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”

Love of the Land: Respected British commentator warns that Israel may precipitate “the end of the world”

Respected British commentator warns that Israel may precipitate “the end of the world”

Robin Shepherd

Think Tank Blog

30 September 09

This week’s anti-Israeli polemic by the widely celebrated British commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is so bizarre that I am not even sure that that headline is quite correct. But as I endlessly repeat, if you subscribe to an agenda which is not only counter-factual but outright irrational as well there can be no surprise if, having said things which are simply nutty, you leave yourself open to misinterpretation. What was that line from Orwell about insincerity as the great enemy of clear writing?

So try this from her piece on Yom Kippur (coincidence?), on Monday, ending an impassioned article about how America must stop grovelling to “fanatic and aggressive” Israel, how there are positive signs in global nuclear disarmament, but how even Iranian oppositionists would rush to their nation’s defence if the evil Israelis attacked.

After some truly weird remarks about Iran’s leaders trying to prove they had “really big willies” by test firing missiles, and the hippie-day rejoinder: “Listen people, we need to talk about Israel. And soon. Like now,” she concluded with the following:

“The Israeli human rights activist Gideon Spiro bravely asks that his country be subject to the same rules as Iran and all others in the Middle East: “Rein in Israel, compel it to accept a regime of nuclear disarmament and oblige it to open all nuclear, biological and chemical facilities and missile sites to international inspection.” The US has leverage because it maintains and funds Israel. If Obama shies away from this, there can be no moral justification to go for Iran or North Korea or any other rogue state. And the leader whose election and dreams gave hope to millions thereby hastens the end of the world.”

Meaning?

Ok. Let’s look at those last three sentences. I suppose it could mean that the Israelis are about to unleash the apocalypse by attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. If Barack Obama does not step in to stop it, the entire world, all of it, will come to an end.

But does that mean that Obama will be responsible for “the end of the world” or Israel? Or perhaps there is a shared responsibility. If so, what proportion of responsibility is carried by either side?

Or hold on, given what she has said previously about global disarmament does it mean that if Obama does not force Israel to disarm this will make it impossible for him to effect the disarmament of “other” rogue states and that soon enough all rogue states will have nuclear weapons. This will then lead to a massive nuclear conflagration, “the end of the world”?

I suspect that, if you really wind your way through the hysteria, that is what she meant. But it still does not get her off the hook.

We are still left, are we not, with the nasty smell of something familiar from this article. For which people, in her worldview, truly holds the fate of the world in its hands? Whose behaviour ultimately will decide whether we live or die? When you boil it all down, to whom are we really beholden? Which people now has to be stopped, lest they kill us all?

Familiar?

But make up your own mind about what she is saying and the mentality which drives her. Click here for the full article?

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/yasmin-alibhai-brown/yasmin-alibhaibrown-dont-israels-nuclear-weapons-count-1794275.html

Love of the Land: Respected British commentator warns that Israel may precipitate “the end of the world”