Bring Anna Campbell Home

Anna Campbell from Lewes died in a Turkish air-strike on 15th March in Afrin in Syria. She was 26.

Anna had travelled to Syria to join the Kurdish fight against ISIS, because she was horrified by reports of their atrocities against the Syrian people and religious minorities. Appalled by ISIS’ assault on women’s rights and reports of mass rape and sexual slavery, she joined the YPJ, the all-female militia affiliated to the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). Throughout the war, these male and female Kurdish ground forces – backed by US and Russian air strikes – have played the key role in repelling ISIS. Battle-hardened, highly disciplined and committed to democratic and women’s rights, they are accepted as allies by the UK, the USA  and the Russians. However, Turkey, fearful of an independent Kurdistan, views them as a terrorist force. 

Despite Turkey’s status as a NATO ally, there have been persistent complaints that its deeply conservative Sunni government has done little to assist the fight against either the jihadis of ISIS or the other Al Qaeda affiliates in the region – and that it has in fact covertly supported them, while impeding the Kurds’ efforts. 

On 20 January, with the West’s attention focussed on the Syrian and Russian bombardment of Ghouta, Turkey launched a ground and air offensive into Syria to oust Kurdish forces from Afrin.  Kurdish forces were redeployed to defend the town, though lacking air support from Russia or the USA, the odds were terrible. There were warnings that Turkey’s actions would allow ISIS to regroup and reassert control of Syrian territory ISIS had previously invaded, putting  vulnerable minorities like the Yazidis at risk of further atrocities. There were predictions of widespread civilian deaths and a refugee crisis. The situation could hardly have been more dangerous, yet Anna Campbell begged her commanders to let her go to defend Afrin. Eventually, reluctantly, they did. She died with two other female comrades at the hands of our NATO ally on 15th March.

When Anna’s death was  first reported I looked at her photograph and thought how near in age she was to my own daughter. Gazing at her fresh and open face, I thought how like she was to girls I had seen at my daughter’s old school. I almost thought I recognised her. It turned out that I did. When my daughter saw Anna’s photograph, she confirmed that in fact Anna had been at her old school, just one year ahead. 

I cannot imagine the pain of losing a beloved daughter and sister and to lose her violently and at the hands of a government that is supposedly our ally. Her family say they have been able to draw some comfort from the fact that Anna was fighting for what she believed. It may also give them some ease to realise that in the publicity surrounding her death, she has managed to highlight issues politicians and the media have preferred to ignore. Many people reading about Anna’s death, will have learned for the first time that the Kurds are our allies, the only effective ground force in a war against a brutal enemy that threatened and threatens both the middle east and Britain. And that against an enemy that despises women, the Kurdish forces have deployed thousands of women soldiers, many in senior leadership positions, who have played a key role repelling ISIS and promoting equal rights.

Shamefully, the Foreign Office has not condemned the Turkish attack on Syrian Kurds, nor Turkish threats to widen the assault to areas such as Sinjar, where Kurdish forces are protecting minorities such as the Yazidis. Instead, the Foreign Office has stated that “anyone” from Britain who goes abroad to fight risks arrest on their return – without any regard for whom they may be fighting. The BBC has ignored recent reports of Turkish atrocities in Afrin, while highlighting Turkey’s view that Kurdish troops are terrorists. 

Political cowardice and media dishonesty cannot alter the reality that, throughout this conflict, the Kurds have been our stalwart ally against a genocidal enemy. Or the shameful fact that this small,  stateless and beleaguered community took up arms against ISIS when Britain had not the courage or resolve to do it. 

Much as our political leaders may suggest it, there is no moral or political equivalence between British Salafists who have volunteered to fight alongside islamo-fascist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda, and those British men and women who have taken up arms against them.  Unlike their opponents, the male and female Kurdish militias have defended human rights and have empowered and protected vulnerable communities.

Anna Campbell fought and died in defence of democracy and what the Kurds call a ‘women’s revolution’. She was a hero and a patriot. 

 

We should support her father’s call to bring her body home.

The Manchester Bomb was an Attack on Girls

Twenty two people died in Manchester and 120 were injured when suicide bomber Salman Abedi blew himself up at an Arianna Grande concert packed with children and young people. Given that the former teenage actor is an idol of young teenage girls, it is likely that the bomber understood very well that most of the victims would be very young and female.

