Holzweg
Nach einer kurzen Phase der Einsicht erleidet die Labour Party einen multikulturalistisch-klientelistischen Rückfall, berichtet Nick Cohen:
Last Sunday, John Denham, the communities secretary, announced: “Anyone wanting to build a more progressive society would ignore the powerful role of faith at their peril. We should continually seek ways of encouraging and enhancing the contribution faith communities make on the central issues of our time.”
As the week wore on, it became clear what type of “faith communities” Labour wanted to put at the centre of its “progressive society”. Denham is forcing out of his department Azhar Ali, an adviser from the heart of the Labour movement (he was once the Labour leader of Pendle council). Ali’s crime was that he opposed Islamism while advising Tony Blair, Ruth Kelly and Hazel Blears.
After Daud Abdullah, the deputy general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, signed a declaration advocating attacks on the Royal Navy if Gordon Brown sent ships to impose an arms blockade on Gaza, Ali told his comrades to cut all links. He might have said that a centre-left party should never have had links with the MCB in the first place. It contains supporters of the Arab Muslim Brotherhood and the south Asian Jamaat-e-Islami. Arab liberals know the Brotherhood to be the enemy of every enlightened value they hold, while their Bangladeshi equivalents regard Jamaat in the same way Observer readers regard the BNP, only worse because Jamaat murderers collaborated in the Pakistani army’s crimes during the Bangladeshi war of independence.
That brief moment of principled politics is over. There’s talk of the government giving the MCB’s Sir Iqbal “death perhaps is a bit too easy for Salman Rushdie” Sacranie a peerage. Meanwhile, ministers are about to cut financial support for Sufi Muslims who, like the majority of Britain’s Muslims, Sunni or Shia, are not represented by the MCB.
Diesem Schwenk der Labour Party liegt wohl folgendes Kalkül mit Blick auf die bald anstehenden Unterhauswahlen zugrunde:
At the Department for Communities, I am told that real power does not rest with the ineffective John Denham, but Shahid Malik, his deputy, who perhaps hopes that appeasing Jamaat and the Brotherhood will help him keep the core vote in his Dewsbury seat and enable a few other desperate Labour MPs to survive a potential Tory landslide as well.
No minister, though, imagines that they will pay a political price as hundreds of thousands of “new atheists” walk away in disgust. Which is not to say that a price will not be paid, just that it will come in a coinage no Observer reader should want to accept. Communalist politics do not always generate a liberal backlash; more often, communalism merely produces heightened communal tension.
Sufis are now promising to tell Dewsbury Muslims not to vote for Malik, which is no more than he deserves. More seriously, a revival of the left’s affair with Islamism can only help the BNP by convincing the white working class that their rulers hypocritically denounce racial conspiracy theories, misogyny and homophobia when they come from the followers of Nick Griffin, but not when they come from the friends of Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
It is a dismal way to imagine Britain’s longest period of left-wing rule ending, but perhaps it will take the BNP winning a parliamentary contest or so splitting the Labour vote that the Tories come through the middle in “safe” seats for the party to realise you cannot be a fairweather anti-fascist or part-time leftist without your “progressive society” turning to dust.
Die britische Variante des sozialdemokratischen “Projekt 18“.
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