Preventing Terrorism With Petit-Fascist Distractions?

Home Secretary Theresa May accused past anti-extremism strategies of engaging with groups that they "should have been confronting" and proscribing (image: ukhomeoffice)

By Elliot Adams

I’m unsettled by the shift in purpose in the governments counter-terrorism measures. I was rather hoping this would be one of the issues where the Lib-Dem part of the coalition won out over the Tories. Unfortunately, in the run up to last week’s release of the government’s updated Prevent counter-terrorism strategy there were numerous concerning hints in the press that this was not going to be the case.

These showed a coalition that was shifting from a strategy of preventing violent extremism by engaging with non-violent radical groups, to one of pursuing extreme views(violent and non-violent) and survielling the communities that harbour these views.

Notably, there was the revelation that National Health Service doctors will be required to identify and report people who may be “vulnerable” to future recruitment by terrorist groups. This was one example of how the new Prevent is intended to bring an end to “ungoverned spaces” in education, in the NHS, charities and discussion forums. To this end, May criticised Muslim organisations for allowing extremist speakers – and under the updated Prevent allowing such views to be discussed could lead to the gathering of organisation members being proscribed.

Furthermore, in a stunning bit of scape-goating that could not possibly aid efforts against radicalisation, May accused Universities of “complacency” in tolerating radical views on campus. I had a crack at this on the day Prevent was published, needless to say I think such attitudes do more harm than good.

I’ve had a more in depth read through of the publication since, and I find myself returning to this issue of refusing to engage with – or even to outlaw – non-violent Muslim groups that give air to extreme views(it is almost entirely Islamist extremism addressed by Prevent, despite a few cursory nods to extreme right-wing or Irish terrorism).

In the past, to counter violent extremism, previous governments have worked with groups like Jamiat-e Islami who were ideologically supportive of some forms of non-violent political Islamism.

I’m not sure if anyone is really qualified to speak as to the efficacy of this, but to me this just makes sense in our national context. Many British Muslim families are of fairly recent immigrant origin, with early migrant communities being built at a time when their countries of origin were held together by a political Islamist social infrastructure. Therefore, the ideologies of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood shaped these communities on an organisational level.

Despite their possibly illiberal views, they were non-violent, connected and were a valuable communication point between these British Muslim communities and the anti-terrorism initiatives of the Police and government.

But the updated Prevent, precludes such communication. Prevent claims that the real problem is a dangerous ideology shared by both non-violent and violent groups, and as such, the government should not work with them at all.

Adding to these problems is that ‘extremist’ isn’t adequately defined in Prevent, nor has it been outside the report. It apparently encompasses those who have ‘un-british’ values, those who do not engage in ‘full participation in society’ and those who ‘implicitly tolerate the killing of British soldiers’.

But this is so vague you can contort it to include just about anyone you want to, This is the rare occasion that I agree with the Archbishop Cranmer Blog that “By codifying a set of values to which Muslim groups will need to subscribe, the Government is effectively reintroducing a Test Act: only those who profess adherence to the orthodoxy will be eligible for … government engagement.”

This will make impossible many valuable partners for the government and police against terrorist security threats. The little guidance Prevent gives on the matter implies that problematic views on gender rights would be enough to exclude a group, which is a subject that could exclude even moderate faith groups.

I understand the hesitancy to engage groups with Islamist influences that may have sympathy for more violent organisations, but we already have heavy-handed and impractical laws that forbid such groups from inciting violence
or religiously-based hatred. The conviction rate with these laws is miniscule, but as these groups haven’t even been threatened with prosecution surely they should be acceptable on those grounds?

To counter Islamist terrorism I can’t see why we wouldn’t want to work with – rather than against – the British Muslim community. They have been conducting a debate on these issues for a long time and, I think, because of these in-group discussions the influence of Islamism is nowhere near the strength it once was. I fear the attitudes revealed by Prevent risk undermining moderate positions in that debate, and legitimising more radical elements by publicly making a Pariah of politically-engaged Muslim groups.

Universities “complacent on Toryism” Islamic Extremists Warn

Worthy organisations like the Bullingdon Tory Studies Club, which were set up to monitor Tory extremism and promote more moderate views, have in fact become Tory recruitment centres giving the world the extremism of David Cameron and Gideon Osborne.