It may be that, as some commentators have said, that the bomber simply didn’t care that the victims were children, but went for soft targets at an event with little security. Or that he deliberately aimed to attack children, knowing the distress and terror this would create. Few have acknowledged the probability that this was a deliberate attack on girls.
Journalists and politicians who had no difficulty describing the 2016 Orlando attack as an assault on LGBT people, struggle to identify the Manchester bombing as a targeted hate crime, aimed not at ‘children’ but at girls. Yet this attack is entirely consistent with previous evidence of targeted attack against females. In 2004, young islamists were recorded by British police while discussing a possible attack on a London nightclub. The men commented that no one could “turn round and say ‘Oh, they were innocent’, those slags dancing around”. The journalist James Harkin has pointed out that In 2007, a car bomb outside Tiger Tiger nightclub in London’s Piccadilly “seems to have been designed to coincide with a ‘ladies’ night’ at the venue, in which the perpetrators might have hoped to kill and maim scantily clad young women drinking alcohol.”

ISIS, the extremist Islamist organisation that has claimed responsibility for the Manchester attack, has many similarities to other Jihadi groups such as the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra (now Jabhat Fateh al-Sham) and Boko Haram. Their adherents are islamist Sunni Muslims, influenced by Salafism, a sectarian system of thought rooted in Saudi Wahhabism. Funded by the Saudi government this ideology is now deeply embedded in British mosques and has taken root in universities, museums, libraries and schools. At its heart is the forced subordination of women and girls.

The Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, like Boko Haram in Nigeria, regularly attack girls, often in their schools, subjecting them to fire bombs, rape, kidnap and murder. The most famous victim of this sort of attack was Malala Yousafzai, who was shot on a school bus in Pakistan because she campaigned for girls’ education. Malala rejected the highly confined role conservative sharia law permits to women and in so doing asserted her right to freedom and self-determination. She was supported in her free choice by her loving parents – as were the teenage girls attending the Arianna Grande concert – but to Salafist jihadis this would make no difference.

While young men like Abedi treat the women of their own Muslim communities with contempt, they reserve their deepest loathing for rebellious women and those in particular who are ‘apostate’ or non-muslim. They view them, as the journalist Sarah Vine puts it, as “barely human, the lowest of the low, for whom no punishment or suffering can ever be enough.” She says “We see this in the treatment of young Nigerian schoolgirls captured by Boko Haram and sold into sexual slavery; we see this in the mass rape of Yazidi women by Islamic State guerrillas; we’ve even seen it in our own country, in the systematic sexual abuse of young girls in Rochdale by so-called ‘moderate’ Muslim men who wrap their own daughters in the hijab, while simultaneously defiling other parents’ children”.

Politicians have for decades sacrificed young Muslim girls on the altar of multiculturalism, allowing powerful community leaders and domestic tyrants to deny girls equal rights to inheritance, freedom and even control of their own fertility. They have allowed generations of boys to grow up believing that they have a right to control female lives and domestic labour – whether this takes the form of untrammelled sexual access to obedient wives and control of their children or the sexual abuse of White girls from Rochdale, Christian schoolgirls from Nigeria or Yazidis from Sinjar.

A young unveiled Muslim woman on Question Time (25th May 2017) spoke out against Wahhabism in British mosques, calling for Saudi funding to be stopped. This brave young woman was supported by panelist Nazir Afzal, the former Crown Prosecutor of the North East of England who had a key role in ensuring that the organised abuse of white working class girls by groups of Pakistani-origin men, was eventually prosecuted.
These brave Muslims, like the Amadiyha Muslim women who stood on Westminster Bridge in protest against the murderous violence of Khalid Masood, deserve our respect, support and gratitude.

Tony Greenstein and Uncomfortable Truths

Tony Greenstein, who occasionally writes for local newspapers, has been suspended from the Labour Party. He’s not sure of the reason, because despite repeated requests over several weeks, party officials still haven’t told him the nature of the complaint against him. However, he believes he is accused of anti-semitism.

He believes this because information was leaked to the The Daily Telegraph, which reported his suspension as evidence of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. The Party took no steps to challenge this report, though Tony did. As a result, the Telegraph has now published a retraction of any implication that Tony may be anti-semitic, as has The Times, which subsequently ran the story.

Tony is understandably aggrieved about the allegation. He is Jewish, steeped in Jewish culture as the son of an orthodox rabbi, and a life long anti-fascist. As an atheist he has rejected his religion (we’ve had many an argument about faith), but he remains fiercely opposed to anti-semitism and all forms of racism. He is also an anti-Zionist and has campaigned for years for better treatment for the Palestinian people. And this is why he has upset a great many influential people.

