Saturday, October 21, 2006

Dialogue 3. Silly and Baseless Slander

Again, in his comment to this post, Ismaeel said:

My objections here on this site are to the rather silly and baseless slander that you have thrown around on your site like your description of the MCB forcing veils on women, encouraging honor killings and forced marriages etc. That kind of "critical analysis" we can do without it to facilitate better understanding. That requires you to be civil. Hopefully one day you will understand that need.
I'm sure you will seek to defend yourself by saying you were being flippant and only seeking to amuse.
I assume this is a reference to an earlier post of mine where I said:
The consequences of giving preferential treatment to extremists like the MCB for a decade, of deferring to the real or imagined sensitivities of a small section of the population, and thereby causing genuine resentment, dislike and even hatred of all Muslims generally within society, then reversing the position and releasing a constant stream of remarks, initiatives and policy changes that feed this cultivated dislike could be horrendous.

Why are Labour doing this? It must be a deliberate policy. I can see no other explanation than that their private polling has revealed a serious threat to their position with the bedrock of their support, the white working class. Having caused the problem, by favouring Muslim extremists to the great personal cost especially of moderate Muslims in the country who have had to endure a surge of religious conservatism, veilings, forced marriage, curtailed female education, lost voting rights for the weakest (especially women) and "honour" violence, they are now reversing the position, also to the potential great cost of moderate Mulsims in this country.
That's a silly misrepresentation, Ismaeel. I think that the cultivation of the MCB and of the even more extreme MAB and IHRC has created a situation in which yet more extreme organisations have begun to campaign through proxies for veiling, and in which honour killings and forced marriages have become more common.

You yourself told me in Oxford that you consider the first part of this to be true, that the government has favoured extremist groups at the expense of more reasonable ones. We specifically mentioned the MCB in this conversation.

So no, I wasn't being flippant. And I don't find it amusing.

1 comment:

Peter Risdon said...

Why are Labour doing this? It must be a deliberate policy. I can see no other explanation than that their private polling has revealed a serious threat to their position with the bedrock of their support, the white working class. Having caused the problem, by favouring Muslim extremists to the great personal cost especially of moderate Muslims in the country who have had to endure a surge of religious conservatism, veilings, forced marriage, curtailed female education, lost voting rights for the weakest (especially women) and "honour" violence, they are now reversing the position, also to the potential great cost of moderate Mulsims in this country.

Peter, please show me some documentary evidence of Muslims in this country being forced into wearing the hijab and or nikab, or having their education stopped or losing voting rights. Also show me evidence for a rise in honor killings within the Muslim community, if anything they have decresed and have actually always been more prevelant in other Asian communities. All of the above in baseless and without evidence

That's a silly misrepresentation, Ismaeel. I think that the cultivation of the MCB and of the even more extreme MAB and IHRC has created a situation in which yet more extreme organisations have begun to campaign through proxies for veiling, and in which honour killings and forced marriages have become more common.

And i think that's alarmist scaremongering with little or no evidence for it

You yourself told me in Oxford that you consider the first part of this to be true, that the government has favoured extremist groups at the expense of more reasonable ones. We specifically mentioned the MCB in this conversation.So no, I wasn't being flippant. And I don't find it amusing.

I don't remember saying that, i remember saying that i think that some of these groups are highly unrepresentative of the vast majority of Muslims in this country and are given far too much prominence by the media and government. I don't brand Muslim groups moderates and extremists.