Britain’s Muslim population ‘reaches 2 million’

I am sure Mark Steyn and his followers are busy writing about the impending arrival of Eurabia following news that Britain’s Muslim population is estimated at around 2 million.

The Muslim bus driver who told his passenger to get off so he could pray

Turns out that “Muslim news story” was garbage.

“Schools to teach the Qur’an”

Apparently the National Union of Teachers has called for the end of separate faith schools and instead for “faith-based instruction, prayer facilities and a choice of religious holidays” to be introduced into all schools.

Don’t have much time to discuss this story, but you can be certain the right-wing press had a field day; even the BBC got in on the act.

Bernard Lewis falls out of favour with the American Right-Wing

Tabsir.net links to a usual anti-Muslim rant piece at FrontPageRag. What is noteworthy about this piece is that the author attacks one of the doyens of Western Orientalism for being a bit too soft on Islam.

The thing with Bernard Lewis is that ultimately he is a scholar (even if he was in the service of Empire), who at least had an argument to make; his opponents could (and did) make counter-arguments. And as noted by a commentator at Tabsir, for Lewis to say “what went wrong with Islam” means he must have seen something that was “right” in the first place.

FrontPageRag, and other hate sites, however, have no arguments to make. They exist only to spew bile under the guise of being ‘conservative’, when in fact they are a curse to this tradition.

Conservatism as a serious intellectual tradition

In order to save (Angloamerican) conservatism, its adherents are going to have to separate themselves from the right-wing hordes who confuse serious intellectual and political thought for their own petty prejudices.

Obama is not a Muslim afterall. Instead he is an antisemitic black supremacist

Is it just me or, having failed to seriously pin the Muslim tag on Obama, his right-wing critics are now increasingly putting the spotlight on the church he belongs to?

I happened to chance upon Mad Mel’s latest contribution to the debate. According to Mad Mel, Barack Obama’s ‘rejection and denunciation’ of Louis Farrakhan is actually “some kind of stealth support for anti-semitic, racist views”.

Next she’ll be telling us calls for harmony and peace are actually a death threat.

Oh.

To be fair to Mad Mel, she has every right to be sceptical about Obama’s motives. I mean, it’s not as though he has suggested Palestinians are all antisemites whose only goal in life is to destroy Israel, nor has he told us of his plans to engage in a new world war against Islam Islamofascism?

Mad Mel also calls Louis Farrakhan an Islamist. It is views like this are fast rendering Islamist totally useless as a concept.

‘In your guts you know he’s nuts’

Bushism is Goldwaterism on steroids, but also something radically different. More than his Republican predecessors – even Reagan – Bush has reorganised the economy to favour the Republicans’ corporate base. The near abolition of estate taxes and the appointment of judges like Samuel Alito and John Roberts who are committed to dismantling the regulatory state fulfils Goldwater’s dream of strict constructionist judges burying the New Deal. Bush’s commitment to moral conservatism (even if his over-the-top evangelicalism would have outraged Goldwater) is the extreme expression of the religious ideology that permeates The Conscience of a Conservative. And his muscular foreign policy – treating ‘radical Islam’ as the equivalent of the Communist menace – is latter-day Goldwaterism. The Bush administration’s embrace of domestic spying, preventive detention and secret tribunals takes Goldwater’s emphasis on authority and security as far as it can go. Bush’s indebtedness to the military-industrial complex – he is, like Goldwater, a product of the Sun Belt – has, however, led him to expand the state beyond what even Goldwater himself might have tolerated. What Bush has lost – and why the Republican fusion is now so fragile – is the sense of balance that, in the end, made Goldwater less of an extremist than his heirs. For Goldwater liberty and authority always existed in tension. Today, both exist in hypertrophied form, their exaggeration finally reaching the point of untenability. Or so at least we can hope.

Source.

There is a sentence in Thomas Sugrue’s piece above that will make you smile:

The modern Republican Party was born of revolution. In the early 1960s, right-wing insurgents – self-consciously using the model of Communist cells – took over the GOP, repudiated the moderation of its leaders, among them President Eisenhower and the New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, and built a formidable counter-establishment infrastructure that extended from local school boards to state capitols to think tanks.

Newsnight versus Policy Exchange

There is a a lot blogtivity regarding Newsnight’s investigation into the much publicised Policy Exchange report on extremist literature being sold inside British mosques. Briefly, Newsnight claimed that some of the evidence used or gathered by Policy Exchange was fabricated or of dubious origin, a claim Policy Exchange denies or deems irrelevant.

Dr. Gabriele Marranci (an anthropologist specialising in Muslim communities) had a post back in October when the report was first released questioning the methodology and approach of the report’s authors. This prompted a response from the report’s main author, Dr. Denis MacEoin (himself a specialist in Arab and Persian literature) [1, 2]. Another academic blogger at Remarks and culture had similar criticisms. Ministry of Truth, Obsolete [1, 2] and Brian Whitaker contribute with some analysis of their own. MacEoin’s own political viewpoints are noted by Garry Smith (1, 2), and a quick search of his name tells you a lot. (Indigo Jo, a keen reader of letters to the editor in newspapers, has come across MacEoin before.) Of course, MacEoin’s political viewpoints do not, in and of themselves discount, the findings of the report; but they provide context especially when the method and evidence is found to be suspect.

The general view from these and other bloggers seems to be that what is under question is not the availablity of ‘extremist literature’ at mosques which Policy Exchange researchers probably did find, but the presentation of the report as a rigorous academic exercise by the major media outlets in Britain. In other words, this Newsnight story is really about the standards (and perceptions) of journalism in Britain, which have taken something of a battering in the last few years, and not really about Muslims (although the Muslim institutions wrongfully implicated in the report have every right to feel aggrieved).

Interestingly, Dean Godson, the man wheeled out by the Policy Exchange to defend the report on Newsnight, was fired from the Telegraph back in 2004 when Conrad Black (now a convicted criminal) sold the paper to the Barclay brothers:

The Barclays[, says Martin Newland, then editor of the Telegraph,] have not laid down a clear political line. “There are occasional conversations. I might call about something. Normal, friendly conversations…” Nonetheless, the comment page has seen some of the biggest changes during the interregnum. “I soon came to recognise we were speaking a language on geopolitical events and even domestic events that was dictated too much from across the Atlantic. It’s OK to be pro-Israel, but not to be unbelievably pro-Likud Israel, it’s OK to be pro-American but not look as if you’re taking instructions from Washington. Dean Godson and Barbara Amiel were key departures.”

Spinwatch did an investigation into Godson’s ideological roots in September this year, which is very informative and provides a lot of context.

And, of course, Labour are seeking to profit from the suspicions cast over Policy Exchange, given the think-tank is linked to the Tory Party.