RUTHFULLY YOURS

“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.

But the most telling aspect of Alibhai-Brown’s writing is that amid all the self-pity about how “We are on trial, always, and always must expect to lose” she provides ample illustration of precisely why there is so much to worry about from the leading lights in the Muslim community.

It is not just the Jews and Israel who attract her ire. Here is what she has to say about Prime Minister Gordon Brown talking last week to a public inquiry about the war in Iraq:

“But, like his predecessor, he [Brown] is shockingly indifferent to the agony of the people most affected by the Iraq war, a war Brown still says was “the right” thing to do for the “right reasons”. His only regret? They should have thought a bit more about what to do next after they had defeated Saddam and pulled down his statues. Not a word about the countless Iraqis killed when we bombed indiscriminately in civilian areas…”

Note the incendiary vocabulary: “bombed indiscriminately in civilian areas”, which is a bare faced falsehood as she must know. The only indiscriminate attacks in Iraq have been conducted by Muslim extremist groups slaughtering fellow Muslims. This, of course, she never mentions. But note above all, that the prime minister of a sovereign democracy is expected to apologise, to express his contrition for having participated in a foreign policy venture of which Muslims do not approve. On behalf of fellow British Muslims (in whose name she speaks in this article), she expects the right of veto on how Britain conducts its affairs abroad.

But the veto extends further than foreign policy. She also turns her sights on recent court cases which have seen the jailing of some of the most violent, Hamas-supporting demonstrators outside the Israeli embassy in London last year during Operation Cast Lead.

“Meanwhile, ” she says “…Judge John Denniss is industriously sentencing demonstrators who gathered near the Israeli embassy to rail against that state’s attack on Gaza, one of the worst acts of state terrorism in recent history… Protesters came from all backgrounds but the vast majority of those arrested were young Muslim men. Dozens are being sent down for insignificant acts of bravado… To deter us from what? Having the temerity to believe we live in a democracy and are free to march?”

I stood outside some of those demonstrations outside the Israeli embassy. I saw the screaming, hysterical hatred in the demonstrators’ faces. I saw them scratching and flailing and punching at the police — desperate to get through the cordon to run riot in the embassy of the hated Jewish state.

For Alibhai-Brown, this is just “bravado”. To take legal action against such horrendous acts of violence and intimidation is to discriminate against Muslims. Muslims should have a free pass whenever they feel offended. The law, she suggests, should not apply to them.

But let me repeat the most important point. Alibhai-Brown is one of the most prominent “moderate” Muslims in Britain. She is feted by the national press and the broadcast media. Neither her editor at the Independent nor pretty well anyone else in the mainstream opinion forming establishment in Britain will have thought twice about her remarks.

Welcome to “normality” in modern Britain.