Love of the Land: Muslim anger rises in Britain: A portrait of extremism from a prominent “moderate”

Muslim anger rises in Britain: A portrait of extremism from a prominent “moderate”

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
08 March '10

"Bravado"

Consider the following remarks from one of Britain’s leading “moderate” Muslim journalists, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, writing about Israeli actions in Gaza:

“First systematically starved, the [Palestinian] population was denied escape and more than 1,200 were slaughtered like animals in an abattoir… On the letters pages Zionists say the violence – including phosphorus burns on children – are “regrettable” but necessary. A nation that asks the world not to forget what was done to its people by Hitler, has advocates who believe brutal ethnic cleansing is “regrettable”. How many Palestinian Anne Franks did the Israelis murder, maim or turn mad?”

That was in January 2009. Here she is again, writing today in the Independent. This time she takes matters a stage further, emulating the Jew-baiting president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, following the visit to Britain last week of Geert Wilders, the anti-Islamist politician currently on trial for offending Muslims in the Netherlands.


“…the crypto-fascist, Aryan Geert Wilders, is invited into the Lords by [the United Kingdom Independence Party] UKIP and crossbench peers to show his vile anti-Islam film in the name of freedom of expression. Freedom my arse. It is just another entertaining episode of Muslim-baiting. I dare the same peers to now invite David Irving, the Holocaust denier, to share his thoughts freely in the Lords…”

These vile and appalling sentiments echo precisely the attitudes and strategy of Ahmadinejad who after the publication in Denmark in 2005 of a set of political cartoons deemed offensive to Muslims immediately set about organising a conference aimed at questioning the reality of the Holocaust.

Alibhai-Brown, like Ahmadinejad, adopts the following strategy: Offend us Muslims and we’ll show you a thing or two about offending people. First up, we’ll stick it to your friends, the Jews.

Quite why the invitation of Wilders — who has much less a claim on being a “crypto-fascist” than Alibhai-Brown herself — should immediately lead someone to think about calling in a Holocaust denier to even up the score, as it were, is perhaps something that only a “moderate” like Alibhai-Brown could explain.

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Love of the Land: Muslim anger rises in Britain: A portrait of extremism from a prominent “moderate”