If you have missed the most interesting news story last week it is probably because you did not watch the BBC’s Newsnight on Wednesday evening. Thanks to the Internet, you can still see it here but before you do, please spare a moment to consider the following scenario.
A thief is caught red-handed with stolen goods in his possession. The police explain to him that if he confesses, it will work in his favor but the thief views the police as mentally inferior and therefore susceptible to his higher skills of blusterous argumentation.
The thief assumes the confidence of an innocent person and launches an offensive dismissal of the evidence arguing with bravado: “Forget about the stolen goods you found in my possession, it’s not important. The main thing is my testimony to you!” The only problem is that the police have seen it all before. It is known as “the pretentious criminal who thinks everyone other than himself is stupid and therefore gullible.”
This scenario is, admittedly, not very inspiring but, believe it or not, this is exactly the scenario we have in the exchanges between the BBC and the neocon think-tank known as the “Policy Exchange”, which is patronized by some leading members of the Conservative Party (e.g. Michael Gove MP).
The think-tank has been caught red-handed fabricating evidence to promote the familiar global neocon agenda of stigmatizing Muslims and the only defense of any substance they have come up with so far is, and I quote, “The receipts are not, however, mentioned in the report and the report’s findings do not rely upon their existence. The report relies instead on the testimony of our research team.” (Policy Exchange Press Release, Dec.12)
As you will see in the Newsnight program, the receipts in question were found to be forged on an ink-jet printer, ostensibly by researchers at the Policy Exchange, to prove that certain books were purchased at specific mosques in the UK. These are the same researchers whose testimony the Policy Exchange wants the world to accept as credible, i.e. more credible than their handywork in the art of forgery. In other words, forget about the fact that we have fabricated the receipts as proof of purchase and just accept our verbal testimony that we did purchase the books from those very mosques. Including from mosques without bookshops!
Now, if you are wondering why apparently rational human beings would rely on such an obtuse defense, then you need to know also that bluster is a tactic that is commonly used in neocon causes. Take the case of former assistant to President Bush and chief of staff to Dick Cheney, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was convicted by a jury of one count of obstruction of justice; two counts of perjury and one count of making false statements to federal investigators. But when a judge sentenced him to 30 months in prison, Bush commuted the sentence and so Libby walked free from prison. In the neocon world, you can lie with a confident straight face as much as you wish because you are likely to get away with it.
So it was no surprise that in the Newsnight interview, the director of research at the Policy Exchange, Dean Godson, who used to work for Conrad Black at the Telegraph, wore a straight and confident face when he demanded that people forget about his think-tank’s forgery and believe him when he says it does not matter because the books were “on sale on the websites of these mosques”. If that assertion were true, why did Policy Exchange not direct the BBC, when they requested proof of purchase, to those very websites? It would have been so much easier to pass on the URLs to the BBC rather than labor with those temperamental inkjet printers. A number of similar inconsistencies and misinformation were picked up by Newsnight during the interview itself. The truth is that the vast majority of the mosques in the UK do not have bookshops and even fewer have websites.
Dean Godson happens to be the son of Joseph Godson, the man who in the 1950s facilitated, in collaboration with the neocon guru Irving Kristol, the infamous CIA-sponsored cultural wars in the UK. This is the same Irving Kristol who wrote that, as a young man, he did not feel the urge to rebel when the teacher (rabbi) in his yeshiva (Jewish madrasa) “taught us to hate the goyin and spit whenever we passed a church.”
As far back as 1993, Irving Kristol was writing about the future of his beloved Israel: “Orthodoxy in Israel is not a ‘saving remnant’; it is moving toward being the established religion of the Israeli society, if not of the Israeli state, which remains technically secular. One out of every 20 eighteen-year-olds in Israel is studying in a yeshiva — i.e. is by American standards ‘ultra-Orthodox’. These give an indication of which way the winds are blowing.”
For Muslims, the neocons want the winds to blow in completely the opposite direction from that which they aspire for themselves. Add to this the fact that the official author of the Policy Exchange report on mosques, Dr. Denis MacEoin, echoes, like a fanatical believer, the sentiments of Irving Kristol:
“Hasbara doesn’t just come out of that liberalism or my knowledge of Jews and Judaism, but from a deepening belief that the future of civilization comes down to Israel in one way or another. If Israel goes, the values that have sustained Western civilization will have gone with it. We aren’t simply fighting a war on terror, we’re fighting for values that once seemed certain to survive and are now being threatened, above all by an unreformed Islam. For every liberal who chants ‘Islam is a religion of love and peace’, I can find a score of Qur’anic verses and Hadiths that say quite the opposite. Politicians and the public must be educated.”
Following that neocon witch-hunt precedent on mosques and libraries in the US, the Center for Social Cohesion and the Policy Exchange repeated the stunt on UK public libraries and mosques respectively.
Now the question is, in the light of these latest revelations of forgery, how much more should we tolerate? Our mosques, our schools, our women, our children, our Holy Book, our Prophet (peace be upon him), and all that we hold dear have been targeted in some way or another by an unrelenting neocon onslaught.
I think it is high time we turned to the criminals and say, “Enough of your deceptive testimonies”. The evidence of your crimes is overwhelming — from dodgy dossiers and dodgy funding to now dodgy receipts, all of which is consistent with the tenets of the philosophy you follow.
We would like to call on the members of the Muslim and non-Muslim communities who have been affected by Policy Exchange propaganda to demand a police inquiry into this forgery that is being used to instigate hatred against a minority.
Too often we have heard the argument that to attack Islam is not racism because it is a faith. The question we must now ask is, forget the victims, what if the attackers and instigators invariably happen to be drawn from one particular race, is that still not racism?
(Courtesy: www.ummahpulse.com)
