It is no coincidence that most revolutions seem to happen in the spring. After a long winter of discontent huddled indoors mulling over past events, the ebullient cavalcade of Allah's bounty that bursts into life within a few short weeks fills the soul with a yearning for betterment and a determination to transform this feeling into a reality.
For those of us looking on at these revolutions from the safety of our western homes, we share the aspirations of many of those rising up against the oppression, corruption and tyranny they face. We feel almost as partners in their struggle, even though this one-sided partnership consists of their blood, sweat and tears with our contribution limited to outrage and tweets.
But consider this: those poor souls struggling to make their voices heard in the Middle East have one distinct advantage over us. When they look around at the interplay that their lives have with their government, they can see the deceit, corruption, manipulation and oppression that goes on. We, however, look around our gilded cage and find ourselves humming along to the background muzak that reassures us that we are free and autonomous beings at liberty, swimming in our democratic ocean of promise.
As Muslims living in the West, we may find our freedom curtailed, not by the crude machinations of semi-coherent despots but rather by the more subtle, insidious and global techniques employed by those politicians who rule over us... and those who rule over the politicians.
As sure as rats congregate around sewers and flies congregate around heaps of dung, whenever global political trends manifest within populist politicians (is there really any other combination?), the News Corp machines swarm into action.
News Corp is of course the family business of the Murdoch family, headed by that wrinkled octogenarian, Rupert Murdoch. Far from being a cuddly pensioner tending his vegetable patch and dreaming of his next trip to Eastbourne, Rupert Murdoch is a multi-billionaire who has met every US president from Truman to Obama and whose media network has been estimated to reach approximately 75% of the world’s population. Heads of state worldwide scurry in indecent haste to pay homage to this modern day robber baron, mindful of Murdoch’s famous quote to politicians: "What'll it be? A headline a day or a bucket of s**t a day?"
Blair obviously accepted the headline a day option when, in 1995, he was flown out first class by Murdoch to meet him at a prestigious resort on an island in Australia's Great Barrier Reef and delivered a Thatcherite speech promising media deregulation. The Sun carried an editorial the next day describing Blair as someone who "has vision [and] speaks our language on morality and family life". Cameron did it in 2008 when he was flown by private jet to Murdoch's 184ft luxury yacht moored off a Greek island for "talks", the content of which he has refused to reveal.
And what about those who stand up to him? Who can forget Neil Kinnock's shock election defeat in 1992 when "It's The Sun Wot Won it" after Kinnock ran on a ticket that included greater media regulation and received his complimentary bucket of effluent a day from the Murdoch press.
As an Australian, Murdoch nurtures the persona of a "little Aussie battler", fighting against the establishment for the good of the common man, imbued with the values of family, patriotism and a "fair go" for all. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was born into a privileged, wealthy family. His father was already a media magnate and he was groomed from a very young age to continue in his footsteps, building up his father's portfolio into an empire which now controls several hundred newspapers and media outlets worldwide. When US media laws prevented Murdoch, as an Australian citizen, from owing any US newspapers, he jettisoned his citizenship and became a US national.
His private life resembles a plot-line from a particularly vulgar Australian soap opera. Despite being an apparently devout Roman Catholic, he is twice divorced and married his current wife, a Chinese TV executive and 38 years his junior, a mere 19 days after his last divorce. He has six children, spanning his three marriages, with the latest one born when he was 73 years old. Historically, Murdoch has pit his children against each other to determine how deserving they are of the family business. When eldest son Lachlan didn't quite cut the mustard as heir apparent, he was unceremoniously dumped and replaced by his younger brother James.
Last week, Murdoch turned 80 and, alongside the birthday cakes and party hats, he received the usual clutch of presents, including a lovely gift courtesy of Her Majesty's Government: the keys to control the national consciousness in the form of a blanket approval to expand his media empire in the UK. After nonchalantly stepping over the still warm corpse of Vince Cable, Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, decided to allow the Murdoch takeover of BSkyB. This is despite a report (subsequently leaked) commissioned by Cable which showed that the takeover will create such a behemoth of an organisation that it would kill media plurality in the UK - a move described as "Britain's Berlusconi moment".
Even putting to one side the issue of media plurality, the mind boggles that, in the midst of the huge phone hacking scandal involving Murdoch's News of the World, News Corp could be handed another media organisation on a plate. It is important to note that the scandal didn't just involve hacking into a few voicemails of some overpaid luvvies, but rather constituted a potentially large and sinister network of corruption running from the gutters of Fleet Street to the top echelons of power in Britain.
