I utterly and unreservedly condemn the BNP and have no desire whatsoever to receive a single second-preference vote from a BNP supporter

This week, Labour and Liberal Democrats were placed in pretty much the same situation by the Muslim Association of Britain. Candidates should likewise reject with alacrity, the endorsement of this extreme right-wing organisation.

These are the candidates endorsed by the MAB:

MAB is advising you to vote for KEN LIVINGSTONE – Labour as your first choice and you can put the second as SIAN BERRY. MAB is advising you to vote for GEORGE GALLOWAY – Respect Party.

Labour Party:

Nicky Gavron
Alex Heslop
Navin Shah
Shafi Khan
Joanne McCartney
Len Duvall
Valerie Shawcross
Jennette Arnold

Liberal Democrats

Farrukh Islam
Shas Sheehan
Stephen Knight

Respect
Hanif Abdulmuhit

Notably absent from the endorsees, are any members of the Socialist Workers’ Party-run Left List. That is unsurprising. The Socialist Workers’ Party has recently been chucked out of RESPECT by George Galloway and his Islamist allies. The SWP’s years spent defending Islamist groups from the charge that they were on the far right have been utterly thrown away.

The MAB is the sister organisation to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. It was founded by Muslim Brotherhood activist, Dr. Kamal Helbawy, in 1997 and is, in effect, the British section of that organisation. The Muslim Brotherhood was aptly described by Tony Cliff, the founder of the Socialist Workers’ Party, as a “clerical-fascist” party. Although Cliff was wrong about most things, he was right on the money in that particular judgement.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood recently published a “blueprint” for government which amounts to an Iranian-style theocracy, in which women and Christians are to be banned from the top offices of state, and legislation overseen by a council of clerics with the power to strike down legislation incompatible with religious law.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, Yusuf Al Qaradawi, authored the fatwas which made it lawful for his followers in Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian section, to commit suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. Qaradawi has been banned from entering this country by the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, much to the fury of the Muslim Association of Britain.

Like the BNP, The MAB/Muslim Brotherhood is desperate to participate in mainstream politics, and to be recognised as a moderate Islamist voice, capable of acting as a bulwark against Al Qaeda. That is rather like turning to the BNP in the hope that they’ll help hold back fascist terrorist groups like Combat 18.

In this country at least, the attempt to reposition the MAB as a non-extremist group is certain to fail. Like most fascists, they can’t help but show their true faces, when they think they’re not being watched. Have a peek at this video of former Muslim Association of Britain activist, Azzam Tamimi, and you’ll see what I mean. Moreover, the MAB/Muslim Brotherhood is essentially an arab organisation, and most Muslims in Britain are South Asian and have no time for the clerical fascists of the MAB. A recent poll indicated that only 1% of British Muslims named the Muslim Association of Britain as “best representing your views on Islam”.

This endorsement by the MAB/Muslim Brotherhood is utterly worthless. This group has little traction in this country, and few voters, if any, will be influenced by their support.

However, for two reasons, Labour and Liberal Democrats should make it clear that they utterly reject the support of this extreme right wing organisation. First, the endorsement of these candidates is part of the MAB/Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy to insinuate themselves into the political mainstream. They should not be allowed to create the false illusion that they are a respectable organisation.

Secondly, this endorsement has the ability to damage the candidates who have received, but have not publicly rejected, the MAB’s support. Imagine what would have happened to Boris Johnson – already under fire for his use of the abusive term “picaninny” – had he reacted with equanimity to the BNP’s endorsement?

My immediate response, upon reading the MAB’s list of endorsement, was to think that the candidates had asked for, or voluntarily accepted the MAB’s support. I spoke to one of the candidates on the MAB’s list this morning, and he told me that he had not asked for their support, and certainly did not welcome it: so I know that at least one candidate was ambushed by the endorsement. However, other voters may be left with the impression that there is some relationship between the supported candidates and the MAB.

Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Green Party should move quickly to make it clear that mainstream politics can do without the support of fascists.

