British campuses have an Islamism problem - "Britain has not yet woken up to the magnitude of Islamic radicalisation in our universities. A 2019 document published by four major UK universities (Durham, Coventry, Lancaster and SOAS), titled Islam and Muslims on UK University Campuses: Perceptions and Challenges, talks for 70 pages about how Muslims are unfairly subject to Islamophobia on campus. It even suggests that discussing the problem of Islamic radicalisation on campus is a contributor to this Islamophobia... expressing concern about the ideology promoted by groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS is a problem because it makes Muslim students feel isolated? The document doesn’t once acknowledge that radicalisation is a major issue; only that Islamophobia is. But the scale of the problem is undeniable. Research over the years by the Henry Jackson Society has uncovered hundreds of examples of Islamic extremists being invited to speak on campuses across the UK. There was Azzam al-Tamimi, who spoke at SOAS as a guest speaker on 9 February 2010. At the event, Al-Tamimi expressed support for terrorism in Israel, stating: ‘If fighting for your homeland is terrorism, I take pride in being a terrorist. The Koran tells me if I die for my homeland, I’m a martyr.’ Then there is Ismail Patel, invited to give a speech at SOAS in February 2009. Patel has praised Hamas, recognised in the UK as a terrorist organisation, referring to it as ‘one of the noblest resistance movements I’ve come across’. This is the same Hamas whose explicitly stated mission is the murder of Jews, the obliteration of Israel, and the replacement of Israel’s government with a Taliban-like theocracy. At Goldsmiths in March 2009, Shakeel Begg spoke at the annual dinner. In 2006, The Times reported that Begg encouraged students at Kingston University who ‘wanted to make jihad’ to go ‘to Palestine… take some money… and fight the Zionists’. He was invited anyway... Between 2012 and 2014, the Henry Jackson Society identified 82 different extremist speakers who were granted permission to speak at various UK universities. The speakers came from societies such as IERA (the Islamic Education and Research Academy) and MPACUK (the Muslim Public Affairs Committee). IERA has been banned from UCL for attempting to segregate students by gender. Two members from the group’s Portsmouth sector have reportedly been killed fighting for Islamic State. The group has admitted that the aim of its Dawah training on-campus is to recruit students. According to the Henry Jackson Society, speakers from IERA have appeared at scores of events on British campuses. Then there is the Muslim Research and Development Foundation (MRDF). Its founder, Haitham Al-Haddad, has spoken at numerous university events, and was reported to have expressed homophobic ideas, referring to ‘the scourge that is homosexuality’. He has also stated that ‘a man should not be questioned as to why he hit his wife’, and has suggested the death penalty for apostates. Alomgir Ali of MRDF has claimed that ‘for a woman, a home is a natural form of a hijab’."
Anti-semitism is just "anti-Zionism". But criticise Islamist terrorism and you're Islamophobic
We must refuse to play the Islamists’ game - "In the days and weeks following the brutal murder of Samuel Paty, there appears to have been more condemnation of the reaction by Emmanuel Macron and his government than of the atrocity itself. The French government’s closing of 50 French Muslim associations and deportation of 231 ‘radicalised foreigners’ has been seen by some as an attempt to stigmatise France’s Muslim population. The international cries of outrage have been led by Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose ruling AKP party has a long history of supporting Islamist groups in Europe – most notably the Muslim Brotherhood. What Macron’s critics fail to acknowledge, however, is that Islamist methods rely on using ordinary Muslims as cover whenever host states attempt to move against Islamist networks. Islamists of various strands – from the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami to Salafists and Iranian-linked Shia groups – have effectively taken over Muslim communities in Britain and Europe through their foreign-funded mosques, educational establishments and (ostensible) charitable organisations. While using these