No Comedy Please, We’re Muslims

Last Updated on Thursday, 23 October 2008 17:44

The Independent newspaper recently reported (11 October) that the comedian Harry Enfield had been prevented, by editorial qualms, from playing a ‘sex-crazed Muslim hoodie’ in his sketch show, Harry and Paul on BBC One. Enfield specialises in humour based on stereotypes, as indicated in this latest series by his portrayal of, among other characters, a Jewish rap DJ from Golders Green, one of the regular features of the show, and it is likely that the Muslim hoodie would have been another of the comic’s trademark grotesques.

However, the story of why the idea never made it beyond the drawing board – at least as reported – throws up a number of questions. The Independent’s columnist, David Lister suggests that the notion was vetoed by the production team who feared a violent backlash. He expresses concern that the decision suggests ‘a climate of fear in the arts and the media about causing offence to one specific ethnic minority’. Lister here succinctly identifies the way in which the media and culture have created a circuit of fear around the portrayal of Muslims in any form, based on the extreme examples of the cartoon controversy, Theo van Gogh’s film ‘Submission’ and other controversialist efforts. In resulting instances of self-censorship there is always the question of whether such decisions are about cultural sensitivity, or whether they really indicate a kind of cowardice: a spokesman for Tiger Aspect, the production company behind Enfield’s show would only say, ‘Obviously, it is a sensitive area.’ But that begs the question, sensitive to whom?

The media elite do themselves no favours when they treat Muslims with kid gloves – as David Lister concludes, ‘they are really insulting … the hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Britain who are perfectly capable of laughing at themselves’. As it is, another kind of ‘framing’ of Muslims – as intolerant, humourless fanatics – is allowed to stifle a comedic framing. So we will never know how Enfield’s character’s Muslimness was to have been signified, and how his sexual obsessions were to have been played out. Knowing Enfield’s line in crude stereotypes it was unlikely to have been a subtle or flattering portrayal. However, are there times when no representation at all is worse than ‘bad’ representations?

Does the BBC Favour Muslims?

Last Updated on Thursday, 11 September 2008 19:02

BBC ‘favours’ Muslims … or so says the Daily Telegraph. In a report by Ben Farmer on 8^th September 2008, it was noted that Hindu and Sikh leaders had complained over the ‘disproportionate number of programmes … made about Islam, at the expense of their own faith’. Statistics gleaned from the BBC’s Religion and Ethics department claimed that since 2001, the BBC has made 41 programmes on Islam, 5 on Hinduism and 1 on Sikhism.

While this reveals a considerable comparative over-concentration on Islam, whether it amounts to ‘favouring’ Islam and Muslims is, of course, another question entirely. The starting point for the statistics (2001) might be taken to suggest not so much a desire to understand Islam as a religious system, as to situate Islam and Muslims within the usual ‘frame’ of issues having to do with security, ‘otherness’ and threat.

Of course, it would be of tremendous benefit to have a wider and deeper understanding of all the main religions through the medium of television. However, the limitations of the debate are indicated through the scant nature of the statistics. How many of these programmes about Islam were to some degree hostile? We are not told. It is unlikely that leaders of other communities would be comfortable with the same degree of microscopic and often critical scrutiny. Overall, however, what the report seems to teach us is not so much – in the misleading word of the title – that broadcasters ‘favour’ Muslims, but rather that a quantitative, rather than qualitative view of religious coverage does not take us very far.

Fear of Islam: Britain’s New Disease

Last Updated on Tuesday, 30 November 1999 00:00

‘Fear of Islam: Britain’s New Disease’. So ran the headline in the Independent in July, above an article by the columnist Peter Oborne in which he outlined the ways in which Islamophobic sentiment had achieved a level of respectability in Britain that no other form of prejudice enjoyed. Oborne argued that, while overt racism and anti-semitism were unacceptable in modern society: the ‘systematic demonisation of Muslims has become an important part of the central narrative of the British political and media class; it is so entrenched, so much part of normal discussion, that almost nobody notices’. Citing proud declarations of personal antipathy to Islam by journalists such as Polly Toynbee and Rod Liddle, and Martin Amis’ assertion that ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order,’ Oborne cited examples of law-abiding Muslims living in daily fear of abuse and attack.

Oborne’s argument, which formed the basis for a Channel 4 Dispatches programme the following week, was accompanied by a Democratic Audit pamphlet, co-written with James Jones, entitled Muslims Under Siege. It remains to be seen what, if any, impact Oborne’s critique has on the way Muslims are ‘framed’ in politics and the popular press – Melanie Phillips, in the following day’s Daily Mail, predictably repudiated Oborne’s argument by trotting out a familiar litany about Muslim youth out of control, a lack of integration and the failure of multiculturalism. However, Oborne’s piece fires a useful opening volley in the battle for the media to be more self-aware and not always seek the sensational and often insupportable when reporting Muslims in Britain.