By Elliot Atherton-Adams 1st Earl of Edinburgh

Extremist Islamic group,  Harkat-ul-Jehad, have accused top British Universities of complacency in dealing with people openly preaching the kind of extremist views one would normally expect to hear from the Conservative party. These Universities they warn, have become a training ground for Tory extremist groups.

Hafiz Saeed from the influential terrorist thinktank said, “Too long has Oxbridge been complacent in tolerating Tories on campus. They are completely blinkered, I think they have secretively placed a fatwa supporting of Tory extremist preaching on their campuses.”

Harkat-ul-Jehad has claimed that Oxbridge universities were at risk of becoming “recruitment centres for Conservative Future[a.k.a. 'The Cameron Youth]‘.

Guy Maquillé the National Union of Students president shares a concern about the threat identified by Islamic extremist groups.

“There has indeed been growing problem of conservatism within universities, these Tories have braisenly peddled attitudes to public services and society that amount to anti-Western propaganda.

He went on to say that there has been an increasing problem on campus of pelting the poor with pennies and taunting the underclasses. There had been troubling incidents of “barbour-jacketed, hunter-booted toffs chasing the the working classes through campuses for sport on horseback”. Most disturbingly, there is evidence of students in possession of copies of Tory literature, for example the novels of Edwina Currie – we can only hope that the dangerous deviants checking these books out of the library will be executed in due course.”

However, the Prime Minister’s lib-dem vassal, assures us that there is “no case for claiming that universities are complacent about Tory recruitment on campuses.”

“We have to distinguish between extreme views, and violent extremism. We must allow Tory perspectives that do not break the law to be expressed, no matter how repulsive and offensive we find those perspectives.”

He claims, “British universities are working with student associations and the police to swiftly deal with anyone who is dismantling welfare, the NHS or other public services.”

Tory propaganda being circulated in universities

Gerald and Ollie, two young British Tory students in the Purple Turtle Union Bar however paint a different tweed-shaded picture. It is a portrait of Britain under Tory law; horseback hunting of single mums and ‘hoodies’ would be legalised, Thatcher would be made Britain’s patron saint, double-barrelled names would be compulsory, the BBC would be replaced with mandatory clockwork-orange-style Sky news propaganda absorption sessions and Cameron would rule over us from atop a throne made from union leaders’ skulls – while Andy Coulson and Gideon George Oliver Osborne squatted at his feet rasping and picking their teeth with the bones of librarians.

Gerald made his position clear, “Labour left our university system infested with the working classes, the burden of poor students is one we all face, we are all in this together, we simply need to drive these rapscallions into the ocean and make it impossible for the damnable poor to go to university in the future.”

“Whiff whaff?” enquired Ollie, confused.

There are many young Tories in our universities like Ollie, who clearly lack the capacity to notice their indoctrination into more extreme forms of Toryism, “this the sad fact we need to address” says Hafiz Saeed, so that “our universities return to being a mecca for “only those with a healthy thirst for knowledge and burning hatred of the decadent west.”

Addendum: apparently a fellow by the name of ‘Spacey‘ fabricated a similar  comical confabulation over on his blog – so all credit to him for that, and clearly being a gentleman of infinite jest.

In Defense of the Burkha Ban

By Elliot Adams

France’s far-right appeasing Burkha ban has been writ in law for a while now, though it hasn’t been enforced and there has been some further political wrangling over just what the law means for France.

If you’ve managed to miss this part of Sarkozy‘s scheme to win the support of fools and fascists, it constitutes a full ban on covering the face in public – with the exception of people wearing motorcycle helmets and attending festivals. This is bad news for protesters, scarf-fanciers and people with excessive facial hair, but the main thrust of this attack is against muslim women who choose to wear the Niqab, Burkha or the Snood.

Now this sounds like an idiotic idea the 1st, 2nd and 99th time you hear it – but give it that magic 100th chance. You should do so because, properly enforced, it also means a ban on these fuckers;

The minarets of Disneyland’s castle represent the greater threat to western culture

When they’re not peddling cheap plastic child-silencers with the Disney brand’s formidable pester power, sexualising children or indoctrinating them with the many questionable ethical lessons of their films and characters, Disney are just busy being hella’ creepy.

