Londonistan

by Melanie Phillips

  The Muslim Association of Britain, the British arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, had already positioned itself as the spearhead of radical Palestinianism in the country. In April 2002 it organized a large pro-Palestinian rally in central London, where some demonstrators signified their approval for terrorism by dressing as suicide bombers and others carried placards downloaded from the MAB website equating Israel with Nazi Germany.5

  With the Iraq war, the MAB realized the opportunity that was presented to vastly increase its own profile within the Muslim community. Its involvement in the Stop the War Coalition, led by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Communist Party of Britain, gave it real power. This antiwar coalition organized a series of rallies during 2003 that proved to be Britain’s biggest-ever political demonstrations. The MAB influence resulted in the slogan “Don’t attack Iraq/Free Palestine.” Two important but separate issues, both key parts of the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda, were thus neatly conflated in the public mind.6

  At a massive Stop the War rally held in Trafalgar Square in May 2003, Tony Benn, a former Labour MP and iconic politician of the left, called George Bush and Ariel Sharon the “two most dangerous men in the world,” while Andrew Burgin of the Stop the War Coalition demanded the dismantling of the Jewish state. “The South African apartheid state never inflicted the sort of repression that Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians,” he said to cries of “Allahu akhbar!” from the audience. “When there is real democracy, there will be no more Israel.”7

  In the wider community, the underlying agenda of hatred of the Jews was largely dismissed—not least by British Jews on the left. Not only did they too subscribe to the prevailing antiwar mood but, like many Britons, some of them actually endorsed the view that Israel was beyond the pale and dismissed any claims of resurgent antisemitism as special pleading. Nevertheless, three Jewish leftists wrote to the Guardian to express their shock and horror at being surrounded on such a march by “hate-filled chanting and images” in which anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiments were blurred. “How else could we feel,” they wrote, “when we saw placards featuring swastikas and the Star of David—an ancient symbol for all Jews everywhere, not just for the state of Israel—as synonymous symbols of oppression?”8

  Such a protest fell on deaf ears. On the back of the Stop the War Coalition, a major plank of the Islamists’ attack on the West was being promoted in London by two prominent British political figures.

  London’s Labour mayor, Ken Livingstone, has always espoused far-left views and has long enjoyed a reputation for being on the extreme edge of the Labour party. Indeed, in 2000 he was excluded from it altogether, having been thrown out when, while sitting in Parliament as a Labour MP, he stood as an independent candidate for the post of London’s mayor.9 In a remarkable volte-face he was brought back into the party by Tony Blair in 2004, when the prime minister realized in a panic that Livingstone was about to win that mayoral election.10 The result is that London is governed by a mayor with far-left views who appears to be impregnable, because the public overlook these opinions as a result of Livingstone’s populist charm and shrewd pavement politics.

  Whereas once he was notorious for supporting the IRA, Livingstone’s signature radicalism is now the Palestinian and Islamist cause. After the London bombings, the mayor’s hostility to Israel and to the West burst into the open. Having first wept over the slaughter and declared that he did not support suicide bombers, he then effectively justified such terrorism on the grounds that the terrorists were “oppressed” by the people they murdered, blaming the West for “double standards” around the world that drove young Muslim men to turn themselves into human bombs because “they only have their bodies to use as weapons” while the Israelis had “done horrendous things which border on crimes against humanity in the way they have indiscriminately slaughtered men, women and children in the West Bank and Gaza for decades.”11 Subsequently, he claimed that Palestinian Arabs turned themselves into human bombs against Israelis because they did not have the vote, and compared the Likud party to Hamas, saying: “I think the Israeli hardliners around Likud and Hamas are two sides of the same coin, they need each other to drum up support.”12

  Even more astoundingly, he tried to draw an analogy between British Muslim suicide bombers and British Jews. “If a young Jewish boy in this country goes and joins the Israeli army, and ends up killing many Palestinians in operations and can come back, that is wholly legitimate,” he said. “But for a young Muslim boy in this country, who might think, I want to defend my Palestinian brothers and sisters, and gets involved, he is branded as a terrorist. And I think it is this that has infected the attitude about how we deal with these problems.”13 But the equation was wholly false. British Jews do not serve in the Israel Defense Forces. “Jewish boys” serve in it only if they are Israeli citizens. And the actions of the IDF in defending Israel against terror are in a different moral universe from the actions of terrorists.

