| | It was only a matter of time before ENGAGE caught the attention of Andrew ‘Islamists under the bed’ Gilligan and lo and behold, the prodigious blogger on all things ‘Islamist’ related had blogged about the all party parliamentary group on Islamophobia to which we are the secretariat.
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We could dispense with Gilligan’s comment piece by simply offering Mehdi Hasan’s brilliant expose on Gilligan’s hypocrisy but that would be to take Gilligan’s allegations lightly, something which we do not do. Gilligan alleges that ENGAGE “is an organisation of Islamist sympathizers” giving as evidence to support his claim our critiques of attempts to malign the East London Mosque and the Islamic Forum Europe. Again, Gilligan shows that his yardstick of measuring an “Islamist sympathizer” is anyone that doesn’t agree with his assessment of the activities and ethos of these organizations. Is it fair then to say that Gilligan would regard Neil Jameson of London Citizens and Revd. Alan Green, chair of Tower Hamlets Interfaith Forum, as “Islamist sympathizers” too for their rebuttals of other attempts to smear these organizations? Or does Gilligan consider a Muslim organization an easier target for smearing and slander?
Gilligan then goes on to consider Monday’s Panorama programme on Muslim schools claiming that that ENGAGE “typically…launched its attack before even seeing the programme.”
Well now, that would be foolish of us indeed and perhaps Gilligan might have a closer read of our article on the programme. He would see, if he’ll temporarily remove the blinkers that cloud his sight and judgment, that we appraised the press articles on the day which carried news of the programme and gave some useful background information on the programme’s presenter, John Ware, who has been lambasted before for his “witch-hunt” style of reporting. Gilligan would also see that we explicitly encouraged readers to watch the programme and contact the BBC with their thoughts following its broadcast.
Gilligan then goes on to claim that ENGAGE stands alone among Muslim organizations that have criticized the programme. It’s no surprise Gilligan wouldn’t be found on the mailing list of various Muslim organizations, so we’ll apprise him of some of the rebuttals that have been issued by the Association of Muslim Schools, the Muslim Council of Britain and iERA.
Gilligan moves on to focus on instances where his own articles have been the subject of ENGAGE critiques mentioning the East London Mosque’s hosting of Anwar Al-Awlaki in 2009. He says that ENGAGE “attacked me [Gilligan] for writing about the East London Mosque’s hosting of the terrorist preacher, Anwar al-Awlaki, in 2009 – advertised with a poster showing New York under bombardment.”
Ah, but you see the ELM/LMC did not host Awlaki they merely let the premises to another organisation which had billed Awlaki among its speakers. He also accuses ENGAGE of peddling the ELM/LMC’s “straightforward lie” that they were not cognizant of the nature of Awlaki’s views at the time. Frankly, if the choice were between taking the ELM/LMC’s word for it that theirs was an honest mistake and Gilligan’s accusation that they told a “straightforward lie,” we’d more readily accept the ELM’s honest mistake over Gilligan’s polemics.
Gilligan then takes issue with our letter to the Home Secretary over the exclusion order imposed on Dr Zakir Naik. Gilligan writes that ENGAGE has protested against the decision arguing that the move would “put at risk good community relations”.
We’re no strangers to the art of selected citations, so we’ve reproduced the paragraphs relating to Gilligan’s referencing of our letter below:
“Home Secretary, freedom of expression is a prized virtue in any democratic society and while we would not condone its abuse to incite hatred or acts of violence, nor would we wish for the right to free expression to be curtailed by a government on a whim. It is the right of citizens to hear objectionable speech from whatever source, a visiting foreign national or via other means, and unless such speech demonstrates an actual, evidential causal relationship to incitement to hatred or acts of violence, its curtailment is a gross infringement of the right to free expression.
“We would further add that the exclusion order puts at risk the very notion of good community relations in whose defence this move has been justified. There are many Muslims who are appalled at the decision taken to exclude Dr Zakir Naik from the UK all the while groups like the English Defence League terrorise neighbourhoods across the UK chanting obscene anti-Muslim slogans.
