Stand up for an Egyptian free speech blogger

There’s a petition to help Karim Amer at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/158/709/068 .
For those who haven’t followed the case, Karim, a young Egyptian blogger, was charged with publishing material ‘critical of Islam’ and Egypt's President Hosni Mubarek. He was imprisoned for four years, and claims that, while imprisoned, he has been beaten at least twice under the supervision of a prison officer.
As the folk behind the petition point out, one of the luxuries of the internet is that it's a forum of expression available to anyone with some cheapish, basic technology to hand. And in this forum, anyone should be able to contribute to a discussion and speak their mind. Karim just exercised what is universally agreed is a right to peaceful freedom of expression - a right all decent governments have committed themselves by various international agreements to upholding.
If the advantages of the internet are to be used to their fullest, we need to speak up for folk like Karim, and stop powerful interest groups from extending their ‘right’ to be beyond jokes, honest criticism and other means by which ordinary folk can cut such loons down to size.

Amnesty doesn't always do the right thing

Not long ago I blogged on the suspension of one of Amnesty International’s leading advisors on womens rights (see 'Amnesty, the Taliban and womens rights - getting the balance right') and mentioned a petition to get them to see sense.
Though the petition was signed by numerous academics and womens right activists from around the world, and taken up in the UK by groups like Women Against Fundamentalism and Southall Black Sisters, it hasn’t worked.
Gita Saghal and Amnesty have parted, and I suspect she was pushed rather than jumping. There’s a story on it at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7095732.ece .
As some of the right wing drivel in the comments section shows, the worst UK victims of her departure will be those Amnesty needed to support most. Women around the world facing male violence, and nearer home especially lesbians, gays and abused women who might have been safe if only the UK’s racist mess of an asylum policy worked as it should.
I cannot believe Amnesty screwed up this badly. As it happens, I also don’t think the UK should have caved in to CIA thugs who snatch and torture UK citizens to fit racist myths used to perpetuate the US war industry. But a personal friend, currently writing a Ph.D. around whether Islamism is one of the new religious varieties of fascism (and also a hardcore anti-fascist rather than the wishy washy UAF variety) has convinced me we should be wary of Moazzam Begg and his Cageprisoners group.
Without doubt, serious Amnesty membership has problems. I’ve had my own - airy-fairy liberals who only want to back safe celebrity victims and think pointing out unpleasantness gives the general public ‘negative vibes’, faith organisations who tried to dictate local group policies at my old college or more recently.
You end up wondering if your limited time could be more profitably used elsewhere. Which is a shame, because even as you wonder some poor sod somewhere is having their fingernails pulled out or their relatives bumped off to shut them up, and then you worry some more that you might have stopped that.
I don’t know the answer either. But I’m mad at Amnesty’s kneejerk, play safe bureacrats for making me reconsider membership of the group I used to be proud my daughter first played a part in when, aged two, she drew a picture used for a greetings card sent to an Iranian trade unionist.

Different Strokes

As I know from various friends, one reason for respectable hard-working people coming to the Isle of Man is to escape sectarianism or even outright theo-fascism elsewhere. As I discovered yet again this week, they still won’t be safe as long as the Manx government and churches are packed with self-serving bigots.
The latest example can be seen with the apparently innocent announcement in this week’s Courier that regular multilingual orthodox services are being held at St. Matthews in Douglas, with the hint that maybe the Manx community should somehow ‘help’ to establish a local Orthodox priest to cope with the ‘growing demand’.
Except that there isn’t a growing demand because, as in the UK, the number of East European guestworkers has peaked and they’re now returning home. Falling attendances at the local Catholic churches alone show that, never mind work permit figures.
Such ‘demand’ as there is actually comes from another group.
The thing is, St. Matthews is the Manx centre of Forward in Faith/Anglican Mainstream activity. While they will never openly admit it, those who study such oddballs know that what they’d really love, short of controlling the Anglican church, is not defection to the Catholic church (which is big enough to resist their petulance) but a link-up with the even odder Eastern Orthodox gang. And as the Effineffers hold the balance in the Manx synod El Bish has little choice but to meet them halfway if he is not to lose a church or two and some rich but eccentric punters.
It’s also coincidentally funny that the priest is being flown in from Belfast. As if Northern Ireland hadn’t bred enough sectarian hate of its own, it is now cultivating and exporting an East European variety.
Because this, as I discovered when mentioning the article to a Russian friend, is the nub of the matter. Surprisingly, a number of Russian-born Manx residents who have mortgages, good and useful jobs and are here to stay are not Christian but Muslim. They came here because, as Jews before them suffered late 19th century pogroms, the new links between Putin and Orthodox theo-fascists made new and convenient scapegoats of an often relatively secular and moderate Muslim community. So they upped sticks and took their skills instead to a place where Stalinists and priests don’t run the finance sector.
My guess is that the Eastern Orthodox worshippers won’t face the problems of Manx Muslims – no Facebook sites, no mutterings about wierdly bearded foreigners putting up strange and distinctly un-Manx buildings. Which is quite funny, because wierdly bearded folk from here and elsewhere are meeting to celebrate a version of Christianity linked to both past and present fascist activity, and doing it in a listed church designed by a notable 19th century architect. Meanwhile, business people join quietly with a few doctors from the Asian subcontinent to worship in a garage. Not a veil or burqa in sight either, from what I hear, and the women are differentiated from locals only by their designer clothes.

