Islam versus Europe

Our old friend Mehdi Hasanis complaining about how the cattle are allowed to moo their discontent at him.

Have you ever been called an Islamist? How about a jihadist or a terrorist? Extremist, maybe? Welcome to my world. It's pretty depressing. Every morning, I take a deep breath and then go online to discover what new insult or smear has been thrown in my direction. Whether it's tweets, blogposts or comment threads, the abuse is as relentless as it is vicious.

You might think I'd have become used to it by now. Well, I haven't. When I started writing for a living, I never imagined I'd be the victim of such personal, such Islamophobic, attacks, on a near-daily basis. On joining the New Statesman in 2009, I was promptly subjected to an online smear campaign, involving a series of selectively edited videos of speeches I'd delivered in front of groups of Muslim university students several years ago.

Source: Guardian

Selectively edited? What does that mean? Any video that isn't simply a full recording of the proceedings must of necessity have been "selectively edited". Listen to Mehdi above describing non-Muslims as "cattle" and ask yourself if you think he has been misrepresented.

I'm a fan of robust debate and I'm not averse to engaging in the odd ad hominem attack myself. This isn't a case of special pleading, on behalf of Britain's Muslims, nor do I think my Islamic beliefs should be exempt from public criticism. But the fact is that you can now say things about Muslims, in polite society and even among card-carrying liberal lefties, that you cannot say about any other group or minority. Am I expected to shrug this off?

Yes, you are, Mehdi. That's what it means to live in a free society.

The truth is that the fear-mongering and negative stereotyping is out of control. I've lost count of the number of websites that try to "out" every Muslim in public life as an extremist or Islamist of some shape or form. The promotion of Sayeeda Warsi to the Conservative frontbench in 2007 provoked the influential ConservativeHome website to describe her appointment as "the wrong signal at a time when Britain is fighting a global war against Islamic terrorism and extremism". Labour's Sadiq Khan, the shadow justice secretary, was accused of holding "extremist" views after he called for a "more independent foreign policy" and was spuriously linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir. In April, Labour peer Lord Ahmed was suspended from the party after he was falsely accused of having put a £10m bounty on Barack Obama's head (the suspension has since been lifted).

If Muslims such as Warsi, Khan, Ahmed and me are all secret extremists, who are the moderates? That, of course, seems to be the implicit, insidious message: there aren't any.

Right. There aren't any. Every single Muslim who's ever been presented to as the "true face" of the "hard-working, peace-loving Muslim majority" on closer inspection turns out to have ties to Islamic radicalism.

Sayeeda Warsi has business and family ties to a leading member of Hizb ut-Tahrir. Sadiq Khan is the lifelong friend of an indicted terrorist recruiter and has maintained his friendship with him following his indictment. (See here for more on this.) Lord Ahmed threatened to organise a mob of 10,000 Muslims to greet Geert Wilders if he came to Britain.

So that these "moderate" Muslims are actually far from the sort is not some crazy, islamophobic fantasy. It's an actual, demonstrable fact. And that is exactly the point. Just about every Muslim in public life turns out to have these unsavoury associations. So it's reasonable to conclude that radicalism within the "Muslim community" is not a fringe phenomenon, but pervasive.

From his new perch at the Huffington Post, though, (is he getting paid?) Mehdi will be able to tell us otherwise, sneering at the murmuring cattle milling around his lofty throne.