He is undoubtedly one of the rudest men in Brighton – as I know to my cost – but he is a sincere anti-fascist and his knowledge of both Nazi genocide and the history of Zionism is more comprehensive than anyone I know. He may sometimes overstate his case, but what he says is almost always based in firm historical fact.

Tony’s suspension has been greeted with a torrent of online abuse. In most political disputes, I would say Tony can give as good (or as bad) as he gets. However, no one should have to endure insults such as, “(It’s a) shame your family survived [the Holocaust] world can do without XXXX (an extreme obscenity) like you” or “You must feel terrible having a Yiddish name why don’t you change it to Hitler”.

Tony’s people were East European Jews from a German-speaking area of Poland near the border with Ukraine. His father was the last of the family to speak Yiddish. Most of his extended family died under the Nazis. Tony travelled there with his son some years ago, visiting Auschwitz and several towns and cities. In every one he says they found memorials to the victims of massacres and atrocities. This is why he has spent his life opposing fascism. And that is why it is a cruel insult and to call him an anti-semite.

The suspension has also been a low blow, considering his health. In recent years, Tony discovered he had somehow contracted Hepatitis C and that his liver was damaged beyond repair. He endured seemingly endless months of painful treatment and uncertainty – attempting to safeguard his family’s future, while waiting for a new liver he knew might never come. It was a worrying time, not least because he has a severely disabled son. In the event, a transplant saved his life. However, he is still recovering and is not really in a position to fight his corner.

It seems to me that the Labour Party is far too ready to squander talent and experience, while being fearful of the genuine cut and thrust of ideas. Tony’s view is that, on the Left, the incidence of anti-semitism is negligible – and that hostility to Muslims is a greater problem. I strongly disagree with that view, but that doesn’t mean I cannot benefit from and respect his knowledge and commitment.

People should not be barred from public life because they challenge ideas or make mistakes – still less be silenced if they sometimes speak uncomfortable truths we need to hear. The Labour Party should think again.

Women, Islamism and Domestic Terrorism

Note: A slightly amended version of this article was first published on the Quilliam Foundation Blog.

In the wake of terrorist atrocities in Brussels, there has been much talk about the determination of European nations to stand together and not give way to fear. It’s assumed that we’re all in it together and that if we are scared, it’s of the same thing – young men with bombs and kalashnikovs.

I suggest this is not the case and that, faced with islamist terrorism, women and men experience very different levels and kinds of fear. While all of us – adults and children – fear explosives and guns in the hands of fanatics, it is women and girls who are likely to experience the most visceral terror. During the Second World War, all Britons feared Nazi occupation – but the fear of British Jews must have been of a different order. Most knew what occupation meant for them. In a similar way, women know what Isis and its affiliates want – and what they intend for us.

Powerful politicians and the liberal commentariat seem indifferent to Isis’ threats to place a black flag over Downing Street and absorb Europe into an islamic Caliphate. They consider such threats unrealistic and grandiose, despite the fact that Isis and associated islamists continue to control huge oil revenues and swathes of land in the Middle East. They are aware that Isis brings death, sexual enslavement and servitude to women – as well as to many minorities – but they can live with it, because there’s no immediate prospect of conventional military occupation in the UK and little threat to them. Sexism blinds them to the suffering of women, while racism and arrogance causes them to under-estimate their enemy. They do not understand the power of ideas to subvert the institutions and social structures they take for granted.

Women tend to have a different perspective. For many of us, occupation seems an immediate threat – or in fact began long ago. It’s not that men in balaclavas are fighting in our streets. It’s that the ideas which fuel such men are here already and have been for decades, blighting the lives of women and girls of both immigrant and indigenous communities and putting all women at risk.

British politicians may suggest islamist terror first came to these shores on 7/7 – and boast that security services have prevented many atrocities. The fact is that domestic islamist terror – rooted in the same islamist ideology as Isis and Al Qaeda – reached homes and streets on these islands decades ago and has flourished unhindered ever since, shored up by Saudi-funded Salafi and Wahhabi teachers in mosques, schools and universities. Politicians have done little to counter this. Rather they have turned a blind eye, appeased and colluded with it. British lawyers and institutions – and even the former Archbishop of Canterbury – have sought an accommodation with sharia law and sharia courts, despite the fact that both deny females equal rights.