Mann, Muslims and counter-terrorism

There’s a report over at Matblog of some excellent advice coming from what is (if only for lack of another label) a British Muslim thinktank. Even more amazingly, it was being given at a Labour party fringe meeting.
In a debate entitled: How should the left engage with British Muslims?, one presentation was by Ed Husain, Co-Director of the Quilliam Foundation.
His reported advice is summarised as follows:

‘- What the left should not do:

* Adopt the attitude of ‘take us to your leader’, and only engage with Muslim communities through self-appointed male middle-aged leaders.
* Seek representation of British Muslims as a monolithic community.
* Turn only to religion to address British Muslims. Besides mosque structures, there are junctures where Muslims interact with wider society: football supporters, college students, pensioners, for example. We must speak to them as ordinary humans and British citizens, and not just talk to them through the prism of religion.

- What the left should do:

* Engage with Muslims as citizens like everyone else. The British Muslim representative model doesn’t work for a whole host of reasons.
* The left — and the Labour Party in particular — should be the grassroots movement of British politics that young Muslims/Asians/Brits are looking for. The Labour Party has failed to galvanize on people’s genuine concerns.
* The left should not shy away from confronting far-right Islamist extremism. Fascism is not only a white-European problem. The left sees minority communities as those that should be protected and not criticised. This liberal paralysis ends up in doing a disservice to minority communities. Instead, the left must confront attitudes in these communities that are anti-women, anti-secular etc.
- Overall, then, the answer is that the left should not engage with Muslims as Muslims per se, but as British citizens and ordinary humans.
- After 12 years of Labour, the government has done many things right, but it is also worth asking where it went wrong and why Blackburn and other northern cities remain so dangerously divided along ethnic and religious lines.’

Excellent stuff, and isn’t it a line secularists should be putting on ‘minority faiths’ to prevent a dying church, desperate to retain privilege, claiming common cause with those it once strove to put out of business?
It also begs another question; why is it us ‘ex-Christians’ (again for lack of an adequate label) are less successful at dealing with the culture we’re from and our families still ‘officially’ belong to than, say, secular Jews or the ex-Muslim movement?
You can see more on the debate and presentations at http://meanwhileatthebar.org/blog/?p=486 .
Incidentally, off-island readers may wonder why I have such interest in the Quilliam Foundation, while on-island readers will recognise Quilliam as a Manx name but may not know the foundation, so here’s a brief explanation.
The Quilliam Foundation is a thinktank involving several ex-members of extreme Muslim groups, set up specifically to try and aid counter-terrorist policy making - and in particular ways to draw disgruntled, disenfranchised young working class British Muslims away from such lunacy and into more productive community or political thinking.
The Quilliam from whom it takes a name was a 19th century Liverpool solicitor, Abdullah Quilliam, who founded the first British Muslim mosque and was something of an intermediary between the British Empire (which he was no fan of) and the Arabic world. He, in turn, was a descendant of John Quilliam, an unflappable Manxman who commanded Nelson’s gun crews. When asked by Nelson how ‘we’ were doing at the battle of Trafalgar, Quilliam reportedly replied “middling”, then calmly walked off as bits of ship’s equipment and crew flew furiously around him.
Sadly, though Abdullah Quilliam had Manx links and even kept a house here, what passes for Manx historical accounts of him are little more than racist whimsy and folk tales. For some sense of what he was really about Wikipedia is a good enough start, and for more on the Quilliam Foundation see the link on the sidebar.
Both the foundation and the inspiration, I'd argue, are worthy of more Manx attention.