More generally at stake is the reputation of The Policy Exchange itself.
Osama Saeed summarises the Newsnight allegations as follows:

Tonight’s Newsnight investigation into The Policy Exchange’s recent report on extremism in British mosques found major irregularities with the receipts that the think tank handed them to investigate the issue further:

• Receipts from North London mosque’s bookshop, when the mosque doesn’t have a bookshop. Forensic examination revealed that the receipt’s heading had been printed on an inkjet printer – when usual procedure for such pieces of paper would be mass printing
• Receipts from other mosques printed entirely on inkjet printers
• A receipt for Euston Mosque with the address on it being for the mosque next door to it on North Gower Street (who would have thought that two mosques next door to each other would be an advantage one day!)
• Forensic tests that found handwriting matching on two separate receipts for different mosques
• Forensic tests showing that the writing on one receipt had been done on top of another receipt for an entirely different mosque

The Policy Exchange, in response, points out that the report did not mention the receipts at all, but was based entirely upon the testimony of the researchers. Therefore, it says, the question of the veracity of the receipts is not a relevant issue at all. Dean Godson criticises Newsnight for giving the false impression that the Policy Exchange did not make the researchers available to Newsnight: when conversations were had between Newsnight and two of the researchers.

Policy Exchange also says that several of the institutions investigated “openly propagate extremist literature and are intimately linked to extremist ideologues. . It also claims to have been ambushed by Newsnight and hampered from mounting its own defence.

You can read the Policy Exchange response here.

All this may be true. Policy Exchange may very well have found that there are organisations, presenting themselves as “mainstream”, while selling literature which promotes bigotry and extremism. The receipts are certainly not explicitly mentioned in the report.

However, what undermines the Policy Exchange’s case, is the fact that there are “receipts” in existence, the nature of which are difficult to explain.

If the receipts had simply been handwritten records of which books were bought, and where, then this would be a minor issue. Nothing more would be at stake than whether or not the publications were, in fact, sold by the institutions, and whether the bookshops in question were related to the institutions or wholly independent ventures.

However, the Newsnight evidence suggests that some of the “receipts” were not in fact issued by the institutions which, on their face, they purported to be. Some of these receipts were knocked up on a computer. That might have been done by the sellers of these books, working out of the mosque. Alternatively, they might have been produced by the researchers.

The crucial question, therefore, is: who produced these receipts?

If it was the institutions, then there’s no issue. If it was “rogue traders” operating out of the institution, then there’s a question in relation to the responsibility of the institution for books sold on its premises.

If, however, these “receipts” were produced by the researchers, in order either to bolster their contention, or to give a false impression, that the books were bought in the institutions in question, then this is an enormously serious matter. It calls into question the value of the report, as a whole.

It also puts the reputation of the Policy Exchange at risk: unless they can show that they were themselves fooled by their researchers, in a manner that they could not reasonably have detected.

Computer produced receipts don’t worry me that much, one way or the other. So what. Institutions sometimes produce computer generated receipts. The suggestion that some receipts, from different institutions were signed by the same person concerns me slightly more.

Finally, I can’t think of an good innocent explanation for handwriting impressions from one receipt appearing on another, unrelated receipt. Perhaps the receipts were obtained some time after purchase from a single trader, operating out of two institutions. That is possbile: but then we’d be talking about a single trader selling extremist literature, rather than two institutions. Alternatively, as one commentator below suggests, one receipt might have been signed at one institution while sitting on top of another from a second institution. Possible, I suppose.

The thing is this. It is no good for the Policy Exchange to say “we’re relying on the veracity of our researchers, not the receipts”. If any the receipts were forged, then that throws into doubt the honesty of at least some of the researchers, and therefore the value of the research itself.

If a researcher did produce his own receipts, then we need to know why he did so. Was it simply in order to ensure that he was reimbursed by the Policy Exchange for books that were genuinely purchased at the institutions in question? Or was it created to evidence books being sold, which were not in fact being sold by those institutions? To what extend does the level of dishonesty taint the totality of the evidence collected by that researcher?

As a matter of urgency, the Policy Exchange needs to find out whether all the receipts were genuine, and whether there is an innocent explanation for the Newsnight evidence. If the receipts are said to be genuine, then the issues raised by Newsnight need to be addressed and answered fully.

The absurdity of this situation is that – as Dean Godson points out – there is extremist and separatist literature available on the websites and in the bookshops of those “mainstream” Islamist institutions associated with Jamaat e Islami and certain Salafist groupings. Inayat Bunglawala himself has declared himself a fan of the clerical fascist, Mawdudi. These are serious matters of concern. Evidence to support that fact is easy to obtain.

However, if a study which purports to show that 25% of mosques sampled were pedding extremist literature was based, even in part, on research carried out by researchers who may have created, to any degree, ‘evidence’ to back up their contentions – even without the knowledge of senior Policy Exchange staff – it cannot be relied upon.

