What should it be called?

This girl can get out of the way and shut up »

Feb 24th, 2024 | By Ophelia Benson
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Former Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson has been suspended from the party after “refusing to apologise” for comments aimed at Sadiq Khan. The Conservative Ashfield MP told GB News on Friday “Islamists” had “got control” of the mayor of London. Responding on Saturday, Mr Khan described the remarks as “pouring fuel on the fire of anti-Muslim hatred”.

What should be said then?

Islamism and Islamists are real, and the words are not simply pejoratives or epithets. In a way they’re otiose, because Islam itself teaches that Islam should be in charge of everything including government, but in reality there are liberal Muslims who don’t think Islam should be in charge of everything including government. Some do, some don’t. It’s not wrong to distinguish between them. We talk about religious fundamentalists here in the US, and it’s not racist or racist-adjacent to say so, it’s just naming a reality. The Catholic church in the US is absolutely determined to force women to give birth against their wills, and we get to talk about that without being called racist. It ought to work the same way with Islamism.

The BBC is bizarrely parsimonious in its account of what Anderson said and what he meant by it.

Speaking on GB News Mr Anderson said: “I don’t actually believe that the Islamists have got control of our country, but what I do believe is they’ve got control of Khan and they’ve got control of London… He’s actually given our capital city away to his mates.”

That’s it, that’s all the information. What did he mean, what was the context, please explain.

On Saturday afternoon, Mr Khan responded to Mr Anderson’s comments which he described as “Islamophobic, anti-Muslim and racist”.

“These comments pour fuel on the fire of anti-Muslim hatred,” Mr Khan said.

But is there any truth in his comments? I for one can’t tell, because there isn’t enough information in the BBC’s report.

It’s just reality though that religions can cause people to do horrific things they wouldn’t otherwise do. It’s a bad idea to make it taboo to say that.

8 Responses to “What should it be called?”

#1
Omar
February 24, 2024 at 3:12 pm

“Islamophobic, anti-Muslim and racist”

is likely in this context to be the old attempt to conflate criticism of Islam (a religion, ie a philosophy based on untestable non-empirical assumptions) and attacking Muslims just for the philosophy based on untestable non-empirical assumptions they happened to be born into. Christians, in the main, are born into their religion, not converted to it from some other faith like Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Bahai etc. (NB I do not include Islam in that list of faiths, as once in, the only way out of it is in a box, one way or another. Apostasy, ie renouncing one’s Islamic faith can score one a fatwah, and the devout follower of The Prophet [pbuh] who does such an apostate in will qualify for a reward of 72 beautiful virgins upon entering the Heavenly Paradise. For some of them no doubt, it is the only possible way they can score a lady’s favours. Any lady’s.)
#2
Tim Harris
February 24, 2024 at 3:59 pm

I am sorry, but Lee Anderson is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, and Sadiq Khan has been, and is, a pretty good mayor of London (and has to live with constant threats to him and his family from dangerous bigots), just as, for example, Mehdi Hassan has been, and is, a good broadcaster and one of the few people in the media to genuinely hold others to account. The vast majority of British Muslims are perfectly normal, law-abiding people. The Tories, who are deservedly making a poor showing on all the other issues they have been trying to keep in the public eye, are now seeking to foment feeling against Muslims in order to improve their electoral prospects, as is made clear by Suella Braverman’s recent hysterical Telegraph piece (headline: ‘Suella Braverman: Islamists are in charge of Britain now: Former home secretary says UK is “sleep-walking into ghettoised society’ that threatens free expression.”‘)

Any ghettoised society is being fortified by people Braverman and Anderson, and the bigots who infest GB News. That is what they want. It helps them. It is no accident that these attacks are being made just before the Rochdale by-election.

On a more general note & pace Omar’s comment, Khan’s statement is absolutely correct. If anyone is conflating things, it is Anderson & Braverman who are genuinely and cynically suggesting, for their political ends, that all Muslims, simply by virtue of their faith, are bad and dangerous people. Khan is not controlled by Islamists, and it is a despicable lie to pretend that that is so.
#3
Ophelia Benson
February 24, 2024 at 5:57 pm

Ok but Sadiq Khan is also the mayor who unceremoniously kicked Joan Smith out of her role as Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board and has never said a word to her since. That was a disgusting thing to do.
#4
Ophelia Benson
February 24, 2024 at 6:02 pm

Also the issue isn’t whether the vast majority of British Muslims are perfectly normal, law-abiding people, the issue is Islamists. Both could perfectly well be true: most British Muslims are not Islamists, and Islamists have Khan’s ear.

Religions have content, and can make otherwise decent people do horrible things. That’s one of the facts “New Atheism” was so determined to keep pointing out.
#5
Lady Mondegreen
February 24, 2024 at 9:23 pm

Of possible relevance–

Wednesday was an Opposition Day in Parliament. There are approximately 20 such days a year, in which opposition parties rather than the government can bring motions for debate and vote in the House of Commons. These votes are not binding on the government, but are nonetheless an expression of the will of Parliament.