With this new law we can hope that Disneyland Paris will be depopulated of its grotesque denizens. These tortured chimeras are victims too though, they cannot speak(their mouths stuffed with blackened gauss) and they cannot leave the confines of their phantasmagorical realm. As Sarkozy said, “We cannot accept … prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity” and quite rightly so, I can only assume he was thinking of the creatures in the ghetto of Disneyland Paris, their curse is to forever shamble through unreal streets with permanent smiles stretched over their faces and their unmoving dead eyes glaring for the next child to ensnare.

Disney's advertising publicly sexualises children, Burkhas publicly desexualise women - I think the former is worse.

Disney raises the West’s children, championing the bland and the insipid, replacing parenting with a multimedia feast of bright colours and unimaginative stories of outdated morality.

Disney is a bigger threat to Western culture than any act of religious devotion and this new law would strike a mighty blow against its heart of darkness in Disneyland paris – if I had my way Cinderella would be dragged from her home and shot behind the chemical sheds, but more moderate voices prevail for now. That is why the Burkha ban should have our support, only perhaps we should rename it to recognise our real enemy – henceforth it shall be known as ‘The Magic Kingdom Final Solution’.

Ready to be shipped to Paris at a moments notice.

We must of course make an example of their leader, Mickey ‘lord of the woods’ Mouse. Construction has already begun on his means of dispatch, to be placed in Place du Carrousel where the Parisian guillotine once sat.

Officials insist the Burkha ban is not discriminatory because it would apply to everyone, not just Muslims. By that logic however I would be unsurprised, though horrified, to see the suggestion of new laws prohibiting the possession of a yarmulhah, or the wearing of a crucifix. But I can hold out hope for the outlawing of oversized mouse ears and *shudder* child-like glee.

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Let's make it happen France, be cheese-eating victory monkeys. (Image: Unknown)

Pope Pilgrim Vs. The Secular World

Emperor Palpatine finds your lack of faith disturbing

By Elliot Adams

So the Pope has come and gone through Edinburgh, the corner of the UK I call home, on his deeply unpopular tour of Britain. It’s not just that there were more seats empty than expected at his gigs, people were questioning whether in the current economic climate Britain should be footing most of the multi-million pound bill for his trip. Stephen Fry in particular put this quite eloquently in an interview with the BBC discussing how he feels the Pope does not qualify for a state visit and should instead pay for his totally welcome visit from the Vatican’s own immensely deep pockets, this and similarly sedate comments were of course portrayed by the Daily Mail as a left-wing venom spitting “atheist hate campaign“, but in reality these reasonable concerns were being voiced from a national majority varied in their political and spiritual leanings.

But behind the usual tabloid hysterics, there was for once an once of truth. There were campaigns to protest the popes visit on grounds of the church’s stance on contraception, homosexuals, women’s rights and child abusers amongst the clergy – there was even a plan to have the pope arrested in the same manner as Augusto Pinochet when he was arrested in Britain in 1998 - which is all fair enough if the evidence is there. But what concerns me is all the comments I heard and read about ‘the Catholics’, connecting them (and the pope) as a group with paedophilia and homophobia just because they were Catholics.

The Vatican got their equally-reductive pre-emptive strike in first before leaving for Old Blighty’s shores. One of Benedict’s closest aides, Cardinal Walter Kasper, was pulled off the trip when in German magazine Focus he called Britain a ”third world country” because of “an aggressive New Atheism [which] is widespread in England” and brutalises Christians with its monstrous secular ways and presumably it’s long thin claws.

The the pope himself tripped over Godwin’s law in a speech condemning atheist ways and putting responsibility for the rise of Nazi fascism in Germany, the holocaust et c. at atheism’s door. This is of course ridiculous in many ways and some easily provoked sorts have pointed out Hitler’s Catholicism, the various Nazi-Vatican concords and that the pope himself was a member of the Hitler youth. I prefer to just chuckle occasionally at his similarity in appearance to Emperor Palpatine off star wars and his awesome car, but it’s clear that the heart of his trip was to give warnings of the dangers and evils of secularism.

