Link back to commentAnother farrago of misrepresentations, non-sequiturs and strawmen from David. I will address each of them in this post, but will start with what I think is the most important.
This latest response provides, as the Americans like to say, a ‘teachable moment’ that reveals with extraordinary clarity the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the contemporary ‘progressive’ left, sodden and obsessed as it is with the identity politics ideology.
In my post, to which his responds, I challenged his assertion (which he refuses to withdraw) that I am a ‘bigot’.
Why am I a bigot? Because I mentioned the paralysis of all arms of the state and the legal system in Britain in the face of two kinds of mass criminality that have emerged among minority, predominantly Muslim, communities, that victimize young girls within those communities and white girls from poor or dysfunctional families respectively.
I asked David: What about the victims? Does he care about them? Since he has nothing whatever to say in response, it would seem the answer is No.
The point of bringing this up is to illustrate what can happen when a ‘welcoming’ liberal Western culture encounters, and is desperate to avoid stigmatizing, cultural practices and norms that would be anathematized if they occurred in white communities.
The result, ironically, is that the vulnerable within those communities are subjected to a different, and markedly lower, standard of protection than is insisted on for whites in similar situations. For any clear-headed person, that should be the very definition of racism.
Or, I should say, nice middle-class whites. As for vulnerable poor whites victimized by members of communities with an ‘oppressed’ identity, well they’re just white trash (British luvvies have coined their own epithet ‘gammons’ – Google it).
Is this what progressivism has sunk to?
I am referring to the tens of thousands, probably well over one hundred thousand, British girls subjected to female genetical mutilation (FGM) as well as the white girls sexually enslaved by ‘grooming gangs’ operating in multiple cities and towns across the country, with the perpetrators overwhelmingly from Pakistani-Muslim backgrounds.
There is no longer any doubt about the existence and scale of both these phenomena, which have been the subject of both official reports and parliamentary inquiries after decades of official and media silence. I provide details and links (none to David’s favourite strawman ‘Fox News favourites’) in an earlier post.
The key question is: Why the official inaction, only partially remedied by recent prosecutions? Why the long media silence? Where were the feminists? Where were the human rights lawyers?
In the case of FGM, a serious criminal offence in Britain since 1985, extended in 2003 to include taking a child offshore for the procedure. Successful prosecutions so far? One, secured in July 2019, and a handful of attempts. By contrast, the Crown Prosecution Service boasted of launching 15,000 prosecutions for ‘hate speech’ offences in one year along. How is that for priorities.
In the case of the grooming gangs, the issue was systematically ignored for decades by police, welfare services, health officials, and politicians. In the most prominent case, the northern England city of Rotherham, the severe – and I mean very severe – abuse of 1500 girls as young as eleven started in 1997. It was recently disclosed the Home Office knew about it as early as 2002.
Yet action only began to be taken in 2012 following a stunning expose by Times journalist Andrew Norton, which led to the setting up of a number of inquiries, the most significant by the chief social work adviser to the Scottish government, professor Alexis Jay (I provide links to sources about this – none of them Fox News favourites in an earlier post).
According to Professor Jay, police often treated victims with contempt, sometimes arresting them while taking no action against the perpetrators. Incredibly, in two cases police arrested fathers trying to rescue their daughters from their abusers (Jay report section 5.9)
Since Rotherham grooming gangs have been found to be operating in a multitude of British cities, the most recent revelations concerning gangs in Telford and Huddersfield.
From the repeated testimony of victims, it is clear the perpetrators held the them in utter contempt and thought they deserved the abuse because of their ‘immodesty’, with recurring reports of them being called ‘white sluts’ or ‘whores’.
We sometimes hear this sort of thing here in Australia from extreme clerics like the notorious Sheik Taj Ed-Din Hilaly, former Mufti of Australia, who said this of ‘immodestly’ dressed women and girls:
‘If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats' or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.’
He also said:
‘…in the state of zina, the responsibility falls 90 per cent of the time on the woman. Why? Because she possesses the weapon of enticement (igraa).’
And what about the politicians, especially those champions of the working class in the UK Labour Party? According to one of their number, the former MP for the seat of Keighley in Yorkshire Ann Cryer – who actually did try to raise the grooming gang issue in 2002 – she was shunned by police, social services and imams, and by elements in her own party.
