The Mayor Responds on al-Qaradawi. posted by Richard Seymour

A friendly ghost e-mailed me last night with the PDF file of the mayor's response to his critics on the al-Qaradawi visit. The mayor had, he rightly told me, comprehensively destroyed the arguments proffered by Peter Tatchell and some others, revealing many of them to be based on pure prejudice, and others on misinformation. Many of those who criticised the mayor's approach on this and contributed to a dossier against the al-Qaradawi visit are desperate Islamophobes who believe that Islam can only be reactionary, that there can be no progressive voice within Islam. I have the whole thing saved here for your comfort and convenience, since PDF files can be mucky.

The mayor's dossier establishes a number of things: 1) Yusuf al-Qaradawi is regarded by both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars as a progressive and tolerant voice within Islam; 2) Al-Qaradawi does not support wife-beating as his accusers say, he openly condemns it, while advocating the equality of the sexes; 3) He has condemned terrorist atrocities from 9/11 to Bali; 4) He has spoken against anti-Semitism and is not himself an anti-Semite as his accusers suggest. Indeed, he has insisted on the equality of Christians, Muslims and Jews, earning him the ire of extremist groups like al-Muhajiroun; 5) He favours democracy and political pluralism; 6) He favours Muslim countries developing friendly relations with the US (notwithstanding his criticisms of US policy), and has shared a platform with Bill Clinton and Richard Holbrooke to argue that point; 7) He condemns the kidnappings and the targetting of citizens in Iraq and elsewhere.

The dossier also establishes that the critics of al-Qaradawi's visit fundamentally misrepresent the evidence and cite imbalanced sources (in particular, some of their information comes from a group calling itself the Middle East Media Research Institute - MEMRI - which is run by an Israeli colonel and which specialises in producing anti-Arab, anti-Muslim propaganda. Read more here and here .)

A number of things are ceded by the dossier. First of all, it is clear that al-Qaradawi, opposes homosexuality as a "perversion". So do leaders of the Christian and Jewish faiths. In fact, this is the stance of Dr Jonathan Sacks, who supports clause 28, and who is often revered as a voice of compassion and moderation. This doesn't protect the leaders of any religious faith from criticism, but why single one out? In particular, why does Outrage claim that al-Qaradawi supports the "killing" of lesbians and gays, when the only source they cite (a rather rancorous page from IslamOnline which I won't link to for obvious reasons) cites a Saudi scholar citing such a recommendation from the Quran, while al-Qaradawi says nothing to this effect at all? (From the dossier, al-Qaradawi is cited as saying: "It is sufficient for a Muslim to object to it verbally or at least within his conscience. We are not required by our faith to declare a war against homosexuality and homosexuals.") Why does Peter Tatchell regard him, then, as more dangerous and more extreme than the BNP, who really would like to kill all lesbians and gays? Are, perhaps, brown homophobes worse than white ones? A letter signed by, among others, the Lesbian and Gay Coalition Against Racism, also notes this alarming aspect of Outrage's campaigns.

The dossier also concedes that al-Qaradawi supports the right of Palestinians to carry out suicide bombings as an exceptional and desperate case. His own explanation is cited: "If the Palestinians had weapons similar to those of the Israelis – tanks, F16 helicopters, they would not have resorted to turning themselves into human bombs. This has been turned into a no-option situation – they had to do this because they have no other means of resisting their enemy and liberating their land." I don't particularly care to pander to the left-liberal moralists on this question. The statement above is virtually unexceptionable, and while I personally don't believe the strategy of suicide bombing is correct, there is no doubt that its persistence is a direct result of the despair created by the Israeli occupation (as well as, to some extent, the weakness and corruption of the Fatah leadership).

At any rate, once the hysterical concatenation of phoney charges, hypocrisy and concocted outrage is dispensed with, the case against al-Qaradawi's visit is reduced to one that might be supplied by the Israeli embassy. The charges are, like Astroglide, messy but not sticky.