As a consequence, in many British homes, women and girls are denied their rights under British and international law, confined to the home, without freedom or control over their own bodies and fertility, finances or futures. Husbands have mastery over wives, brothers over sisters, uncles over nieces and sons over mothers. Polygamy is tolerated because, though bigamy is illegal, unregistered ‘religious’ marriages are not. Under age marriage of teenage girls to much older men takes place, denying girls education and a career and condemning them to repeated pregnancies. Hard line Imams and even some school teachers justify domestic beatings and sexual violence, instructing girls that they may not ‘refuse’ their husbands.

There are no public slave markets, but there is domestic slavery and organised trafficking and abuse of vulnerable young girls by groups of men – until recently, routinely tolerated by politicians and the police. There is also female genital mutilation, forced marriage and so called honour killing. These abuses are illegal, but convictions are vanishingly rare. Each is declared an abomination, but the ideology which underpins so many of these crimes remains unchallenged.

There is the ‘Prevent’ programme, but it promotes ‘tolerance’ not equality – certainly not equality for women and girls. In practice, our society treats the control of women and children by men, even returning jihadis, as a religious imperative or a bargaining chip – to be tolerated provided men keep their violence off the streets.

The Sussex Boys

Where are they now,
Our swaggering sons
Our likely lads?
Shouldering black flags and guns
In Syria and Iraq.

Hard to think
They took the bus
Wrote GCSEs
And drank in parks,
then staggered back.

Did they use stones to kill
Or buy girls cheap in a market place
To rape another day?
These sad-faced dead-eyed boys,
With mobile phones and southern ways

Some are dead –
Did they die alone?
Did they call for their mothers
As it’s said
real soldiers do?

Or curse some bastard father
Safe at home.

Bishop Bell and the Church of England

I’ve been saddened to see so many people rush to defend the reputation of Bishop Bell – and by implication suggest the elderly woman who accused him of child sexual abuse is a liar. The Church of England has accepted that the abuse took place and given its previous determination to keep abuse by its clergy under wraps, I suspect the evidence is compelling. I was pleased that Bishop Warner apologised for the abuse and defended the alleged victim from criticism.

In respect of prominent abusers, the modern Church of England has done better than the Church of Rome. Eric Gill, the famous artist and Roman Catholic adult convert was the son of a Church of England clergyman, also from Chichester. Over many years, Gill sexually abused his sisters, servants and then his daughters, socially isolating the girls while using them as models for semi-erotic religious art. The abuse is catalogued in his own diaries, but if you visit the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral, where his famous Stations of the Cross take pride of place and are publicised in the Cathedral shop, there’s no mention of his history or his victims’ exploitation.

The Churches’ responsibility – and our own, whether we have faith or none – must be to protect the living, defend the powerless (especially children) and treat survivors with compassion. This being the case, Chichester Diocese should, out of respect to all clergy victims, fulfil its promise to change the name of Bishop Bell House – and ensure people understand its past actions and current position regarding child protection and clergy abuse.

In Defence of Christianity

I’m a Christian. Not a good one. But I am one. My faith affects every aspect of my life and is at the root of my politics. So I’m fed up with having that faith rubbished and being told I’m part of a dying breed. Barely a week goes by without some survey or other gleefully reporting the end of Christianity in Britain.

I can handle secularism. Given the damage religious institutions have done and the many crimes committed in the name, or under cover, of religion, I can understand and support the argument for separation of church and state.

I’m happy to accept just criticism of the Church. It’s committed countless historic abuses, from exploitation of enslaved, oppressed and colonised peoples to attacks on women, homosexuals and heretics, anti-semitism and child abuse. I will defend the right of anyone to challenge religious corruption.

However, the thing I find hard to accept is that, in intellectual and professional circles, other religions appear not to be subject to the same scrutiny, nor are they held to the same standards. There are no blasphemy laws in this country, but those brave souls who criticise non-Christian religions, in particular fundamentalist Islam, are nowadays regularly prevented from speaking at meetings by offended individuals (often men) who defend their ‘rights’ by aggressively shouting down speakers. Disgracefully, they often receive the support of liberal intellectuals.

These same liberals and progressives, who dare not criticise Islam or other minority religions, feel free to undermine or attack Christianity. This is despite the fact that, across the world from Pakistan to Kenya, Israel to India and Nigeria to Egypt, Syria and Iraq, Christians are at greater risk of persecution, discrimination and attack than any other faith group.

