What Muslims Don’t Really think

Well, after all the hype, how did Trevor Phillips do? If polled, I’d be inclined to say that after all that hype, the programme itself was an anticlimax. 

Did you think Trevor Phillips’s programme was truly representative of what Muslims think? 

• Strongly agree, 
• Agree, 
• Neither agree nor disagree, 
• Disagree, 
• Strongly disagree. 

I’d tick ‘neither agree nor disagree’  

I’m a terribly bad liar. I hardly ever lie in real life, but when I’m polled I lie all the time. Not that I’ve ever been polled about anything interesting. Just market research, which I deeply regretted as soon as I realised I was being bombarded with junk mail purely because of my gullibility.

The programme itself was always going to be an anticlimax, these things always are when all the juicy bits have already been cherry-picked and disseminated all over the place.

I thought it was a good plan to begin with a reassuring preamble about the methodology of the ICM poll. Insurance against the kind of criticism Trevor Phillips correctly anticipated he would face. The last thing a programme like this needs is doubts about its veracity. However it didn’t convince me. 

I mean, the decision to select interviewees from heavily Muslim-populated areas threw up more questions than it answered. The logic of that decision was missing. Surely including areas populated more sparsely (by Muslims) would show up a different set of results with a different set of questions, eg., would these Muslims absorb western culture or resist it more fiercely if they weren’t cushioned by or influenced by the like-minded? 

I was more interested in some of the press reviews of the programme than my own reaction to it. 

Andrew Billen’s review in the Times included this passage: 

“Phillips, knowing that his programme would be controversial and that the pollsters are not riding high on credibility, took admirable care to explain the methodology of his documentary’s professional question posers. I have no quarrel with how ICM found the 1,081 Muslims it talked to face-to-face. Quarrels with the programme’s interpretation of their answers I do have.

However, the Telegraph’s Emma Barnett questions the methodology.:

I don’t have a problem with such surveys being done per se, although there are some serious questions about the methodology used – one being that the only Muslims polled lived in areas where they made up more than 20 per cent of the local population. 

Allison Pearson, also in the Telegraph, takes a different approach. She takes the methodology at face value because she’s much more interested in the fact that at last someone has decided to investigate this topic, and even better, that a mainstream channel has agreed to air it. She takes recent events into account and puts them into context, something which the other journalists cited here seem afraid to do.

Emma Barnett seems angry. She thinks Trevor Phillips has only succeeded in making British Muslims feel more isolated. Jeremy Corbyn’s fans dismissed accusations of his links with terrorists and antisemites as ‘smears’. Is that what Emma Barnett is doing here?

“Having had real conversations with some real Muslims, they are appalled by his handiwork and feel attacked, not “listened to”. 

As one woman said to me: “Even the title of the programme implies Muslims have some sort of collective hidden agenda, which is horrifying.” 

Reactions online have been predictably hysterical, with people seizing upon the data to support their creeping Islamophobia.”

This response goes to show that some people are resistant to any interpretation of any kind of poll if the findings indicate something disagreeable.

Andrew Billen seems to be echoing Polly Toynbee. He compares the conservative attitudes of pre-enlightened non-Muslim Britain with current Muslim attitudes towards, say, same-sex marriage or the ethics of including the word ‘obey’ in the marriage vow. 

With a little wishful thinking one can equate and conflate some conservative attitudes in the hope they’ll eventually liberalise. That might be a plausible theory, but the attitude to terrorism was not quite so easy to dismiss. He admitted it was worrying, but he disputed the presentation, i.e., the way the question was phrased.

Well, it’s a poll. The wording’s subtle affect on the outcome is one of the built-in shortcomings of polls. Nuance there is not. 

The issue both the programme and the reviewers skirted round - or ignored - concerned the attitude to Jews. 

Many Muslims said they thought Jews had too much power. That’s a view that is embedded in their religion. That’s where Andrew Billen is wrong. The softening of hard-line views necessitates a softening of the religion itself. The views we fear are part and parcel of the religion. If Muslims are unable to relinquish some of their religiosity (which their religion does not permit) no amount of wishful thinking will help.

What the papers say

Now I’ve done my review, I need to do a review of the reviews of it that have appeared in the press. Andrew Billen (Times/paywall)  is one of those (rare) reviewers who sometimes sees things from an independent angle. He isn’t completely taken in, as the other somewhat gullible reviewers often are in the mainstream press. 

For example, his review (July 6th) of “A song for Jenny”, (one family’s experience of their daughter’s murder in the 7/7 terrorist attack on London)  bucked the trend. 

The Guardian’s  verdict of that drama was so gushing that I hastily skipped to the comments below it. The Guardian’s commentariat seem to have woken up recently. Many of them spotted the flaws in this production. It’s a brave person who dares to criticise such a project, but once the first arrow is slung it’s less risky. 

