 |  | | Martin ‘The Great Koran Con Trick’ Bright in this week's JC (and Spectator blog), writing on the prospect of a BNP MP in Barking and Dagenham and the possibility of the party winning control of its first ever local council next year, calls for a ‘strategic alliance between British Jews [and] anti-Islamists’ in London’s East End.
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The East End with its history of Jewish immigration and anti-fascist campaigning, Bright contends, has now become ‘the home of the Islamist extreme right’ and ripe for a Jewish return.
Bright writes that:
The ‘East London Mosque and the London Muslim Centre, both dominated by Jamaat-i-Islami (South Asia’s version of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood)’, ‘have played a central role in promoting a sectarian Islam that represents only one strand of thinking within the magnificent diversity of this world religion’.
Bright argues that the Jewish community, having once fought the fascists in East London, would do well to return and assist ‘the anti-Islamists within the Bangladeshi community’ in their fight against the ‘revival of totalitarian politics in Britain today’.
There is a lazy pseudo-intellectualism that pervades the thinking and writing of those, like Bright, who employ the sort of reductionism that allows them to equate Jamaat-i-Islami with the Muslim Brotherhood, and both these movements with ‘totalitarian politics’.
The reductionism is deliberately employed to conjure up images of a single pervasive enemy with no regard for the multiplicity of views which prevail within movements such as the JI and MB, let alone at the East London Mosque and the London Muslim Centre.
By categorizing all as ‘Islamists’ and their politics as ‘totalitarian’ Bright reveals the extent to which his prejudice and preconceptions clouds his judgment.
It is revealing particularly given the recent report by IPPR on the sort of politics that Muslim based political parties and movements are engaged in and the variances one finds in party politics in the different Muslim states.
Bright's criticisms of the ELM and LMC are reminiscent of the comments made by Jim Fitzpatrick MP during the segregation row (comments which incidentally, and to no-one’s surprise, Bright supported), that the choice of the marrying couple to separate their guests was influenced by ‘Islamists’ at the LMC.
You can read IFE President Habibur Rahman’s rejection of the inference that the Islamic Forum Europe, another ‘Islamist’ group implicated by Fitzpatrick, was in any way responsible for the choice exercised by the couple in question. But the use of the term 'Islamist extreme right' is not employed solely to grossly malign the ELM and LMC. Recoiling at Boris Johnson's visit to the centre some weeks ago, Bright uses the term for the deliberate purpose of casting these institutions in the same light as the BNP thus placing them beyond the respectable politician's pale. As a general election looms and Muslim institutions make use of mosques and other places to advocate for Muslim political engagement, by equating the ELM and LMC to the racist BNP, Bright hopes these institutions will be conveniently avoided by politicians in their efforts to engage with local Muslims.
Bright continues with his dichotomy of choices facing the East End with this:
‘Mike Gapes, the Labour MP for Ilford South, which borders Barking, is an Islamist target because of his consistent support for Israel. His seat is far from safe.’
This is a particularly damning remark. Gapes is the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and it is worth recalling here a significant recommendation made in the select committee’s report, ‘Global Security: Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories’, on the need for Government to open direct channels of communication with Hamas in the interests of Middle East peace.
During the parliamentary debate in the House at the time of Israel’s war against Gaza, Gapes questioned the Foreign Secretary stating:
‘The Foreign Secretary said that the Arab League and Egypt are engaged in dialogue with Hamas. In the process of getting a conclusion to this conflict and the beginnings of the necessary settlement, is it not time that the Quartet allowed its representative, Tony Blair, and other representatives to engage directly with Hamas, too, in order to move them to the Quartet principles of non-violence, recognition of the state of Israel and abiding by previous agreements?’
In devising friends and foes thus Bright, paradoxically, mirrors just the sort of narrow-mindedness and prejudice he levels against the ELM and LMC.
Bright’s remarks on Gapes are perhaps all the more interesting for coming in the week that the Dispatches documentary on the pro-Israel lobby’s influence on British media and politics was screened.
Making common cause and pooling resources to fight the very real threat that the BNP poses to community cohesion in the UK is a laudable endeavour and one that Muslims and Jews, as primary targets of the BNP’s hate-filled harangues, would do well to tackle together. Sadly, it is a prospect made all the more remote by the efforts of Bright and others to portray Muslim institutions committed to a multicultural Britain, in which individuals of all faiths and none flourish, as ‘extremists’.
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