It’s worth thinking about why people ignore the persecution of Christians. One probable reason is fear. It’s not possible to defend beleaguered Christians abroad without a willingness to confront the religious extremism – in particular fundamentalist Salafi Islamism – which is so often a primary factor in their persecution. This ideology, promoting the ideal of a caliphate under sharia law, underpins the violent activities of jihadis from Al Qaeda, to Isis, to Boko Haram, Jabhat al Nusra and others. Funded and promoted by Saudi Arabia and other powerful foreign states, these ideas influence many British universities, mosques and and communities. There are risks attached to challenging them so it’s simpler not to.

Far easier and safer to placate Islamists, pretend they pose no danger and pillory brave women like Mariam Namazie, an atheist ex-Muslim, who has been condemned as an apostate and ‘no-platformed’ at universities from Dublin to Warwick. Easier still, to attack Christianity, which can be done without any associated fear of violent reprisal or allegations of hate crime or racism.

Christian institutions don’t make life easy for their supporters. The Church of England, in particular, seems to have accepted it is in terminal decline and has no option but to sell off its churches and lessen its influence. Its liberal clerics promote other faiths and factions without challenge, as if there is no difference between them. At a time when Christians, and others under attack, need clear and committed support, they are told to embrace religious ideologies which in some cases threaten their rights and future. They should not comply.

Jesus called on his followers to love their enemies, not to pretend they were friends. When he was asked what he considered to be the greatest commandment, he didn’t say it was to obey priests or follow rules, still less collude with injustice or capitulate to bullies. He said it was to love God and our neighbours as ourselves.

This simple call to equally value self and others – and to make it central to people’s faith – lies at the heart of the centuries-old struggle for equal human rights. Though regularly betrayed by leaders of church and state, it has been one of the wellsprings of democracy and an inspiration to countless subject peoples seeking justice.

It is surely not an idea to attack or suppress, but one to celebrate and defend.

The Archbishop at St Peter’s Church in Brighton & Hove

On 8th March 2015, I queued for 30 minutes to hear Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury preach at the 10.30 service at Brighton’s St Peter’s Church. Cold as I was, I couldn’t stop smiling.

This is a church that just a few years ago was earmarked for closure. It was expensive to run, needed extensive repairs and was situated on a prime site at the juncture of the London and Lewes Roads. Despite the protests of its small but loyal congregation, the Diocese proposed its redundancy and its clergy and the then bishop of Chichester agreed. The Diocese reckoned without two things, the stubbornness of the congregation and local people’s deep affection for the church.

A campaign was set up and over two years, the Friends of St Peter’s wrote letters of protest, gained cross-party support from Brighton & Hove Council and gathered a 7000 signature petition. In May 2008 a small group of campaigners travelled to London to appear before the Church Commissioners in London. It was adversarial and frighteningly formal, but the Commissioners were kind.

The Bishop of Chichester, the archdeacon and other members of the church hierarchy still argued forcefully for redundancy, but four of us spoke against. Our position had been strengthened by the fact that Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) church in London had learned of the church’s dire situation and told us it had offered help. We asked the Commissioners to explore this option and, to our delight, they agreed. We were confident that, given the chance, HTB would succeed. And so they did.

The church authorities still closed the church and removed many things the ‘old’ congregation held dear. Nonetheless, HTB was on its way and, during the few months the church was closed, a small group of us met for Saturday matins, first in Bardsley’s fish and chip shop in Baker street and then at St Bartholomews Church.

In October 2009, Archie Coates, a popular clergyman from HTB (who is married to a Brightonian), was inducted as the new vicar. The church was packed at that event and has remained that way pretty well ever since. There were hundreds of people at Sunday’s service.

Archie Coates interviewed Justin Welby, whose self-deprecating style suited the mood of the congregation. Though he didn’t mention it was International Women’s Day (I wish he had) he made a point of saying that the “average Anglican” is an African woman in her thirties, living in poverty, who has lived with conflict and violence and has a 50% chance of being in an area in which Christians are persecuted.

Asked about leadership, he replied that nothing could be achieved without God and without humility (or as he said “keep washing feet”). He added that good leaders need the confidence to surround themselves with people who are cleverer, brighter and more spiritual than they are. He joked “share the credit for their success” but “be prepared to take the blame”. As we approach a secular general election this seems useful advice.

