Nicholas Sarzoky’s attack on the burkha has garnered plenty of support, from people who are worried about the oppression of Muslim women to those who just want to use it as an excuse to attack Islam and Muslims.
There are plenty of reasons to criticise the burkha. It makes some people feel uncomfortable because it denies them face to face contact with the person underneath, while in certain situations, such as checking in at airports, it is clearly inappropriate. Some women are forced or pressured to wear it, while their husbands and male relatives go around uncovered. There is not even Qur’anic justification for it. Yet do these objections mean that it should be banned? No. There are two reasons for this: the practicality of such a ban, and the loss of liberty.
Enforcing such a ban would be hard. Would we have police ripping off women’s clothes if their faces were covered? Pregnant women and young mothers put behind bars for repeatedly defying the ban? Would anyone who covered their face up be breaking the law? Would Darth Vader impersonators be held? How much face would have to be covered up for it to be illegal?
At stake too is the liberty of individuals to decide what they wear. Some women choose to wear the burkha because they like it, and this should be their decision. The burkha itself isn’t a sign of repression. It is in some cases a product of repression, but it is unclear why women who are forced to wear the burkha would suddenly become freer. If anything, the opposite might happen, and women who were allowed to go out before could be forced to stay in. We as a society do need to do much more to help oppressed women, but regulating their clothes isn’t going to help.
I blog under a pseudonym. Being a private person, I like to separate out my blogging life from my ‘offline’ life (though a number of people know my real identity and I have met many friends though blogging). I am lucky; I can blog without fear of reprisal because I know that even if my real name was published, it wouldn’t really matter. Others are not so fortunate:
“Earlier, Mr Justice Eady refused an injunction to prevent the Times identifying “Night Jack”, who won an Orwell prize for blogging in April. The judge said blogging was “essentially a public rather than a private activity”. The blogger’s lawyer had argued that preserving his anonymity was in the public interest.”
Whistleblowers are not protected in this country, whether they are corporate or public sector whistleblowers. Fine-sounding laws are meant to safeguard them, but they don’t work. Blogging provides (or used to) one of the few safe outlets for people to expose wrongdoing by. This is in the public interest. The ruling also asserted the odd idea that it was in the public interest to know as much as possible about a blogger: but the very joy of the blogosphere is that you do not have to read any blog you don’t want to.
Oh look, ex-Muslim Council of Britain honcho Inayat Bunglawala has written an article not only arguing for free speech for the extremist group al-Muhajiroun, but also chiding Luton Muslims for driving away those idiots last week!
Amusing to watch a man, until recently obsessed with telling everyone how free speech and Islamophobia was hurting Muslims, now singing like a canary about how great freedom of expression is. Inayat Bunglawala’s two-faced hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Yesterday’s Independent carried an excellent article: Luton fights back against right-wing extremists. It mentions that many of Luton’s ordinary Muslims had to face constant hassle and goading from extremists from the al-Muhajiroun/al-Ghuraaba lot. The demo against British soldiers was clearly the straw that broke the camel’s back and the following week they drove the extremists off the Mosque. Good on them.
Religious fanatics of all stripes have always been a cancer on minority communities because of their willingness to use intimidation and stop them from speaking out. Obviously many of the people who attended the Luton mosque had enough and took matters into their hands to reclaim their space. What else were they supposed to do? But no! That’s soooo terrible for our fanboy for free speech! Inayat thinks that somehow these “morons” will be driven off the street by magic, despite the fact they love the publicity, without the communities actually standing up to their actions. No really! Just as al-Muhajiroun announce they’re coming back, somehow they’re going to listen to his enlightened thoughts and decide that it’s probably best to shut the fuck up and sit at home.
Or Inayat could recognise that the Luton fightback against the al-Ghuraaba sect, if translated into something far wider, could be the best bit of PR British Muslims could get for years.
Also: A new website commemorates Britain’s Muslim Soldiers (nothing about beheading them honest, lol).
After our discussion on this thread, I decided to look at the scale of slavery/exploitation (most often in terms of sex), that still exists in Britain. An article from 2008 paints a shocking (though, sadly not surprising) picture:
“Up to 18,000 females, including girls as young as 14, are working in brothels across Britain after being smuggled into the country to meet the booming demand for prostitutes…
Most victims are foreign, with least 85 per cent of the women working as prostitutes coming from countries including Brazil, China, Lithuania and Thailand. Many victims are lured to Britain with false promises of work in bars or nightclubs only to be sold for up to £5,000, often at airports or service stations, to pimps and brothel-keepers.”
” Trafficking is a lucrative activity, estimated to be worth $32bn globally per year. It is the selling of women and children into the sex industry that usually takes the limelight, eclipsing those trafficked into Britain to do work that is dirty, difficult and dangerous – construction, care work, cleaning and agriculture – for little or no pay.”
