Melanie Phillips Rides Again

[maven]

Melanie Phillips On The Muslim Anti-Sharia Demo The BBC Newschiefs Refused To Cover.

Sunday, 1st November 2009

(This is the group who's demo was hijacked by less savoury 'moderate' Muslim groups)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn2JgvWZJ-0

On Friday, I wrote about the confused message being put out by the various groups which were taking to London’s streets yesterday, including one led by Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain, to oppose the ‘sharia now’ demonstration by al Muhajiroun. My post provoked an unexpected reaction – an extraordinary ad feminam attack upon me, on the Guardian’s 'Comment is free' blog, by the ‘reformist’ Muslim Ed Husain which accuses me of displaying zealotry and ignorance, being filled with anger, venom and hatred, not to mention also being demented.

Such fame! It could turn a girl’s head.

The first question is why Ed Husain was so exercised by what I wrote. After all, this was not his fight; I had made no mention of him or his ‘anti-Islamist’ Quilliam organisation. Much more astonishing was that he was leaping to the defence of none other than Inayat Bunglawala and the MCB. The MCB is an Islamist body which wants to theocratise Britain according to the precepts of Islam.

Last March, the government suspended links with it after its deputy Secretary-General, Daud Abdullah, signed a declaration that was seen as calling for violence against Israel and condoning attacks on British troops in Iraq. Earlier this year, it boycotted Britain’s annual Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration ceremony. Its Secretary-General, Dr Abdul Bari, has said Britain should adopt Islamic practices such as arranged marriages and that Britons should follow the teachings of Islam. Moderate it is not.

As I reported below, Bunglawala told me himself that he wants Britain to become an Islamic state. Yet Ed Husain, whose Quilliam organisation receives a great deal of money from the government in order to oppose Islamic extremism, actually extols Bunglawala for having moved to embrace liberal attitudes. Ed Husain, who in 2007 vividly described in his own book Bunglawala’s anti-Jewish attitudes, now says Bunglawala should not be held to account for remarks he made in 1993 in support of Islamist extremism and from which he has now ‘distanced himself’.

People must decide for themselves whether Bunglawala’s apparent conversion to the causes of gay rights and freedom of speech is genuine. But what about his declared aim of turning Britain into an Islamic state? Does Ed Husain now think this too is evidence of Bunglawala’s ‘liberal’ attitudes? Or must we assume that Ed Husain too must not be held to account for his previous opposition to this Islamist goal?

Now let’s look at what Ed Husain says about me. His article sits underneath a strapline, almost certainly written by the Guardian rather than by him, which says:

"In her McCarthy-style paranoid parallel universe, the Spectator columnist views every Muslim as a potential Islamist terrorist."

You really do have to rub your eyes at this. In my blog post which provoked Ed Husain’s article, I praised and welcomed those truly moderate Muslims who were mounting a counter-demonstration against al Muhajiroun, particularly the group British Muslims for a Secular Democracy. I have never said or implied that ‘every Muslim’ is a ‘potential Islamist terrorist’. On the contrary, in everything I have ever written about the subject I have emphasised that there are many Muslims who sign up to secular western values and who are themselves victims of the jihadis.

I have always emphasised that, while jihadi Islamism is a particularly troubling interpretation of Islam because it is based on theology and backed up by the history of Islamic conquest, it is only one interpretation and there are other Muslims who interpret their religion in an entirely peaceful and unthreatening way. To suggest that I have ever said otherwise is not only a demonstrable falsehood but is a smear which is likely to incite hatred against me.

But it is Ed Husain’s account of how we first met and what followed that utterly destroys any claim he has to integrity. This is what he writes:

"I first met Melanie two years ago at the Richard and Judy show. Unaware that she was a last-minute, unexpected guest, and aware of the prejudiced views that she has expressed about Muslims in the past, I was unwilling to appear beside her as a complementary contributor; I made my excuses to Richard and left the studio.

However, I believe in the human ability to change and, in that hope of helping Melanie see the flaws in her analysis, I met with her several times in private and appealed to her to stop blaming Islam and Muslim scripture for (the decidedly un-Islamic phenomenon of) terrorism. Why would she and her acolyte Douglas Murray not cease attacks on Muslim scripture that were based on bin Laden's understanding of Islam? And why would they not support Islam's inherent pluralism and recognise that Islam per se is not the problem, but iconoclastic interpretations of it."

I would not normally ever reveal what takes place in private conversations. But since Ed Husain has grossly abused this confidence by misrepresenting these exchanges in order falsely to blacken my reputation, I will now reveal what actually happened.

We did indeed first meet in July 2007 in the hospitality ‘green’ room of the Richard and Judy Show, where we were both due to appear on a panel. Upon my arrival in the green room, however, Ed Husain immediately said he would have to leave. I was taken aback, since I had admired his position as a practising Muslim who had renounced his former membership of the jihadi khalifate group 'Hizb ut Tahrir' and was now fighting Islamist extremism. When I asked him why he felt he could not appear with me, he told me that "He could not risk the damage this would do to his reputation amongst other Muslims."

