It Shouldn’t Happen to a Muslim
July 13, 2008
In this Channel 4 Dispatches documentary It shouldn’t happen to a Muslim Peter Oborne looks at whether or not Islam and British Muslims have been demonised by the UK media. Poor in places but worth watching.
On the third anniversary of the 7/7 London Bombings, Peter Oborne investigates whether these attacks and the fear of terrorism has fuelled the rise of violence, intolerance and hatred against British Muslims.
July 14, 2008 at 9:18 am
It takes courage for anyone to live in Basildon.It’s a complete hole not dissimilar from Dagenham or Barking.All three are predominantly white working class,so their political representatives will,as their political base shrinks,pander to the moronic tabloid-induced worldview of their constituents.
Margaret Hodge,and Phil Woolas(who was in the film decrying the veil as intimidating to his constituents)are playing this Islamophobic card as a desperate means to marshall their troops and get them to the polls.Pity most of them can barely read the ballot papers and require precise instructions from The Sun newspaper(with diagrams)on how to engage in the democratic process!
Most of us dread turning on the t.v.and radio and the prime reason is both are disinformation saturation points.Were we to credit any of the manifest falsehoods and moral panics there disseminated we would end up resembling some of the brain-dead sponges who absorb them we saw in the film.
There was Andy Cap in Stoke who subscribed to the cockroach theory of Islamic encroachment.This cretin
and his BNP canvasser friends already have an eminent public mouthpiece namely Mr O’Flynn at the Express who,until the caption identifying him came up,I mistook for a BNP spokesman himself.
Evidently the Oborne programme was part of a Channel 4 7/7 commemorative.Its fatal flaw was that it played into a very British phenomenon.That is their morbidly anally retentive capacity to remain in denial about what actually constitutes the main features of their identity.
Sadly these qualities are not the ones of compassion,decency and tolerance Oborne would like us to think he personifies.The Islamophobic tabloid stories actually tap into a very raw nerve in the British psyche.There is here in the cultural imagination of the British a tendency to
self-inspection by comparison.We project on to others qualities we cannot speak of in ourselves.
So the focus on forced marriage and veil-wearing,genital mutilation,and honour-killing as supposedly distinctively abhorrent muslim practices are,though they are utterly unrepresentative,taken as constituting salient features of muslim life.
The British tendency to boorishness,drunkeness,hypocrisy,nosiness,prurience, sadism,self-deception and violence others often see in us would have made for a far more interesting and worthwhile programme.
Typically it was the British capacity for denial and hypocrisy that predominated in this film.Thus when it actually got close to ruminating less on the horror of what occurred on 7/7 and moved on to dealing with the investigation to discover who was actually responsible-time was called.
MET Specialist Operations Officer,Andy Hayman,it was he who,with Commissioner Blair,indicted the muslim community and the supposed suicide bombers from day one.In thefilm Hayman is shown asserting a few days after the atrocity that the Tube bombs had been placed on the floor of the carriages.
Witnesses who went unheeded because no inquiry ever took place said that on the contrary the bombs appeared to have been placed not on but under the floors of the carriages.
Again,while the film at this point dwelt on the symbolism of the Tavistock Square road sign it did not mention that the CCTV there had been conveniently switched off on 7/7.The suspicion that it was under the floor of the bus rather than on it that the explosives had been laid has never been allayed because as with the Tube trains the wreckage was never examined and presented as evidence as it would have been had any real investigation been allowed to take place.
The source of the “terrorist grooming” that formed the lurid basis of British tabloid headlines mentioned in the film is far more likely to lie in an elite agenda in our security services and political establishmnent than it is in the muslim community.
All this went unspoken in this typically Daily Mail with-a-conscience type account of our public culture.
July 14, 2008 at 9:41 am
Hey freeborn, thanks for the analysis, I was too lazy to write one. It really wasn’t very good in places. However I found parts interesting, such as the interview about Jack Straws comments. Phil Woolas suggesting it was ok to tell women not to wear the veil as people link it to terrorism and they may experience intimidation. Perhaps we should tell Jews not to dress like Jews cause there are some Nazi’s out there? Or warn girls not to wear short skirts as they are inviting the attention of rapists? What a moron, picking on the victim is never noble or clever. I’m sure Muslim women are quite aware of the bigots on British streets nd need support not comments that further reinforce bigotted opinion that they should lose their traditional dress.