There is never an excuse for “gilding the lily”: making a good case stronger, by improper methods. Such a technique inevitably rebounds upon the person who seeks to ‘improve’ the evidence.

The Policy Exchange is meeting today in order to “discuss legal action against the BBC”. If the Newsnight allegations are false and were carelessly made then they have a good case. If they are not, then they ought seriously to consider the prospect of legal action against them, by any institution which did not in fact sell extremist literature, but which was falsely portrayed as peddling it.

You can watch the Newsnight programme here and read a Guardian report of some of Newsnight’s claims here.

If the Policy Exchange finds dishonesty on the part of a researcher, then they would be sensible to:

1. Assess which parts of the report can be attributed to the researcher who created these receipts;

2. Withdraw the report entirely: or republish the report, minus any parts of the report which is tainted by that researcher’s work; and

3. Conduct an audit of the the methodologies used in the report generally.
(cross-posted from Harry’s Place)

Frankly, all you need to know about this report, can be determined by the following facts. One of the authors is Inayat Bunglawala. Two of the other authors are Mohammed Abdul Aziz and Tariq Hameed. All three of them – that is, one third of the team – are Muslim Council of Britain activists. No muslim, unconnected to the MCB, were appointed to the committee.

One of the major themes of the report is that the Muslim Council of Britain has been unfairly criticised by journalists. So, in effect, what has happened is this. Ken Livingstone has given tens of thousands of pounds of public money to fund a report, co-authored with the Muslim Council of Britain’s spokesmen, in which newspapers and television stations are criticised for pointing out that the MCB is a promoter of the politics of the Islamist far right.

Precisely what this has to do with the representation of ordinary muslims in the British media is unclear to me. It seems to have rather more to do with Ken Livingstone doing a favour for one of his allies. Isn’t that a scandal?

A curate’s egg
When the report is dealing with the position of ordinary British muslims, who are – let us be frank – facing a tide of suspicion and hostility within this country, it is not at all bad.

There is a section which deals well with the plight of British muslim reporters, who – after 9/11 – found themselves being assigned to “muslim” stories and being treated as “a spokesperson for the faith”.

Other parts of the report take aim at tabloid reports of banned piggy banks and cancelled Christmases: trivial and often untrue stories which are likely to provoke and increase feelings of insecurity, suspicion and anxiety amongst non-Muslims [and] feelings of insecurity, vulnerability and alienation amongst Muslims. That seems correct to me.

These are all points well made.

Silliness
A big chunk of the report consists of a facile analysis of reports in newspapers about muslim subjects: which are then categorised as either positive or negative. The stories identified are overwhelmingly negative. However, as the report admits:

The principal instances of negative association were to do with terrorism in Britain, and with Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran.

No, really? I’d have thought that terrorism was a subject on which one might put a positive spin. Here’s another example of a story which the Report judges to be negative:

Likewise the article ‘Missed clues over the fanatical four’ (Daily Mail, Friday 12 May) rested heavily on the premise that there remained a threat from other similar young Muslim males in the UK. In relation to Jermaine Lindsay, it noted, ‘after he converted to Islam his behaviour changed’ nd ‘religion increasingly became the main focus of his life’. Whilst none of these examples were explicitly anti-Muslim per se, there is a strong implication that ‘Friday prayers’, ‘conversion’ and ‘religion’ are warning indicators of those who might subsequently pose a threat.

Uh huh. Also included among “negative” stories are Prince Naseem’s speeding ban. By that measure, had Naseem won a fight in the week in question, it would have been a “positive” story, no doubt.

Defending the MCB
What troubles me most about Ken Livingstone’s Report is this. A major function of the Report appears to me to be the defence of the Muslim Council of Britain. Given that Inayat Bungalawala is an author of the report, that is wholly unsurprising. However, the sections of the report which defend the MCB appear to have very little, if anything, to do with the representation of ordinary British muslims in the media. It has everything to do, quite explicitly, with an ideological defence of the politics of Islamism.

Section 5 of the Report is wholly devoted to a hatchet job on John Ware. I would be astounded if this section had not been written by one of the three MCB appointees to the panel. It does little more than rehearse all the arguments which the MCB deployed in the wake of the John Ware Panorama expose of that organisation.

A lengthy section repeats the MCB’s unapologetic and unconvincing defence of the clerical fascist and Jamaat e Islami founder, Mawdudi. It is telling that the Report adopts the MCB’s hagiographical attitude to Mawdudi. Indeed, it rather goes to show how close the senior ranks of the MCB are to this vicious and dangerous ideologue.

