Tuesday morning saw the launch of a report that must constitute one of the most appalling abuses of Mayoral privilege even from this London Mayor. After sitting on the final report (presumably in embarrassment) for some time, Ken Livingstone finally held a press conference to launch a work of research which can only really be described by that old Private Eye moniker: ‘piss-poor.’
The report – ‘The search for common ground: Muslims, non-Muslims and the UK media’ – purports to be a study of the British press and its ‘Islamophobia.’ If can be found here.
The report’s nine authors include Inayat Bunglawala and two other members of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). Thus a report which includes among its ‘findings’ a startling attack on John Ware and his superb BBC critique of the MCB’s leadership is here – on the initiative of the Mayor of London – critiqued by, er, the MCB.
Among the other authors (presumably to prevent an absolutely clean-sweep by the MCB) are a Guardian journalist, a couple of people who have made their careers from ‘Islamophobia’-spotting and an academic called Julian Petley.
I heard a presentation from Mr Petley, (a professor of film and television at Brunel University) earlier this year, and a weaker academic presentation I’ve never heard. Mr Petley’s technique on that occasion – at a colloquium at his own university – was to differentiate between ‘progressive’ and (if I remember correctly) ‘anti-progressive’ media. Or to put it another way – papers he liked and papers he didn’t like.
The Livingstone report takes the same rigorous line, essentially dividing coverage of Islam in the UK media into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ stories.
Fortunately at the press launch of this document there were a few sturdy journos doing the job which the report’s authors failed to do. And so what should have been a simple back-patting formality turned into one of the most enjoyable, train-wreck press conferences I’ve ever witnessed.
The whole wonderful event can be seen here. It’s from about ten minutes in that the fun really starts.
Nick Cohen, John Ware, Shiv Malik and Martin Bright get in question after question. And frankly you end up almost feeling sorry for Livingstone and one of the report’s authors, Robin Richardson. Richardson starts by looking deflated and ends looking worse. If there were an equivalent of the RSPCA set up to protect Mayors and their hire-lings then the event would have been shut down long before the first round of questions had ceased.
Being asked to pick a favourite moment is hard. Perhaps it is John Ware’s request to know where – if the Mayor’s comment were true, and the report’s nine authors were all academics – Mr Bunglawala holds a university chair?
Or perhaps the prize for ‘putting a stick in the Mayor’s spokes’ should go to a moving methodological query from Index on Censorship. Their reporter cited the case of the Iranian government’s Holocaust-denial cartoon competition. This had been in the press around the week in which the sample had been taken. Under the criteria laid out by Mr Richardson and his colleagues, the Holocaust-denial cartoon competition would obviously count as a story which portrayed Muslims negatively. But ‘how exactly’, Index on Censorship seeks to know, ‘is the press supposed to report that [story] positively?’
The question – and many others in this press conference – shows up the true vapidity of Mayor Livingstone’s grievance-mongering.
The free media used its freedom to critique an unrepresentative and backward organisation – the MCB. The Mayor’s response was to hire representatives of that organisation to explain why such attacks are not attacks on their own organisation, but on their whole religion and all their fellow Muslims. Perhaps the MCB just hopes that if they stir people up long enough they will end up responding.
This has come in the same week as the Mayor chose to use his time, once again, to write a lengthy and inaccurate letter to Private Eye defending Yusuf al-Qaradawi and libelling the Middle East Media Research Institute.
I don’t want to be so rude as to suggest that the Mayor of London is wasting precious time or money. But does it never strike him as shameful that even all these years after starting his crash-course in Islamic theology, the best he thinks he can find in the way of progressive Muslim preachers is Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and the best he thinks he can do in the way of a moderate Muslim group is the MCB?
The fact that Livingstone thinks British Muslims are – and should be – represented by such individuals speaks of more 'Islamophobia' than all the serried ranks of quotes cited in his degraded and wasteful report.