He said that at times he feels like “an imposter”, as if the real Archbishop of Canterbury will suddenly appear one day and tell him he’s taking over. He added that he didn’t quite know how he’d got there. I was similarly amazed – not, of course, at how Justin Welby had come to be Archbishop – but at how the Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual heir of St Augustine, had ended up in our St Peter’s Church, doomed for so many years to closure. But then, in a way it was fitting. As Justin Welby said, a Bishop once told him before he was ordained “there’s no future for you in the Church of England”.

During the St Peter’s campaign, nobody ever told us what the developers intended to do with the church if it closed, but it was pretty clear a great deal of money would have been involved.

I smiled as I left the church, remembering that the gospel-reading for the service had been John 2.13-25….. the one in which Jesus drives the money lenders out of the temple.

Radicalisation in Brighton

BBC cameras recently filmed north Syrian Kurds pay tribute to Konstandinos Erik Scurfield, an ex-Marine from Barnsley, who died fighting alongside them against Islamic State. Soldiers stood at attention as the coffin passed. As if to emphasise the difference between their forces and ISIS, several women fighters stood in the front line of the honour guard, nearest the coffin, while an older civilian woman, probably around my age, put her arm about the dead man’s grieving father and kissed his forehead.

I have no military background or training, but it occurred to me as I watched those Kurdish militia that if I had been younger and stronger I would have wanted to fight as a volunteer alongside them. For the first time in my life, I think I understand what motivated young British volunteers who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. I believe terrible dangers face this country and as the mother of a daughter, I fear for her future.

The second world war was a war against fascism and I know without a shadow of a doubt that I would have wanted to serve in it. In the years before the war, I hope I would not have been deterred by the siren voices of non-intervention and appeasement.

The young fighters of the International Brigades were not mercenaries and they were not ‘interfering’ in another country’s dispute. Long before their own government, they realised that fascism respected no borders and posed a grave threat to human civilisation. They lost in Spain, not least because the British blocked international aid reaching Spanish government forces, but failed to stop Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy supporting Franco. Hitler deployed 19,000 German soldiers in Spain, then used what he’d learned there to destroy much of Europe. Fascism flourished in Spain for more than 30 years.

Now we are faced with the possibility of another global conflagration and an equal or greater threat to civilisation. ISIS (like al Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra, Boko Haram and the Taleban) is a fascist organisation, committed to destroy democracy and set up a dictatorship by caliphate. While Hitler butchered Jews, Slavs, Gipsies, trade unionists and gays, treating women as either brood mares or sex slaves, ISIS tortures and kills without mercy, treating women, Jews, Christians, Yazidis, Shia, Kurds and other groups as ‘untermensch’, barely worthy of life. It sells women and girls into sex slavery, handing control of their lives and fertility into the hands of men, justifying rape, child ‘marriage’, FGM, domestic violence and wife-murder.

These are unspeakable people, but the views they hold are not uncommon in Britain. The ideologues of Hitler’s Germany found fertile ground when they went to the German people, parts of whose culture were already steeped in militarism and anti-semitism – coupled with a powerful sense of both entitlement and post-war grievance. In a similar way, sections of Britain’s muslim population provide fertile soil for the extremist Sunni ideas of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra. Supported by Saudi money and political influence, the deeply anti-democratic and sexist Salafi and Wahhabi ideology has become deep-rooted in parts of Britain’s sunni Muslim community – including here in Brighton & Hove – as well as in some British universities and schools.

In the 1930s, Hitler’s diplomats and our own fascists tried to persuade British politicians and the British people that nazi militarism was a response to an unfair war-settlement and that fascism posed no dangers to Britain. There were many who supported appeasement and others who actively shared Hitler’s views, but there was aways a significant minority of intellectuals, trade unionists and politicians in this country who understood the danger. Regrettably, that is not now the case.

Liberal intellectuals who rightly rail against white British fascism and would have no difficulty in acknowledging the Roman Catholic church’s role in the growth of Spanish fascism, have become eager apologists for Sunni Islamic extremism in Britain, defending every assault on women’s rights – from sharia courts to the burqa, polygamy to discriminatory inheritance – caricaturing legitimate criticism as ‘islamophobia’ and permitting the development of a de facto blasphemy law in this country – one that protects only one set of extreme religious opinions.