Such days are usually uneventful but on Wednesday, the Scottish National Party—a small opposition party led by Humza Yousaf, whose in-laws successfully fled Gaza in recent months—set a trap designed to expose the Labour Party’s internal divisions on the Israel-Hamas war. The SNP’s motion called for an “immediate cease-fire” in Gaza and described Israel’s actions since October 7 as “collective punishment.” The Labour Party then submitted an amendment to this motion that instead called for an “immediate humanitarian cease-fire” to be observed by “all sides” and demanded a two-state solution. The Conservative government then submitted its own amendment to the original motion calling for an “immediate humanitarian pause” while also asserting Israel’s “right to self-defense.”

By convention, if the government tables an amendment to a motion submitted by an opposition party, it is the government’s amendment that is then debated. That meant the Labour Party—which increasingly relies on the Muslim vote for a significant number of its seats—was stuck between a rock and a hard place: either they would have to vote for the extreme anti-Israel SNP motion which calls Israel’s actions “collective punishment,” or vote for the government’s amendment which does not call for the cease-fire Labour supporters demand.

The upshot of this procedural controversy is simple and alarming: the Speaker of the House of Commons overturned established precedent because, as he later himself admitted, he feared for the safety of Members of Parliament. Put bluntly, British democracy ceased to operate by its own rules in order to prevent its elected representatives from being violently hounded, if not killed, by Islamist mobs.

In one sense, the Speaker’s decision was not unfounded. MPs really are at risk. Only weeks prior, Mike Freer, a Conservative MP who represents a constituency with a significant Jewish population, announced that he would not be seeking reelection because of threats to him and his family over his support for Israel. Explaining his decision, he revealed that he had started wearing stab-proof vests when meeting constituents….

This was all undoubtedly on the minds of our parliamentarians in the lead-up to yesterday’s vote. MPs on both sides of the aisle have faced angry mobs when out in public in recent weeks, with one MP warned by the police to stay away from his own house due to a hostile gathering outside his family home.

On Wednesday evening, as MPs debated the cease-fire motions inside the chamber, protesters projected the words “from the river to the sea” onto Big Ben.

On Thursday, Jewish Conservative MP Andrew Percy gave a powerful speech in the House of Commons in which said he had just returned from Israel and that “I actually felt safer in Israel than I do in this country.”

The journalist Dan Hodges echoed something I have personally heard from several MPs myself when he wrote on X that he had spoken to an MP who “had weighed up his own physical safety when deciding on how to vote on yesterday’s Gaza motion. We have crossed a line now. We are not a properly functioning democracy if this is a factor in how our elected representatives act.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/are-islamists-in-charge-of-britain-kisin
#6
Blood Knight in Sour Armor
February 24, 2024 at 9:36 pm

I’d argue that yes, all Muslims (barring the fluffy weirdos that are somehow embracing the gender goblins) are bad and dangerous people. All religious conservatives are… Mollycoddling them because they’re from a traditionally disadvantaged region doesn’t make them any different from the papists, the fundagelicals, or the ultra orthodox.
#7
Omar
February 24, 2024 at 10:53 pm

BKiSA @#6: I have visited Iran (shock! Horror! ) and have found the ordinary (Muslim) people there to be as well-mannered and as charming as any I have encountered anywhere else. They are also scrupulously honest. If you drop your wallet in the street, just go to the nearest police staion and report it missing. London to a brick you will get it back, cash and cards included.

The Iranians happen to be sitting on a huge deposit of oil, This caused the American CIA and Britain’s MI6 to get to work on behalf of, and in conjunction with, the reactionary Pahlevi dynasty (ie the Shah’s mob) to overthrow the Iranian democracy in 1953. The oppressive and antidemocratic regime of the reactionary mullahs was installed in its place.

Mohammad Mosaddegh… (was an Iranian politician, author, and lawyer who served as the 30th Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953, elected by the 16th Majlis… He was a member of the Iranian parliament from 1923, and served through a contentious 1952 election into the 17th Iranian Majlis… until his government was overthrown in the 1953 Iranian coup d’état aided by the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom (MI6) and the United States (CIA), led by Kermit Roosevelt Jr…. His National Front was suppressed from the 1954 election.

Before its removal from power, his administration introduced a range of social and political measures such as social security, land reforms and higher taxes including the introduction of taxation on the rent of land. His government’s most significant policy was the nationalisation of the Iranian oil industry, which had been built by the British on Persian lands since 1913 through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC/AIOC), later known as British Petroleum (BP)….

In the aftermath of the overthrow, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi returned to power, and negotiated the Consortium Agreement of 1954 with the British, which gave split ownership of Iranian oil production between Iran and western companies until 1979. Mosaddegh was imprisoned for three years, then put under house arrest until his death and was buried in his own home so as to prevent a political furore. In 2013, the US government formally acknowledged its role in the coup as being a part of its foreign policy initiatives, including paying protestors and bribing officials.

The ironical result of this could be an Iranian nuclear bomb on say, Israel; with consequences worldwide.

As they say, what goes around comes around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh
#8
iknklast
February 25, 2024 at 7:43 pm

Omar, that brings up a point that I have struggled with for a long time. If a person is pleasant and agreeable, even nice, but has some awful views that harm others (for instance, you have a long time friend who is one of the most courteous people you know but he votes for Trump), at what point does that person cease being “nice” and become just “pleasant and courteous”? I can accept flaws in people, of course, but is there a line where someone no longer gets to be called “nice” even if they manage to behave appropriately in public relationships?

This is an honest question, not a critique. I’ve taken a number of ethics classes, and find they don’t help solve the hard problems, they only help you see even more possible permutations that make it more complex!