The scandal involves private investigators (with the main perpetrator having planted false evidence and having escaped a murder conviction after his trial collapsed on technicalities); corrupt police officers who sold confidential records; a legion of corrupt employees of banks, GP surgeries and government departments who would gather information illegally; a Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police who has been accused of misleading Parliament over the scandal and attempting to kill the investigation; MPs warned off pursuing the scandal "or else"; and at the top of this odious tree of corruption we have the twin figures of Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks, both former editors of the News of the World. The former is Cameron's former director of communication and the latter is chief executive of News International (a News Corp subsidiary) and the PM's neighbour in Oxfordshire. Both Coulson and Brooks were editors at the time these scandals were occurring and both strenuously deny any knowledge of these misdeeds.
It also emerged that, over the Christmas period, David Cameron attended a dinner party at Rebekah Brooks' house. The guest list included James Murdoch, and Andy Coulson. Cameron again refused to reveal the subjects of conversation but hastened to add that neither the BSkyB takeover nor the phone hacking scandal were discussed.
Should we as Muslims be worried about this level of intimacy between the government and the Murdoch family?
There is precious little in the public domain of Murdoch's own thoughts on Muslims and Islam. This is strange given his media outlets seem to report about little else, although it may be symptomatic of the fact that he owns most of the public domain. My research has only uncovered three references. Two come from speeches that he delivered and are carefully worded warnings about Islam and the third, which is probably the most telling, comes from prominent US journalist Michael Wolff, who writes:
"I can attest to the obsession inside of Murdoch's News Corp. about Muslims. I've had conversations with Murdoch in which he, in pseudo-scientific fashion, parses the problem with Muslim intelligence (in brief, they marry their cousins), and conversations with Roger Ailes about the great Islamic plot to bring the terror war to his house in New Jersey. In other words, all this stuff out of News Corp. is the real, unfiltered thing: retro, primitive, weird, reactionary, racist, paranoid, really, really old-guy stuff."
This stance is buttressed by Murdoch's flagship US channel, Fox News, a byword for anti-Muslim hate speech which seems to feed the opinions of Tea Party voters and red neck xenophobes across America. If this model is replicated in the UK, it will make the barely literate, anti-Muslim, rants found in the Daily Express and the Daily Star seem like testimonials for community cohesion. For those thinking that this could never happen here I would remind them that David Cameron is taking active steps to prepare the ground for a Fox News bridgehead into the UK with his plans to further cripple Ofcom, the already toothless communications watchdog, whilst simultaneously hamstringing the BBC's influence and clout. This is further contextualised by the comments of BBC Director General Mark Thompson:
"The BBC and Channel 4 have a history of clearly labelled polemical programmes. But why not entire polemical channels which have got stronger opinions? I find the argument persuasive."
So there we have it. Arguably the most powerful opinion maker on the planet, with appallingly negative views on Islam and Muslims, has been given the green light to completely take over public discourse in the UK. The police have shown themselves to be corruptible by his organisation whilst the government is more than happy to accommodate its every request. Any voices of dissent are quelled by the power, reach and strength of Murdoch’s media mammoth. Is there any hope at all?
And then we see true power.
The world watched in horror as first an earthquake and then a tsunami wiped out vast swathes of one of the most technologically advanced nations on Earth. With the connectedness of modern society, we have been real-time witnesses to this Japanese disaster of epic proportions. We saw for ourselves what previously had only been spoken of by shell-shocked survivors, who may have been suspected of hyperbole had they told of giant whirlpools engulfing ships and black tides of destruction racing across farmland overtaking speeding cars and trains.
Just as our time to witness this has come, so will the time for reckoning also come. For everyone.
When the earth is shaken with her (final) earthquake
And the earth throws up her burdens (from within)
When man cries, "What is happening to it?"
On that Day, it will tell all
Because your Lord will inspire it [to do so]
On that Day, people will come forward
In separate groups to be shown their deeds
Whoever has done an atom’s-weight of good will see it
But whoever has done an atom’s-weight of evil will see that.
(Qur'an, 99:1-8)
And the earth throws up her burdens (from within)
When man cries, "What is happening to it?"
On that Day, it will tell all
Because your Lord will inspire it [to do so]
On that Day, people will come forward
In separate groups to be shown their deeds
Whoever has done an atom’s-weight of good will see it
But whoever has done an atom’s-weight of evil will see that.
(Qur'an, 99:1-8)
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