false treaties, and of course, killing.
I know that our esteemed proprietor doesn’t agree with what I’m about to say, but the so-called extremists are practicing their “religion” the way its founder intended it to be practiced. They haven’t hijacked islam. There may indeed be millions of muslims who wouldn’t engage in such activities, but their first loyalty is to islam, whether they live in Cairo or London.
Unless our leaders understand the nature of the enemy we face and act accordingly, it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when one or more of our cities goes up in a mushroom cloud.
If you’d like a quick overview, I would recommend Why I Am Not a Muslim, by Ibn Warraq, and The Sword of the Prophet, by Serge Trifkovic.
I’ve been a proponent of attacking the terrorist problem at the madrassa, mosque, and Islamic center level. I think the problem is fundamentalism / literalism. But I also recognize that it is fundamentalism and literalism within Islam. And I’ve never been afraid to point that out.
Time for a burrito I think.
I hope it’s an islamic burrito, because otherwise, off with your head!!
Aren’t you kind of splitting hairs, Jeff? The problem is not fundamentalism or literalism, the problem is islam. If you do the research, all this crap is part and parcel of this “religion.” It’s a basic tenet of islam.
I’ve done research, Craig. And I’ve fought academically with MESA types.
Put it this way: I may be splitting hairs, but they are hairs worth splitting at this point, because for strategic reasons I don’t think it’s wise for George Bush to come out and say, “we are at war against Islam”—even though when I read the Koran and a lot of Islamic scholarship (this was back in the late 90s, while I was living abroad), I was troubled by the circular reasoning that seems (to me, at least) to guide the faith and provide built-in justifications for all sorts of barbarism disguised as piety.
Still, I hold out hope that just as many of today’s Christians and Jews aren’t sacred text-literalists, the majority of the world’s Muslims will ultimately eschew the kind of literalist interpretation of Islamic holy texts that calls for physical attacks on non co-religionists. Which, for what it’s worth, is why I don’t find myself calling on Yahweh to help me fight the Assyrians.
For the record, though (and my early archives will back this up) I am no fan of the religion, and I don’t believe for a second that it’s the religion of peace.
I take your point about not alienating the entire religion absolutely. That’s the fine line that we have to walk. In a perfect world, if it were up to me, I’d nuke every last one of the bastards, but it’s not feasible to declare war on an entire religion, if only because the war would be neverending.
I can’t get trackbacks to stick any more either – so here’s my manual one: Sacrificed Sons.
Funny how all this multicultural pussyfooting doesn’t seem to stop anybody on the left from criticizing the Jews, though. Must be some kind of exception to the rule that only those on the left understand.
“Diversity” is like saying you’ll make a jigger of gin better by adding a jigger of fruit juice, a jigger of tomato juice, a jigger of seawater, a jigger of tonic, a jigger of dishwater, a jigger of motor oil from the crankcase, a jigger of dog slobber, a jigger of vomit, and a jigger of leper pus to it. The contention is true if a) the mixture inherently gets better the less gin it contains as a percentage and/or b) anything you could possibly dilute it with is better than gin. If premise a) and b) aren’t true, it tends to become a transparent method of flushing the system of gin.
Boy, that perfect world CraigC wishes we lived in is perfectly awful.
Christianity spent its share of time doing some evil shit based on literalist readings of scripture. Yet somehow western civilization pulled through. I have high hopes that the Islamic world will do the same.
I’m glad to see they named a church after good old St. Pancreas.
No, Matt individual people who claimed to be Christians did evil shit. I don’t know how I can make it any clearer, the basis of islam is making sure that the entire world is Dar-al-islam. Here is a cut-and-paste version of an article in a Brit paper (I’m not sure the link is still there). Please note the part that includes the quote, “There are no moderate muslims behind closed doors.” You’re living in a dream world, my friend.
Terror on the dole
By David Cohen, Evening Standard
20 April 2004
Four young British Muslims in their twenties – a social worker, an IT specialist, a security guard and a financial adviser – occupy a table at a fast-food chicken restaurant in Luton. Perched on their plastic chairs, wolfing down their dinner, they seem just ordinary young men. Yet out of their mouths pour heated words of revolution.
“As far as I’m concerned, when they bomb London, the bigger the better,” says Abdul Haq, the social worker. “I know it’s going to happen because Sheikh bin Laden said so. Like Bali, like Turkey, like Madrid – I pray for it, I look forward to the day.”
“Pass the brown sauce, brother,” says Abu Malaahim, the IT specialist, devouring his chicken and chips.
Other stories:
G8 protesters and police clash
Leaders fly in for G8 summit
Coe promises magic at 2012 Olympics
Vegetarianism ‘could help climate’
Mortgage payments ‘stable’
Huge costs for parents of disabled
Murdered newlywed’s father in court
ASBO boss in ‘foul-mouthed rant’
Prince’s flight in mid-air drama
M25 closed after van fire
“I agree with you, brother,” says Abu Yusuf, the earnest-looking financial adviser sitting opposite. “I would like to see the Mujahideen coming into London and killing thousands, whether with nuclear weapons or germ warfare. And if they need a safehouse, they can stay in mine – and if they need some fertiliser [for a bomb], I’ll tell them where to get it.”