If we want to prevent the so-called ‘radicalisation’ of young people, we need to confront the ideology at its root, challenging the attitudes that sustain it, using our equality laws to force the pace of change. For if British values are to mean anything they must include a commitment not just to ‘tolerance’, but more importantly to real equality and justice for all citizens – including all women.

Fear and Sharia

There are few things so ‘ex’ as an unsuccessful ex-candidate for parliamentary selection. Once the winning candidate is selected, the election campaign proper begins. The pretender must quietly withdraw, being of no further interest.

 Anne Marie Waters, the National Secular Society council member and lesbian feminist who stood against Purna Sen in Labour’s selection for Brighton Pavilion, was the loser in the recent battle and has disappeared from political view – though she has close personal ties to the city and I guess may attend Pride.

 Waters’ experience of the battle must have been bruising. She was defeated overwhelmingly by the local candidate. As a member of the organisation One Law for All she was also subject to scrutiny about her views on sharia law which some thought “islamophobic”.  Local newspapers, including this one, highlighted her anti-sharia stance and her views on religion and immigration. They juxtaposed information about Purna Sen’s background as a childhood immigrant from India and highlighted the fact that Waters’ views about Sharia – the moral and religious code that governs the lives of many orthodox Muslims – had received unwanted endorsement from the English Defence League (EDL).  

There had been an earlier on-line campaign against Waters, which influenced local newspaper coverage and opinion. Andy Newman, writing online for the organisations Socialist Unity and Left Futures, referred to Waters as “the worst possible potential Labour PPC” for Brighton, an “anti-islam extremist” with “bigoted anti-religious views”, claiming the Brighton party was “on the edge of an abyss”. Newman linked her with the EDL and asserted that she had said that “religiously observant Muslims should leave the UK.” Newman also criticised her for writing to object to the planned visit to the UK of the former Pope, failing to mention that the letter was co-signed by almost sixty other prominent journalists, academics and thinkers.

I have done some online research and can find nothing to support the suggestion of a link to the EDL  nor any call for observant Muslims to leave the country. Waters is evidently a secularist, with strong and critical views about religion – not uncommon these days amongst people of Irish catholic background. She is blunt, undiplomatic and perhaps rash, but not, I think, islamophobic. Islamophobia by definition  implies unfair discrimination, whereas Waters demands that Muslims – and people of other faiths and none – have exactly the same rights and obligations.

Waters is blamed for being a vocal opponent of sharia law, but she has that in common with many progressive muslims who seek the protection of universal law. The muslim journalist Yasmin Alibhai Brown spoke in 2010 at a conference of One Law for All about her deep concern about the intrusion of religious bigotry into political discourse and the specific danger sharia poses to the rights of women and children. 

Alibhai Brown writes passionately about the increasing influence of what Geoffrey Robertson QC once called the “indelibly sexist legal regime of sharia law”. When the former Archbishop of Canterbury controversially suggested that sharia courts might be acceptable to assist with “family problems”, Alibhai Brown responded with rage, saying “Many will be sent back to bastard husbands or flinty-eyed mullahs will take their children away. In Bradford and Halifax, they may be forbidden to drive or work where men are employed. Adultery will be punished. I don’t think we will have public stonings but violence of some sort will be meted out (it already is) with lawmakers’ backing.”

Dr Shaaz Mahboob, like Alibhai Brown a member of British Muslims for Secular Democracy, has warned “Any introduction of sharia law would almost certainly lead to the curtailment of women’s rights in cases such as inheritance, reducing their share to less than half of what a male heir would expect. Similarly the testimony of a woman would be valued at half of that of a man in a sharia court. Modern forensic evidence, DNA technology and CCTV footage would be deemed inadmissible, should a case of alleged adultery be under trial; instead, the court would have to rely solely on the testimony of four credible male witnesses.” 

Anne Marie Waters may be blunt, but is nothing in comparison to Taj Hargey, a historian and Islamic theologian, who runs the Muslim Education Centre in Oxford. He wrote: “Sharia is nothing but a human concoction of medieval religious opinion, largely archaic and outmoded and irrelevant to life today. Most sharia contradicts the letter and spirit of the Koran….”

As a person of faith from a Christian tradition, I want to live in a just secular state in which human rights are protected. Sharia law, in common with other religious law, undermines the principle of universal justice and poses specific dangers for women, homosexuals and children. 

I oppose it with every breath in my body. I want elected representatives in Parliament who, on my behalf, will do the same. 

Published in Brighton and Hove Independent 2nd August 2013