Thursday 25 January 2018

AKA "holding the country to ransom"

From the BBC:

The head of Theresa May's new anti-extremism commission - set up after the Manchester Arena attack - has faced criticism from some Muslim leaders. Sara Khan, who has campaigned for women's rights in Muslim communities, has been given the task of rooting out extremism in the UK...

But her support for the Home Office's Prevent strategy has led to claims she is too close to the government.

Lady Warsi, the first Muslim woman to serve as a British cabinet minister, said many British Muslims saw Ms Khan as a "mouthpiece" of ministers. The Conservative peer questioned Ms Khan's likely independence as the Commissioner for Countering Extremism in a series of tweets and warned of "destructive and dangerous games" being played...

Harun Khan, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: "The fight against terrorism requires equal partnership between all parties, including Muslim communities. This appointment risks sending a clear and alarming message that the government has no intention of doing so."


They might as well accuse MI5 or SO15 of being government stooges and demand that "Muslim communities" (whatever they are) be given a veto right over their operations.

19 comments:

Ted Treen said...

"...They might as well accuse MI5 or SO15 of being government stooges and demand that "Muslim communities" (whatever they are) be given a veto right over their operations...."

You mean they haven't already?

Mark Wadsworth said...

TT, probably have, on reflection.

Bayard said...

This is reminiscent of the farce surrounding the head of the enquiry into historic sex abuse in Westminster, where the Government faced the insoluble problem of how to appoint someone on the Gravy Train who couldn't be seen as part of the very Establishment they were supposed to be investigating. The idea of appointing a non Gravy Train passenger to this sort of position, is, of course, unthinkable.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, of course they only appoint fellow Gravy Trainers, that's not really relevant to the topic in hand.

This particular commission is not investigating historic sex abuse (past crime) by Establishment people, it is supposed to minimise future crime perpetrated by we-know-exactly-who.

This commission might be an ineffective load of crap, or it might actually help, at the margin. I assume the former, in which case, what are "Muslim communities" so bloody worried about? And if it helps, why are they complaining?

DBC Reed said...

We should be adding the melting pot argument to LVT propaganda. As far as I can see, the only way you can get your end off as a good Muslim youth is to become a jihadi , get shot at and hope to acquire a stable of Yazidi slave wives.And for this you get full remission of sins although I expect the divvying up of the women lacks fairness.
Otherwise you get stuck at home under full patriarchal control. And for the girls it must be impossible.We should be calling for the over-supply of cheap bed-sits as in London in the 60's where quite strait-laced girls went "to become short-hand secretaries" and set themselves up virtually as scarlet women working their way through as many men as they could manage,before settling down with one of them eventually.
We always appeal to the target group of young couples with children.We should also include the sexually adventurous:during the Jack the Ripper era this appears to have been a major function of civic life.

paulc156 said...

Well if the BNP said it...
The Koran says all kind of shit [actually most of the shit is in the hadiths) as does the OT the NT and several other ancient and not so ancient religious texts (mormons, scientology etc etc) ...SHOCK!
The fact is you can just as easily utilise the turn the other cheek NT to either justify pacifism or burn your enemies at the stake (after a handy bit of torture first). And if we needed reminding, even 'peace loving' Buddhists are quite handy at throwing babies into burning buildings when given licence to, we only need to check out Myanmar, 2017. Which does kind of give pause for thought on the uniqueness of the Koran in that regard. My own feeling is the problem vis a vis Muslims today and the west is 95% political and only 5% their lousy texts. Given another century or two of largely internecine warfare they will all be sufis. A bit like the modern day Christians who reinvented themselves as happy clappys only after a whole lot of bloodletting.

MikeW said...

Interesting thoughts about British MI5. I would suspect that there is interest, but you have the wrong security service in mind. Drugs, Money, Poltical Corruption 'Prostitutes', Rentier Empires, Cities within Cities, Slave Labour, all to be protected for a states interest in Northern England? Seems more like a Pakistan ISI or FIA concern to me. Which Khan family above is networked to which political elite and security agencies in their homeland - who knows? Looks like they are up against the Warsi elite though.