This is a tame squabble compared to the GROUND ZERO MONSTER MOSQUE OF MURDER debate from across the pond, which is currently so heated that you can just about boil an egg by pointing a chicken at the Atlantic.

If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid this ‘debate’; it concerns a mile-high mosque that is going to be built at ground zero, with a thousand golden minarets that are carefully arranged to cast the shadow of a giant upraised middle finger over mourning 9/11 widows, while Muslims fire AK-47′s into the air screaming whatever that foreign word for ‘victory’ is, around a bonfire of bibles, American flags and human decency.

Or at least that’s what some media outlets would have you believe, it’s actually a community centre a few blocks away from ground zero with a basketball court, swimming pool, small restaurant, comfy chairs and presumably somewhere you can buy a halal muffin, the bastards.

It all seems very myopic from where I’m standing, i.e. gawking from the sidelines of an absurd fight I didn’t pick, and which seems intent on dragging me in somehow.

The pope rolled down my road in the pope-mobile but I didn’t go see him, because my spiritual experience only extends to typing ‘omg’ every now and then; he’s just another rich old guy with a cool car to me and though I find the papacy historically very interesting, I know very little about this particular chap. Consequently I can’t really comment on whether he is involved in covering up child-molesting or if his spiritual disposition is related to this in any way. I do however have an old mate with a cool car who has a narcotic-triggered spiritual disposition that leaves many people incensed and I’d like to use him to express myself here – it’s one of them there ‘metaphors’ I’ve been hearing about.

The mate in question can ramble for hours about the time he took a especially lethal strain of hallucinogenic fungus he bought off the internet and sat outside in the rain staring cross-legged at a wall, and found himself seeing through its, like, inner-eyes man – his mouth tasted of mortar, he felt moss growing in the cracks of his mind and had an epiphany that when you think about it, deep-down we’re all bricks, in a way, and that was a truly bloody life-changing spiritual experience, let me tell you. ‘Want to try some? Do you want to take some? Go on, I need someone on my level to discuss things with. EAT THE BLOODY SHROOMS!’

His company is combative to say the least, also confusing and at times terrifying. But putting it in a facile and patronising manner, he is a stoner -this does not make him evil, nor does it people with similar opinions on spiritual experience.

In the same vein and in condescending order, I do not think there is a god – this does not make me and those like me responsible for the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany. The pope thinks there is a god – this does not make him and those like him paedophiles. Muslims think there is a god – this does not make them terrorists.

This may be a gross simplification, but could we not just all be nice to each other and stuff, accept that people have differing opinions on these matters? Didn’t that Jesus fella’ say something along those lines?

Ground Zero Mosque Bullshit-Cycle

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By Elliot Adams

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the activist who is behind the Cordoba House (Image: Magnus Manske)

The Ground Zero Mosque is the most half-baked political hot-potato currently in circulation. It concerns the proposed building of a community centre in Manhattan by a Muslim organization; which is truly bizarre as it’s planned to be built on legitimately acquired private property a considerable distance away from ground zero, it’s not a mosque (though the group has had one in the same neighbourhood for years), there is already a mosque far closer to the former site of the world trade centre, the people behind it have no connection to the attacks on the world trade centre, the Imam behind it is a remarkably moderate Sufi even by Republican tastes; and of course US law legally protects the freedom of religious assembly. It’s not the most newsworthy issue in that part of New York, or even on that street, yet the US press have given it amazing prominence over the past few months.

The most concerning thing is that the media furore surrounding this non-story seems to be largely originating with, and driven by, Pamela Geller, a conspiracy-vomiting terrorhawk of a blogger who is viciously anti-Muslim. She posts her protracted and bigoted diatribes and conspiracy theories across a range of far-right and end-times blogs, she is also a leading member of Stop Islamization[sic] Of America(SIOA; if you can’t guess what they advocate, consider that one founder encourages people to murder their liberal relatives and all Muslims).