Here’s the Report’s conclusion:

In reality, Islam is all-embracing in the way that it touches personal relationships, intimate feelings and the inner life of the spirit; and because of the central belief in God as omniscient and omnipotent, it is more holistic than either fascism or communism. The BBC’s response demonstrated that Mawdudi’s words had been quoted accurately, but only in a limited and strictly literal sense. However, the words ‘fascism’ and ‘communism’ carry negative connotations for most people in Britain. The effect of using a very brief quotation was, therefore, to highlight references to these two political systems and to exaggerate the parallels with Islam, thereby transferring to Islam the negativity that fascism and communism connote.

There you have it. A defence of Mawdudi, paid for out of public money by Ken Livingstone!

A further part of section 5 goes on to object to the use of the term “Islamism”, on the grounds that it sounds too much like “Islam”, that it has negative connotations, and that it fails to do justice to the many and varied ways in which the “personal and political” are intertwined within Islam.

A particularly odd part of the Report deals with John Ware’s “hostile body language” when talking to Azzam “Kaboom” Tamimi. This is the part of the interview that the Report thinks is particularly unfair:

John Ware: You said that martyrdom in Israel is, quote, ‘divine bliss’. That’s glorifying, that is glorifying the tactics in another country irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the Israeli government, that is glorifying a terrorist tactic, the same tactic that was used in London. You, Mr Tamimi, are an apologist for terrorism, aren’t you?

Dr Azzam Tamimi: If you want to consider me so, that’s up to you.

And here is the Report’s main objection:

Ware’s method of conducting this interview meant that Tamimi was quite unable to present the context which would enable him to explain fully what he actually meant by ‘martyrdom’ and ‘glorification’.

Astonishing. Another part of the Report condemns the hostile response to the Muslim Council of Britain’s “Information and Guidance for Schools”. According to the authors of the report, the function of this Guidance was “to provide helpful guidance for headteachers and governing bodies on understanding the needs of Muslim pupils.”. The Report is upset that the press coverage of the MCB’s Guidance was not more positive.

In fact, the MCB’s Guidance showed scant respect for diversity of practice between British muslims, and promoted a particularly restrictive and puritantical vision of acceptable muslim practice. It recommended avoiding dance lessons, mixed gender sports, and mixed gender trips, as well as any drawing of the human form. Furthermore, it counselled:

In public boys should always be covered between the navel and knee and girls should be covered except for their hands and faces, a concept known as ‘hijab’.

The Report specifically condemns the use of the phrase “Taliban-style conditions” to describe the treatment of pupils promoted by the MCB’s Guidance. Perhaps the Report has a point. Gender segregation, and the presumption that British muslim children follow the most restrictive school of muslim thought is bad. However, at least the MCB wasn’t recommending the stoning of pupils caught snogging.

Conclusion
I get the distinct impression that Ken Livingstone is embarassed by this shoddy self serving report. Indeed, it might not have been published at all, were it not for Nick Cohen’s Evening Standard piece, a few weeks ago.

There is, as yet, no sign of it on the Mayor of London’s home page; although it was launched this morning. Instead, there’s an article about a survey which highlights the shared values of all Londoners, including muslims. There’s an announcement about a Livingstone jolly to India. There’s something on Bendy Buses. There’s also something on homophobia and attacks on homeless people.

But nothing on this Report. And, frankly, I’m not surprised.

If I’d just spent £30-50,000 of public money on a shoddy piece of advocacy for the MCB, written by a committee, on third of whose members are MCB activists, significantly directed at a journalist who correctly pointed out that the MCB was closely aligned to South Asian and Middle Eastern clerical fascist political parties, I’d be keeping quiet about it too.

Here is Ken’s press conference, where the report was launched. John Ware, Martin Bright, Nick Cohen, Padraig Reidy and Shiv Malik all are present, and ask some focussed and rather tricky questions.

At one point, Nick Cohen asks whether opposing the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat is racist. Ken Livingstone doesn’t answer, but instead, starts to talk about 19th century prejudice against jewish immigrants. Indeed, Livingstone repeatedly references historic hostility to jews, whenever he is asked about criticism of Islamist groups.

John Ware makes the point that the MCB is a political pressure group, and asks why this report seeks to prevent scrutiny of a political organisation. Ken simply squirms, and utterly dodges the question.

Pathetic.

(Cross-posted from Harry’s Place)