Nasty stuff when your country and political system is a mere battleground on a map. If we are not careful, we will have the CIA and Mossad dicking around in our political and social matters too... er ;)

Mark Wadsworth said...

DBC, good point.

RM, as occasionally happens, we are in agreement :-)

PC, as predictable as ever... For sure, the Bible is full of nonsense, some of it promoting violence, but 99.9% of practising or atheist Christians don't support or tolerate terrorism against other religions. Could say much the same for most major religions... with one notable exception. There's no point saying "Don't worry about it, the problem will go away by itself in a few hundred years."

MW, you have lost me. Who is trying to infiltrate whom? AFAIAC, ISI, ISIS, most Muslim countries and a sufficient number of Muslims in this country are all on the same side.

Don't play the "CIA and Mossad are just as bad card", firstly they aren't nearly as bad and secondly that's o/t.

MikeW said...

'MW, you have lost me. Who is trying to infiltrate whom? AFAIAC, ISI, ISIS, most Muslim countries and a sufficient number of Muslims in this country are all on the same side.'

MW you have lost me too with that.

My post, was more or less a joke about whose rival security services have the most interest in Blackburn or Nelson or Bradford! Why assume British ones? That's it.

ISA - Inter Service Intelligence, Pakistan. FIA - Federal Investigation Agency, Pakistan. Do they and their Guv have an interest in UK policy in Northern UK cities? So asking, which group the waring Khan's in the article are directly related to(if any). Just who is whose, 'mouthpiece', useful idiot, stooge in this particular sort of game?

Didn't play any card. Was also actually thinking about the Labour, rising star,Tulip Siddiq, who worked very hard at hiding her family links, as it happens.

'CIA and Mossad are just as bad card'. Was not making that call. Said what I said. Play the same games and seek to influence policy.

Physiocrat said...

Christianity did not become bible-based until the Reformation. The nasty stuff that went on after the 11th century was one of the fruits of the Roman Catholic doctrines of Purgatory and Indulgencies. If you killed heathens and Muslims you got let off time in Purgatory, and there was until recently a special schedule or tariff giving the number of days off for each meritorious deed.

The Eastern Orthodox shrug their shoulders, taking the view that nobody has ever come back to report on what is there.

paulc156 said...

MW. There's no point saying "Don't worry about it, the problem will go away by itself in a few hundred years."
Point is I am saying it. It's understandable you want Islam to go through the same process as Christianity but in double quick time. The conflicts will play out over time and likely end up with a similar denouement as Christianity did. Maybe it won't take hundreds of years but it seems implausible that it will happen in less than a few generations. What would you do to radically speed things up? The main point is it has little to do with the uniqueness of the Koran. You can take any of the scriptures and mould them into almost anything you want. In the same way that rabbis moulded the Torah with Talmud and the same way that the church contextualised Jesus sayings and still do so today. So Mathews gospel some would say led directly to the Jewish pogroms and ultimately the Holocaust but today the same gospel is understood differently. Ditto gay marriage is gradually accepted. It's protean.The Koran is too... obviously.

Bayard said...

"but 99.9% of practising or atheist Christians don't support or tolerate terrorism against other religions."

That isn't even true in the UK (have you forgotten about the Northern Irish?) but it certainly isn't true in the USA, the largest Christian country in the world. OK the USA's form of terrorism is the more gentrified form, i.e. state sponsored, but it is terrorism, none the less.

Bayard said...

"B, of course they only appoint fellow Gravy Trainers, that's not really relevant to the topic in hand."

You miss my point, which is that Sarah Khan is being objected to because she's a Gravy Trainer and thus (rightly) viewed with suspicion, unless of course, by "not really relevant to the topic in hand" it is not about anti-Muslim prejudice.

Mark Wadsworth said...

MW,thanks for explaining.

Phys, ta.

