radicalisation in Cambridge: where to go for advice?

The Cambridge News reported recently that the Muslim Council of Cambridgeshire (MCC) hit out after monies to prevent radicalisation of Cambridge residents by fundamentalists were handed to Cambridge Citizens’ Advice Bureau. The vice-president of the MCC, Mizra Baig, asked: "Please tell me honestly: do you really think that a young Muslim who is already thinking of committing a suicidal activity would go to the CAB for advice?"

I’m sure the answer would be no; but surely a wannabe suicide bomber wouldn’t seek anti-radicalisation advice from anybody?

This isn’t an academic question, as Cambridge’s Islamic communities have already produced two terrorists: Dr Mohammed Asha (left), who is believed to have inducted Dr Bilal Abdulla into the city’s Hizb-ut Tahrir group, where Abdulla was radicalised and subsequently mounted a suicide attack on Glasgow Airport.

Radicalisation in Cambridge was again put on the agenda by moderate Muslims, who were "appalled" when the Islamic Society was addressed by Dr Haitham al-Haddad, who advised students to "prepare themselves for jihad, all over the world".

And I’m willing to believe that the MCC is composed largely of the more moderate among Cambridge’s 7,000 Muslims. For example, they advised their members not to join a UAF counter-protest when the EDL marched, after a blind man had been thrown out (illegally) of a café because of his guide dog.

But we're all prisoners of our assumptions: one of the MCC's is that "the spate of violence in the name of religion that has plagued the comity of nations is a phenomenon that is to be deliberated upon by the Muslims themselves". In other words, "it’s our business, mind your own" – the position of the apartheid-era South African government.

So I would recontextualise Mr Baig’s question: would somebody worried about an individual being radicalised go to the Muslim Council of Cambridge?

Fred Redman
300 words

UK aid to India: eugenics raises its racist head

The UK Government, it seems, is up to the old racist tricks that have occupied Western administrations since the dawn of eugenics. A report claims that UK aid money is being used to fund forcible sterilisation of Indian women.

Three things occur to me. The first is to ask whether Indian politicians learnt nothing from the Emergency, when coerced sterilisation was a major factor in bringing down Indira Gandhi’s first administration at the conclusion of the Emergency in 1977.

The second is the shocking sexism, if not misogyny, visited on young and mostly poor women. It doesn’t take medical training to see that during a vasectomy you don’t have to invade the body further than the scrotum; but to sterilise a woman involves breaching then stitching the abdominal wall, almost certainly leading to infection when conditions are unhygienic. This, again, fuelled the anger of the Emergency.

The third consideration concerns ethnicity. In the newscast embedded above, I didn’t see any women in burqas, only saris. Whereas during the Emergency Rukhsana Sultana (right) demanded 300 sterilisation certificates from a group of Muslims who petitioned her to stop their houses being demolished, I wonder if the then-minority Muslim position that they should take the chance to outbreed Hindus, Sikhs and Christians will assume the status of a war-cry at the hands of Salafites and others of their ilk.

Globally, there is only one dependable contraceptive: rising standards of living. Matthew Connelly reports in Fatal Misconception that when Planned Parenthood went into Central America, they found birth-rates already decreasing because of increasing prosperity. Shrewd management of the riches India already has could easily better the lot of all her children.

But do you think population control only blights faraway lands? Look at the Mail’s sinister headlines today: "NHS…using terminations 'as another form of contraceptive’".

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

where's the entertainment value in rape?

If you find this image uncomfortable or even disturbing, there’s hope for you yet. I found it forwarded from a Facebook group called SickAndTwistedDotCom, which otherwise posts funny pics, inspirational messages and assorted lolcats.

Just where is the entertainment value of rape? Given the above pic, with the motto "I can run faster horny than you can scared", that’s basically what we’re talking about, right? Commenting on the image last year, the Feministing community advises that one repeat ten times, "rape jokes are never funny.

Besides humour, rape seems to be present through large swathes of the entertainment industry. In Straw Dogs, for example, we see "a dangerous endorsement of the male 'rape myth' that women secretly enjoy being raped" – did this myth underlie Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke’s (right) comment about "serious" rape, indicating that some rapes are less serious than others?

A form of rape that was, until recently, surrounded by a common-sense firewall is paedophilia; but recently Channel 4 not only showed but repeated Ricky Gervaise’s video Science, in which he tells two jokes about paedophilia. I complained about this and Channel 4 didn’t want to know, ditto the Culture and Media Select Committee. Following the beachhead created by the sexualisation of children, are we now seeing the commercialisation of rape?

I don’t know why SickAndTwistedDotCom posted this particular picture, which left me feeling dismayed and depressed. Could it be that we as a society are so inured by sexual images in “lads’ mags”, on catwalks and in (young) girls’ magazines that the poster(s) failed to see anything offensive in it? If so, we need an urgent re-education in the hard-won rights of women to own their bodies and their dignity. I started my own re-education by "unliking" SickAndTwistedDotCom and switched to Lolcats. How will you start yours?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

EDL 3rd birthday demo, Luton: picture this

I had expected the usual pictures of English Defence League "violence" on the UAF website, on the basis that a picture paints a thousand words. The thing is, the UAF wants also to dictate the words that the picture speaks: this to me is fascism.

Sometimes, however, words are worth a thousand pictures – for example, Martin Luther King’s (right) "I have a dream" speech; and it is much harder to dictate the pictures that these words form in each individual’s mind.

So I’d like to pick out three themes from the speeches at the EDL’s third birthday march at Luton on Saturday 5 May. Picture as you will.