podiums to delegitimise moderate voices and encourage a grievance-laden, separatist mindset over several decades, Islamists also use the communities they claim to represent as political bargaining chips and human shields against scrutiny... Islamist ‘non-violence’ is only ever strategic. It is not a guiding principle, but simply a matter of temporary pragmatism. As Lorenzo Vidino observes in The Closed Circle (which presents personal accounts from former members of the Muslim Brotherhood), those who use violence in the West are seen as ‘good souls’ whose aim – the establishment of an Islamic state – is correct, but who are simply guilty of ‘being too impatient and choosing the wrong tactics’. Meanwhile, Islamist sermons regularly extol the virtues of jihad in places like Palestine, Kashmir and Iraq, where violence is seen as more tactically appropriate. Emmanuel Macron’s departure from conventional wisdom is to see the Islamist movement in its entirety as an infringement on French sovereignty... the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, Yusuf Qaradawi, who argues that the Muslim Brotherhood should ‘play the role of the missing leadership of the Muslim nation’, especially in the West. ‘Try to have your society within the larger society’, urges Qaradawi, ‘otherwise you will melt in it like salt in water’. While Islamists will opportunistically accuse Western societies of rejecting and alienating Muslims, they themselves have been working to create their ‘own Muslim ghetto’ (Qaradawi’s words) within the borders of Western countries, in order to leverage them in return for political influence. The multicultural policies that have dominated Europe and the UK for decades were a perfect environment for the Muslim Brotherhood’s project... As one former member of the Muslim Brotherhood explained to Vidino, ‘Western policymakers and elites are willing to turn a blind eye toward and even support the Brotherhood’s activities’ in return for ‘financial or electoral advantages’. While setting the ideological groundwork for violent attacks, Islamists have also been happy to profit from their outcomes. ‘We understood that the West is short-sighted… and that it basically wants three things from us: money, votes and not being Bin Laden.’... In casting Macron’s attack on them as an attack on Islam and Muslims, Islamists in France and elsewhere are employing the increasingly threadbare tactic of using Western attitudes, values and sensitivities against themselves, in the hope that cries of ‘Islamophobia’ will be enough to ward off the attack. In How Democracies Perish, the French journalist and philosopher, Jean-Francois Revel described how the Soviets used a similar device in their relations with the West: ‘In their minds, the aim of negotiation has never been to reach a lasting agreement but to weaken their adversary and prepare it to make further concessions, while fostering his illusion that the new concessions will be the last, the ones that will bring him stability, security, tranquility.’ Revel called this tactic ‘attack through pacifism’, a form of ‘peace propaganda’ whose aim was to convince ‘others not to defend themselves’. What alarms Islamists the world over is that France has now openly acknowledged the rules of this game, and is refusing to play."
From 2020
Islamists want to scare us into submission - "A French philosophy teacher has been put under police protection after he paid tribute to slain teacher Samuel Paty. A French philosophy teacher from Trappes who paid tribute to Samuel Paty & urged colleagues to resist Islamism is now under police protection... Didier Lemaire, a philosophy teacher working in the Paris suburb of Trappes, wrote a letter in L’Obs, a left-wing magazine, the month after the murder... nearly half of French secondary-school teachers self-censor on topics from the Holocaust to sexuality to avoid offending Muslim pupils. This is an increase of 13 per cent compared with a similar poll from two years ago."
From 2021
Islamism is scaring teachers into silence - "Nearly half of French secondary-school teachers have self-censored for fear of offending Muslim students... In the face of this highly censorious threat, it is more important than ever that we stand up for free speech. French teachers’ fears show the absurdity of the claim that cancel culture only harms the rich and powerful."
