This is a guest post by Amjad Khan
In a recent piece for the New Statesman, Quilliam’s Maajid Nawaz made the point that government should bypass Islamist front groups such as MAB, IFE and the MCB when engaging with Muslims. Rather Muslims should seek representation through their elected politicians, just like all other citizens, and Islamist inspired organisations should not be allowed to monopolise Muslim representation. Quite a straight forward argument you may think, who could possibly be upset with a challenge to anti-democratic means to representation and extremism?
Welcome to the world of Bob Pitt. Bob is an ageing and outmoded far-left blogger who has developed a reputation for making mind-bending and logic-stretching arguments in order to contort reality to his fit his cynical far-left worldview. In Bob’s world, Islamophobia is not a societal scourge to be challenged, but rather something to be exploited and manipulated for short-term political point scoring. His website www.Islamaphobia-watch.com is less about Islamophobia and more about attacking his political opponents, many of whom are Muslim.
It should, therefore, come as no surprise that Bob was not happy with Maajid’s piece. In fact, he has an entire piece on his website attacking it. In his piece Bob claims that Maajid:
‘…presents an argument against the state having relations not just with Islamists of any variety but with any group claiming to represent any section of the Muslim community.
This is not of course a view that prevented Nawaz and his friends at Quilliam from accepting generous state funding under the last Labour government, on the spurious grounds that they represented a tendency within the Muslim community that could assist in the campaign against terrorism. And if the principle of rejecting co-operation with Ikhwan-associated political organisations were applied to foreign policy it would lead to the UK breaking relations with Tunisia and Egypt.’
Firstly, Maajid does not argue that the state should have absolutely no relations with Islamists or groups claiming to represent any section of the Muslim community. Rather, he quite clearly argues that government should not rely on such groups when engaging with Britain’s diverse Muslim communities because they don’t represent Muslims, they are not elected and they represent the more repressive and reactionary strands within Muslim communities. Secondly, Quilliam never claimed to represent any Muslim community nor any sections of it, this is made very clear from their website. Thirdly, Bob’s foreign policy analogy is simple laughable because in Tunisia and Egypt there have been elections recently and Islamists have won a large share of the vote. Hence, engaging with those governments is very different since the Islamists within those governments have a democratic mandate, which their counterparts in the UK lack. Also, co-operating with Islamists on issues of concern is very different to relying on them to represent the views of people they don’t represent and have had no contact with.
As a Muslim, I take offence to Bob, under the guise of tackling Islamophobia, attacking people who are speaking against attempts by Islamists to monopolise Muslim engagement, especially when the arguments made are so lame and badly argued. I appreciate sections of the left have been drifting aimlessly for a number of years but this really takes the biscuit.
Then again, Bob is rumoured to have belonged to Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party, which was known for having links with Saddam Hussain and Colonel Gaddafi. Healy himself was accused of sexually abusing female colleagues and enjoying a financially comfortable lifestyle whilst allowed fellow activists, who he lived off, to live in poverty. With roots like that its not surprising that Bob produces such lame nonsense.