| | Harry’s Place has as its motto the Orwellian line 'Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.'
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Orwell’s observation that ‘Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful … and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’, would, in our view, be a far more appropriate slogan given the actual content of the articles published on Harry’s Place.
Readers of the notoriously anti-Muslim website will not be surprised at the regular postings by (largely anonymous) individuals looking to tarnish the reputations of British Muslims who are actively engaged in politics, media and society. It quickly becomes clear reading through the prolific posts on the blog that for HP the only ‘moderate’ Muslim is one who is pro-Israeli, pro-war and in favour of the neo-con project.
Harry’s Place began as a venture of the pro-Iraq War Left whose politics neatly corresponded with the politics of the neo-conservative movement in the US, particularly over the issues of military intervention, to argue their case in support of the US led war in Iraq. The near universal resistance to the war on the Left and the huge demonstrations that gave rise to a burgeoning solidarity between British Muslims and other political groups that adopted an anti war stance, led those of a pro war orientation to gather and launch a new manifesto on allegedly based on the principles of the Left titled the ‘Euston Manifesto’.
The Manifesto’s content echoes the work of Nick Cohen in his book, ‘What’s Left: How Liberals Lost their Way’, in which he argued that the Left’s supposed flirtation with political Muslims rendered it ideologically moribund, betraying the essence of the values of the Left and its progressive politics.
The manifesto states that, ‘We decline to make excuses for, to indulgently “understand”, reactionary regimes and movement for which democracy is a hated enemy … We draw a firm line between ourselves and those left-liberal voices today quick to offer an apologetic explanation for such political forces’.
From thence Harry’s Place takes its cue in undermining, marginalising and maligning those individuals, particularly British Muslims, who voice their objections to the Iraq war and its consequences in the form of increased radicalisation of Muslim youth in the UK.
It is noteworthy that among the signatories of the Euston Manifesto Group are ‘Harry Hatchet’ of Harry’s Place, ‘David T’ of Harry’s Place, and Nick Cohen.
Other stalwarts of Harry’s Place include ‘Gene’, (Gene Zitver), ‘Marcus’ (Marcus Laughton), Brett Lock from Outrage, who blogs on his own site, Lock and Load, as well as contributing pieces to Harry’s Place. Lock’s particular obsession is the demonisation of Muslims through the linking of homophobia with Islam. His attempt to further the HP agenda of belittling those elements of the Left that work with Muslims, even if this involves peddling false information, was exposed by Islamophobia Watch in the article ‘Tatchell, Outrage and the Grand Mufti’. The identity of ‘Harry’ of the eponymous blog has itself been the subject of some speculation.
While shielding their identities behind anonymity, and in the case on ‘David T’, wilfully misleading others as to their actual names, bloggers on Harry’s Place engage in the most base slander against individuals whose names and other details they shamelessly, and with no pretence to hypocrisy, expose on the website.
‘David T’ is actually David S Toube (pictured). His true identity was uncovered by Richard Seymour, who runs the Lenin’s Tomb blog, despite Toube’s attempt to deter others from discovering his real name. His earlier attempt to evade his identity being disclosed was revealed in a Guardian article:
‘David T and "Harry", of Harry's Place, insist on preserving their anonymity because they do not want to aggravate their employers.’
And yet the aggravation caused to those that they blog about is – of course - of no significance.
Toube previously joined the Guardian’s Comment is Free section falsely giving his surname as ‘Tate’. It is only through the uncovering of his identity by those that have often been at the receiving end of his venomous propaganda that we know the true identity of ‘David T’.
It would seem hypocritical to any that a man such as Toube, who goes out of his way to unearth details about those whom he targets should then go to such enormous lengths to cowardly lie about his own identity. But then, such underhandedness is a reflection of the depths to which David Toube and his fellow travellers will sink to malign others.
