You can learn as much about a country from its silences as you can from its obsessions. The issues politicians do not discuss are as telling and decisive as those they do.
You can also learn a lot about media organisations from the stories which they decide to cover and those they try to hide.
The BBC has an increasing tendency to smother any report which would reflect badly upon Islam or the Muslim ‘community’, either remaining silent on the Muslim identity of any person caught acting in an unChristian manner or if forced to admit a person is a Muslim the BBC will attempt to claim that any anti-social actions were not as a result of Islamic teachings or belief but driven purely by crime or madness.
This report about a Muslim who had sex with a 13 year old girl is just another story of sex abuse on the face of it but you don’t have to delve very far to realise that what is revealed has far deeper implications for society….but it is a story the BBC prefer to bury:
‘A muslim who raped a 13-year-old girl he groomed on Facebook has been spared a prison sentence after a judge heard he went to an Islamic faith school where he was taught that women are worthless….In other interviews with psychologists, Rashid claimed he had been taught in his school that ‘women are no more worthy than a lollipop that has been dropped on the ground’.
Adil Rashid, 18, claimed he was not aware that it was illegal for him to have sex with the girl because his education left him ignorant of British law.‘ [Despite ignorance of the Law being no excuse…it seems it was in this case]
Here is a Muslim who attends a Muslim faith school…schools which are being promoted by the present government, in which he is taught that women are worthless.
We don’t know the religion of the girl but you can see the connection to the sex gang in Rochdale for instance where they believed that white or non-Muslim girls were worthless trash.
You may also comment that in Islam it is perfectly legal to have sex with a girl from the age of nine… ‘as did Muhammed’….as long as they are married.
So we have a man taught that women are worthless and that under Islamic law sex with young girls is legal….and all that being taught in a ‘British school‘…based on the writings in the Koran and the Hadith…Schools being promoted by our very own British government.
All that and yet the BBC do not report this case. It is a case which has serious implications…..if Muslims are being taught such beliefs and are encouraged to obey a different legal system to that in use by the rest of society that is a recipe for social unrest and conflict.
Allowing a completely alien cultural, social and legal system to grow within your own society is to allow a time bomb to slowly develop, one that has already seen events such as 7/7, numerous other Koran inspired terrorist actions, and of course the recent ‘Muslim Patrols’…which are in fact only the most visible evidence of what goes on in Muslim dominated areas….such ‘enforcement’ of Muslim ideals has been occurring for a long time.
Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at Birkbeck, University of London is working on a research project on Britain’s changing population, said:
“If your country doesn’t have hard borders, you may get people creating their own boundaries below the level of the State.”
Such hard boundaries include not only the obvious national borders but the laws, culture and values of a society which if allowed to be broken down end in an ever growing disparate society, one ever more dangerous and uncontrollable…. A society in which a few men armed and ready to use violence can take control and impose their own law…as in Mali.
Below Tony Blair recognises what could be at stake….though of course he talks of ‘political Islam’…..making a distinction between that and ‘Islam’ when there is no distinction in reality…Islam has always been political, it is more politics than religion, the ‘religion’ being merely a façade, a front giving divine sanction to an ideology of conquest and colonisation.
‘But what I understand [now is] how deep this ideological movement is. — this is actually more like the phenomenon of revolutionary communism. It’s the religious or cultural equivalent of it, and its roots are deep, its tentacles are long, and its narrative about Islam stretches far further than we think into even parts of mainstream opinion who abhor the extremism, but sort of buy some of the rhetoric that goes with it.
I think a lot of people don’t understand that this is a generational-long struggle… and I think one of the things we’ve got to have and one of the debates we’ve got to have in the west is you know are we prepared for that, and are we prepared for the consequences of it?‘
The fact that Islam is political in itself and that the beliefs of the ‘radicals’ are in fact the beliefs of the mainstream, though a mainstream that at least in public abhors the violence of the extremist but not his motives, should be understood but are not…and this is where the problem lies…a problem that the BBC has decided to ignore, refusing to engage fully in any debate about the true nature of Islam.
The BBC prefers to hide behind the usual guilt clause…that the West is to blame for the rise of Islamic extremism….as shown here by one of the BBC’s favourite sons, Jonathan Miller:
‘LaurieTaylor suggests that the revival of religion in fundamentalist forms has confounded the expectations of sociologists, and Jonathan Miller replies:
‘But we have to remember that in the case of the Islamic fundamentalism it’s associated with an objection to what they see as the military tyranny inflicted upon their people by the United States and by NATO. It’s a politically motivated thing.‘ ‘
The BBC might like to consider this:
BEFORE the recent French intervention in Mali began, 412,000 people had already left their homes in the country’s north, fleeing torture, summary executions, recruitment of child soldiers and sexual violence against women at the hands of fundamentalist militants. Late last year, in Algeria and southern Mali, I interviewed dozens of Malians from the north, including many who had recently fled. Their testimonies confirmed the horrors that radical Islamists, self-proclaimed warriors of God, have inflicted on their communities.
Policy decisions regarding this potential Afghanistan-in-the-Sahara must be informed by the fact that what is happening there is not simply a question of regional or global security, but of basic human rights.
Or this…especially relevant in relation to Faith schools when talking about Ray Honeyford:
Staging free speech
Lloyd Newson, creator of “Can We Talk About This?”, speaks to Maryam Omidi.
Lloyd Newson tackles issues of free speech, Islam and multiculturalism in his recent verbatim theatre production, which combines text drawn from interviews with movement. This is the point of departure for an interview with Maryam Omidi.
When British Muslims are demanding respect and equality in Britain why are they falling short in reciprocating it? Tolerance isn’t a one-way street.
We also interviewed Ishtiaq Ahmed, who’s associated with the Council for Mosques in Bradford. He did a survey in the late ’90s and there were students in Bradford who went to Asian nursery schools, Asian primary schools, Asian high schools and also colleges where they virtually never mixed with non-Asians. This is complicated, because there’s the issue of white flight, the issue of councils often dumping Asian families into poor areas. Honeyford was forced to resign in 1985. In 2001 the Bradford race riots erupted and many feel if we had acted on Honeyford’s central arguments and not been distracted by his tone, these riots may not have occurred. This year the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development published a report saying Britain’s schools were some of the most socially and racially segregated in the world.
Kenan Malik, a broadcaster, writer and scientist, interviewed Sir Iqbal Sacranie back in 2005 when he was the head of the Muslim Council of Britain. Sir Iqbal Sacranie is a man who said that death was too good for Salman Rushdie and who has condemned homosexuality, and yet has been knighted. Where’s the prejudice and Islamophobia there? To add to this, in an interview with Malik in 2005, Sacranie told him that 95 to 98 per cent of those stopped and searched, under the anti-terrorism law, were Muslim. Malik went and researched that figure and it was actually closer to seven per cent. When you consider that the Muslim population in the UK have a tendency to live in major cities, have more children (i.e. younger members, who are the demographic most likely to be searched), the figure of seven per cent is proportionate to the Muslim population. Considering this interview took place just after the Madrid train bombings and just before the 7/7 Underground attacks, it seems surprising the number of Muslim men stopped and searched was that low. So why was the head of the Muslim Council of Britain exaggerating Islamophobia so adamantly? The constant yell of Islamophobia by some Muslim organisations and liberals is a default position and often at odds with the facts.