When research becomes a crime?

Last Updated on Tuesday, 30 November 1999 00:00

The walls have ears, careless talk costs lives, think before you print?

The small mindedness of a small island resurfaced recently with the case of Rizwaan Sabir and Hisham Yezza at Nottingham University,

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=402125&c=2

Much of the outcry regarding this case has revolved around academic freedom and the continued state coercion of academic institutions to effectively spy and inform on its staff and students. The Guardian coupled the story with that of Shiv Malik whose publisher Constable & Robinson handed his manuscripts over to the police:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/22/pressandpublishing.uksecurity?gusrc=rss&feed=uknews 

The probability is that you are reading this at or as part of research conducted at an academic institution, if that happens to be in the United Kingdom then you too could be committing a crime, or so the UK's Terrorism Act states. And if you do happen to be of Islamic faith, and you are detained then you could join the "gang" in Whitemoor...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/may/25/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime

 

 

Martin Amis’s The Second Plane: Not so ‘Hot’?

Last Updated on Tuesday, 30 November 1999 00:00

Martin Amis’s The Second Plane: Not so ‘Hot’?

Martin Amis first wrote about September 11th a week after the attack took place in a piece for The Guardian, in which he depicted ‘the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty’ as ‘galvanised with malice, and wholly alien’.

Since then, he has returned to the subject of 9/11 and his ‘Islamismophobia’ again and again, in reviews (of the film United 93 as well as books such as Ed Hussain’s The Islamist), essays, and in two short stories, ‘In the Palace of the End’ and ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’.

See, for example:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/sep/10/september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety

Collected together as The Second Plane, published in hardback in January 2008, these writings will reappear in paperback early next year (and with them, no doubt, the framing figure of Amis).  

But how helpful (and how damaging) are his unfailingly controversial, undoubtedly inflammatory characterisations of the Muslims he calls ‘Islamists’ as 'the male idea in such outrageous garb as the robes […] jeans, tracksuits and medic’s smocks of the Islamic radical; of ‘the rank and file of the Muslim male’ as ‘violent’ and ‘irrational’; and of Muslim women as either the utterly suppressed would-be schoolgirls of Afghanistan under the Taliban, or the complicit mothers of Palestinian suicide bombers, raising their sons to death?

Voices of dissent abound, see:

http://arabist.net/archives/2006/09/15/the-friday-rant-martin-amis/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=488239&in_page_id=1770

At a time when personalities like Amis seem continually to be encouraged to offer their opinions on topics that range from radical Islam to why they are backing Barack Obama (a ‘slave-president’ capable of ‘reaching out to Iran’?!), it seems important to keep such (self-styled) commentators firmly in the frame.

Anti-Koran Film launched and removed from Internet

Last Updated on Wednesday, 02 April 2008 22:05

Anti-Koran film launched on the internet by Dutch MP

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/europe/antikoran-film-launched-on-the-internet-by-dutch-mp-801771.html

The right-wing Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders has posted a film on the internet accusing the Koran of inciting violence, despite government fears that it will offend Muslims and cause protests. The film was posted on his Freedom Party's Web site (www.pvv.nl) but could be watched only briefly before the website said it was not available for technical reasons.

This link to it used to work:

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=7d9_1206624103

However it now (02-april-08) says "This media item has been removed by the uploader!
Reason from user 'geert_wilders': "deleted due to copyright issues...will upload edited version shortly...""

Is this a diplomatic enforcement of copyright?

 

IPCC finds police honour lacking

Last Updated on Wednesday, 02 April 2008 21:32

The IPCC investigation into the murder of Banaz Mahmod has concluded that a Police Officer and Inspector will face a disciplinary hearing to "explain their actions" or rather continued inaction in protecting her. The full Ipcc report can be found after some searching on the Ipcc site, here's the link

http://www.ipcc.gov.uk/news/pr_020408_banaz_mahmod.htm

Press reaction to this has refreshed interest in the case and the issue of Honour Killings such as:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7326468.stm

However, beyond restating the facts and issuing some disciplinary warnings, will this result in changes to police attitudes and their effective working practices in responding to Honour Violence? We will be watching closely for the review that this case has stimulated and hope it will bring some change.

Force Marriages' Extraordinary Renditions

Last Updated on Wednesday, 02 April 2008 21:54

The issue of Forced Marriages has been in the press again recently following the results of a study into them in Luton, it revealed that the government's estimates were out by a factor of 10, previously suggesting 300 a year, which has now been revised to up to 4,000:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/11/gender.communities

This response by Yvonne Roberts argues strongly that such estimations, despite raising moments of wider media awareness play into long term stereotypes, and do not help in the real practical sense of how to get a grip on numbers.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/yvonne_roberts/2008/03/forced_marriages_who_counts.html