His friend, Abu Musa, the security guard, smiles radiantly. “It will be a day of joy for me,” he adds, speaking with a slight lisp.
As they talk, a man with a bushy beard, dressed in a jacket emblazoned with the word “Jihad”, stands and watches over them, handing around cups of steaming hot coffee. His real name is Ishtiaq Alamgir, but he goes by his adopted name, Sayful Islam, meaning “Sword of Islam”. He is the 24-year-old leader of the Luton branch of al-Muhajiroun, an extremist Muslim group with about 800 members countrywide, who regard Osama bin Laden as their hero.
Until recently, nobody took the fanatical beliefs of al-Muhajiroun too seriously, believing that a British-based group so brazenly “out there” could not be involved in something as “underground” as terrorism. The group is led by the exiled Saudi, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad, from his base in north London. Yesterday, in a magazine article, Bakri warned that several radical groups are poised to strike in London.
For all its inflammatory rhetoric, al-Muhajiroun has never been linked to actual violence. Yet, with the discovery last month of half-a-tonne of ammonium nitrate fertiliser – the same explosive ingredient used in the Bali and Turkey terror attacks – and with the arrest of eight young British Muslims in London and the South-East, including six in Luton, extremist groups such as al-Muhajiroun are under the spotlight like never before.
Detectives fear that the “enemy within”, the homegrown extremists leading apparently normal lives in suburbia, now pose the greatest threat to security in Britain. Sayful and his friends fit this “homegrown” profile: three were born here, two came as young children from Pakistan; all were educated in local Luton schools; and they grew up in families of full employment – one of their fathers is a retired local businessman, two are engineers, and two worked in the local Vauxhall car plant.
The question is: how worried should we be? Is al-Muhajiroun nothing more than a repository for disaffected Muslim youths who have adopted an extreme interpretation of Islam – perhaps to cock a snook at the white establishment – but who are essentially posturing? Or does the group also perform a more sinister function, sucking in alienated young men and brainwashing the more impressionable into becoming future suicide bombers?
Although none of the arrested Muslims – aged 17 to 32 – appear to be current al-Muhajiroun members, rumours have circulated of informal links to the group. Moreover, parents of the arrested men have spoken anxiously of the “radicalising influence” of al-Muhajiroun militants who “ corrupt” their children at mosques.
Nowhere has this public confrontation between radicals and moderates been more apparent than in Luton, which has the highest density of Muslims in the South-East – 28,000 out of a total population of 140,000 – and has long been regarded as a hotbed of extremism.
Sayful Islam, for one, is particularly proud of his contribution to Luton’s hardline reputation. His exploits include covering the town with “ Magnificent 19” posters glorifying the 11 September suicide bombers. “When I joined al-Muhajiroun four years ago, there were five local members,” he says. “Now there are more than 50 and hundreds more support us.”
The strange thing is that four years ago, Sayful Islam was a jeans-clad student completing his degree in business economics at Middlesex University in Hendon, north London.
The son of a British Rail engineer who came to this country from Pakistan, Sayful grew up in a moderate, middle-class Muslim family in Luton. At the local Denbigh High School, he is remembered as one of the smartest kids, and was selected to attend a science masterclass at Cambridge University. He would go on to marry, have two children and find work as an accountant for the Inland Revenue in Luton. He was thoroughly uninterested in politics.
THEN he met Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad at a local event. Within two years, he had swapped his decently paid job as an accountant for an unpaid one as a political agitator. What turned him into an extremist? And how far is he prepared to go to achieve his aims?
Prior to seeing the group at the fastfood restaurant, Sayful meets me at his semi-detached rented home in Bury Park, Luton’s Muslim neighbourhood. He no longer works, even though he is able-bodied, he admits, preferring instead to claim housing benefit and jobseeker’s allowance. He smiles sheepishly and says the irony is not lost on him that the British state is supporting him financially, even as he plots to “overthrow it”.
“I made a decision that I wanted to follow what Islam really said,” Sayful begins, sitting on his sofa in his thowb (a traditional robe) and bare feet. “I went to listen to all the local imams, but I found their portrayal of Islam was too secularised. When I heard Sheikh Omar [the leader] of al-Muhajiroun speak, it was pure Islam, with no compromise. I found that appealing.
“At the same time,” continues Sayful, “wars were happening in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Afghanistan. People were being oppressed simply because they were Muslim. Although I had never experienced racism in the UK, it opened the eyes of a lot of Muslims, including mine.”
But it was the events of 11 September that crystallised Sayful’s worldview. “When I watched those planes go into the Twin Towers, I felt elated,” he says. “That magnificent action split the world into two camps: you were either with Islam and al Qaeda, or with the enemy. I decided to quit my job and commit myself full-time to al-Muhajiroun.” Now he does not consider himself British. “I am a Muslim living in Britain, and I give my allegiance only to Allah.”
