The Centre For Social Cohesion

Towards the end of last year, following separate exposes by John Ware and Martin Bright of just how immoderate the views and policies are of the leaders of the Muslim Council of Britain, until then the government’s preferred interlocutors when dealing with the country’s two million Muslims, it looked as though at last the government was finally about to get serious about henceforth dealing with and supporting only genuinely moderate Muslim organisations and their leaders.

In a blaze of publicity, Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly announced ‘a fundamental rebalancing’ of the government’s relations with the Muslim community, indicating that, in future, only those Muslim organisations that had shown themselves to be genuinely moderate could expect any government grants or its ear.

Well, we can see from two news items in today’s press just how feeble and short-lived this government resolve has turned out to be.

Speaking on the second day of the major London conference ‘Islam and Muslims in the World Today’ David Cameron has spoken of the need to re-invent British-ness in order to tackle the growing problem of “cultural separatism”.

“The challenge now is to create a positive vision of a British society that really stands for something and makes people want to be a part of it," he said.

However Cameron also said that much of the onus also lay with Muslim religious leaders and that “confronting the false basis of this perversion of Islam is one part of what needs to be done.”

It seems unlikely however that Cameron is likely to attempt to separate ‘the true Islam’ from its numerous “false” perversions.

Instead the presence of Ali Goma, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, at the event – which Tony Blair had addressed the previous day – indicated a possible new direction for government policy.

Time Out has just confirmed that it is not a magazine of theology.

Before revealing that the Church Times is not the place for nightclub-listings, or that the lavatory-arrangements of bears are largely woodlands-based, it is worth mulling an extraordinary article in the current issue of Time Out which suggests that the magazine should be re-titled. Perhaps ‘Way Out’. Or just ‘Nuts’.

In ‘Is London’s Future Islamic?’ the author (one ‘Michael Hodges’) begins with a heavy-handed parody of what he thinks critics of Islamism think an Islamic Britain might look like. But stick with it, because it’s only after the attempt at parody that the real hilarity gets under-way.

Among the benefits the writer seriously argues an Islamic Britain would enjoy are: greater green-ness, better health-care, better education, better food, and better arts. He also concludes that an Islamic London would be ‘a little less cruel.’

Recently, I posted a blog expressing concern about newspaper reports that this year’s poppy crop in Afghanistan promised to be of record proportions. My concern arose from that country being the source of virtually all of the world’s entire supply of heroin, and from how active in its illicit sale were those here with connections to that part of the world.

It turns out that I am not alone in harbouring such concerns.

When calling for an end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory at this coming Saturday's 'Enough' Rally in London, how many demonstrators present there will be aware or even interested that many Palestinians in Gaza want the Israelis to return?

As MEMRI reports:

The Charity Commission has found that George Galloway's Miriam Appeal - an organisation set up to campaign against UN sanctions on Iraq - may have indirectly received as much as $376,000 from Saddam Hussein's government.

The Commission said that large sums of money donated to the charity by Fawaz Zureikat - a Jordanian businessman and one of the Miriam Appeal's trustees - had come from the sale of Iraqi oil through the oil-for-food programme.

The Commission found no evidence of wrong-doing however and merely said that Galloway and the charity's trustees should have "should have been extremely vigiliant" about accepting donations.

The findings of the Charity Commission look set to put new pressure on Galloway - an MP for the anti-Iraq war Respect Party - at the very moment when the portly Scot is attempting to receive his politcal fortures by taking a new role in TV's Big Brother as a presenter.

A London court has found a Kurdish man guilty of organising the murder of his 20-year old daughter for undermining his family's "honour".

Prosecutors said that Mahmod Mahmod ordered his relatives to arrange the killing of his daugher Banaz in early 2006 after finding that she left the husband he had forced her to marry and was now dating an Iranian Kurd who was "not a strict Muslim", Reuters reported.

The details of the case - the latest 'honour killing' to come before the British courts - are evidence of rising Islamic radicalism according to Nazir Afzal, a Crown Prosecution Service director who organised one of the UK's largest conferences on honour killings in 2004.

Despite all the appalling details to have emerged in today's press about the truly dreadful ‘honour killing’ of Banaz Mahmod, given yesterday’s guilty verdict of her father and uncle for arranging her murder, the true and horrendous significance of one aspect of her case, to my mind, has yet to have be adequately noted or commented on.

It makes details of her murder even more chilling and disturbing, if that is possible, than those that have already emerged and been noted by the media.

