Mulled Whine

Written by Karima Hamdan

Christmas this year seems to have arrived with a bitter sort of edge to it. Perhaps it is the generally stressful feeling transmitted by so many people struggling, in this age of cuts and recession, to ignore the perilous economic climate and spending well outside their means. Perhaps it is the grim-faced, frost-bitten, "Scott of the Antarctic" determination of legions of shoppers who, after realising that their many online purchases will now not be delivered, have faced sub-zero temperatures, traffic pandemonium and icy pavements to buy themselves some Yuletide joy.


Perhaps it is the feeling of betrayal felt by so many that, after years of praying for a white Christmas, it seems to have finally arrived. But "Snowmageddon" has brought more chaos and misery to the UK than a whole legion of terrorists could possibly ever dream of.

Or perhaps it may be the ugliness of a new phenomenon we have witnessed this year: a manufactured, "false flag" cause, designed to divide communities and create scapegoats.

Observing the level of anger channelled towards Islam and Muslims on the internet and in the media in years gone by, one may have mistakenly concluded  that this was either just a coincidence or perhaps a groundswell of righteous indignation that, while misguided, was entirely understandable. However, these assumptions have been recently examined and found to be untrue by the US-based, freelance investigative journalist, Max Blumenthal. In an online article published on Monday, he traced the origins of this anger back to 2003 and concluded that the fell hand of the "only democracy in the Middle East" was behind it all.

In what started out as an attempt to limit the influence of pro-Palestinian activists on US university campuses, the movement has snowballed over the last 7 years, with numerous multi-millionaire donors channelling their money and influence into diverse strategies. These range from funding and promoting bigoted Islamophobic bloggers like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, to campaigning against new mosques and even Arabic language schools, with by far their biggest campaign to date being against the new community centre and mosque in lower Manhattan, Park 51.

With the bad publicity surrounding the "Ground Zero Mosque", or the "Great Islamophobic Crusade" as Blumenthal calls it, a juggernaut of rhetoric has powered its way through politics and the media. Those who have jumped on the bandwagon include US presidential candidates, top-rated news anchors, and a whole new political movement – the Tea Party. Importantly, this is a movement that is not just confined to the US; as mentioned in a previous JumahPulse, there are strong ties with European crypto-fascist movements such as the EDL and Geert Wilders' Freedom Party. In addition, it is interesting to note that the same EDL template of football hooliganism linked to vile anti-Muslim rhetoric has been reproduced in 10 European countries (including Denmark, Russia, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Poland, Romania, and Sweden) as well as in the US.

So what has this got to do with Christmas?

A great deal, as it turns out.

Following the American paradigm, we have witnessed much of this anti-Muslim rhetoric piggy-back off a new Christian identity now being voiced more frequently in the UK. Worryingly, it appears that the number of Christians willing to jump onto this anti-Muslim bandwagon are not limited to the fringe elements within the church.

First to step up to the plate was the Church of England's General Synod member, Alison Ruoff, who recently appeared in a BBC Radio 5 Live debate, declaring that Islam must be stopped because it was a religion of war and that all Muslims were going to rot in hell. This is not Ruoff's first foray into vicious anti-Muslim rhetoric. She is quoted in The Times as calling for a halt to any new building of mosques, she has spoken out against halal meat provision in schools, as well as against shari'ah. As far as I am aware, she has never been condemned for her appalling comments by the General Synod.

It is not that the Church of England is at all reticent to suspend or condemn members who don’t tow the party line. The Bishop of Willesden recently found this out after having the temerity to suggest that any marriage between the second in line to the throne and Kate Middleton would probably only last around 7 years and that he didn’t feel particularly joyful about having to pay for it. For his thoughts, he was suspended from duty and roundly condemned both by the Synod and by Alison Ruoff, who said his comments were "cruel, childish, unnecessary and unchristian" – quite unlike her comments about Islam then, clearly.

This hijacking of anti-Muslim rhetoric has taken on a more subtle facade with the launch of the "Not Ashamed" campaign. The campaign urged Christians to wear outward symbols of their religion like crosses or merchandise bearing the "Not Ashamed" logo in public. It also highlighted several cases of alleged discrimination against Christians who had been sacked or penalised in some way for following the edicts of their religion. Former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, has backed the campaign, commenting that hostility towards Christianity came from a combination of "well-meaning political correctness, multiculturalism and overt opposition to Christianity". He also highlighted the "watering down" of the religious background of Christmas, pointing to schools putting on secular versions of the nativity play, as well as government agencies sending out cards with "Seasons Greetings" rather than "Merry Christmas" on them, as evidence.

The use of this sort of hyperbole, that characterises Christianity as being "under attack" and lays the blame at the doors of political correctness and multiculturalism, is a clear example of the type of dog-whistle politics that is more commonly seen emanating from the frothing mouths of right wing politicians, rather than from men (and women) of the cloth. For those not familiar with "dog-whistle politics’, it is used to describe the use of coded language that sends a certain message without actually having to use any terms that can be deemed offensive. It became popular in the UK during the 2005 election, when Tory leader Michael Howard used it to great effect in campaign posters containing provocative statements about immigration. The slogan underneath read, "Are you thinking what I’m thinking?"

When Lord Carey and his sidekicks, like Bishop Nazir-Ali, speak of Christianity under attack and multiculturalism in the same breath they are playing to a popular myth which has been planted in the national psyche by the efforts of right wing commentators over a number of years: that Muslims want to ban Christmas because it "offends" them.