I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, before the MPs expenses scandal blew up, but my article for New Statesman magazine has finally been published:
Hanging on to civil liberties
Technology allows corporations and governments to store huge amounts of our personal data – but it also gives us ways to fight back
Article on their website or this week’s print edition.
The Guardian has an excellent, and harrowing, article on the abuses which many female immigrant workers from the developing world suffer, with the focus on the huge numbers of migrant workers in the Middle East:
“Her testimony, along with thousands of others’, has been gathered by Human Rights Watch (HRW). The group claims that, every week, one of an estimated 200,000 migrant domestic workers in Lebanon dies. Normally it is recorded as “suicide” or falling while trying to escape their employer. Another major cause of death is untreated illness – hospitals cost money and maids aren’t seen as worth the expense. HRW claims that maids in Lebanon, as elsewhere in the Middle East, are increasingly vulnerable to beatings, rape and murder – and there are no laws to protect them from abusive employers.”
There’s a good article by Salil Tripathi in the New Statesman about how the 1979 fights in Southall, which led to the death of Blair Peach (below), radicalised a generation of British Asians who felt they had to fight for their right rather than take abuse from the National Front lying down.
The artist and film-maker Shakila Taranum Maan, who grew up in Northolt, Middlesex, near Southall, recalls the late 1970s vividly. She remembers the terrifying experience of seeing her mother encircled by hate-filled white teenagers. “Our days were spent dodging Paki-bashers. The [Southall] riot came as no surprise, as people were very angry, and keen to shed their passive skins. I wanted to be in Southall the next day, but my dad didn’t want me to go. I had a huge argument with him, and I welcomed the uprising, and saw the strength in a group of people which had for too long been reduced to mere shadows.”
The Southall Monitoring Group emerged in the aftermath of 1979, initially to monitor racial abuse of Asians, but soon expanding its remit. (The group was at the forefront in supporting the families of the Chinese cockle-pickers swept away by the tide at Morecambe Bay in 2004.) Another organisation to emerge was Southall Black Sisters, campaigning against gender- and race-based discrimination. Its campaigns against religious fundamentalism in the Asian community, where patriarchs have a disproportionate role in determining how their sisters, daughters and wives should dress or behave, and its unstinting care for the victims of domestic violence, have helped build British opinion against forced marriages and honour killings.
There’s a point to be made here about identity politics – that in some contexts it works and it’s necessary. If people are attacking you because you’re brown or black, the natural reaction amongst people of those origins is to bunch together with those in the same predicament and then fight back. It’s not just natural but actually required if the law does not protect you adequately.
So this is the dilemma for liberals who hate identity politics – how do you ensure a society whereby one group of people aren’t picked upon? Or at least how do you stop even a powerful group asserting its identity? I pointed out the example last week of various Christian groups lobbying through the national newspapers to stop a Muslim becoming the head of religion at the BBC purely because of his religion. There are Christian lobby groups in the UK and they are powerful because newspapers like the Daily Telegraph act as their mouthpieces. Do you ignore that? Deny them the opportunity to push their interests (especially if private companies are aligned with those interests), and how?
I don’t think there is an adequate answer to that.
A friend and colleague remembers Blair Peach, killed by a member of the Special Patrol Group in Southall during a demonstration against the National Front (NF) on 23 April 1979.
Blair Peach was born in New Zealand in 1946. After earning his degree at Victoria University and periods of work as a fireman and hospital orderly, he arrived in London in 1969.
From that year until his death on the streets of Southall on 23 April 1979, he worked at Phoenix School in Bow, East London. He was a dedicated and brilliant teacher who was much appreciated by his pupils. As one of them wrote, after Blair’s death:
He was a different kind of teacher. His interest in his pupils was not confined to the schoolroom but extended into their homes, where he would visit and give advice and practical help whenever he could.
He was a man of high ideals, but ideals are no good if they are not put into practice. He always practised what he preached. At school he instituted a special class to help those children who had difficulty in reading and those classes were extended into the school holidays. He did this because he cared about these children and wanted them to be free thinking adults who would not be pushed about by the system. I know I will never forget him and he will always be remembered as a friend of the people.
There’s a good article by Cath Elliot today in which she attacks those who try and tell mothers where they should give birth:
“Thinking of having a home birth? Don’t be so backward and selfish. How about an elective caesarean? What’s the matter with you, too posh to push? And don’t even get me started on the breast versus bottle-feeding debate. It seems that no matter what parents do, or what decisions they make, there’s always some sanctimonious do-gooder somewhere ready to tell them how and why they’ve got it all wrong.”
Providing there aren’t any health risks, I don’t see the problem with home birth. This is just another example of the hectoring attitude that many people take to legal activities which they frown upon.
