an unnecessary schism between the government and British Islamists, it cites as evidence first the government failure to condemn Israel in the aftermath ofOperation Cast Lead [which] exposed a bias towards Israel and an ambivalence towards the value of Palestinian lives that angered British Islamists. But the British government did not fail to condemn Israel. It condemned it virtually from the start as a ‘disproportionate’ operation that was ‘killing too many people’, and said this repeatedly thereafter. What this claim appears to be referring to was the government’s observation made from the other side of its mouth that Israel was entitled to protect its citizens against Hamas rocket attack. The idea that innocent Palestinians were targeted by Israel which thus deemed them to be worthless -- rather than what actually happened, which was that Hamas were targeted to prevent the further killing of Israeli innocents and it was Hamas, using innocent Palestinians as human shields and bonb fodder, who deemed their lives to be worthless -- is one of the lies promulgated by the Arab and Muslim world. The second piece of evidence is Communities Minister Hazel Blears’s ill-judged assault on Daud Abdullah and the Muslim Council of Britain. Taken together these incidents reinforce concerns that British Islamists are uniquely held out for political attack, and illustrate the power of key anti-Islamist lobbying groups. The result is a feeling that the government holds Islamists to a different political standard based on a Bush-ite principle of ‘either you are with us or against us’, where the ‘us’ is clearly not Muslim. Let us remind ourselves why the minister insisted that the MCB disavow Daud Abdullah, the MCB’s deputy director-general, before the government would deal with it again. Daud Abdullah signed the Istanbul Declaration in which, inter alia, he called on all Muslims, including those in Britain, to take up arms against any forces, including British ones, should they ever seek to prevent arms from getting to Hamas to be used to murder more Israeli citizens. This is what the authors believe is holding Islamists to a different political standard... To which one might ask – different from what? It is the same standard required of all British Muslims – not just Islamists – along with every other minority andthe indigenous majority, ie, all British citizens, that they do not take up arms against their own country, and that they do not support terrorism anywhere in the world. It is the authors who are requiring the government to hold Islamists who take this position to a different standard from everyone else. Indeed, given that Islamism is the shorthand for politicised Islam, according to whose tenets there can be no secular government and so Britain and the world must be conquered by Islam by both violent and cultural means depending on circumstances, the authors -- using a sanitised definition of Islamism which fails to make this clear -- are promoting what used to be called sedition, and then arguing that it is outrageous to treat its adherents differently from anyone else. (The authors nevertheless make their one truthful -- if back-handedly revealing -- point in observing that Abdullah Quilliam, the British Muslim whose name has been taken by the Quilliam Foundation as a supposed example of how Islamic precepts can be reconciled with British values, was himself an outright Islamist who wanted Britain to become an Islamic state). The authors strive to present Daud Abdullah and the MCB as ‘mainstream’ Islamists, as opposed to the ‘extremists’ of Hizb ut Tahrir and Islam For The UK. This is a totally specious distinction. All Islamists are extreme by definition, because they do not accept secular government and refuse to live by its tenets, devoting themselves instead to its overthrow and replacement by Islamic rule. The fact that they have different strategies for achieving that end -- some of which, as exemplified by the MCB, use the democratic system to undermine itself -- certainly does not obviate their common extremism and the threat they pose to British and western societies. The idea that some Islamists are Bad because they speak unambiguously about the threat they pose while other Islamists who veil that threat in more acceptable language are therefore Good and even a useful tool against the Bad Islamists is as ridiculous as it is lethal. Yet this is a continuum which the government -- the Daud Abdullah affair aside -- refuses to acknowledge, as the growing phalanx of Islamist 'counter-extremism' advisers within Whitehall continues so egregiously to advertise. Which brings me to why this particular article -- whose proposterous bad faith is after all replicated time and again in other Guardian columns -- merits such attention. It is because Robert Lambert is a former Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism officer. Amazing to report, as head of the Muslim Contact Unit within the Met’s Counter-Terror Command Lambert employed two Salafists (Islamists) as officers on the basis that – as he has stated -- terrorism cannot be fought by contact with moderate Muslims but through partnerships with the Salafists. Now we can see how his position has developed, from using Salafists to defeat other Salafists into becoming a Salafist apologist himself. Lambert may no longer be a serving police officer; but the fact that the Met could employ such a man in such a post says all you need to know about counter-terrorism in Londonistan.
Into The Teapot In Londonistan
You might think this is an April 1 spoof but alas, it is in deadly earnest. An article on GuardianComment is Free by Robert Lambert and Jonathan Gizens-Mather is an unabashed pitch for radical Islamism, a piece which stands truth, reason and morality on their heads in virtually every line and sides openly with those who wish to destroy the free world. Lamenting
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
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