  Deciding to ride the tiger of British Islamism to court the ever more significant Muslim vote, Livingstone embraced the Muslim Brotherhood—literally so. At a conference in London in July 2004, Livingstone publicly embraced Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s spiritual leader who has not only endorsed the use of human bombs against Iraq and Israel but denounced the “incomparable and overt” iniquity of the Jews and called for Jews and other infidels to be killed.14

  The occasion was the annual session of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, held at London’s City Hall. Livingstone later claimed that Qaradawi had been invited to City Hall to oppose the French ban on the Islamic headscarf.15 But at the inaugural press conference, the mayor was the only person to mention the ban. Neither the MAB spokesman nor Qaradawi mentioned it, but concentrated instead on promoting the Fatwa Council’s leadership role in the community. The main purpose of the conference was clearly to promote Qaradawi and the Fatwa Council, and the headscarf debate and the use of the mayor were just means to that end.16

  What was so remarkable about Livingstone’s embrace of Qaradawi was that the sheikh’s virulent prejudices against homosexuals, women and “infidels” dramatically conflicted with Livingstone’s carefully cultivated “rainbow coalition” of precisely such victim groups from which his original political power base had been formed. Nevertheless, the mayor insisted that his controversial guest was a beacon of modernity:

  “Of all the Muslim leaders in the world today,” he told the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, “Sheikh Qaradawi is the most powerfully progressive force for change and for engaging Islam with western values. I think his is very similar to the position of Pope John XXIII.”17

  The mayor’s erstwhile “rainbow” constituency took a very different view. An unprecedented coalition encompassing Sikhs, Hindus, Orthodox Jews, gays, lesbians and students produced a dossier detailing Qaradawi’s many rabid utterances and accusing Livingstone of abusing his office. Livingstone reacted by accusing the opposition of being a Mossad plot to peddle a conspiracy theory to defame Islam.18

  The fact is that Livingstone was extremely close to the Muslim Brotherhood, with whom his office enjoyed close links. But the Islamists opened up a second and even more powerful front with the election of George Galloway, another former Labour MP, who had been thrown out of the party for inciting British troops in Iraq to mutiny. Galloway, a defender of Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat, enjoyed five minutes of fame when he put on a characteristically swaggering performance in front of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and disclaimed any wrongdoing in the “oil for food” scandal in Saddam’s Iraq. Now he had put himself at the head of the far-left/Islamist alliance in Britain with the creation of a new political party, Respect, of which he became the first MP.

  Staffed mainly by the Socialist Workers Party and other hard-left groups, Respect targeted its message at Muslims in accordance with the same political strategy that had created the Stop the War Coalition. Riding the ever-rising wave of opposi
tion to the Iraq war, Galloway used his formidable demagogic skills to whip up feeling among the disaffected Muslims of London’s East End and defeat the sitting Labour MP, Oona King, at the 2005 general election, establishing Respect as a genuine force in a number of other constituencies too.

  Such is the state of British politics that Oona King was herself a politician who had said of America: “It’s a f***ing f***ed-up power man, it’s a fundamentalist Christian power if we’re not careful. It’s terrifying.”19 In a newspaper article, she compared the Palestinians in Gaza to the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.20

  Nevertheless, what Galloway brought into being was a far more alarming development—sectarian politics, a specific appeal to Islamic religiosity through a political program skewed to foreign conflicts and tied up in the leftist projection of victimhood.

  Narrow-minded, intrinsically intolerant, chauvinist, exclusivist and demagogic, and with a capacity to whip up anti-Western hysteria, it was thus profoundly dangerous to Britain, providing an unprecedented platform for the propagation of Islamist views in Britain. It was in exactly the same East End district that another demagogue, Oswald Mosley, had launched his Union of British Fascists in the 1930s. The appeasement-minded, reality-denying mood of the country then was similar in many striking respects to the mood of Britain today.

