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 The Channel Four programme, Dispatches, aired an interview on 6.8.07 with a person known to have links with neocon activists.
Haras Rafiq told the Dispatches presenter that 9% of Muslims in the UK are actively supporting suicide bombings and that it can take less than two weeks for 20% of Muslims to become active supporters of terrorism. No evidence, surveys, or polls were offered for these outlandish claims. It appears that Mr Rafiq, a businessman by training, commands such esteem in the corridors of power that his words are authoritative enough to obviate all need for quality control and standards of accuracy. What some people may not know is that this outrageous claim, which has the potential to heap yet more suspicion on every Muslim in the UK and push communities further apart, is a copy-cat stunt that was used effectively in the USA in 1999 by his friends. Haras Rafiq’s friend and fellow neocon darling, Mr Hisham Kabbani, while addressing a forum organised by the US State Department, claimed that “80% of mosques in the USA were run by extremists” and, by implication, were potential terrorists. When challenged by over a hundred Muslim organisations in the US to justify his statement, Kabbani retracted it with clever linguistic acrobatics. However, his statement is now used regularly by Daniel Pipes and other Muslim-hating-neocons to defend their despicable rhetoric and activism against Muslims in the West (search for "kabbani" at danielpipes.com). If the government is serious about community cohesion, it needs to take a closer look at the implications of appointing “advisors” who have neocon agendas that will not only undermine the fragile balance of coexistence between communities, but will also serve as perfect examples of the neocon “interference agenda” for those who are on the path to extremism. The media must be more responsible when presenting people as “experts” on Islam and Muslims. The Dispatches programme also featured another faceless person called “Abu Muhammad” who was described as having studied in “centres of Islamic learning in the Middle East”. In the interview, the so-called “scholar and expert on exegesis” tried to read verses from the Quran to justify the London Underground bombing. With his finger resting on pages of the Quran, he attempted to read a verse in Arabic and, in so doing, demonstrated his utter ignorance of basic Arabic reading skills. If one thing marks people out as ignorant of Islam, it is their inability to read the Quranic text. It is a skill that Muslim children are taught all over the world in their early years. Even if they do not understand Arabic, they acquire a reasonable level of competence in vowel and consonant recognition. The Dispatches expert, “Abu Muhammad”, failed to recognise and pronounce the correct vowel on the word “millah”. Instead of “millaTAhum”, as it was written on the page, he recited “millaTUhum". The grammatical and syntactic implications of such a mistake are enormous for anyone who has the slightest knowledge of Arabic. The change from the accusative to the nominative case alters the entire meaning of the sentence. This sort of mistake would be excusable if someone had been reading from memory and had no comprehension of the Arabic language. It is certainly not excusable for someone who is being portrayed a scholar, teacher and versed in Quranic commentary. Channel Four now has a responsibility to investigate the background and qualifications of both Haras Rafiq and “Abu Muhammad”, especially given that Dispatches has now inadvertently contributed to their publicity among people who might not recognise their bogus pretences of knowledge and hollow babble based on prejudice and ignorance. The Government also needs to replace both these neocon advisors and their programmes that were established in the Blair era. Contrary to claims and appearances, these programmes are not designed to create community cohesion nor peaceful co-existence, but rather are designed to perpetuate fear and tension, so that the Christians and Muslims will increase their killing and slaughter of one another. How else can one interpret the designs of a school curriculum that is so dangerous that it must remain secret and shielded from public debate and scrutiny. Like methods of hypnosis that are edited out of TV programmes, the Channel Four presenter explained in respect of the Nabwood School's syllabus in Bradford: “Programmes to de-radicalise Muslims apparently do not benefit from public exposure”, while the other government advisor and so-called “scholar” refused to even answer questions about methods, claiming that they are a secret and that, if the public were to find out, “we will loose out”. For Muslims in the know, the stark contrast between this and the six-year-long neocon fixation with every detail of Muslim school (madrasa) curricula all over the world, is all too obvious. If the the authorities fail to recognise the damage they are doing to community relations in this country by promoting charlatans and their agendas, and if the media continues to tread the all too easy path of shoddy journalism, then I fear the hasty arrival of a day on which we will witness the unthinkable – a Muslim holocaust in Europe - which no amount of debate about theological covenants will be able to prevent. The repercussions of such a future are utterly bleak in the global village we all now call home.
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