Channel 4 Dispatches used to be a haven of serious documentary, but has degenerated into a stream of Islamophobia. It touched rock bottom today with a truly pathetic effort by Andrew Gilligan which found – shock horror – Muslims in the East London mosque!
These Muslims actually wanted society to be ordered in an Islamic way on Islamic principles. To try to achieve this they were – shock horror – undertaking political activity and joining political parties!
Gilligan’s piece turned on the Daily Express trick of attempting to inculcate fear that suddenly you and I will wake up under sharia law. The fact is of course that no matter how much devout Muslims may want to campaign to ban alcohol and push-up bras in the UK, they have not a hope in hell of succeeding.
But surely they have a right to their beliefs and ideology and a right to espouse it? Surely we should be delighted that these Muslims are seeking to advance their views through participation in the democratic process and not through violence? In fact, is this not the sort of activity we should be encouraging?
Apparently not. Apparently you only should be allowed to participate in politics if the ideology you are offering to the electorate is broadly the same as Andrew Gilligan’s. We were apparently supposed especially to be shocked by Gilligan’s revelation that Muslim activists campaigned for George Galloway because of his opposition to the Iraq war and support for the Palestinians. Wow! Whatever next?
Gilligan went on to introduce a number of neo-conservative nutters from wild eyed groups such as the Centre for Social Cohesion, to condemn all this “extremist” activity, without giving any context to explain where his “Independent” commentators were dredged up from.
Gilligan’s only useful point was about the waste of taxpayers’ money being pumped in to various Muslim groupings. Sadly he confined his criticism on this point only to financial support for those Muslim groups who did not wholeheartedly support the Bush/Blair foreign policy, when in fact twenty times more public money has been wasted on tiny but grasping Muslim groups who proselytise Blairism.
All in all, the most risible piece of half-baked Islamophobia I can recall. Gilligan – a man for whom I have had respect – should be ashamed of himself.
technicolour
3% of 61m would be 1.83m, so what’s the difference?
The upper estimate of the 2.0-2.5m range I quoted is supported by Mohammed Ami, the Chair of the Business & Economics Committee of the Muslim Council of Britain who says Muslims are just over 4% of the UK population. See: http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2010/03/06/powerful-or-powerless/
That would be 2.44m Muslims at least.
If a small population grows at 300% it will in time overtake a larger population that is growing at 50%. It is growing at a faster rate.(see basicmath) Perhaps you have a different idea of what the word faster means.
I didn’t say there are Muslim towns. I said some towns are becoming Muslim. If you want examples, you might consider those cites and conurbations where Muslim Arbitration Tribunals are operating.
“Irish people in the UK no longer have the big families they used to up to the 1960s”
Go back just a couple of generations. My grandmother, ordinary mainstream white English, was one of a mind-boggling number of children. 15, I think. Many of them died in infancy. It wasn’t particularly abnormal, I don’t think.
Not so many die so young any more, and nor do we any longer have the lebensraum to export the survivors to. The US, yes; it was _about_ building itself up out of incomers, in ways the UK never saw itself.
(clarinet).
basicmath: basic terminology. By all means bring in exponential growth of populations, or even logistic growth of populations, if you wish to speculate. To me, any future looks positive.
But in the meantime, let’s say I have 60 pence, and you have 2 pence. Someone gives me another 30 pence, and they give you another 6 pence. Would you say you were getting more money than me? Or faster?
Still, this is a diversion, of course. To repeat: the original post said that the Muslim population is ‘growing faster than the rest of the population.’
Apologies for belatedly realising that the poster can only mean ‘than other religions’. There is no ‘rest of the population’. And in fact, the statement that ‘Muslims are growing faster than members of other religions’ in this country is brilliantly untrue. The accolade of ‘the largest increase in numbers of a religious group’ since the previous Census goes to the Jedi Knights.
Libertyphile: You did say “some towns are becoming Muslim areas and Muslim towns”; I’m quite disappointed, but OK.
I looked at the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal, thank you. They’re campaigning against forced marriages I see, very good. They seem to run consultations in Nuneateon, Birmingham, Bradford, and Manchester. At the last census it seems Nuneaton was 95.1 percent ‘white’ while Muslim people made up 1.6 percent of the population. Some of those ‘white’ people will be Muslim too, of course, but it still sounds quite dull.
Statistics are quite dull too, in fact. Sorry, all. Off to play in the park.
basicmath, I respect your numerical erudition and I agree that it’s important one is accurate about such matters. However, please be aware of what you’re feeding into here; I think technicolour expresses that well in their later posts.
Also, anti-Irish and anti-Jewish prejudice has nothing to do with skin colour either, but it’s prejudice all the same. Please note, I’m not saying you’re prejudiced! Just that it would do well for all of us – of all skin colours, creeds, etc. – to be wary of divide-and-rule and supremacist agendas – let’s not get fooled again.
Richard – clarinet! Magical!
technicolour
Nuneaton happened to be where one of the founders of the MAT inherited a “stately home” which is used as the MAT H.Q., I believe.
Try Bradford for population statistics.
Another thing the MAT has been doing is to get Muslim men sent on anger management courses in domestic violence cases. You might also be interested in the the House of Lords view on Muslim child custody rules.
See http://libertyphile2.blogspot.com/2010/01/one-law-for-all-yes-and-no.html
for a good overview of Sharia law as unfolding in the UK.
Yes, LibertyPhile, I do agree that the insidious spread of Sharia in the legal system is of substantial concern. I think it’s misguided and seems to be being inserted by degrees through the back door; initially as an innocuous, and even a progressive and /or feminist (at the risk of waking-up Jimmy Giro; eh, Jimmy {as we say in Glesga}, how’s the music going!), measure (i.e. as opposed to patriarchal interpretations). I think this is a worrying precedent. There was an article in the Sunday Herald (Scottish ‘paper) today about it, synchronistically enough.
I think that if people want to advise people on religious matters, that’s fine and it ought to be done in that sphere – i.e. as a spiritual advisor and/ or mullah/ priest/ rabbi as already happens in any case and not as part of a legal process or as part of (a) law practice, in either English or Scottish Law. I believe that the same should apply to all religions – Jewish, Christian, Hindu, whatever.
… though I think that scare tactics used by (or at least from the bit quoted) the opposition spokesperson (hand amputation, etc.) in the article were predictable and OTT in the UK context.
Amusingly, the ‘ex-Muslim’ spokeswoman is ironically named, Miriam Namazi. ‘Namaz’ is the Urdu word for a Muslim prayer, so it’s a bit like calling someone, ‘the ex-Roman Catholic, Mary Massie’! Proof positive that reality is always stranger than (even Swiftian) fiction!
Hold on Suhayl! In the example given, of anger management courses for domestic violence offenders, Sharia law not insidiously doing anything; it is merely following general UK law:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2006/apr/12/crime.penal1
Interesting, but nothing to get excited about. Similarly, Libertyphile, I don’t see anything sinister in the idea of inheriting a ‘stately home’, unless it’s the central heating bills.
I was referring actually to the piece in the Sunday Herald, not to the anger management classes. The law firm providing services makes it all seem innocuous and maybe in their case it is, but it is dependent on this kind of moral due diligence being applied across the board and it won’t be. I’m also against it in principle; I know the agendas of some of the people behind it – not fearful, terrorist agendas, not ‘swamping, baddie agendas’, but ongoing agendas of social manipulation and control of the Muslim community (ies).
I’m part of the IFE and I’ve never had to take any tests… It’s not school… and frankly I think that episode of Dispatch was very 1 sided. Slightly upsetting for us. Besides if a community opens their heart to us I think it’s our duty to give back to the community.