I must admit I’m a little surprised, I always had the impression Mark Thomas wasn’t too keen on voting. This is another step in the Green Party becoming the ‘left’ alternative for those who don’t want to vote Labour or can’t bear voting Lib Dem.
My review of From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy by Kenan Malik is now online on CiF Belief.
The great appeal of From Fatwa to Jihad is its pitiless observation and it is this which raises it above the easy standards of one-sided polemic. No one gets away – certainly not Islamic radicalism and multiculturalism and its penchant for ethnic and religious particularism, the monomaniacal Melanie Phillips and the chauvinism of Daniel Pipes and Mark Steyn are all roundly criticised. If Malik’s book advocates anything, it is a social order based on universalist Enlightenment values, the importance of free speech and for the elevation of secular and progressive ideas within minority, particularly Muslim, communities.
Recent history has a way of becoming too quickly forgotten, its shifts naturalised so that current assumptions take on the aura of “forever”. Impeccably researched, brimming with detail, yet razor-sharp in its argument, this book provokes a necessary re-examination. It demands, particularly, to be read by faint-hearted politicians and all those worried by the ongoing erosion of our liberties.
Maliks is a superb book that reads like a precursive diagnostic tool for most of the issues we discuss here. Well recommended.
This is what folk (see the comments below her video) describe as an unreliable narrator. There is nothing, nowt, unreliable about it. That is what we should all aspire to be. It is what we all are, really.
Sikhs wishing to join the US military have long been barred from joining if they refused to cut their hair and discard their turbans. A 1981 regulation banned ‘conspicuous’ religious symbols in the military (though there had been some exemption for the turban) while in 1999 new regulations forced Sikhs (apart from those who had enlisted prior to 1984) to choose between the five Ks and the military. Now two Sikhs who enlisted are being told, despite previous assurances, that they will have to remove their turbans, cut their hair and shave their breads when their training is finished.
The Home Office is not issuing a visa to the Indian minister Narendra “butcher of Gujarat” Modi, I can confirm exclusively!
Obviously I’m disappointed that I can’t protest against the scumbag, but it seems that the government is now strictly enforcing a policy of banning anyone controversial. I don’t agree with it, but I do think that if the government is to ban controversial people then it should do so with bigots all races, religions and ethnicities, not just the ones that people like Douglas Murray don’t like.
This is not going away despite Police version of events. If this man’s death isn’t investigated properly and those responsible brought to justice I think we’ll see some very angry protests. You can view the footage here.
Dramatic footage obtained by the Guardian shows that the man who died at last week’s G20 protests in London was attacked from behind and thrown to the ground by a baton–wielding police officer in riot gear. Moments after the assault on Ian Tomlinson was captured on video, he suffered a heart attack and died.
The Guardian is preparing to hand a dossier of evidence to the police complaints watchdog.
It sheds new light on the events surrounding the death of the 47-year-old newspaper seller, who had been on his way home from work when he was confronted by lines of riot police near the Bank of England.
The submission to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) includes a collection of testimonies from witnesses, along with the video footage, shot at around 7.20pm, which shows Tomlinson at Royal Exchange Passage.
Eyewitnesses today described how protesters came to the aid of a man who collapsed and died during G20 demonstrations at the Bank of England. Police were involved in running battles with protesters in central London when the man, believed to be in his 30s, fell to the ground and stopped breathing.
…
“One or maybe two plastic bottles were thrown, but it was by people further back in the crowd who did not know what was going on. There definitely wasn’t a rain of bottles. There were lots of us gathered around him telling people to give him space. The idea that protesters did not care is completely false.”
This contrasts with the Evening Standard’s disgusting piece yesterday stating the police were ‘pelted with bricks’ when trying to help him – a story they quietly changed on their website later. The paper is a stain on London.
RIP Ian Tomlinson, a guy who was just walking by, and got caught in the Met Police’s delightful strategy of ‘kettling’ people in. BenSix has more.
I’ve written an article for CIF on blogging and libel law – found here. To give you some background, Index on Censorship and English PEN are putting a joint submission to a consultation on whether libel law needs to be changed. They’re consulting with various people, including bloggers (I’m involved) on the submission. This is part of that.
We knew this was coming. The Met police had been scaremongering about the G20 protests for weeks through a willing media, based on a few random website postings. This, from an institution which the Joint Select Committee on Human Rights said only a week ago was “too heavy-handed in dealing with protests”. This, from an institution that intentionally harassed and went completely over the top with Climate Camp last year.
And the same happened yesterday. We were only reporting for the Guardian and yet, unexplicably, the police closed in on all protestors from as early as 12:30pm and would not let the several thousand people go anywhere. We managed to escape through the police cordon, but Dave Hill was stuck there till late evening and some, according to the police, would be there till midnight. They all had to be photographed and had their details taken down you see. For just attending a protest.