  Galloway’s startling trajectory was, however, to be brought to an abrupt and unforeseen halt in January 2006 after his Muslim constituents were appalled by his participation in a vulgar and sexually voyeuristic TV show. The wider community took a similarly dim view of his behavior. This was all the more startling since his pro-Islamist demagoguery—including a visit to Damascus, where he exhorted the Arab masses to rise up against the West—had been largely treated with indifference.

  Neither Livingstone nor Galloway was taken seriously as a threat by the British public, who appeared almost wholly indifferent to the dangers they posed of whipping up Islamist extremism. One important reason was that the issue of Israel was central to their platform; and the British do not acknowledge the prejudice behind this onslaught against Israel because they tend to share it.

  The reason is that Israel has now been delegitimized so it has become seen as on a par with apartheid-era South Africa. This is because extreme ignorance about the Middle East has led the British to swallow a campaign of demonization against Israel conducted by the media, who overwhelmingly subscribe to the worldview of the left. The unholy alliance between the left and radical Islamists is not confined to the revolutionaries of the Socialist Workers Party. Because of the iron grip exercised by the left on the British intelligentsia, its worldview has become the norm for most of the media class.

  The result has been a media assault upon Israel of a kind that no other country in the world has endured. Of course, where Israel behaves controversially it should be criticized like anywhere else. But it has been demonized in a way that goes way beyond legitimate criticism, because the attacks are based on distortions, libels and outrageous double standards. The one democracy in the Middle East is being delegitimized as a pariah state while the media is relatively silent on the atrocities committed by the various despotisms that are trying to destroy it. Echoing the scapegoating of the Jews for people’s troubles that has defined anti-Jewish hatred throughout the centuries, Israel has become a scapegoat for the violence of the Muslims and Arabs who attack both it and the free world.

  Israel’s history is routinely denied or ignored, so that the defense against attack that it has been forced to mount since its inception is falsely represented as aggression. It is the target of systematic and egregious lies and smears. Its every action is reported malevolently, ascribing to it the basest motives and denying its victimization. Instead of being the world’s principal state-victim of terrorism, it is accused of being a terrorist state. So John Pilger, a persistent and egregious attacker, could write: “Thus, the state of Israel has been able to convince many outsiders that it is merely a victim of terrorism when, in fact, its own unrelenting, planned terrorism is the cause of the infamous retaliation by Palestinian suicide bombers.”21

  Israel is presented in the worst possible light by people who display an eagerness to believe that all its actions are malign, even where the facts clearly refute such assumptions. When Israel went into Jenin in 2002 to root out terrorists, the British media virtually without exception described the operation as a massacre, with hugely inflated figures of hundreds of dead Palestinians. Yet the facts were that only fifty-two Palestinians died, of whom the vast majority were armed men, and no fewer than twenty-three Israeli soldiers. But the false impression of a massacre, which ran in the press for days, has settled in the British psyche as a fact.

  There is a refusal to report the nature and intensity of the attacks being perpetrated against Israel. Only a few of the most spectacular atrocities are reported in Britain; and since some 90 percent of attacks are thwarted by the Israelis, the full scale of the bombardment is vastly greater. Israel’s attempt to defend itself is represented as a desire for vengeance or punishment—tapping into the ancient prejudice that the Jews are motivated by the doctrine of “an eye for an eye”—or sheer malice against the Palestinians.

