Harry's Place

When a handful of social misfits from the al-Muhajiroun front group ‘Followers of Ahl us-Sunah wal-Jamaa’ah’ turned up to make a deliberately provocative ‘protest’ in Luton recently, the media went into overdrive, with the usual screaming headlines and repeated TV news footage. Every time one of acid burnout Anjem Choudary’s cultic groupings so much as opens its mouth, the British media gleefully provide us with juicy reports.

For example, among the items published in recent months we find The Star reporting that Choudary boycotts Remembrance Sunday, The Mail and The Telegraph informing us that Choudary is a joyless twat who hates Christmas, The Star giving space to the ‘news’ that Choudary gets off on terrorist atrocities, and The Telegraph reporting that Choudary has written on his obscure website in support of flogging drunks. More recently, we’ve been treated to reports of the pathetic ‘March for Islam’ held last month by a Taliban fan club in London and of course lots on the Luton incident.

These ‘news items’ are obviously widely reported because they provide sensational stories and the chance for shocking headlines, but the reality is that giving all this mainstream media attention to Choudary and al-Muhajiroun does nothing but feed their egos and stir up fear about British Muslims. From the overblown rhetoric used in stories about al-Muhajiroun you would think that they are on the verge of marching on Downing Street and enslaving us all.

The Telegraph in particular, desperately sniffing around for the tabloid style stories it increasingly features, has provided some ridiculous coverage of what are nothing more than Choudary’s writings on his Islam For The UK website. In ‘Muslim lawyer Anjem Choudary brands Christmas “evil”‘, we learn that ‘chairman of the Society of Muslim Lawyers’ and ‘Principal Lecturer at the London School of Shari’ah’ Choudary has been blathering about Christmas ‘in a sermon posted on the internet’, and in ‘Muslim preacher Anjem Choudary calls for people who get drunk to be flogged‘, we read that ‘the 41-year-old made the remarks on his website Islam4UK’.

This kind of attention is completely unwarranted as al-Muhaijroun are about as representative of most British Muslims as the British People’s Party is representative of most white people in Britain. The ‘London School of Shari’ah’ is basically Choudary and a few of his associates and consists of little more than a YouTube channel, and I don’t know what ‘Society of Muslim Lawyers’ Choudary is supposed to be ‘chairman’ of, but it certainly isn’t this one and the only address I could find for it is from a 1997 discussion on ‘The Jewish controlled British Media’ which has it listed as being based out of a house in a residential area.

Quite how unrepresentative al-Muhajiroun are of British Muslims can be seen in the tiny crowds they manage to muster for their events. As Arun Kundnani of Britain’s Institute of Race Relations rightly notes, ‘the constant media coverage has given the impression that these tiny groupings are, in fact, more influential than they are, thereby flattering their own apocalyptic pretensions’. Kundnani cites a ‘rally’ held by al-Muhajiroun, also in Luton, in 2001 which was organised ‘in memory’ of two British Muslims who died fighting alongside the Taliban:

The problem for Muslims generally is that groups like Al-Muhajiroun, which revel in negative publicity and lace their rhetoric with anti-Semitism, homophobia and calls for jihad, have dominated the public representation of Islam. Their presence in a town can be devastating. In Luton, the local ‘branch’ of Al-Muhajiroun attracted national headlines in October 2001 after two men from the town, who had gone to fight for the Taliban, had been killed in a US bombing raid on Kabul. Al-Muhajiroun, which has just six members in Luton, organised a ‘demonstration’ in memory of the two.

Out of 20,000 Muslims in Luton, only 10 showed up for the event, and shortly afterwards Luton’s al-Muhajiroun ‘leader’ was beaten up in the street by moderate Muslims who were sick and tired of all the trouble he was causing.

Kundnani writes of ‘a lazy racism that lumps all Muslims together’ and there is a degree of truth in this, but when it comes to the media it is less a case of racism and more the desire for the ’shock factor’ that is at work. What this endless hyping of Choudary and al-Muhajiroun has succeeded in doing, however, is providing an excellent recruiting tool for the BNP, an organisation whose racism is far from lazy.

The BNP website and numerous pro-BNP blogs have jumped into action in the light of the recent Luton incident with reports such as ‘Muslim Luton Anti-Army Protest “Portent of Things to Come”‘ and ‘Islamist Invaders Promise More Protests against British Troops‘:

The shocking anti-British army protest by a group of Muslims in central Luton earlier today is a portent of what is to come unless the Islamification of this country is halted, the BNP’s defence spokesman has warned.

“The disgraceful sight of Muslim protestors carrying posters saying ‘Anglian Soldiers Go to Hell’ while parading through town after tours of duty risking their lives is the inevitable consequence of the colonisation of this country by Third Worlders,” Mr Peter Mullins said.

“Luton is well known as a heavily Muslim colonised town, and it is little wonder that there was nearly a confrontation between indigenous British people watching the parade and the Muslim protestors,” he said.

[...]

“Only the BNP will bring an end to this madness,” he concluded.

The sentiment of most of the comments on the BNP site are neatly summed up by one poster who states:

I hope they keep protesting, the more the better, keep digging that hole you cant out of Mr Muslim and you will not only see the dormant Lion roar but you most likely see it BITE as well.

The Green Arrow blog, quite popular in BNP circles, has made much of the recent controversy. In response to the Luton protest it states: ‘Shhh. Can you hear it? It is the sound of civil war’. And in a post featuring a video of a Choudary speech, entitled ‘How the Moslems intend to take over the UK’, the ‘Green Arrow’ excitedly proclaims:

If you will not believe what the British National Party says about the intentions of the Moslems in the UK, then perhaps it is best if you hear it straight from the horses mouth.

Please take the time to watch this video because whether you believe it not, there is a tidal wave of blood rushing towards us.

The majority of Muslims in the UK have no interest in Choudary and his bizarre vanity organisations. The majority of Muslims in the UK are what Tarek Fatah refers to as ‘nine-to-five Muslims’ who ‘are mostly concerned with making a living and getting ahead’. Even among more conservative Muslims in this country, hardly any are enthused by the idea of living in some kind of dictatorship run by Anjem Choudary and his unbalanced supporters. If they were, they would have been out there in their thousands, standing alongside the ‘Followers of Ahl us-Sunah wal-Jamaa’ah’ or filling the streets of London during Choudary’s ‘March for Islam’.

In their regular reports on the minutiae of Choudary’s world, the British media are causing grave harm to the image of Muslims in Britain and are providing a propaganda gift to the BNP by presenting al-Muhajiroun as an important organisation, as opposed to the cult that it really is. If the BNP continues to grow in profile and support, then part of the blame for this can be laid squarely at the feet of Anjem Choudary and the scandal hungry media that promote him.