• EDL founder Tommy Robinson, his latest beating by thugs visible on his face as the price of our fragile freedom, spoke of the "outstanding" Muslim individuals and businesses that he encountered and frequented daily.

• He added that the many brown and black faces visible in the crowd were better signs of barriers being broken down than any number of resolutions.
• He told of how he had helped organise people of all ethnicities on the main housing estate into a committee to sit down and thrash out their problems around a table in reply to exhortations to do this instead of demonstrating by Hazel Simmons, leader of Luton Borough Council; and of how a team of policemen had been ordered to go from door to door to cancel the meeting once councillors realised how big this was going to be.

It was interesting to see that, on the Luton Borough Council’s webpage, Hazel Simmons criticised the EDL for marching in Luton "so soon after their previous protest" 15 months ago. On the other hand, Assistant Chief Constable Andrew Richer chose to criticise the UAF for trying to break out of its allotted marching area. Picture as you will.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

beast priests have a powerful enemy

Pressure mounts on Cardinal Seán Brady (right) to resign over his part in the case of beast priest Brendan Smyth in 1975. But beyond the Mail and the recent BBC This World documentary on the subject, paedophiles in the Roman Catholic Church have a more implacable enemy: Joseph Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI.

In 1985, in a little-publicised move, Cardinal Ratzinger persuaded the then Pope to prevent America from moving alleged paedophiles outside the US. Over the next decades as hush-money emptied the coffers, affected US dioceses started to file for bankruptcy. It was a powerful lesson.

Shortly after relocating from Munich to Rome in 1982 Ratzinger was given access to details outlining the true extent of the paedophile scandal in the RC Church and commented on the "filth" within the church. The chronology is now generally recognised by church papers, but following John Paul II’s death in 2005, as Ratzinger emerged as a favourite, the quote was released to Catholic papers as if he’d just said it, the inference being that he’d been referring to his competitors. Knowing his views on beast priests, was a faction in the Papacy moving to keep Ratzinger off St Peter's chair?

I’m not presenting Ratzinger as a saint – the Vatican's equation of homosexuality with paedophilia> will live in infamy. But he has struck blows against beast priests in the US, Ireland and the powerful Legionaries of Christ, any one of which could be seen as marching on Moscow.

But clerical abuse doesn't happen in a vaccuum: for instance, social workers in Glasgow knowingly returned fleeing children to abusive nuns in Nazareth House and later claimed they’d had nowhere else to put the children. When the media gives equal weight to the enabling of abuse by social workers and others (such as Margaret Hodge), their pursuit of a then junior player might seem less ideologically fuelled.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

vote 2012: democracy loses

Richard Taylor is that rarest of creatures: a genuinely independent political commentator. The conclusion to his article about why candidates for council elections in Cambridge weren’t canvassing in some areas should shock:

I am wondering if the major parties essentially giving up on all but a few wards and by doing so are to all intents and purposes agreeing among themselves who ought be elected in many parts of the city.

So my ears pricked up when, during the BBC’s coverage of the council elections, Conservative Party co-chairman Baroness Warsi (right) remarked on the "interesting" fact that the fall in BNP candidates nationally matched the rise in UKIP candidates "almost exactly". A UKIP spokesman later said she’d suggested a link between the two, but she hadn’t gone that far, as you’ll see if you follow the link above.

I understand her unwillingness to commit. After the 2010 General Election she was the only politician with the chutzpah to accuse Labour of benefitting from electoral fraud in three constituencies, denying the conservatives victory, and was gagged by David Cameron.

Electoral irregularities are on the agenda right now as an investigation gets underway into voting fraud in Tower Hamlets, where police were called to a polling stations after Green candidate Chris Smith said he’d been threatened by a Respect activist. Respect is, of course, the party of George Galloway, the recently-elected MP for Bradford West, where allegations of electoral fraud have also been made.

If the Conservative, Labour and Lib Dems are carving up wards between them like drug-dealers putting dibs on an inner-city housing estate, they deserve what they get when parties like the BNP and UKIP practice a bit of Realpolitik of their own. But the real loser of this election, decided on the lowest turnout for a decade, is democracy.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

did the Luton terrorists get their toy car idea from the BBC?

According to the Daily Mail’s Chris Greenwood, the four terrorist suspects arrested in Luton last week got their ideas from an Al-Qaeda publication. But were they also inspired by something closer to home?

On Saturday 21 April, BBC2 aired TV 73: The Defining Shows. One show included was The Burke Special, hosted by James Burke (right).

The particular episode that presenter Mark Lawson focussed on concerned the IRA. Burke had persuaded the British Army to fly over a small part of a haul of arms captured from the IRA, including automatic rifles and a hand-held rocket launcher, and these were frightening enough. Then, crucially, Burke turned to explosives, and showed how a radio-controlled car could be used to detonate a bomb from a distance.

It is, of course, entirely possible that the BBC is innocent, and that older Al Qaeda members who used to be in the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) got the idea while dealing with their opposite numbers in the IRA: former SAS officer Gayle Rivers stated in his 1986 book The Specialist that the IRA, the PLO and Basque ETA used to traffic arms to each other to frustrate investigations of where they came from. Might ideas also have been exchanged?

The toy-car incident may have happened before TV 73 was aired; so then why, when 70s nostalgia is so big, can you view episodes of BBC2’s The 70s for 3 weeks while TV 73 has been taken off i-player? In addition, there’s no mention of the car in the BBC’s web article, and I heard no mention of Luton at all on Radio 2’s news this morning.

In any case, whether or not the BBC’s broadcast of Burke’s explaining how a radio-controlled car could set off a bomb inspired the Luton terrorists, could showing that clip when the country is at unprecedented risk of terrorism really be called responsible broadcasting?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words