Last December The New York Times published a fairly passive piece on the plans to build the Cordoba community centre. The article covered Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s plans to counter extremism – and quoted the mayor’s office, families of world trade centre victims, representatives of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, the leader of the local Jewish community centre and the FBI (who have worked with the Imam in the past) all giving their support to the community centre and Imam Feisal.

Even Fox News was largely positive when in the same month Imam Feisal’s wife was interviewed by Laura Ingraham, a guest host on Fox news’ O’Reilly factor mainly notable for her past homophobic rhetoric and an attempt to hinder Democratic Party voters. But Ingraham remained supportive of the project, saying she couldn’t find many people who have a problem with it and saying “I like what you’re trying to do,” even though she does seem to imply that American-Muslims aren’t properly ‘Americanized’.

Then the story all but disappeared from the press for about six months, as no one except Geller and a few other bloggers really cared where the Cordoba community centre was built – and rightly so.

That is until May of this year, when an NYC community committee unanimously approved the project and Geller’s SIOA launched it’s campai

Denying the right of free religious assembly here is an attempt to apply a collective guilt to the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims for a pitiful act of mass murder committed by a small heretical sect, it delineates the conflict with Jihadists as a war between western civilisation and Islam. Pictured is one of the people who've been pushing this agenda in the past.

gn to stop what she was now calling the “Monster Mosque” that will be built at ground zero “just as Al-Aqsa was built on top of the Temple in Jerusalem.” It is important to remember that this woman is either delusional or a habitual liar; she has variously claimed that President Obama was involved with a crack whore, was a Pimp, that he wears gang colours in the white house, that Malcom X is his real father(based on some kind of neo-phrenology) and that she has pornographic photograph’s of Obama’s mother.

What the ultra-conservative factions of the US press did next though was truly revolutionary outside the box thinking. The box in question is the one clearly labelled ‘Journalistic Integrity.’

They fully adopted those like Geller and the way in which they framed the story. Notably for once, or at least first out of the starting block this time, was Andrea Peyser of the New York Post in her column, ”Mosque Madness at Ground Zero.” Peyser quotes Geller extensively and unironically describes her SIOA group as a “human-rights group.” It’s the first article I can find that depicts the ‘Monster Mosque’ in the way that bloggers from the far-right had been framing the story, as a despicable attack on America.

The rest of the conservative media quickly fell into line, the Washington Examiner called it “a second attack on the World Trade Center” and Fox News was almost beautiful in how much it’s coverage got behind bigots like SIOA, it’s like watching them pick a fight with the idea of journalism itself – media matters covers this far better than I could hope to. The more moderate conservative news outlets and other mainstream organisations were forced to now respond to this with dissent, or reporting both sides of the ‘dispute’, but by doing so were also framing the story within terms of a entirely manufactured controversy.

Geller herself put in a few more forays into the press, including a radio appearance with Sean Hannity, but her part in this was largely that of the vanishing mediator and she had already succeeded. The story in the US press has been delineated into this simulation of a fake controversy to such an extent that now even Obama’s weak statement, and re-statement, that those behind the Cordoba community centre had the right to free religious assembly is now read as both an appeasement to Islamic extremists and then a back-tracking of his comments.

This whole debate that has played out in the media is just too much hyperreality in the headlines for me – if you’ll forgive the jargon wankery – there was simply nothing newsworthy about it before the press picked up Geller and her ilk’s touting of the proposed Islamic community centre as something it wasn’t. To abuse a Harmsworthian proverb, it wasn’t a man-bites-dog story, or even a dog-bites-man story; it was a conspiracy-theorist-looks-at-dog-and-claims-it’s-a-badger-poised-to-bite-all-you-hold-dear story.

One of the few sociology studies I tolerate is Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics, a look at the media hype and social reaction to the mods and rockers brawls of the 60s. In it he proposes a ‘Deviancy Amplification Spiral’ to describe the way in which media hype of behaviour increases the intensity of that behaviour, attracts people expecting that behaviour and consequently intensifies media hype – closing a cycle of amplification. But what we have here is a ‘Bullshit Amplification Spiral’, completely devoid of any real event or behaviour in the first place, the press has just been taking every comment and statement and forcing it into the polemic framework of a debate that never really existed outside of the mind of one hate dribbling blogger.