This Islamist rhetoric is designed to frighten – and we know where it can lead - "Why should any charity claim the right to get rid of a teacher? Why would a charity which does not state in its legal governing document that it is Muslim feel it right to attack people for (as it sees it) attacking Islam’s prophet? Why would either of the charities involved here feel entitled to speak for the parents of Batley Grammar School, and why should the school or public authorities recognise such an entitlement? Why would they and other protestors arrange a small mob to stand at the school gates? In a free and plural society, should such organisations be the gatekeepers of what Muslims can be taught? There are other questions, too. Why did Mr Kibble, the headmaster, feel it necessary to apologise “unequivocally” for the lesson in question and to relay an apology from the member of staff accused? Why did he describe the use of a particular image as “totally inappropriate”? In a robust statement, the Department for Education said that the protests had been “completely unacceptable”. Why did Mr Kibble give in to them? So far, all we know is that the teacher involved was giving a religious studies class about blasphemy. In it, he showed his middle-school pupils a cartoon of Mohammed with his turban rendered as a bomb, probably the one originally printed in Charlie Hebdo. There is a clear, easily justifiable educational purpose here... There is also a free speech issue. Mr Hussain of PoL says: “We can’t use the expression, freedom of speech, to offend people.” Where does Mr Hussain get that idea? In Britain, we can, we do, and the law upholds this. If it did not, I could counter by claiming that Mr Hussain’s threatening intervention offends me – which it does – and have him arrested, and soon everyone would be claiming offence about everything and free speech would be destroyed. It was because of this danger that the senior members of Cambridge University recently defied their woke vice-chancellor and voted to insist that freedom of academic speech includes the right not to respect certain beliefs... The phrases in Mr Hussain’s letter are rhetorically violent: they accuse the teacher of hating Islam, insulting its prophet, committing terrorism against Islam and Muslims. Mr Hussain equates the teacher’s behaviour with the great fire that recently burnt many Muslims in a Rohingya refugee camp. Murder, rape and being burnt alive, he says, “will only increase if we allow this [ie the teacher’s] kind of behaviour”, which he also calls “sadistic”. Not only are these uncharitable, horrible accusations to make against anyone, they also, in many cases, contain trigger words to incite anger. Mr Hussain and PoL presumably chose their words carefully. They are being said in a context in which the teacher’s home address has been put online. Why are all of us in the media referring to him as “the teacher” when normally, in a free country, people in news stories can and should be named? I think PoL knows why. Where do such things lead? We know the answer. Only six months ago, Samuel Paty, a teacher in a suburb of Paris, was also teaching pupils about the Charlie Hebdo cartoons (in his case, more in reference to free speech than to blasphemy). Even though he allowed Muslim pupils to leave the class or look away while he used the offending pictures, he was shopped by pupils and parents. One parent led an online campaign against him. This in turn inflamed a young Chechen Muslim, who turned up at the school gates. He asked a pupil to identify M Paty, followed him as he left his work and beheaded him. Then he posted a picture of the severed head online"
From 2021
Teacher who showed Muhammad cartoon still in hiding 3 years later - "A teacher who prompted protests in a small Yorkshire town after showing his students a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad remains in hiding nearly three years on and is unlikely ever to return home, his family say... A family member told The Times that the man, who is in his early 30s, continues to live in hiding and remains cautious about contact with his relatives. “I literally haven’t seen him since it all happened,” they said. “We’ve just had a few messages and that’s all. There’s not been much communication with the family and we don’t push things... An external investigation later found the teacher had not used the image with the intention of causing offence and the suspension was lifted. It concluded that the teacher “genuinely believed that using the image had an educational purpose and benefit”, namely to start a discussion about the meaning of blasphemy. Yunus Lunat, a lawyer who at one point acted as a representative for concerned Muslim parents at the school, said he believed the teacher should never have been suspended. He claimed the teacher would be safe if he returned and that children at the school would like him back. “My question is, why was he suspended?” he said. “Were there grounds for a suspension? If you believe that your employee has done nothing wrong, why would you suspend your employee? Why would you create a situation where your employee feels in fear of his safety? Would you not want to protect your employee?” However, one former governor of the school said that if the same incident were to occur again today, the response was likely to be the same, with the teacher suspended “until things were clarified”. “It would probably be the same response on the basis of the fact that there is a very high proportion of Asian people in this community,” the former governor said. “I would say approximately 70 per cent of students are Muslim. So they would have to do something to quieten the families.” The issue of Islamic influence in schools has been revived in recent weeks. A Muslim pupil at Michaela community school in Wembley, northwest London, is suing her school over its “prayer ban” policy, while in Leyton, east London, a primary school has said it may have to conduct lessons online because of security fears following a decision to ban students from wearing pro-Palestine badges. Last year four boys at a school in Wakefield, ten miles from Batley, were suspended for allegedly causing “slight damage” to a copy of the Quran. West Yorkshire police intervened as false rumours spread that it had been set alight. One of the boys, who was 14 and autistic, was told by friends to bring in the holy book as a forfeit for losing at a video game. The boy’s mother apologised but said she had been left “petrified” by death threats."