Contributors like David Toube and ‘Habibi’ regularly post comments on the goings on in society and the corridors of power that offends their sensibilities and reaffirms their staunch belief that the government, metropolitan police, local councils etc. are all engaged in a fight against extremism in collusion and partnership with those that are themselves extremists.
Here are just a few examples:
Nick Cohen, Demos and IslamExpo
Salma Yaqoob Picks Today to Support Jihadists
Azad Ali: I am working for a Hamas Caliphate
Fools at your Service Indeed, HP has made it their business to determine the proper designation of the label ‘moderate’, and ‘extremist’. Toube and others brandish the labels persistently and aggressively in determined efforts to cower Muslims whose politics they don’t like and whose very outspokenness, the ‘telling people what they don’t want to hear’, upsets the applecart of politics peddled by HP itself.
If it were merely a place for bloggers to exchange demented ideas, it would be relegated to the heap of fringe sites that pepper the World Wide Web. But it is precisely because the website is used to carry out and foment witch hunts against British Muslims that its contents and flawed argumentation is of more serious import. Harry’s Place has often been the starting point of a hysteria that infects our mainstream newspapers and influences the policies and attitudes of politicians.
Among recent targets have been the huge Global Peace and Unity event hosted every year and supported by Islam Channel and IslamExpo, which was supported by the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, and which in July 2008, attracted around 40,000 British Muslims.
Harry’s Place has sought variously to undermine work done by Muslims that do not fit its prescribed model of ‘moderate’. Moderate for HP is synonymous with the Quilliam Foundation’s Ed Husain and Maajid Nawaz; another ‘ex-Islamist’ Shiraz Maher of Policy Exchange, and Dr Taj Hargey of the tiny fringe outfit, the Muslim Education Centre in Oxford.
It is not difficult to see why these three discredited ex-Hizb ut-Tahrir figures and Hargey are held up as the benchmarks of ‘moderation’. Their politics revolves around denying, or more appropriately, suppressing, a Muslim political identity. They also refuse to acknowledge the contribution of our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan to the rise of violent extremism and heightened insecurity at home.
It seems to be the contention of HP that only those Muslims who deny that Islam should have any influence on political ideas and political behaviour are to be trusted as ‘moderates’. Muslims who embrace political ideas and activity on the understanding that Islam promotes justice as the basis for enduring peace between peoples and communities are despised by Harry’s Place precisely for their preoccupation with justice, especially in occupied Palestine.
Striking a new low for the website’s shady ethics, David Toube also targeted in his smearing campaigns the 17 year old girl, Sabiha Iqbal, who was selected to join the Young Muslims Advisory Group in October 2008, on grounds that she was a member of the Socialist Workers Party.
The girl’s great crime in the eyes of Toube was the SWP’s backing of public demonstrations against the war in Iraq in which thousands of British Muslims participated.
Collectively, the crimes of Muslim individuals, organisations and events targeted by HP are that they are not considered moderate enough. In fact, their actual crime is to be what Harry’s Place calls ‘Islamists’.
And throwing pejorative labels at Muslims is a huge fixation on Harry’s Place. Blurring distinctions and misrepresenting individuals as teetering on the brink of an extremism that justifies violence, the infamous ‘conveyor belt’ theory that leaves no tenable position for a Muslim on the political spectrum lest s/he becomes a violent extremist, is a regular tool used on Harry’s Place to subvert the conscientious objections Muslims assert over aspects of Government policy.
The term ‘Islamist’ is applied to any Muslim who doesn’t subscribe to a worldview that places religion firmly in the private sphere. More specifically, it is applied with vehemence to those Muslims whose views on politics are informed and shaped by their faith.
In labelling such individuals ‘Islamists’, those like David Toube, who use Harry’s Place as a springboard from which to promote insidious comment and engage in character assassination, attempt to render derogatory any semblance of a Muslim political identity that is not acquiescent or submissive to the prevailing paradigm. That prevailing paradigm is the championing of ‘ex Islamists’ or individuals who embrace an apolitical form of Islamic identity. Precisely because such an identity could pose no threat to the Zionist centred politics of Harry’s Place itself.