  But then, in much of the media, Israel’s self-defense is regarded as intrinsically illegitimate. Thus Sir Max Hastings wrote in the Guardian: “Israel does itself relentless harm by venting its spleen for suicide bombings upon the Palestinian people.” Attempts by Israel (or Russia) to defend themselves against terror by killing terrorists were described as the equivalent of Nazi tactics or war crimes. Hastings managed to present the Israeli victims of terror as Nazi-style butchers while the murderous aggression of the Palestinians, whose own demonology of the Jews is sometimes redolent of Nazi images of a subhuman race, was ignored altogether.22

  But probably the greatest single reason for the obsessive and unbalanced focus on Israel is the prejudice and hostility of the BBC’s reporting. Unlike newspapers, the BBC is trusted as a paradigm of fairness and objectivity. In fact, it views the world from a default position on the left. And since it regards this as the political center of gravity, it cannot acknowledge its own bias. The BBC is thus a perfectly closed thought system.

  When it comes to Israel, the BBC persistently presents it in the worst possible light. The language and tone are loaded; Arab and Israeli interviewees are handled with a double standard; panel discussions are generally skewed, with two or three speakers hostile to Israel against one defender or, more often, none at all. Events in the Middle East are frequently decontextualized, so that reports of Israeli strikes against Palestinian terrorist targets downplay or even omit altogether any news of the attacks that prompted them. Thus Israel is transformed from victim to aggressor and presented as responsible for the violence in the Middle East when it is, in fact, the victim.

  The BBC rarely talks of Arab or Muslim violence; when it does, reporters are keen to sanitize it and present Israelis as aggressors. Thus one correspondent described how a Palestinian suspected of collaborating with the Israelis had been beaten by other Palestinians and shot at close range in the side of the head, after which the mother of one of the men he betrayed was called forward to stab his lifeless corpse and pluck out his eyes—and the correspondent referred to this as “Old Testament-style brutality.”23

  The BBC never lost an opportunity to claim that the settlers in Gaza were “Jewish” and the land they were settling was “Palestinian.” It wears its heart on its sleeve for the Palestinians, who are presented not as aggressors motivated to murder by brainwashing in hatred of Israel and the Jews, but as innocent victims. Reporter Barbara Plett actually burst into tears of sympathy when Yasser Arafat left the Muqata on his way to die in Paris.24

  While one program even staged a mock “war crimes” trial for Ariel Sharon, with the verdict—that Sharon had a case to answer—never in doubt, Arafat received very different treatment. One thirty-minute BBC profile described him as a “hero” and “an icon” and spoke of h
im as having “performer’s flair,” “charisma and style,” “personal courage,” and being “the stuff of legends.” Adjectives applied to him included “clever,” “respectable” and “triumphant.”

  In addition, some BBC staff are open about their sympathies for Hamas. The senior BBC Arabic Service correspondent in the Gaza Strip, Fayad Abu Shamala, told a Hamas rally on May 6, 2001, that journalists and media organizations in Gaza, including the BBC, were “waging the campaign [of resistance/terror against Israel] shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people.” The BBC’s response to requests from Israel that they distance themselves from these remarks was to issue a statement saying, “Fayad’s remarks were made in a private capacity. His reports have always matched the best standards of balance required by the BBC.”25

  Despite the claim that this is simply “criticism of Israel” and in no way antisemitic, the language used by the media constantly elides Israel and the Jews, and—consciously or unconsciously—draws on ancient antisemitic tropes to do so, even in the most respectable outlets. For example, the New Statesman printed an investigation into the power of the “Zionist” lobby in Britain, which it dubbed the “kosher conspiracy” and illustrated by a cover depicting the Star of David piercing the Union Flag. After protests, the editor apologized for the cover but saw nothing wrong in running an article based on the premise that there was something untoward about Jewish influence.

  But then, the New Statesman has run piece after piece defaming Israel. A typical column by John Pilger stated:The Zionist state remains the cause of more regional grievance and sheer terror than all the Muslim states combined . . . the equivalent of Madrid’s horror week after week, month after month, in occupied Palestine. No front pages in the west acknowledge this enduring bloodbath, let alone mourn its victims. Moreover, the Israeli army, a terrorist organisation by any reasonable measure, is protected and rewarded in the west. . . . The “neoconservatives” who run the Bush regime all have close ties with the Likud government in Tel Aviv and the Zionist lobby groups in Washington.26