Antisemitism still going strong

With an agenda to promote diversity and social cohesion, the BBC necessarily turns a blind eye to the antisemitism within the Muslim community. 

It would be ridiculous to deny that hatred of Jews is the default position of Muslims, as even Mehdi Hasan, one of the most prominent offenders, has freely, (and rashly) admitted. 

The irony is that many of the high profile Muslims who mask their visceral antisemitism with the societally acceptable ‘intellectual’  anti-Zionism, are also claiming that Muslims are the new Jews. These are the people who complain of Islamophobia and carefully tag “antisemitism and other forms of racism” onto the complaint.

Let me say this. There’s no need to look for the ‘new’ Jews because the antisemites haven’t finished with the ‘old’ Jews yet.

The BBC constantly features Muslim politicians and personalities without seeing any need to challenge their racism or question their default hostility to Israel. The Muslim perspective, with its intrinsic, Koran-rooted Jew-hate, is a given; and it is understood that these are the terms upon which their contribution, whatever it may be, must be taken and accepted.

Look at Andrew Marr’s recent fawning interview with Sayeeda Warsi. 

Perhaps flushed with success due to the positive reception the media is giving to her then 'soon-to-be released' book, she decided it was a good time to  announce that she believes British citizens who fight in the Israeli army should be prosecuted 

Oddly enough, even though the piece is in the Israel-hostile Independent, she gets a drubbing in the below-the-line comments. 

Initially attracted by the headline “The BBC plunges into a period of National mourning” I read this piece by Iain Dale on the Conservative Home website, a site I rarely visit, and spotted an enthusiastic paragraph about Warsi’s book. 

“There were two new books out this week which may be of interest to ConservativeHome readers. Sayeeda Warsi has written a book called The Enemy Within, which is allegedly how some people described her when she was a minister in the Cameron government.

It’s certainly not a kiss-and-tell account of her time in government.  Instead, it’s a thoughtful tome about the place of Muslims in Britain today. It’s incredibly well-researched (and heavily footnoted), and I hope it gets a much wider readership than simply Muslims who are interested to read about the views of Britain’s first Muslim cabinet minister. It deserves to.”

That prompted me to ‘Look inside” on the Amazon page promoting the book. 

I can understand why people were intrigued by its autobiographical beginning. It’s as readable as any other bit of ‘me’ journalism.

However, what stood out for me, in the light of Warsi’s comments about British citizens fighting for the IDF was her own self-confessed ‘dual loyalty’. She and her family feel a strong affinity with Pakistan, and are loath to sever their links with that country.

Openly stating such a thing with pride, almost as a plea for understanding and empathy, seems hypocritical at the least, as it throws her antipathy towards Jews who identify with Israel into sharp focus.

Warsi’s Twitter feed indicates that amongst the most enthusiastic supporters of her book are well known anti-Israel lobbyists. Peter Oborne, Shami Chakrabarti and Sir Alan Duncan as well as assorted Muslims and folk from the Labour Party.

 

Book launch

As for Iain Dale’s comment:  “It’s incredibly well-researched (and heavily footnoted) I refer you to Douglas Murray: (£)

“Perhaps it was after seeing drafts of these pages (the autobiographical section) that the publisher had the idea of persuading its author to broaden her authorial viewpoint. Although this has allowed the book to gain in length, it has not gained in depth. Much of the resulting text reads like poor cut-and-pastes from Wikipedia. […] 

“On to this historical and personal structure are welded some reflections on life as a Muslim in Britain. These portions are the book’s principal points of interest. Most interesting is her account of the Salman Rushdie affair. Like many an observer before her, she sees the Satanic Verses controversy as the turning point for Britain’s Muslim communities. However, Warsi appears to believe that the government was wrong to defend Rushdie and that a prosecution for blasphemy in 1989 could have gone some way to avoiding our present troubles. 

A final joist contrived to hold all this up consists of some policy-wonkery. Three chunks of this have had to be lifted from the main text and dumped as separate appendices at the end. However, the residue lingers within the main body like snail-trails of bureaucratese. It is here that we read of “current failures in policy making”, and while Warsi is careful not to tell any interesting stories it is in these sections that we get the most sideways score-settling and rewriting of events”

For those of you without access to the Times, at the time of writing there are only 5 comments below this review, including a reference to this “Much friendlier review” in the Telegraph, but as I am not a subscriber, I can’t read past the first paragraph, which is about anti-Muslim sentiment. 

Read this open letter from Emanuel Miller on Harry’s Place (Warsi certainly won’t) - and catch the below-the-line comments before they disappear. Miller’s affinity with Israel almost mirrors Warsi’s with Pakistan. Here he eloquently sets out the reasons that inspired him to join a scheme that enables British volunteers to fight with the IDF. 

This is one case which deserves the label “you of all people.”  

Baroness Warsi, that you, of all people should wish to criminalise “foreign ties,” which racists disparagingly term “dual loyalty” is hypocrisy of the purest kind.