Here, in their own words, are the views of the leading lights of one of the many groups of inflammatory speakers, the Islamic Education and Research Academy (iERA): "If someone's going to fight against the [Muslim] community they should be killed"; "sexual relations were permitted between a man and his female slaves"; "adultery is punishable by death, and a slow and painful death by stoning." And on the Lawyers' Secular Society report goes, listing every variety of prejudice and every exhortation to young Muslim men to avoid the corruption of Western life.
Their appeals are not quite the incitement to violence they seem. The iERA may have once had on its board hate preachers now banned from the UK for preaching hatred of gays and Jews, supporting child-marriages and calling for the death penalty for "apostates". Its speakers have certainly spent years touring universities and Muslim communities, largely unopposed. Earlier this year — and again no one disputes this — young men in Portsmouth, who had been distributing Islamist material while wearing iERA T-shirts, went off to Syria to fight on behalf of the Islamic State. Nevertheless, the iERA can claim that it has stayed on the right side of the law by saying that the bigotry it endorses and punishments it dreams of will only come in an ideal future Islamic state. Its speakers are not inciting violence in the here and now.
I accept that, technically, they may be telling the truth and this is why the state is tearing up the old laws to catch them, but I still need to ask why these legal technicalities should bother the Left. That an extreme-Right group is just about within the law as it now stands does not stop protests against the English Defence League, British National Party, or indeed, UKIP and assorted priapic males. Leftists say that their ideas are poisonous and must be countered before the poison spreads. The law is an irrelevance.
The only left-winger I have seen attempt to explain the double standard is Nick Ryan of Hope not Hate. He deserves credit for his frankness, but his argument had no coherence. He said that Muslim communities were "immature" — thus infantilising Muslims and treating them with a condescension he would never apply to whites. He said that Muslim ultra-conservatives should be our allies if they are against violence — thus abandoning all who suffer because of ultra-conservative ideas. He said that if anti-fascists tackled Muslims whose ideas mirrored those of the white far-Right, "we're just going to end up pushing all Muslims further away" — thus aping the arguments of Islamophobes who treat Muslims as a monolithic bloc. And disgracefully but predictably, he dismissed liberal and left-wing Muslims and ex-Muslims as an unrepresentative minority it was a waste of time supporting.
I could continue, but in its hypocrisies Hope not Hate's response illuminates a wider cultural crisis. Teachers, musicians, comedians, authors and liberal-left intellectuals and politicians ignore the Islamist far-Right. They are frightened of accusations of racism. They think the cause of liberal Muslims hopeless, and not worth arguing for. As a result, the young men who end up killing, enslaving, raping and dying in Syria and Iraq — and maybe soon in Britain too — have not grown up hearing arguments against extremism. British culture has presented them with racism on the one hand and silence on the other. A potentially violent young man attracted to neo-Nazi extremism will take a cultural battering. But when it comes to the equally fascistic doctrines of radical Islam, fair-weather feminists and pseudo-leftists don't want to argue. Hope not Hate and part-time anti-fascists will protest only if extremism topples over into violence, by which time the battle of ideas has been lost and the time for protest gone.
Their appeals are not quite the incitement to violence they seem. The iERA may have once had on its board hate preachers now banned from the UK for preaching hatred of gays and Jews, supporting child-marriages and calling for the death penalty for "apostates". Its speakers have certainly spent years touring universities and Muslim communities, largely unopposed. Earlier this year — and again no one disputes this — young men in Portsmouth, who had been distributing Islamist material while wearing iERA T-shirts, went off to Syria to fight on behalf of the Islamic State. Nevertheless, the iERA can claim that it has stayed on the right side of the law by saying that the bigotry it endorses and punishments it dreams of will only come in an ideal future Islamic state. Its speakers are not inciting violence in the here and now.
I accept that, technically, they may be telling the truth and this is why the state is tearing up the old laws to catch them, but I still need to ask why these legal technicalities should bother the Left. That an extreme-Right group is just about within the law as it now stands does not stop protests against the English Defence League, British National Party, or indeed, UKIP and assorted priapic males. Leftists say that their ideas are poisonous and must be countered before the poison spreads. The law is an irrelevance.
The only left-winger I have seen attempt to explain the double standard is Nick Ryan of Hope not Hate. He deserves credit for his frankness, but his argument had no coherence. He said that Muslim communities were "immature" — thus infantilising Muslims and treating them with a condescension he would never apply to whites. He said that Muslim ultra-conservatives should be our allies if they are against violence — thus abandoning all who suffer because of ultra-conservative ideas. He said that if anti-fascists tackled Muslims whose ideas mirrored those of the white far-Right, "we're just going to end up pushing all Muslims further away" — thus aping the arguments of Islamophobes who treat Muslims as a monolithic bloc. And disgracefully but predictably, he dismissed liberal and left-wing Muslims and ex-Muslims as an unrepresentative minority it was a waste of time supporting.
I could continue, but in its hypocrisies Hope not Hate's response illuminates a wider cultural crisis. Teachers, musicians, comedians, authors and liberal-left intellectuals and politicians ignore the Islamist far-Right. They are frightened of accusations of racism. They think the cause of liberal Muslims hopeless, and not worth arguing for. As a result, the young men who end up killing, enslaving, raping and dying in Syria and Iraq — and maybe soon in Britain too — have not grown up hearing arguments against extremism. British culture has presented them with racism on the one hand and silence on the other. A potentially violent young man attracted to neo-Nazi extremism will take a cultural battering. But when it comes to the equally fascistic doctrines of radical Islam, fair-weather feminists and pseudo-leftists don't want to argue. Hope not Hate and part-time anti-fascists will protest only if extremism topples over into violence, by which time the battle of ideas has been lost and the time for protest gone.
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