It gives considerable pleasure to be able to report that Saturday’s ‘Enough coalition’ rally turned out to be a washout. The march against ‘Israeli occupation’ which the organisers believed would bring tens of thousands of people out onto the streets of London had to make do with a few thousand odd stragglers.

Among them were the terrorist-supporters and wannabe-terrorists, holocaust-deniers and anti-semitic conspiracy theorists who this blog has made mention of in the past. Though saying so says much about our times, it is nevertheless a notable success that – even with so many ‘celebrity’ endorsements – so few people wanted to walk down the street with this crowd.

Today’s Times carries a comment piece about the resolution adopted at last month’s annual conference of UCU, the British universities’ lecturers union, calling for an academic boycott of Israel.

Entitled ‘This boycott is not just wrong, it’s anti-Semitic’, its authors, Anthony Julius and Alan Dershowitz, argue the call is not just ill-judged in strictly political terms, something for which they make a convincing case. They also argue it is motivated by anti-Semitism, a claim for which they do not make out a convincing case, despite it being the main burden of their piece.

Reaction in Pakistan and Iran to the knighting of Salman Rushdie has not been celebratory.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mohammad Ali Hosseini has said: ‘Honouring and commending an apostate and hated figure will definitely put the British officials [in a position] of confrontation with Islamic societies.’

"Unfortunately, the U.S.A., Britain, the alliance, our government... are driven... by the obsession to eliminate the Muslims from the surface of the earth. Whether my colleagues, companions and Muslim brothers die today or tonight, every drop of blood will invigorate the Muslim movement."

So reportedly said the leader of the “British brigade” in explanation of why "his team" stands ready to carry out suicide attacks in Great Britain. He reportedly did so in a valedictory speech delivered at a graduation ceremony for future suicide-bombers held ten days ago at a training camp somewhere inside Afghanistan near the Pakistan border.

John Reid, the foreign secretary, has defended - in unusually strong terms - a government decision to award a knighthood to Salman Rushdie.

"We have a set of values that accords people honours when they contribute to literature even if we don't agree with their point of view," he said.

"We have to be sensitive to the views of people of religion, people who have very strong views."

"But I think that we all appreciate that in the long run our protection of the right to express your views in literature, argument, politics, is of over-riding political value to our societies."

‘[Although] our own commission was set up in the wake of 7/7, … we would recommend that central Government …[adopt] a whole community approach to be the driving force of central Government engagement on integration and cohesion. Although the Government rightly takes a particular approach when working with Muslim communities to prevent extremism, work to build integration and cohesion is something separate – and something that has to be about all different groups, and the bridges between them. We therefore ask that Government set out a clear narrative about the difference between the two agendas.’ (4.11)

Mohammad Sawar, who became Britain's first ever Muslim member of parliament in 1997, has said he will step down after the next elections.

He said he took the decision after receiving numerous death threats from the friends of three Pakistanis who were imprisoned for their brutal murder of a white teenager in Glasgow in 2004.

Sawar - of Pakistani origin himself - played a key role in arranging for the three to be extradited from Pakistan.

News that the Labour MP had been threatened by members of Britain's Pakistani community for helping punish the killers of a white teenager has evoked sympathy but little surprise or outrage.

Jack McConnell, the Scottish Labour Party leader, said: "Mohammad Sarwar made history and made a real difference. He and his family deserve a break; they can look back with pride on all he has achieved."

McConnell's mundane response is evidence of how violence and the threat of violence have become an accepted part of race relations in Britain - and indeed in Europe as a whole.

Being desperate to stop the radicalisation of British-born Muslims, the government turned for expert advice on how best they may be taught about Islam so that they would learn that only moderate versions of their religion were, if not authentic, then at least palatable.

To be their adviser, the government chose Dr Ataullah Siddiqui of the Markfield Institute of Higher Education. Well, however conversant Dr Siddiqui might be with moderate versions of Islam, he certainly should know his stuff about the other forms of that religion, given the institution at which he works.

On Tony Blair’s last day in office pundits are fishing around for apposite quotes. To this observer, the best words from the now former Prime Minister were the ones he wrote in the Sunday Times a month ago.

In ‘Shackled in the war on terror’ he expressed with enormous clarity where – agree with him or not – he stands on the issue of our time. He wrote:

According to the recently published Siddiqui report entitled Islam at Universities in England: Meeting the Needs and Investing in the Future, there is one vitally important form of information about Islam which Britain's universities are currently failing to provide to their students, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. This is information about ‘how the teachings of Islam can be put into practice in a contemporary pluralist society.’ (p.4)