‘They already call me a Zionist’, he said. Of course he was anything but. What he meant was that Islamists who were out to destroy him were using the most lethal form of demonisation that they knew. If he opposed Islamic extremism, he had to be a ‘Zionist’ stooge. He had in fact recently written an article for the Guardian which troubled me very much, in which he wrote:

"Zionism and Islamism are both political perversions of ancient Abrahamic faiths of Judaism and Islam... Prior to the Holocaust, Zionism was a pariah movement among Europe's Jewish communities. Rabbis chastised Zionists for abusing religion and religious identity. And yet, with the inhumane onslaught against European Jews in the 1940s, Zionism gained acceptance and respectability."

I asked him whether the reason he had written this article was similarly to fend off the taunt of ‘Zionist’. "Of course", he said. He was, he said, "on the point of encouraging more defections from Hizb ut Tahrir and could not afford to allow anything to jeopardise this delicate mission". So he had written this article mainly as a tactical ploy to deflect the charge that he was a ‘Zionist’ stooge.

‘But’, he added, "it was not altogether wrong. There is a core of truth in what I wrote".

I was appalled to hear this. Cynical, tactical use of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist bigotry to save his own skin was bad enough. But for him to believe that Zionism really was a perversion of Judaism suggested to me that, even though he had renounced the jihad, he was still in the grip of the poisonous Muslim delusions about Israel and the Jewish people.

So it was I who suggested we should meet, in order to discuss this. He enthusiastically agreed; he made plain he had no quarrel with my position on Islam. He appeared keen to strike up a friendly relationship, and wanted to know more about my views on Israel and Zionism which were clearly a point of contention between us. So we met in a cafe, chosen at his request to be in an out of the way place where he would run no risk of being seen with me by anyone who could use this against him.

I gave him a quick history of the Jews and their ancient relationship with the land of Israel, explaining to him the symbiotic relationship between the people, the religion and the land. I ran through the development of political Zionism in the 19th century, the decision by the world community after World War One that the Jews had an unchallengeable and unique right to the land of Palestine where their ancient national home should be reconstructed, and the subsequent attempt by the Arabs to frustrate this aim, the actual cause of some nine decades of conflict in the Middle East.

He was – at times, literally – open-mouthed at all of this. He had clearly never been told any of it before. It threw him. He cavilled at parts of it, not because he had any contrary information but because, he said, he just "couldn’t believe it". But there was one thing I said to which he responded with enthusiasm.

I remarked how amazing it was that the anti-Israel ‘progressive’ Left supported ethnic cleansing in the putative state of Palestine through their core demand that the Israeli settlers had to be removed from that territory. After all, there was in principle no reason why the settlers couldn’t just be left there and become citizens of a state of Palestine whose boundaries could simply be drawn around them. This was impossible, however, because the Palestinian position was that no Jews could be citizens of Palestine – a racist position supported by the ‘anti-racist’ Left.

CONTINUED:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melanieph...n-and-me.thtml

[andak01]

Regarding the charge at the bottom of the article that Hussain has been "gotten to" by the Muslim Brotherhood, note...

"The Quilliam Foundation has no formal links with Mufti Ali Goma of Egypt. However, we have named him on our website as a scholastic giant. Some have asked us whether we know of Mufti Ali Goma’s stance on suicide bombings. Firstly, let me clarify that our view on suicide bombings is on the record. We have explicitly condemned the deliberate targeting of non-combatants, in Israel or anywhere else in the world. Ed Husain directly criticised Qardawi’s fatwa justifying suicide bombings whilst in Qatar for the Doha Debates. Furthermore, I personally challenged Azzam Tamimi - Hamas representative in the UK - on this matter in a studio debate on BBC’s flagship Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman (video)."

http://www.unitedstatesaction.com/bl...20Responds.htm

Qardawi is Muslim Brotherhood.

Phillips and others have repeatedly asked why the MCB and its affiliates do not oppose extremism. Well, this weekend, a leading affiliate, the Islamic Society of Britain, and a prominent leader of the MCB, Inayat Bunglawala, will, once again, oppose extremism. Rather than welcome this much-needed shift in protecting Britain's national security, setting the right tone among activist Muslims, Melanie imagines a grand conspiracy lying behind his actions. Even when he is right, he is wrong. Inayat, with all his faults, has risked much among entrenched, dinosaur Muslim "leaders" by publicly supporting gay rights, freedom of speech for Salman Rushdie and Geert Wilders, and challenging conventional narratives on creationism. Holding him to account for comments made in 1993, from which he has since very plainly distanced himself, is neither fair nor humane.

But do fairness and humanity matter to Phillips? After all, Obama was, apparently, being "tactical" in his Christianity:

"We are entitled to ask precisely when he stopped being a Muslim, and why. Did Obama embrace Christianity as a tactical manoeuvre to get himself elected?"

To that demented mindset, whatever Muslims do, right or wrong, principled or otherwise, we will always be subject to Robert Spencer's brigade of trolls who will shout "taqiyya" to our supposed hiding of Islamist loyalties.
I have hope for British Muslims. The journey ahead is tough, risky and fraught with danger. But with the right interjections, alliances, encouragement and guidance from Muslim and other thought leaders, British Muslim communities can become shining examples of hope, prosperity and progress. Melanie Phillips and her ilk need to decide whether they want to help or hinder. It's not too late. She can always travel back to the centre.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...mism-spectator

[Tonto]

Dang, andak. That was pretty good. I'll give you a pat on the head for that! Not bad.