PC, yes, there is a theory that what Islamist are doing is just the naughty adolescent phase of the religion. I couldn't care less. What bothers me is that western nations, in general, invite them in and let them fuck the place up. Why can't they grow up in their own countries?

B, agreed, lots of wars appear to be against Muslim countries. Not actually true, it's about oil, which by unfortunate coincidence was mainly discovered under backward middle eastern countries, which as a result become even more backward, see "curse of oil". So some want to grab the oil to pay for global Jihad, and others want to grab the oil for good old fashioned economic reasons.

B, it's a democratically elected government, they can appoint who they like to do what they like. Whoever they gave this job, some un-elected "Muslim community spokesman" would be whining about it.


Bayard said...

M, second point, fair enough, but this thing is not confined to Muslims. Hardly a day goes past without the Lord or Lady of some minority (blind, deaf, disabled, Jews, Afro-Caribbeans, MGBGTs etc etc.) comes on the radio and spouts off about people he or she appears to consider his subjects.

Physiocrat said...

Christianity didn't go bad until well after Constantine made it the state religion. After that it was a perpetual embarrassment to emperors who were inclined to play the tyrant, because a religion that preaches the doctrine of the Incarnation - that God became man - does not go with one man lording it over another. The emperors tended to favour the Arians, who denied the doctrine of the incarnation, since that suited them better.

The Arians persisted but were gradually squeezed out by those who kept to the traditional teaching, but they were still around in the seventh century and Arian theology slipped into Islamy. So tyranny is in the genes of Islam. An early attempt to reform Islam from the inside, a movement called the Mutazalites, was firmly squashed. Islamic nastiness never really went away - there were seriously unpleasant goings-on in the Balkans right up until 1923, when 1.5 million Christian Greeks got the genocide treatment.

Mainstream Christianity split from around 700, essentially over the notorious Filioque clause, which seems trivial but its effect was to demote, subtly, the Holy Spirit, which also helps to give the OK to nastiness. From that point, other doctrines developed in the west, including Original Sin and its companions, Purgatory and Indulgencies. The latter made it OK to kill heathens and do crusades, as it gained the perpetrator time off in Purgatory. So the nastiness in Christianity is essentially a western development which grew up from the ninth century onwards. Christianity did not improve with the Reformation, but broke into two warring camps, with the Protestants doing witch burning and the Catholics doing the inquisition, though the numbers of victims are now known to have been exaggerated.

The generalised Christian nastiness seems just to have run its course by 1750, after which the initiative in Christian countries passed to the atheists, such as the French Revolutionaries, and of course the Communists, though Christians in Nazi Germany were hit if they did not keep their heads well down.

Bayard said...

"Christianity didn't go bad until well after Constantine made it the state religion."

From then on, it suffered from the schizophrenia of being a state religion whose founding figure spent much of his time railing against state religion, which can't have done it's "mental health" any good.

Physiocrat said...

@Bayard,

Exactly right. There has been a constant tension. In the west, the Popes of Rome became an emperors. In the east, the Emperors of Constantinople claimed divinity. Islam was a better fit, as the Ottoman Sultan could, without contradiction, be both at the same time, and eliminate anyone who disagreed. The same applied even more to the twentieth century Russian Tsars from Lenin to Chernenko.

Bayard said...

"But I'm not aware that "blind, deaf, disabled, Jews, Afro-Caribbeans, MGBGTs" would secretly like to overthrow the democratic system, force us all to convert to being "blind, deaf, disabled, Jews, Afro-Caribbeans, MGBGTs" and then make us a vassal state of some shithole like Blindistan or Deafistan."

Apart from the proselytising nature of Islam, which is also shared by Christianity, the rest of your assertions are really only true in DM world. There is a certain irony in the citizens of a country that, historically, was quite happy to overthrow the existing political system in countries and force the inhabitants to convert to an alien religion and become a vassal state, complaining when it is even suggested that the latter day inhabitants of such countries are now prepared to do the same in return.

In any case, the aim of most pressure groups is to at least subvert the democratic system to their own advantage. Some of the less visible ones, like the City of London, have done this very successfully.