So why this neglect? The former Labour MP for Rotherham Dennis McShane admitted that as a ‘Guardian reading liberal leftie’ he shied away from the issue, telling the BBC:
‘I think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat if I may put it like that.’
McShane’s successor as MP for Rotherham Sarah Champion wrote an article in 2017 following the exposure of another gang in Newcastle that called on her colleagues to frankly face up to the nature of the problem. For this, she was forced to resign as Labour’s shadow equalities minister after making a grovelling apology for ‘causing offence’.
Champion was denounced by another Labour MP Naz Shah (Bradford West) for writing an article that ‘is not only irresponsible but is also setting a very dangerous precedent and must be challenged.’ Shah, who is notorious for her blatantly anti-Semitic tweets, shared (and liked) a tweet that said:
‘…those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of #diversity!’
So was she disciplined for this? Not likely – she was actually promoted to Sarah Champion’s former post of shadow equalities minister. As the saying goes, you can’t make this stuff up. The debasement of this once great party under Corbyn is a historic tragedy. The new leader Keir Starmer is trying to pull it back from the abyss. Let’s hope he succeeds.
It looks like, when it comes to these matters, David is in the Naz Shah boat. Just shut up and don't rock the diversity boat.
Now onto David's other claims.
‘Peter is no longer saying that ordinary Muslims docile and weak minded’. I never said that, or anything like it. I made the straightforward point, familiar to anyone who has ever been in politics, that an activist minority with a political or religious agenda can exert far more influence than a majority with other priorities, who just want to get on with their lives.
Neither did I say that Muslims, as a whole, are trying to impose Sharia law. I did say that a substantial, not a tiny, minority (43 percent according to the poll I cited above) want at least some elements of Sharia introduced. And it is happening, with over eighty Sharia Councils already operating in Britain which, while formally lacking the force of law, have immense power to bully and intimidate women in particular, especially in family matters.
He criticizes the Civitas think thank, which has done a detailed report on the impact of Sharia Councils, including their considerable power to intimidate. Civitas’ politics are generally described as centre-right, not ‘hard-right’ as David contends.
This is a standard tactic – to label anything to the right of Leon Trotsky as ‘hard-right’ or ‘extreme-right’. David might ask himself: why is it generally only these groups that seem interested in investigating these questions? Doesn’t the left care about women’s rights? Not the identarian left, it seems.
This, by the way, is also done to genuinely moderate Muslims, like Maajid Nawaz, founder of the Quilliam Foundation that seeks to counter extremism. Nawaz was included by the Southern Poverty Law Center in the US on a list of anti-Muslim extremists (he sued and got an apology plus $US3.4 million).
But what does he have to say about this article, in that well-known Fox News favourite the UK Independent newspaper, by Sufiya Ahmed, with the title ‘No one talks about the fact that in sharia courts, British Muslim women have fewer rights than women in Islamic countries’.
She writes:
‘I have heard enough tales of women wronged and almost destroyed in the cases of separation and divorce to know that this is a subject that needs to be shouted about from the rooftops in order to obtain a change in the law. One which will give British Muslim women the right to a civil divorce and a share of matrimonial finances.’
‘Take the case of a friend of a friend who tried to separate from her husband. Actually, she was already separated. She paid her own rent, utility bills and living costs, as well as solely providing for her three children who were all under the age of 10. Her peace of mind and happiness were all on hold as she tried to obtain a divorce through the Sharia Council because her husband refused to grant her one.'
‘For a Muslim man, it is simple. He merely has to say “I divorce you” (talaq) three times over a period of separation and the divorce is legitimate. A Muslim woman cannot say the words. She has to go to an Islamic judge in a Muslim country, or a sharia council in non-Muslim countries, to seek a judicial decree on specific grounds to be free. If she does not have any grounds for a divorce, she has to waive her “Mehr” – a compulsory financial gift by her husband.’
I guess David would say we shouldn’t make too much of that – that would be bigotry.
David also asserts: ‘Thankfully the related theme that Islam has aggressive imperial ambitions and is endlessly seeking world domination has also been put back in its box.’
How so? On the matter of Islam’s global ambitions I mentioned that the Islamic scriptures, the Quran and the canonical hadiths, oblige Muslims to fight to make Islam supreme universally.
