The last few years have not been kind to our domestic Islamist groups.
The Muslim Association of Britain is now pretty universally acknowledged as the British franchise of the clerical fascist Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Council of Britain never really recovered from the disclosure that Bunglawala distributed the writings of Osama bin Laden a few weeks before 9/11, and has been utterly discredited as little more than a front organisation for the small clerical fascist South Asian party, Jamaat-e-Islami. The Muslim Public Affairs Committee was torpedoed by its repeated reprinting of material from neo-Nazi websites, and the revelation that its founder, Asghar Bukhari, offered to fundraise for David Irving: the man branded a falsifier of history and racist by the High Court.
How will they fight back?
The answer, so it seems, is to create a new organisation: the “Islamophobia Media Monitoring and Response Agency” (“IMMRA”) or, alternatively, the Blackstone Institute or Foundation. “Blackstone” to me has legal connotations. But apparently it is a reference to the Kaaba: a stone venerated by Muslims.
I don’t think this agency has yet been announced. Therefore, I’m announcing it here.
Here is a pdf of the Proposal to create IMMRA. Read it.
And here is an email from Carl Arrindell, the Director of International Operations & Strategic Planning at the Islam Channel, discussing the strategy with those who are involved in the creation of this body. The participants are an interesting bunch.
- Carl Arrindell is a disqualified director and convert to Islam
- Mohammed Ali is the CEO of the Islam Channel
- Bob Lambert is a retired police officer, who pioneered the strategy of partnering with the MAB
- Asghar Bukhari is a David Irving fan
- Inayat Bunglawala is a figure of fun
We don’t really need to go much further. What will sink this project is that those involved in it are considered to be silly, sinister, or dodgy by most people. Arrindell is aware of the problem. What is proposed, therefore, is that tame academics will be recruited to give the project credibility:
“Whilst a long term goal should be to establish a Muslim friendly think tank, in the short term it would be advisable to source a team of credible and authoritative commentators/academics who will be prepared to provide written response/analysis to key events on a regular basis – this may have to be budgeted for. It will be the provision of this regular credible information that will be the justification for journalists to engage with us. “
I have no doubt that academics will be found who are prepared to play patsy for this Islamist group. Academics are, after all, a notoriously unworldly lot. However, as we saw from the disasterous launch of the Ken Livingstone-funded Islamophobia Report – perhaps the prototype for this venture – the clueless academics were hopelessly out of their depth, and their analysis was quickly ripped to pieces by journalists.
The proposals are ambitious. They’re also just a little bit pie-in the-sky. They include the creation of letter writing networks, the harnessing of the support of “community leaders”, and a “legal response unit”:
“Such a unit will provide a staunch legal rebuttal mechanism to allegations and defamation etc and I believe that it should not be so difficult or costly to acquire the services of a team of sympathetic Muslim advocates on a pro-bono basis. The effective legal challenge of a few carefully chosen cases will send warning signals to editors and broadcasters that they should think twice before producing sensational headlines and potentially defamatory content. It will also be important for this resource to build up a network of intelligence gathering mechanisms – to establish files on individuals and/or organisations which consistently attack the Muslim community.”
The hook on which the UK Islamists want to hang their political project is “Islamophobia”. It is very clear to me that some British citizens who are Muslim do encounter racism directed at them, and that they may also experience discrimination. This government has made combatting violence and discrimination, directed at ordinary people, doing no more than going about their daily lives, one of its top priorities. The Islamists – purveyors of hatred themselves – are the last people who have a right to speak out against bigotry. This is not their political football.
I think that the big issue of the next decade will be anti-sectarianism. I think that most people are also tired of being defined in terms of their victimhood. I think that most people are tired of being treated as members of groups, with disparate interests: instead of individuals with composite identities engaged in multiple overlapping voluntary associations, and as equal citizens of this country.
What I think is a great pity, is that the groups which have realised this – notably the Centre for Social Cohesion – are centre-Right, and that there appears to be no corresponding centre-left think tank putting forward the liberal, progressive argument against sectarianism.
That’s the sort of institute we really need.
Anyhow, enjoy reading the proposal for the Blackstone Foundation. Or whatever it ends up being called. There’s lots of fun stuff there.