It started back in 1997, when Birmingham City Council wanted a name for its winter festivities that ran from early November to January in order to promote its newly rejuvenated city centre. They encompassed various events including Christmas markets, Christmas lights, an open air ice rink, Children in Need, Chinese New Year, Hanukah and Diwali, out of which the term "Winterval" was born.

Despite the City Council's protestations to the contrary, church leaders seized upon it as an example of Christmas under attack. The tabloid newspapers embraced the rhetoric and further embellished the story by labelling Muslims as the main culprits behind Winterval replacing Christmas, mainly relying on the fact that Eid had fallen in the winter months for a few years and some boroughs, with high proportions of Muslim residents, had put up a few Eid lights alongside their Christmas lights. Even this year – 13 years after the name Winterval was coined – the EDL has written to every council in the UK, threatening to "shut down" any town centre that uses the term Winterval instead of Christmas in order to appease Muslims.

Such pernicious outbursts are not limited to the EDL, with Tory Communities Secretary Eric Pickles "vowing" to stop any replacement of Christmas by Winterval in an effort to be politically correct. Pickles is obviously attempting to distract the nation from the real reason that the closest many impoverished councils will get to Christmas lights is a fire lit by tramps in an abandoned skip left on a neglected side street – that is the swingeing cuts that his own department has clobbered councils with. It is so much easier to mention Winterval and play on the automated subconscious link the populace has with the lack of Christmas lights and the presence of Muslims.

Similarly, nowhere in the Church's rhetoric can we find the most obvious reason why Christians are reticent to practice their religion in public and why Christmas is becoming less religious. The truth is that Christians are becoming less religious but this is conveniently ignored: a phenomenon which reflects poorly on them as leaders of their community. Contrast this to the mania among Muslims and non-Muslims to blame imams for all of their community's ills, even when they involve the sort of Muslims who would never attend the mosque. It appears that in the Church of England, you can only blame Muslims for all your inadequacies.

Just take the example of the threatened mergers of the Dioceses of Bradford, Ripon and Leeds owing to diminishing Church attendance. We are informed that this is due to "Muslim worshippers outnumbering Christians two to one". Given the level of vehemence in the tone of the article presumably these Muslims picket the houses of Christians every week, restricting them from attending Church. The reality, of course, is that most Christians would rather have a lie in on a Sunday morning watching re-runs of Top Gear on Dave. Any suggestion that the Church has altered its religion to such an extent that anyone demonstrating more than the most mindless devotion is simply no longer intellectually challenged by its teachings, is never mentioned.

Of course the yin to the tabloid's yang – Anjum Choudary – has used this year to cement the idea that Muslims are offended by Christmas into the public psyche by placing posters in some city centres which declare Christmas to be "evil". The tabloids have responded with red-faced, bellowing outrage, with each article attracting hundreds of comments of the "round up all Muslims and deport them" variety. Choudary has given the tabloids their headlines, the tabloids have given Choudary his publicity, and both sides are content with their Christmas presents. Peace, love and joy indeed.

The underlying hostility of the Church towards Muslims is also manifested by Nazir-Ali, who has never made any bones about his antithesis towards Islam. He recently appeared on the BBC's Newsnight programme, debating with Ibrahim Mogra (MCB), Hamzah Tzortis (IERA) and Joan Smith of the National Secular Society about whether a clash between Islam and the West was inevitable. It became rapidly clear that, in Nazir-Ali's mind, any atrocities perpetrated against Christian minorities in Muslim countries ruled by "western-backed" violent dictators (who, in the spirit of equality, are usually more than happy to commit violent atrocities towards their Muslim countrymen as well) were entirely the fault of Islam, whereas any Islamophobic attacks on Muslims in the West were mostly their own fault. Nazir-Ali also heavily buys into this deep vein of victimhood, where all the ills of the Church are caused by Muslims. So blinded is he by this sense of victimhood, perhaps, that he has never allowed himself to acknowledge that for 14 centuries, Christianity flourished in Islamic states under shari'ah, whereas it has come under attack in the last 100 years, since the introduction of secular democracy.

This year has seen the most important Christian festival of the year hijacked by cynical Church leaders in order to stigmatise Muslims and use them as scapegoats for their own inadequacies. The Church has a long and unfortunate history of whipping up public hysteria against religious minorities for its own purposes. One only needs to study the multitude of pogroms, perpetrated by frenzied mobs driven to barbaric acts, whilst their Church fathers look on benevolently in the centuries leading up to the Holocaust. Even during the Holocaust, despite acts of heroism by individual Christians to save the lives of Jews, the attitude of the Church was one of indifference and a selfish need to protect its own interests. If Carey, Nazir-Ali and Ruoff look at their empty Churches and then at the overflowing mosques and start playing a dangerous game of stoking up hostility between Islam and Christianity, they need to realise that this path has been trodden before and it ends in the most appalling of ways. To the average Christian, fearful and anxious that their country is being "Islamised" and their heritage stolen, I would quote from the Bible, the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him):

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." (John 8:32)

"Thou shalt not raise a false report: put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness." (Exodus 23:1)

"Let there be no compulsion in matters of faith." (Quran 2:256)

"And do not argue with the People of the Book (i.e. Christians and Jews) unless it be in a way that is better, except with those of them who do wrong. But say, 'We believe in the Revelation which has come down to us and in that which came down to you. Our God and your God is One; and it is to Him we submit.'" (Quran 29:46)

"A Muslim is one from whose tongue and hands other Muslims are safe. A Mu’min (true believer) is one in whom all mankind has a sanctuary for life and property." (Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), as recorded by Bukhari and Muslim)