The bullying, maligning and disfiguring of Muslim and other personalities associated with views that are disagreeable to the bloggers at Harry’s Place, and to some extent to the signatories of the Euston Manifesto and their claim that the Left has, in its empathy with arguments against liberal interventionism, surrendered the very principles it claims to espouse, are indistinguishable from McCarthyite methods.
Lenin’s Tomb usefully relates the efforts exerted by David Toube to try and sabotage someone else’s career in true McCarthyite fashion because he disagreed with the reviewer’s positive appraisal of Richard Seymour’s book, ‘The Liberal Defence of Murder’.
Free speech in liberal democracies in Europe is undergoing turbulent developments in terms of both retaining hard fought privileges and expanding them as our societies become more plural. Government legislation on banning from entry into the UK alleged ‘preachers of hate’ and proposals of prohibiting certain groups from operating in the UK given the messages they disseminate, has brought questions of free speech back onto the agenda. The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, revealed in an interview with the Jewish Chronicle, that more than half of those that had been excluded from the UK since 2005 had been refused entry on grounds of having expressed allegedly anti-Semitic views.
The revival of far right politics and the use made by the British National Party of mainstream images and attitudes towards Muslims in their own campaign literature also raises important issues on the abuses of free speech.
Freedom of expression has certainly been revived over problems on attitudes towards minority cultures in the UK raising the question of due limits, if any, of civility in public discourse and free debate.
All of this would seem perfectly healthy for a democracy. For citizens to question whether civility is something that should be legislated, through incitement to religious hatred legislation, or left to the workings of the free market, where intolerant views are crowded out and marginalised by the good sense of the majority, would seem perfectly reasonable and open for discussion.
Indeed, debating whether proscribing groups is the most effective way of disarming them and their disagreeable views should be a matter of free contestation by concerned citizens. Intolerance is not eradicated through laws prohibiting certain views, something that appears to have been acknowledged by the Minister for Communities and Local Government, Hazel Blears, when she spoke at the LSE last month on engaging with purveyors of distasteful views. Intolerance is challenged and undone through open discussion and critical appraisal of views of individuals and groups that are deemed offensive.
The difficulties we presently face are not in the acceptance of how we challenge intolerant views but in the limiting of the parameters of agreeable opinion. The exploits of Harry’s Place point to the dangers of seeking to buttress democracy by undoing one of its most essential features; open contestation and a free marketplace of ideas.
HP has made it its business to approve and anoint those Muslims that have passed its test to qualify as moderates and are therefore, safe for future engagement. The fact that few of those anointed by HP actually enjoy any legitimacy whatsoever among British Muslims, is perhaps an indication of why the site targets those that do enjoy legitimacy with such fervour.
While purporting to advance political debate, the distorting and dangerous consequences of HP’s antics are that British Muslims committed to an open society, one in which we truly uphold and respect the right of individuals to tell others what they don’t want to hear, take flight from fear of being demonised. They live in fear of their opinions being misrepresented and their persons harassed should they rise above the parapet and take a stand against policies they know to be wrong headed or simply misinformed.
Muslims that have been targeted by Harry’s Place all share a common background, they are individuals with a public presence who serve on public bodies and they are unabashed in their willingness to speak out on political matters. It is on the basis of these factors that they are singled them out for vilification by Harry’s Place.
The website’s nefarious and cowardly intent is to tarnish the reputations of such individuals to the point of silencing them through intimidation on the site and through pressure exerted on those that deal with them in other capacities thus rendering them ‘untouchables’. The insidious nature of these tactics are being steadily realised by those that have observed HP’s strategy in recent times. And while the website’s motto proudly declares that it will exercise an untrammelled right in telling others what they don’t want to hear, there is little doubt that its glaring lacunae is its inability to hear what others reserve the right to say.
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