Fear of Islam: Britain's New Disease

Peter Oborne | The Independent

http://arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article=111511&d=5&m=7&y=2008

Three years ago, four young suicide bombers caused carnage in London. Their aim was not just to kill and maim. There was also a long-term strategic purpose: To sow suspicion and divide Britain between Muslims and the rest. They are succeeding. In Britain today, there is a deepening distrust between mainstream society and ever more isolated Muslim communities. A culture of contempt and violence is emerging on our streets.

Channel 4's Dispatches program discovered many violent episodes and attacks on Muslims, with very few reported; those that do get almost no publicity.

Last week, Martyn Gilleard, a Nazi sympathizer in East Yorkshire, was jailed for 16 years. Police found four nail bombs, bullets, swords, axes and knives in his flat. Gilleard had been preparing for a war against Muslims. The Gilleard case went all but unreported. Had a Muslim been found with an arsenal of weapons and planning violent assaults, it would have been a far bigger story. There is a reason for this blindness in the media. The systematic demonization of Muslims has become an important part of the central narrative of the British political and media class; it is so entrenched, so much part of normal discussion, that almost nobody notices. Protests go unheard and unnoticed.

Why? Britain's Muslim immigrants are mainly poor, isolated and alienated from mainstream society. Surveys show Muslims have the highest rate of unemployment, the poorest health, the most disability and fewest educational qualifications of any faith group in the country. This means they are vulnerable, rendering them open to ignorant and hostile commentary from mainstream figures.

Islamophobia — an unfounded dread and dislike of Muslims — can be encountered in the best circles: Among our most famous novelists, among newspaper columnists, and in the Church of England. Its appeal is wide-ranging. "I am an Islamophobe," the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee wrote in The Independent nearly 10 years ago. "Islamophobia?" the Sunday Times columnist Rod Liddle asks rhetorically in the title of a recent speech, "Count me in". Imagine Liddle declaring: "Anti-Semitism? Count me in", or Toynbee claiming she was "an anti-Semite and proud of it".

Anti-Semitism is recognized as an evil, noxious creed, and its adherents are barred from mainstream society and respectable organs of opinion. Not so Islamophobia.

"There is a definite urge; don't you have it?", the author Martin Amis told Ginny Dougary of The Times: "The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. Not letting them travel. Deportation; further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or Pakistan. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children."

Here, Amis is doing much more than insulting Muslims. He is using the foul and barbarous language of fascism.

All over Europe, parties of the far right have been dropping their traditional hostility to minorities such as Jews and homosexuals; in Britain, the BNP has come to realize that anti-Semitism and anti-black campaigning won't work if they are serious about electoral success. To move to mainstream respectability, they need an issue that allows them to exploit people's fears about immigrants and Britain's ethnic minority communities without being branded racist extremists. They have found it. Since 9/11, and particularly 7/7, the BNP has gone all out to tap a rich vein of anti-Muslim sentiment. The party's leader, Nick Griffin, has described Islam as a "wicked, vicious faith" and has tried to distance himself and the party from its anti-Semitic past. Party members are now rebuked for discussing the Holocaust and told to focus on terrorism, the evils of Islam, and scare stories of Britain becoming an Islamic state. Griffin's strategy has been inspired by the press.

Many categories of immigrants and foreigners have been singled out for hatred and opprobrium by mainstream society because they were felt to be threats to British identity. At times, these despised categories have included Catholics, Jews, French and Germans and blacks. Now this outcast role has fallen to Muslims. We should all feel ashamed about the way we treat Muslims, in the media, in our politics, and on our streets. We do not treat Muslims with the tolerance, decency and fairness that we often like to boast is the British way. We urgently need to change our public culture.

— Peter Oborne's Dispatches film, "It Shouldn't Happen to a Muslim", will be screened on Channel 4 at 8 p.m. on Monday

UK Chief Justice Sees Shariah Role in Mediation

Agencies

http://arabnews.com/?page=4&section=0&article=111527&d=5&m=7&y=2008&pix=world.jpg&category=World

LONDON: Leading Muslim jurists yesterday welcomed comments by Britain's chief justice supporting a role for Shariah in resolving disputes.

Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips said in a speech on Thursday that there was no question of Islamic law replacing English law, but "there is no reason why Shariah principles, or any other religious code, should not be the basis for mediation or other forms of alternative dispute resolution."

Shaykh Faiz Siddiqi, a barrister and chairman of the governing council of the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal, said yesterday that critics of any use of Islamic law failed to recognize that both parties had to agree to any form of dispute resolution in Britain.

Shamim Qureshi, the presiding judge of the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal, said the application of Shariah could be useful in settling disputes about forced marriages, according to a statement released by the tribunal. Qureshi, a judge in Wolverhampton Magistrates Court, is one of the few Muslims to serve as a judge in England.

The Muslim Arbitration Tribunal, established last year, offers alternative resolution of family disputes, forced marriages, and disputes over debts, commercial matters and inheritance.

In his speech at the East London Muslim Center, Phillips said there is a widespread misunderstanding of Shariah in Britain.

"Part of the misconception about Shariah law is the belief that Shariah is only about mandating sanctions such as flogging, stoning, the cutting off of hand or death for those who fail to comply with the law. And the view of many of Shariah law is colored by violent extremists who invoke it, perversely, to justify terrorist atrocities such as suicide bombing, which I understand to be in conflict with Islamic principles," Phillips said.

He said British media in particular had misunderstood a speech in February by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who also supported a role for Shariah, specifically suggesting a role in resolving disputes.

Yesterday, the country's first Muslim government minister said Muslims in Britain felt like aliens in their own society and that they were targeted like "the Jews of Europe." International Development Minister Shahid Malik painted a bleak picture of the integration of Britain's 1.8 million Muslims, three years after British Muslim suicide bombers killed 52 people on London's transport system.

The attacks triggered a debate on whether Britain's policy of avoiding imposing a single British identity, and instead promoting a multicultural society, had led to segregation of ethnic minorities.

Malik, who has been the target of race attacks including a firebombing of his family car, said some media coverage "makes Muslims feel like aliens in their own country."

"If you ask Muslims today what do they feel like, they feel like the Jews of Europe," he told a documentary to be shown on Channel 4 television next week.

"I don't mean to equate that with the Holocaust but in the way that it was legitimate almost — still is in some parts — to target Jews. Many Muslims would say that we feel the exact same way," Malik said.