According to Sayful, the aim of al-Muhajiroun (“the immigrants”) is nothing less than Khilafah – “the worldwide domination of Islam”. The way to achieve this, he says, is by Jihad, led by Bin Laden. “I support him 100 per cent.”
Does that support extend to violent acts of terrorism in the UK?
“Yes,” he replies, unequivocally. “When a bomb attack happens here, I won’t be against it, even if it kills my own children. Islam is clear: Muslims living in lands that are occupied have the right to attack their invaders.
“Britain became a legitimate target when it sent troops to Iraq. But it is against Islam for me to engage personally in acts of terrorism in the UK because I live here. According to Islam, I have a covenant of security with the UK, as long as they allow us Muslims to live here in peace.”
HE USES the phrase “covenant of security” constantly. He attempts to explain. “If we want to engage in terrorism, we would have to leave the country,” he says. “It is against Islam to do otherwise.” Such a course of action, he says, he is not prepared to undertake. This is why, Sayful claims, it is consistent, and not cowardly, for him to espouse the rhetoric of terrorism, the “martyrdom-operations”, while simultaneouslylimiting himself to nonviolentactions such as leafletting outside Luton town hall.
He denies any link between al-Muhajiroun and the Muslims arrested in the recent police raids. But, as I later discover at the fastfood restaurant, not everyone attaching themselves, however loosely, to al-Muhajiroun draws the same line. Two members of the group – Abu Yusuf, the financial adviser, and Abu Musa, the security guard – scorn al-Muhajiroun as “too moderate”.
“I am freelance,” says Abu Yusuf, fixing me with his piercing brown eyes. What does that mean? I ask.
“The difference between us and those two,” interjects Abu Malaahim, pointing to Musa and Yusuf, “is that us lot do a verbal thing, [but] those brothers actually want to do a physical thing.”
Referring to the latest truce offered by Bin Laden, and Britain’s scathing rejection of it, Abu Malaahim adds: “He tried to make a peace deal. When terrorism happens, you will only have yourselves to blame.”
How far are you prepared to go? I ask.
“You want to know how far I will go,” says Abu Musa, his high-pitched lisp rising an octave. “When Allah said in the Koran ‘kill and be killed’, that’s what I want. I want a martyr operation, where I kill my enemy.”
Are you saying, I probe, that you are looking to kill people yourself ? “Yes,” Abu Musa says, “to kill and to be killed.” He emphasises each word.
What’s stopped you doing it? “As you know from watching the news,” intones Abu Yusuf, “there are brothers who do leave the country and do it.” He is referring to the four Muslims from Luton who died fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the two British Muslims, said to have had ties to al-Muhajiroun, who last April left to become suicide bombers in Israel. “In-shallah [ Godwilling], there will be a time to go.”
It is hard to know whether Musa and Yusuf are deadly serious or just pumped full of misguided, youthful bravado. Though I see coldness – even ruthlessness – in their eyes, I sense no malice. Both young men agree, perhaps foolishly, to be quoted using their real names, though they decline photographs – thus illustrating their uncertainty of which way to jump.
Muhammad Sulaiman, president of the Islamic Cultural Society, the largest of the 14 mosques in Luton, dismisses al-Muhajiroun as “verbal diarrhoea”.
“They are an extreme Right-wing group – the Muslim version of the BNP,” he says disdainfully. “They think Muslims should dominate, just like the BNP thinks whites should dominate. They use Islam as a vehicle to promote their distorted beliefs, particularly to unemployed young bloods who are vulnerable.”
ALTHOUGH unemployment in Luton is just six per cent, the rate among Muslim youths is estimated at 25 per cent. “They are no more representative of our Muslim community than the BNP are of the white community.”
Sulaiman insists that Sayful Islam and his crew are not welcome at the mosque. He cannot prevent them praying there, but he will never give them a platform. “I’ve told Sayful to bugger off and ejected him many times,” he says brusquely. “Even Sayful’s father, who I know well, thinks his son has been brainwashed.”
But Sayful and his friends laugh at the idea that they are local pariahs. “The mosques say one thing to the public, and something else to us. Let’s just say that the face you see and the face we see are two different faces,” says Abdul Haq. “Believe me,” adds Musa, “behind closed doors, there are no moderate Muslims.”
They also mock the idea that they are attracted to al-Muhajiroun because they have suffered alienation from white society. “Do we look like scum?” they ask. “Do we look illiterate?”
As they call for the bill, Abu Malaahim flicks open his 3G mobile phone and, with a satisfied grin, displays the image, downloaded from the internet, of an American Humvee burning in Iraq.
Abu Yusuf says: “That’s nothing. I downloaded the picture of the four burnt Americans hanging from the bridge.” It’s oneupmanship, al-Muhajiroun style.
Sayful, the only married one in the group, prepares to go home to his wife and children. Before he departs, he says he has a message to deliver.
“I want to warn that the police raids – if repeated – could create a bad situation.
“Islam is not like Christianity, where they turn the other cheek. If they raid our homes, it could lead to the covenant of security being broken.
“Islam allows us to retaliate. That would include” – he tugs his “Jihad” coat tight against the night air – “by violent means.”