They motivated an extraordinary, historically unparalleled in their rapidity, succession of wars of conquest following Muhammad’s death that produced in less than a century a zone of Islamic dominance from the Pyrenees in the west to the Indus river in the east. This was followed by later campaigns, with the Ottoman Caliphate destroying the last vestiges of the Eastern (Byzantine) Roman Empire, then advancing through Europe to besiege Vienna on two occasions (1529 and 1683).
To be clear, I am not claiming that most Muslims are committed to, motivated by or even know about these mandates or this history, any more than a majority of Catholics nowadays follow the Church’s teachings on birth control. But they are compelling enough to motivate tens of thousands of young men and women in Western societies to have travelled to the Middle East to fight for ISIS and other terrorist groups, and numerous others in various parts of the world.
And these are not stupid people – many are extremely bright, like two Australian teenagers who attended a selective school and tried to set off for Syria a couple of years ago. Those who have studied ISIS ideology closely (including the Australian Robert Manne, who wrote a short book about it) have been struck by how scholarly and sophisticated their theology is.
David has refuted none of this. Indeed, after initially seeming to deny the long record of Islamic conquests, which I set out in outline in another post, he eventually acknowledged that these things actually happened, but he rejected the ‘gloss’ I put on them.
What gloss? He doesn’t specify. Here is my gloss: This history refutes the claim that David makes in another post that all the problems with Islam in our time have been caused by Western meddling in the Islamic world, especially the Middle East, in the 19th and 20th centuries. On the contrary, jihadic warfare has been waged since Islam’s inception 1400 years ago, and continues to inspire people today, reappearing when circumstances and opportunities arise.
Unlike Western imperialism, which has been pretty much completely unwound and the empires dissolved, Islamic conquests have almost never been voluntarily relinquished. In one of the rare cases, when Indonesia allowed East Timor to achieve independence in 1999, the move was heavily criticized by hard line clerics on the ground that once a land or state has been under Muslim rule it can never be relinquished.
So what is David talking about when he says the notion that Islam has an imperialist imperative has been ‘put back into its box’?
Presumably this. In an earlier post I cited a book Islamic Imperialism: A History by the Israeli/British historian Efraim Karsh, founding director and emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, London.
Karsh surveys Islamic history as a totality, from its inception to the present day, and argues that throughout this entire period the universalist imperialist ambition has always been present.
Unsurprisingly, this argument has been disputed by some other scholars in the Middle East Studies area, and several hostile reviews are mentioned on the Wikipedia page about Efraim Karsh, which David copied and pasted into an earlier post.
He neglected, however, to include the positive reviews by other history professors, mentioned on the same Wikipedia page, that say ‘it is a work deserving to be read for its penetrating analyses of the long history of Islam as an expanding and proselytizing faith’, and that the book ‘is destined to become a seminal study on the history of radical Islam’, and that ‘by seeking the roots of the current situations in the Middle East within the framework of Middle Eastern history, Karsh provides an invaluable assessment’.
So we can have experts at forty paces.
However there is a fundamental issue here. Academics, and I gather David is one, are very inclined to the ‘argument from authority’ approach that relies on citations from highly credentialled experts – and in some fields, such as the basic sciences and vocational areas, this might make reasonable sense.
So David demands of me a ‘reading list’ of ‘solid, respectable historians’ that support the argument I’m making, while exempting himself from this requirement when he asserts that Western meddling has produced all the problems with Islam.
But here’s the problem: the area of Middle East Studies is riven by bitter ideological divisions, with allegations that the long-standing peak organisation in America, the Middle East Studies Association, with which most of Karsh’s critics are affiliated, has evolved from a purely scholarly to a political activist role, buying into current political controversies like travel bans and BDS, and with a definite ideological slant grounded in the work of post-colonial theorists like Edward Said.
This reached a point where some of the most venerable figures in the field, like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, broke away about a decade ago to form their own association, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa.
Then there is the problem of the wholesale compromising of the field by the flow of immense funds from Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Iran and Turkey. I discuss this in more detail in a separate post, which cites evidence of how this dependency is seriously constraining the ability of Middle East studies institutes to explore topics that their benefactors may disapprove of.
So, which experts do we rely on? Solid reputations, but according to who?