Browbeaten

Unfortunately, the fashion for painting huge eyebrows on top of our actual eyebrows is still with us. (The actual fashion is, like, ‘so over’, but people will fail to keep up with the cutting edge. 

As heavy-handed with invective as they are with war-paint, two Muslimas, one who describes herself as an anti-colonialist anti-Imperialist Islamist and another who says she is as a ‘third generation British Asian Pakistani woman with distinctly left-leaning politics’ are part of a group that have set up a Muslim ladies’ book club. And very angry, they are. Too angry for the local Mosque, i.e., pretty angry.

They have assembled in a cafe with interviewer Assed Baig to discuss the findings of yet another inquiry, and are  being filmed for Channel 4 News.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSdG-RRlqpw After eighteen months of research the inquiry has concluded that the relationship between the government and the Muslim community is broken. 

It occurred to me that Peter Kosminsky devoted a similar number of months to his quest for the truth about Islamic State. It’s rather optimistic to assume eighteen months is long enough to get to the bottom of whatever it is that makes Muslims so angry if you can’t make the connection between that and Islam itself. Eighteen years probably wouldn’t even do it.

On this particular occasion the anger was directed at the Prevent strategy. Baig asked: “how do you safeguard children if you don’t have Prevent?”


Third generation British Asian Pakistani woman leapt into action almost before he’d finished the question.

“Review your geo-political ambitions and your foreign policy!” she proclaimed, dropping her pen with a triumphant flourish.

I’m not saying they were directly advocating or inciting violence or explicitly supporting terrorism, but the sentiment they expressed didn’t seem a million miles away from the bloody rant delivered by Michael Adebolajo when he’d finished hacking at Lee Rigby’s neck. 

Disturbingly, the ladies claimed to be highly educated. One claimed she has a ‘masters in law’, no doubt a lot of (preferably understated) eyebrows were raised at that, and really, her Facebook history indicates it’s a question of ‘what you see is what you get’. Her ’drop the pen’ / ‘foreign policy’ friend is an ‘educator’. That is not encouraging. 

Goodness knows how they’d managed to live in Britain  for three generations and still speak with barely intelligible foreign accents, and goodness knows what message Channel Four was trying to send. 

Bear in mind the plight of Amina Lone who has been deselected by the Labour Party for backing Sarah Champion’s short-lived truth-telling exercise.  

Consider, too, Peter Oborne’s inexplicable Islamophilia. Is it his hatred for Jews that drives it?  Look at this strange attack on Anne Marie Waters, whose bid for the UKIP leadership he considers dangerous. 

“I don't know which it will be. What is absolutely apparent is that Anne Marie Waters is not a happy prospect for British Islam or – I believe – for Britain.”

All this is a symptom of a world turned upside down. It doesn’t need eighteen months to figure that out.