“In striking the balance between liberty and security we would urge you and the new coalition government not to retrace the steps of the former Labour administration which by readily sacrificing liberties in the name of national security left British citizens neither more secure against threats of terrorism nor sufficiently protected against the overbearing powers of the state.”
And then there’s Gilligan’s criticism of our critiques of the views espoused by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on the niqab and burqa. He writes, “She is far from the only Muslim to be attacked by iEngage. It is interesting that no Muslim MPs attended the launch of the all-party group last night.”
It is disingenuous to claim that ENGAGE is on the lookout for Muslims to attack. It’s not the individuals or the faiths they profess that come to our attention but the views they put in the public domain which have a bearing on Muslims in the UK. Is it then Gilligan’s contention that the likes of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Dr Taj Hargey or Rashid Ali should be free to articulate their views on matters ranging from headscarves, niqabs, burqas and Hizb ut-Tahrir but that those who dispute their views should put up and shut up? Strange model of press freedom and freedom of expression Gilligan purports to support.
As for his claim that no Muslim MPs attended the launch of the parliamentary meeting, Gilligan might be surprised, or perhaps not, to note that not a single member of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Anti-semitism is Jewish. Why then should he infer from the absence of Muslim MPs that the Islamophobia Group is somehow at a disadvantage?
Gilligan makes a rather interesting claim in a further paragraph writing that “hate crimes against Muslims have fallen, often dramatically, (in Tower Hamlets, for instance, London’s main Muslim area, hate crimes are down by 50% in seven years).”
If indeed hate crimes against Muslims are falling, then that is good news and long may the work of the police forces and local groups challenging prejudice and hate crimes continue.
The point of interest is how it is Gilligan concludes that hate crimes against Muslims have fallen? According to the response received to a question posed by Lord Eric Avebury on hate crime data collection and aggregation, “the data will not be disaggregated to reflect the religion or belief of offenders and victims.”
Since one of the areas of work of the all party parliamentary group will be hate crime and anti-Muslim violence, the way in which hate crime statistics are recorded and analysed will obviously be an area of focus. But how, given the response received by Lord Avebury does Gilligan conclude that “hate crimes against Muslims have fallen, often dramatically”?
There is a final point that Gilligan raises over which we do profess mea culpa. He cites our article on the report produced by iERA on non-Muslim attitudes towards Islam. But then, Gilligan erroneously claims the Group meeting took place “last night” (Wednesday 24th November) when, had he read the parliamentary notices to check his facts, he would have found that the inaugural AGM took place on Monday 15th November. Further, we don’t know who Gilligan’s sources are but he’s misinformed if he thinks Lisa Nandy MP attended that meeting. Given that Gilligan is rarely on top of his facts when blogging away, it’s a little bit of the pot calling the kettle black for him to not excuse the same flaws in others.
The general gist of Gilligan’s article, painstakingly put together to portray ENGAGE as “Islamist sympathizers,” has consequences beyond the polarization of debate between blog and counter-blog. Gilligan, and those like him, who smear Muslim organizations and accuse them of “deliberately conflat[ing] Islamism with the entire faith of Islam,” not only manipulate the contours of the debate by amplifying the voices of some British Muslims (Alibhai-Brown, Hargey and Ali, inter alia) and silencing the voices of others, they also, with their deranged attempts to prevent Muslims speaking for themselves and casually labeling those that don’t toe the Gilligan line as ”Islamists,” disenfranchises British Muslims.
The right of British Muslims to engage in political debate and to argue, criticize or applaud developments in policy and political discourse that upholds and strengthens our shared values and our equal citizenship is steadily undermined by the nefarious efforts of Gilligan and others who with their “Islamists under the bed” rhetoric look to create a Britain of unequal citizenship for its British Muslim citizens. Shame on you Andrew Gilligan.
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