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Should we be ‘nice’ to radical
Islamists?
Now chat the dust has settled, let's admit the truth about the Danish
cartoon furore, said Andrew Sullivan in The Sunday Times. The West has caved in
pathetically to the "Islamo-bullies". There has been a lot of pious
guff about why the British and American media didn't publish the
offending images of Mohammed: "the press doesn't want to inflame
matters further; no editor has to publish images that would appal
readers; reprinting them would merely play into the hands of
extremists, and so on." Of course, the real reason is that Muslims on
three continents rioted, burned buildings, and issued death threats.
"Many editors simply don't want to put their staff at risk of physical
danger." We appear to be happy to cede the principle of free speech "to
fear and phoney civility - all in the name of getting along".
Even more craven, said The Economist,
was the reaction of the British and American governments. The US State
Department declared that "anti-Muslim" images were "unacceptable",
while Jack Straw called their publication "unnecessary, insensitive,
disrespectful and wrong". Even if the cartoons were all these things,
it is not a government's business to say what should and shouldn't be
published. It is depressing that we have fallen into confusion over
such a fundamental principle, said Christopher Hitchens on Slate.Com.
The situation is very straightforward. Islam apparently forbids the
depiction of the Prophet, just as it prohibits pork and alcohol. "Very
well then, let a good Muslim abstain from all of these. But if he
claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest
possible proof of an aggressive intent." He seems to say: "You will do
what I say and you will do it on pain of death". What's more
"offensive" and "unacceptable" - a few crude cartoons, or this
"international Muslim pogrom against the free press"?
But this is not a simple face-off between free speech and Islamic
intolerance, said Olivier Roy in Newsweek. The vast majority of
European Muslims utterly condemn the violent protests, but they also
feel "intense anger" about the cartoons. As far as they are concerned,
Muslims are the victims of double standards. Freedom of speech is not
absolute: anti-Semitic cartoons, for instance, would be liable to
prosecution almost anywhere in the West. Holocaust denial is an offence
in several European countries; right across the EU there are laws
banning homophobia and protecting minorities from degrading insult. So
why are Muslims not similarly protected? Depicting Mohammed as a
terrorist was a calculated insult to Islam, which also demonised
Muslims by implying that they are all violent fanatics. We are left
asking ourselves one question, said Fareena Alam in The Observer: "Why does Europe treat us
with such disdain?"
This whole furore has more to do with politics than with religion, said
Adrian Hamilton in The Independent. In the Middle East, Muslim anger
has clearly been exploited for political ends: the Syrian government,
the Taliban, and Palestinian groups have all orchestrated violent
protests to
advance their own particular causes. Likewise, it's no accident that
publication of the cartoons "has been most zealously pursued in those
countries - Denmark, Austria, Germany and France - where feelings
against immigration are highest and the political position of the
extreme Right the most pronounced". In Europe, they have been published
in a spirit of "deliberate provocation" by those who are less
interested in free speech than in "forcing compliance on what they
regard as an alien culture".
That is not necessarily as reprehensible as it sounds, said the Sunday
Telegraph. If the last few years have taught us anything, it is that a
minimum of compliance and assimilation is necessary if immigration is
to work. The Government's "cringeing reaction" to the cartoon protests
- like the failure to arrest the fanatics who threatened to "behead
those who insult Islam" outside the Danish embassy in London, and the
pathetic reluctance to prosecute the likes of Abu
Hamza - are all part
of the same "transparently self-destructive policy". The thinking seems
to have been: "If we are 'nice' to radical Islamists, they will be
'nice' to us." Not only is this morally wrong, it doesn't work - as we
now know to our cost. "Only by confronting the radical Islamists
head-on, and forging a united front to defend the values of a liberal
and tolerant society, can we defeat the extremists."
Where
modesty stops and madness begins
Taken from the Daily Telegraph 2006-02-18
Two weeks ago, the case of Shabina Begum, the Luton girl who wanted to
wear a jilbab at Denbigh High School in defiance of its school uniform
policy, went to the Lords.
The law lords' judgment will finally decide who was wrong in law: the
(then) 14-year-old schoolgirl who wanted to claim her human right to
manifest her religion in a garment of unarguable modesty, or Denbigh
High, a mixed comprehensive with a 70 per cent Muslim intake.
The uniform for girl pupils includes a shalwaar-kameez (tunic and
trousers), agreed on by the governors for Hindus and Sikhs as well as
Muslims. The rules on the colour/style of shalwaar-kameez are carefully
set out, as are the rules for the Muslim headscarf: navy blue, tied at
the back, ends neatly tucked in for health and safety, etc.
