Right on cue, the Murdoch press comes up with a classic “Muslim preachers of hate” scare on the eve of 9/11. Friday’s Times splashed with “Hardline takeover of British mosques”, plus three full pages inside, while the Sun ran with “Hate sect runs 600 mosques”. The timing was clearly also meant to reinforce a connection in readers’ minds with the arrests in Germany two days before of three Muslims on suspicion of a plan to attack US bases.
The Times’ key accusations were:
· That the Deobandi current of Islam “gave birth to the Taliban” and runs half of Britain’s mosques
· A bloke in the Deobandi leadership “loathes the British”, Jews and Christians;
· And of course, he wants Muslims to “shed blood”.
These allegations were generalised into a vituperative Times leader attacking “this virulent, exclusionary, uncompromising extremism”. And then, the icing on the cake – columnist Rod Liddle spelt out what all this is getting at, namely, you can’t make any distinction between moderate and extremist Muslims:
“The terms moderate and extremist are not much use to us when considering Islam; they sort of merge with one another.”
Monday’s Times followed all this up by giving a new twist to the hoary old row about the “mega-mosque” in East London also being controlled by extremists. This in turn was nothing but a re-hash of Friday afternoon’s Evening Standard’s re-hash of the original piece in the Times!
This is all textbook Islamophobic reporting, and it can be pulled apart quite easily.
Ahmed Rashid, the Telegraph’s Central Asia correspondent, in his masterful book on the Taliban, spells out at some length that “The Deobandis, a branch of Sunni Hanafi Islam, have had a history in Afghanistan, but the Taliban’s interpretation of the creed has no parallel anywhere in the Muslim world.” Taliban madrassas “were run by semi-educated mullahs who were far removed from the original reformist agenda of the Deobandi school”. A clear and detailed exposition of the same position is also to be found in an essay by the historian of the Deobandis, Professor Barbara Metcalf.
The Times bends over backwards to make the bloke at the centre of the allegations, Rihadh ul Haq, look like a new Abu Hamza, but flinging lots of mud doesn’t guarantee it will stick. The quotes taken from his speeches are tendentious in the extreme. Ul Haq is certainly no Malcolm X, but Alex Haley’s autobiography of the great black Muslim anti-racist brings out some of the same themes bitterly expressed in Ul Haq’s sermons – namely, a hatred for the surrounding society that hates black people and persecutes Muslims.
As for “seperationism”, in London there are communities of Jews who still dress the same way they did in Lithuania a century or more ago and do not mix much with outsiders. They receive no great criticism for this. The same is true of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and various Christian sects in the USA. With Muslims, however, the media grab any stick they can to beat them with.
The Times’ reporter, Andrew Norfolk, has a pedigree of Islamophobic reporting – he is a neo-con journalist with an agenda. But he is just a cog in the machine. As even the conservative Wall Street Journal writer Paul Craig Roberts has recently pointed out: “An entire industry has been created that is devoted to demonising Islam”.
In a remarkable article, Roberts continues: “In the US it is acceptable, even obligatory in many circles, to hate Muslims and to support violence against them. … Blind ignorant hate against Muslims has been brought to a boiling point.”
Roberts points out how this Islamophobia is laying the basis for an attack on Iran. It goes without saying that Murdoch’s Fox News is a chief proponent of military action on Iran.
The UK has its own industry demonising Muslims. Its techniques are crude but effective – and a shameful comment on British journalism.
Right on cue, the Murdoch press comes up with a classic “Muslim preachers of hate” scare on the eve of 9/11. Friday’s Times splashed with “Hardline takeover of British mosques”, plus three full pages inside, while the Sun ran with “Hate sect runs 600 mosques”. The timing was clearly also meant to reinforce a connection in readers’ minds with the arrests in Germany two days before of three Muslims on suspicion of a plan to attack US bases.
The Times’ key accusations were:
These allegations were generalised into a vituperative Times leader attacking “this virulent, exclusionary, uncompromising extremism”. And then, the icing on the cake – columnist Rod Liddle spelt out what all this is getting at, namely, you can’t make any distinction between moderate and extremist Muslims:
Monday’s Times followed all this up by giving a new twist to the hoary old row about the “mega-mosque” in East London also being controlled by extremists. This in turn was nothing but a re-hash of Friday afternoon’s Evening Standard’s re-hash of the original piece in the Times!
This is all textbook Islamophobic reporting, and it can be pulled apart quite easily.
The accusation that Deobandis are the British wing of the Taleban is laughable; it’s like saying the co-operative movement is responsible for Stalin’s Gulag, or that Cambridge University fosters fascism because BNP leader Nick Griffin got a degree there. As one Deobandi leader put it, it’s just “a load of rubbish”.
Ahmed Rashid, the Telegraph’s Central Asia correspondent, in his masterful book on the Taliban, spells out at some length that “The Deobandis, a branch of Sunni Hanafi Islam, have had a history in Afghanistan, but the Taliban’s interpretation of the creed has no parallel anywhere in the Muslim world.” Taliban madrassas “were run by semi-educated mullahs who were far removed from the original reformist agenda of the Deobandi school”. A clear and detailed exposition of the same position is also to be found in an essay by the historian of the Deobandis, Professor Barbara Metcalf.
The Times bends over backwards to make the bloke at the centre of the allegations, Rihadh ul Haq, look like a new Abu Hamza, but flinging lots of mud doesn’t guarantee it will stick. The quotes taken from his speeches are tendentious in the extreme. Ul Haq is certainly no Malcolm X, but Alex Haley’s autobiography of the great black Muslim anti-racist brings out some of the same themes bitterly expressed in Ul Haq’s sermons – namely, a hatred for the surrounding society that hates black people and persecutes Muslims.
As for “seperationism”, in London there are communities of Jews who still dress the same way they did in Lithuania a century or more ago and do not mix much with outsiders. They receive no great criticism for this. The same is true of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and various Christian sects in the USA. With Muslims, however, the media grab any stick they can to beat them with.
The Times’ reporter, Andrew Norfolk, has a pedigree of Islamophobic reporting – he is a neo-con journalist with an agenda. But he is just a cog in the machine. As even the conservative Wall Street Journal writer Paul Craig Roberts has recently pointed out: “An entire industry has been created that is devoted to demonising Islam”.
In a remarkable article, Roberts continues: “In the US it is acceptable, even obligatory in many circles, to hate Muslims and to support violence against them. … Blind ignorant hate against Muslims has been brought to a boiling point.”
Roberts points out how this Islamophobia is laying the basis for an attack on Iran. It goes without saying that Murdoch’s Fox News is a chief proponent of military action on Iran.
The UK has its own industry demonising Muslims. Its techniques are crude but effective – and a shameful comment on British journalism.