From 2024
Meet the Islamic scholars taking on Islamism - "Since 2017, Islamist terror attacks have shown no signs of abating. Two were killed in the London Bridge stabbings of 2019. Three were killed in a knife attack in Reading in 2020. And last year David Amess MP was stabbed to death at his constituency surgery. One of the biggest contributors to the ongoing carnage is the lack of a compelling counter-narrative to Islamist ideology within Muslim communities. A new Muslim-led think tank, the Oxford Institute for British Islam (OIBI), has been launched to provide precisely that – a strong Islamic opposition to Islamism. Oxford-based imam Dr Taj Hargey, one of the driving forces behind the project, says the OIBI seeks to ‘theologically empower’ Muslim youth to resist divisive, hostile and fundamentalist interpretations of Islam. At the OIBI’s launch event last month, hosted at St Peter’s College, Oxford, Hargey said the institute ‘will demonstrate that violence against non-Muslims, blasphemers and apostates, FGM, women’s suppression, stoning to death – all these barbaric practices – have no Koranic validation’. These ‘barbaric practices’, argues Hargey, come from the Hadith (alleged sayings of the Prophet Muhammad written 300 years after his death), the Sharia (a concoction of medieval clerical opinion) and the fatwas (arbitrary rulings masquerading as religious decrees). ‘We don’t follow [this] toxic trio’, he said... The OIBI’s scholars hold different and sometimes conflicting opinions. This is in keeping with Hargey’s vision of the OIBI as ‘passionately pluralistic’. Hasan, for example, does not reject the Hadith wholesale. As he put it to me in a phone conversation, ‘the tradition of personal ijtihad, where every believer ought to be able to read the Koran and Hadith and form his or her own opinion, is a classical position which has got lost in the past 30 years’. ‘Literalists’, he added, ‘have closed down the debate’."
From 2022
Across the Muslim World, Islamism is Going out of Vogue - "Erdoğan has committed to his eccentric strategy of combating high inflation through the lowering of interest rates, citing Quranic precepts prohibiting the practise of usury. “[T]hey complain we keep decreasing the interest rate. Don’t expect anything else from me. As a Muslim, I will continue doing what our religion tells us” he declared on state television on December 19th. Taking aim at the independence of the central bank, Erdoğan has thus far dismissed three central bank governors since 2019, and further sacked three central bank policy makers in October. Erdoğan is seemingly alone in this line of thinking—the majority of central banks operating in the Muslim world remain largely autonomous and happy to utilize usury. “Mr. Erdoğan’s ‘what our religion tells us’ statement shows a subservience to medieval notions about finance, no matter the harm they cause,” argued Daniel Pipes, President of the Middle East Forum. Pipes warned that Turkey risks becoming another Venezuela. On the ground, Erdoğan’s traditional support base, including those residing in the conservative heartland as well as the business community, have increasingly condemned his reckless monetary policies... In Tunisia, Turkey, and Malaysia, Islamist parties ultimately proved incapable of enacting promised changes or providing material prosperity, souring their support base by failing to meet their constituents' expectations and by (in some cases) attempting to shift towards political pragmatism (e.g., Ennahda in Tunisia). Islamism as an ideology may be great at mobilizing people, but this doesn’t necessarily translate towards effective governance, as has been proven again and again. In the more consolidated democracies of Malaysia and Indonesia, Islamist movements often remain divided."