Shabina started at Denbigh High in September 2000, and wore the
shalwaar-kameez until September 2002, when she told the assistant
headmaster that it no longer met the requirements of her religion. She
was not quite 14. He sent her homeward to think again.
At a subsequent meeting about her non-attendance, she was accompanied
not by her father (who died when she was little), nor by her mother
(who spoke no English), but by her brother, Shuweb Rahman, and "another
young man". Both young men apparently acted "aggressively" and were
"not prepared to compromise". Shabina did not attend school for the
next two years.
She said the school had excluded her unlawfully. The school said she
had excluded herself, and won at a High Court hearing in April 2004.
Shabina's mother died a month before the hearing. It was her brother
who was her "litigation friend" in that case (and the subsequent ones).
Shabina went to the Appeal Court last March, backed by the Children's
Legal Centre, which appointed Cherie Booth QC as her lawyer. She won.
She was then 16, and said outside the court that she "could scream with
happiness" about her victory, which would give "hope and strength to
other Muslim women who wish to preserve their identity and values
despite prejudice and bigotry".
Hmmm. On first hearing, I was sympathetic to this feisty girl. Muslim
women needed a fair bit of hope and strength back then, I reckoned, and
she not least. From 2003 to 2004, she had watched her mother die, had
seen shock and awe rain down on Iraq and taken on her school in the
High Court. A hard year for a Muslim girl of 15.
I didn't have much sympathy for her fierce desire to wear the jilbab.
For a Western liberal, and for an (albeit fainthearted) feminist such
as me, it's a bothersome garment. Not as bothersome as some - burqas,
or niqabs (the scarf that shows only an eye-slit), or the extraordinary
headwear I saw in Qatar, where women tie a stiff, silk scarf over their
heads in a bubble-shape, like a space helmet. You can't even see the
shape of the head, never mind the face.
As a uniform for schoolgirls, a jilbab is quite mad. But no madder,
truthfully, than many a uniform I've meekly worn in my time. Ties,
elastic-legged bloomers worn over "knicker linings", a
double-broadcloth boat-cloak that fastened at the neck with a metal
chain. The cloak was lovat-green and the huge hood was either red,
Cambridge blue or violet, depending on which house you were in. (This
was a girls' school.)
So, I was minded to be sympathetic, until I read an interview with
Shabina last March. She talked in depth to only one newspaper, the
Guardian, whose young trainee reporter Dilpazier Aslam secured an
exclusive. Shabina said, he reported: "I hope in years to come
policy-makers will take note of a growing number of young Muslims who,
like me, have turned back to our faith after years of being taught that
we needed to be liberated from it." Gosh, I thought. That's telling
you, policy-makers. I wish I'd been so savvy at 17.
She also said: "Our belief in our faith is the one thing that makes
sense of a world gone mad, a world where Muslim women, from Uzbekhistan
to Turkey, are feeling the brunt of policies guided by Western
governments." At this point, I came over all faint. Uzbekhistan to
Turkey? What's that about?
Iraq and Afghanistan, yes - we're all up to speed about
Western-embattled warzones. But Uzbekhistan? Well, it's the cradle of
Hizb-ut-Tahrir, one of the "extreme groups" with an "extreme ideology"
that Tony Blair is currently minded to ban, along with Al-Muhajiroon.
They make him nervous, which is not surprising. They make most
Westerners nervous.
Dilpazier Aslan was sacked from the Guardian's journalist-trainee
scheme after the July bombings on the grounds that he hadn't declared
his ties to Hizb-ut-Tahrir.
So there is more going on in Shabina's mind than modesty, though
modesty is what she may win on in the Lords. Denbigh High's lawyer said
on Monday that "Miss Begum's advisers objected to the school uniform of
shalwaar-kameez because it was also worn by non-believers."
Cherie Blair leapt to her feet to correct him: "That is not the reason
why we object. It is because it is not modest enough." This is quite
mind-boggling. As wife of the Prime Minister, this is the woman who
stood next to Laura Bush at Downing Street, mugging to the camera with
her fingers over her eyes to mimic an Afghan woman peering through a
horrid burqa. We all got the point: burqas - unliberated - must help
George bomb Kabul in order to Free Afghan Women from beastly Taliban
extremists.
Now, as Cherie Booth QC, she assists Hizb-ut-Tahrir extremists to help
their sisters into head-to-toe "modesty". Lord knows what they talk
about in bed, those two.
Vicki Woods
See other articles:
Progressive Islam
Afghanistan mission is not without risk
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