What would egalitarian capitalism mean for policy?
It means the left no longer needs to be shy about equality. But we should be smart about it. We can’t create equality in the old way. We can’t simply take money from one set of people and give it to another, and call that equality. That is a palliative. It is trying to compensate for an unequal society not trying to tackle its causes.
Instead, the left needs to remember that it started off as a movement about power. We need to recognise that income inequality is just part of a wider struggle against the inequality of power. The greatest injustice is when people cannot achieve their goals because someone else with power stops them. The credit crunch was a power failure. Too much power was invested in bankers and too little in regulators. Too much power went to the market and too little to democracy. We had the power all in the wrong place – too concentrated, too many bankers with monopoly power. So disperse the power and don’t allow one interest to predominate.
All this may be true, but Labour politicians have this amazing ability to say the right things in front of an audience and get them fired up, and then do the complete office when back in their offices. I’ve seen Hazel Blears at close range talk about how she wanted the Labour party to get in touch with its grassroots!
“The main problem with our security services monitoring social networking sites is that it will be a colossal waste of time. Facebook is the Reuters of inanity: a news agency for stuff nobody wants to know. “Dave is playing on Facebook. Dave is a bit annoyed. Dave is going for a drink. Dave has found a toothsome bit of cheese under the nail on his big toe.”
Are we seriously expecting al-Qaida to organise its next atrocity through Twitter? “@Osama going to shops to buy fertilisers lol ” … “@Mo on bus, OMG, virginz here I cum!”"
This whole saga is getting quite amusing. First Nick Cohen wrote an article in the Observer clearly implying the British liberal left had failed liberal Muslims, especially groups like the Fabian Society. Then Sunder pointed to lots of examples where this wasn’t the case. I joined in, Nick backtracks. Then Sunder replies, twice.
1) Nick writes on LibCon that Jamaat-i-Islami had been appeased “by such noted lefties as the Lord Chief Justice, Prince Charles and Her Majesty the Queen.” — WTF?? Since when did the Queen become a noted leftie? Prince Charles may be pro-environment but a leftie? I mean honestly, is this the sort of argument I’m supposed to engage with?
Sunder Katawala has written a reply to Nick Cohen’s article in The Observer this weekend. In fact, a reply is not really a satisfactory word. Sunder tears apart Nick Cohen’s poorly written article with great force. He completely eviscerates it. If this was Menace 2 Society, which I watched yesterday, Sunder would have taken out an Uzi 9mm and destroyed the whole joint. You get my point.
This has become Nick Cohen’s latest game: to attack the liberal-left by using ‘liberal Muslims’ as his proxy. It would be funny if this wasn’t a national newspaper column expressly aimed at influencing the govenment’s Preventing Violent Extremism strategy. So, let’s play that game.
Mel Phillips is an easy target – but the reason I highlight her editorials sometimes is to point out how hypocritical and bigoted she is. In the Daily Mail she writes (via rhetorically speaking):
Not surprisingly, this enraged the rest of the crowd of decent, patriotic people who had turned out to welcome the troops home. Yet the only arrests made were among those who objected to the Muslim provocation, including a man who shouted something at them. Talk about getting things back to front! The police turn a blind eye to gross and offensive provocation which clearly poses a threat to public order, while arresting instead those who are thus provoked!
…
Yet if anyone objects to any of this, they are called ‘Islamophobic’. Just think what the reaction would be if, say, a group of Ku Klux Klansmen in full regalia took part in a demonstration by neo-Nazis in a heavily ethnic minority area. Does anyone imagine that such a direct threat to public order would be permitted?
The recent protests against the Anglian Regiment in Luton by a small group of extremists, linked to al-Muhajiroun, exposes the squalid nature of their intolerant, racist and braindead credo more perfectly than a thousand A5 leaflets handed outside Luton Mosque ever could.
This was an obvious insult to the British Armed Forces. But for Iraqis who have embraced a pluralist democratic process and the British public who support their efforts to reconstruct a unified and prosperous nation, it is an obligation to stand up to this kind of grotesque exhibitionism.
This Times editorial applies revulsion and common sense in equal measure and captures my sentiments perfectly:
Have a look at this news-video about Stephen Clarke, a man who was accused to taking pictures of sewer-gratings in Manchester and arrested. Though the police couldn’t find any photos of sewer-gratings on his phone (and even though “what a sewer grating looks like” isn’t a piece of specialized terrorist intelligence), he was held on suspicion of planning an act of terror, imprisoned for two days while the police searched his home, his phone and his computer. When they couldn’t find anything suspicious, they released him, but kept his DNA on file, as the biometric of someone who had been accused of plotting a terrorist act.
” … “@Mo on bus, OMG, virginz here I cum!”"
