The Prophet Disarmed. posted by Richard Seymour

Following 9/11, the Bush & Blair administrations needed to find some respectable, moderate Muslim organisations they could patronise: these, you see, are the good Muslims, whom we are not at war with. We make no crusade – er, war – against Islam; our only enemy is the acephalous international network that struck at the heart of, um, Western civilisation. Why, no other than Iqbal Sacranie, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, was knighted for his services to the Crown-in-Parliament. Those good old days are gone, and it now seems that even the moderates are becoming too prickly for the government to deal with: saying bad things about the war on Iraq and Western support for Israel one minute, looking for a cup of tea in Downing Street the next. Who on earth do these Mohammedans think they are?

I say this because there appears to be something programmatic about the ferocity with which moderate Muslims are being attacked and publicly vilified, and it has to do with disarming their criticisms of the government’s foreign policy. Last night’s Panorama documentary, ably dispatched by the MCB themselves, was preceded by a barrage of attacks on the Muslim Council of Britain, a moderate Muslim organisation. There was also the odd scare story about Muslims, particularly this drivel, which claimed that a Muslim crime organisation was funding terrorist attacks – of course it had no evidence whatsoever for such a thesis. On the same day, there was Martin Bright’s rather wet effort for The Observer, which referred to “an extraordinary letter obtained by the Observer”. The letter, addressed by the MCB to the BBC’s director-general, was available on the MCB’s website – the front page, in fact, so hardly a terrific find on the part of the Observer. The article said that the MCB was accused of failing mainstream Britain because it called the upcoming Panorama documentary “pro-Israel”. It noted that the letter would be “used by critics” of the organisation. Who these accusers and critics were, the reader was never told. One astute reader of the piece wrote to Mr Bright, and received an interesting if cursory reply:

Both your objections are valid. I can't say any more: as the article appeared in my name I have to stand by it.

Warned by the sound of so much hand-washing, then, one is inclined to wonder in who else’s name the article might have appeared under had Mr Bright not been so lumbered. Indeed, this wasn’t the only response, as the Observer’s blog notes:

The overwhelming balance of correspondence we have received has been towards defence of the MCB and anger at the tone and content of our story.

That would be, anger at the fact that it’s all tone and zero content. The reference to a “pro-Israeli agenda” arose because the MCB said that almost the entirety of John Ware’s questions toward Iqbal Sacranie were about he and his organisation's attitudes to Israel. Indeed, as Inayat Bungwala rightly notes, it is perfectly correct to describe a pro-Israel bias at the BBC, since “All independent studies show that all the mainstream broadcasters give more coverage to the Israeli official perspective than to Palestinians”. See, in particular, Greg Philo and Mike Berry’s Bad News From Israel, in which their exhaustive studies confirm a bias of several orders and magnitudes in Israel’s favour. Mr Bright’s article managed to claim that the MCB is a “self-appointed organisation” and has “no women prominently involved in the organisation” – except, of course, as Iqbal Sacranie promptly pointed out, there are many Muslims in the organisation, and one of its assistant secretary-generals, Unaiza Malik, is a woman. The entire article was, in fact drivel.

Aside from all of this nonsense have been various charges levelled against Inayat Bungwala. The Financial Times reports that he said Osama bin Laden was a “freedom fighter” when he fought the Russians in the 1980s. “Obviously I don't hold those views now”, he said. He added: “We condemn the killing of innocent civilians. The term mujahid is reserved for those fighting illegal occupation, which Osama bin Laden was doing in the 80s in Afghanistan”. Not good enough for the pink paper, which salivates about how Bungwala’s comments “come at a sensitive time” when everyone is already laying into the MCB. The Telegraph charges him with anti-Semitism, because of a comment made back in 1992, from which Bungawala has already resiled. According to Rod Liddle , both Inayat Bungwala and Iqbal Sacranie must be anti-Semites because they did not attend Holocaust memorial day. It’s political-correctness gone mad, I tell you.

This comes as Normo Tebbs has decided to enlighten the world as to the problem with these Muslims – they hadn’t been asked to pass his “cricket test”. Islam, he said, had made no real advances in art, literature or sciences. Could this be the same former Tory front-bencher who took it upon himself to defend the Sun’s use of page three girls? I think we all know what he means by literature... It follows a series of bigoted articles by some dickhead called Will Cummins, and also a rather nasty stream of Islamophobic vitriol from Anthony Browne , who has recently been paid for a couple of Muslim-baiting articles on a racist website known as V-Dare, in which he complained that Britain was losing its identity “under the weight of Third World colonization”. It is twinned with a similar campaign in the United States against a similar organisation known as the Council on American-Islamic Relations. (Also see this right wing stop-shop and penumbral lair of moonbats: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19140).

And of course it comes amid the epidemic of racist violence toward Muslims, latest among which is an arson attack on a Masjid in Woolwich, where I used to live and study. The place was surrounded by a high wall topped with barbed wire the last time I was there, so these were some determined arsonists.

Back to the Panorama documentary, and the reporter behind it, John Ware. Ware has form, it seems, as Islamophobia Watch explains. He has previously been behind what even David Blunkett couldn’t help but describe as a programme pursuing a “Powellite anti-immigration agenda”. The documentary, again a Panorama special, relied on unchecked claims from the right-wing anti-immigrant group Migration Watch. It assured viewers that they had every right to feel resentful about these immigrants “jumping the queue” for housing and healthcare. What a surprise to discover that he is behind yet another poorly sourced, badly made programme with a racist message.

The eternal bleat from the Right is that they are being prevented from asking legitimate questions by an hysterical climate of political-correctness. This would be more impressive if they managed to get their facts right from time to time, or if they could even come up with a properly phrased question. As it is, the attacks presently being mounted demonstrate what has previously been indicated in attacks on the MAB and the crusade against the much more extreme Hizb ut-Tahrir: that Muslims are already guilty, and that they must ceaselessly plead their innocence by placing before the courts fresh examples of Muslim deviance, tolerating the odious, announcing the obvious, and otherwise keeping very, very quiet.