Here’s one example:

“What happened that day was horrific and I totally sympathise with all concerned and am relieved that no-one from my family was caught up in it.
That said, this drama was unbareably (sic) awful; stilted acting, twee set pieces, clichéd, melodramatic, and utterly thrilled with itself.
The BBC has lost its way, maybe because society has lost its way.”

That commenter took a small hammering for that, but still.

The Telegraph’s Michael Hogan was even more gushing than the Guardian. Since the Telegraph has recently started morphing into the Guardian, I hesitated briefly before skipping. 

One commenter said:

I'm sorry and, to be fair, I only watched the last 20 minutes of it but I found it to be trite, manipulative and self serving. I would give them a trowel if they were going to lay it on any thicker.

Someone said he had no business commenting on something he’d only watched 20 minutes of, and the majority of Telegraph commenters  seemed to have been ‘deeply moved’ by the programme.

Andrew Billen was the only MSM critic that had anything critical to say. After the obligatory expression of sympathy for the real characters in the tragedy, he admitted that he thought the drama was ‘unsatisfactory.’ His article was headed: Big issues drowned in sentimental song.” (£) There you have it. Now for his take on Children of the Gaza War.

Andrew Billen's review of Lyse Doucet’s film was short and comparatively sweet.  It started with praise, and continued with descriptive text. Then he said:

 ”What was annoying was that Doucet’s film was scrupulously balanced by her visiting Israeli children traumatised by Hamas’s rocket attacks on their homes - yet still unerringly pointed to the propaganda victory that Israel has awarded to the Palestinian cause.
Israel would never have attacked if its citizens had not been attacked first. Hamas doubtless deliberately sheltered its rocket launchers in civilian areas and next to schools. The fact remained that only one of the 500 dead children was an Israeli child and holes in the walls of a kibbutz are no match for what we saw of the tragic remains of Gaza City.”

So he found some of the omissions annoying! He inferred that none of this would have happened if Hamas had not willingly instigated it. This needs to be said loud and clear. What is everyone afraid of?

Now to the Telegraph.  Harry Mount was won over by Lyse. Despite initially confessing that he was on ‘red alert for some Israel-bashing’ Harry’s antenna were not very effective last night. In fact they must have been switched off altogether.

“But Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, is more on the ball than that. She was even-handed in her interviews with Palestinian and Israeli children caught up in last summer’s 51-day war – when rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel, and Israel responded with massive force. More than 500 children were killed in those 51 days, and thousands more traumatised. One 12-year-old boy saw his brother and three cousins killed on a Gaza beach by a rocket from an Israeli gunboat. His 1,000-yard stare, and husky voice – old beyond its years – were haunting.
The simple words of children were all the more affecting. “We didn’t know the beach was dangerous,” he said. Those poor souls murdered on a Tunisia beach last month must have thought much the same.”

This received a well deserved bashing of its own in the below the line comments.

"The simple words of children were all the more affecting. “We didn’t know the beach was dangerous,” he said. Those poor souls murdered on a Tunisia beach last month must have thought much the same."
Equating Israelis and Isis terrorists is wrong on many counts. Not even mentioning that on the previous day there were accounts of rockets being fired from the same spot on the beach and that the figures were not identified as children but assumed to be running cometant (sic) is something that should be mentioned in this article. The impression given is that the Israelis murdered the kids intentionally as the Isis terrorist did in Tunisia. Fact: There is no war and there was no war in Tunisia more than there was a war on 7/7 in London or 11/9 in NY. Fact: there was a war during the beach attack in the Gaza strip and in Israel.”

said one person.

'When we grow up, we're going to kill them' The arab/muslim dreams of death and killing.The Jew/Israeli about life and how to make it better for his/her children. Hamas in Gaza build terror tunnels and couldnt give a g'dam for their people. Israel builds bomb shelters to keep its people safe.”

said another.

The Independent. Sally Newall’s review was brief and descriptive rather than overtly judgmental. The reviewer’s choices of which quotes to reproduce in her article was quite sufficient to show clearly which side she identifies with.

The only btl comment at the time of writing is telling:

“When the BBC momentarily departed from its Zionist bias, in one of its token gestures like this programme, and actually mentioned the plight of the Palestinian refugees in Yarmouk refugee camp, Doucet said they were descended from those who'd fled the fighting between Arab armies and Israel in 1948. An absolute distortion of the truth. They were driven out by Israeli terror, and they have lived in pain ever since. There is no balance between a bully and his victim. The BBC's reporting on Palestine is an exclusively Zionist narrative, in contrast with the excellent Al Jazeera. Doucet would do well to get some training from AlJ.”

Blimey. The commenter was using a thoroughly British name, too.

Oddly enough, the Guardian hasn’t reviewed it yet.