[matilda] Cameron must rein in these toxic neocon attack dogs

[ruhul]

The exposure of faked evidence for a thinktank report is a warning of
the dangers of Britain's anti-Muslim media campaign 

Seumas Milne

Thursday December 20, 2007

The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>

Last Saturday, Ahmed Hassan, a 17-year-old Muslim student, was
stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack by a gang of white youths at
Dewsbury railway station in west Yorkshire. Two have now been charged
with his murder, and police say they are investigating whether there
was a racial or religious motivation. In the Muslim communities in
Dewsbury and neighbouring Batley, where Hassan lived, there's little
doubt about it. In the run-up to today's Eid festival, Hassan's family
issued a statement saying they hoped their loss would help "unite the
community and all faiths". 

But divisions run deep in the area. The far-right British National
party, which has increasingly turned its racist venom against Muslims
in recent years, won over 5,000 votes in Dewsbury in the last general
election, its highest tally in the country. Its leader, Nick Griffin,
has argued that his party must capitalise on the "growing wave of
public hostility to Islam currently being whipped up by the mass
media". It's not hard to see why he sees an opportunity. Since the
July 2005 bombings in London, there has been a stream of
sensationalised and poisonous stories about Britain's Muslims. 

This media onslaught - often based on research by apparently reliable
thinktanks - has clearly fed anti-Muslim prejudice. Combined with
hyped terror-plot reports, the point has now been reached where
Britons are found in polls to be more suspicious of Muslims than are
Americans or citizens of any other major European state. For many
Muslims, that heightens a sense of intimidation and alienation. For a
minority, it translates into Islamophobic violence on the streets:
Asian people are now twice as likely to be stabbed to death as a
decade ago, and four out of five convictions for religiously
aggravated offences last year involved attacks on Muslims. 

But now the seamy underbelly of this dangerous campaign is coming to
light. At the end of October, the influential Conservative-linked
thinktank Policy Exchange published a report entitled The Hijacking of
British Islam, which claimed that 26 out of nearly 100 mosques
surveyed had been found to be selling "extremist material, some of it
antisemitic, misogynistic, separatist and homophobic". The story was
given top billing by newspapers and broadcasters. "One in four British
mosques is in the grip of extremism", the Sun screamed, while the
Times splashed it across its front page under the headline: "Lessons
in hate found at leading mosques". 

But last week, BBC's Newsnight programme - previously not shy of
running inflammatory items itself on the Muslim community - revealed
that a forensic examination of five receipts provided by Policy
Exchange for the material had found them to be either faked, written
by the same person, and/or were not issued by the mosques in question.
A sixth receipt was also regarded as unreliable. 

It might be supposed that receipts from the other 20 mosques were
nevertheless found to be authentic and that Policy Exchange's basic
case held. Not so. Newsnight didn't have the resources to check them.
But it has since emerged that in one of these cases, Edinburgh central
mosque, the mosque authorities insist books said by Policy Exchange to
have been found there were in fact dumped in its grounds after the
report was published. In another, the Times has this week had to
publish an apology to East London mosque chairman Dr Muhammad Abdul
Bari, after reporting Policy Exchange's claim that the mosque was
selling extremist literature. 

Yesterday I contacted yet another mosque, Rochdale Central, claimed
by Policy Exchange to have provided a receipt for extremist
literature. No, said the imam, Hafiz Ikram, "we haven't got a bookshop
and we don't sell books. Once or twice a year, people set up stalls in
the carpark outside the mosque after Friday prayers, but they have
nothing to do with us." That makes all nine receipts so far
investigated either fabricated or inaccurate. 

Policy Exchange insists it is standing by its research. But, given
the evidence of falsification, it clearly cannot be regarded as
reliable, nor can there be any confidence that the mosques supposedly
surveyed were a representative sample. The thinktank has form in this
area: earlier this year, the methodology and reliability of another
heavily publicised report on Muslim separatism came under heavyweight
academic attack. But it was still used by David Cameron to rubbish
multiculturalism. 

Charles Moore, Policy Exchange's chairman and former Daily Telegraph
editor, claims Newsnight "told a small story" about dodgy receipts to
"kill a much bigger story" - that "extremist literature was available
in the mosques". But the extent of that availability is crucial: one
of Policy Exchange's researchers told Newsnight they had had to go
back three times to get hold of books. Of course, there are plenty of
ultra-conservative and reactionary religious Islamic texts in
circulation (though little of what Policy Exchange identified had
anything to do with jihad) and those are most effectively challenged
by other Muslims. You can also see ugly material in other religious
institutions, such as the aggressively homophobic pamphlets I recently
found on display in a south-west London church. 

But the exaggeration of such phenomena and constant regurgitation of
Muslim-baiting "research" by hard-right thinktanks like Policy
Exchange and the Centre for Social Cohesion misleads the public and
inflames ethnic tensions. It is also transparently driven by a
neoconservative agenda that seeks to convince people that jihadist
terror attacks in Britain are fuelled not by outrage at western
violence and support for tyranny in the Muslim world, but by hatred of
western culture and freedoms. 

The roll call of those involved in Policy Exchange makes the point.
Its policy director, Dean Godson, who blustered at Newsnight's
presenter Jeremy Paxman last week, worked for the Reagan
administration, was a signatory to the neocon Project for the New
American Century, and was special assistant to the jailed former
Telegraph owner Conrad Black. The report's author is Denis MacEoin, a
pro-Israel campaigner who says he has "very negative feelings" about
Islam. The thinktank's founders were Nicholas Boles, now Tory
candidate for Grantham, and Michael Gove, author of that British
neocon rallying cry Celsius 7/7 and now the Tory education spokesman.
If Cameron cares anything for community relations, he should rein in
these toxic attack dogs.



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