Islamophobia and homophobia part 4: East London Mosque and oppression Olympics

PinkNews published a letter today condemning the £100 fine for Mohammed Hasnath, who put up the ‘gay-free zone’ stickers in London earlier this year.

The lead signatories of the letter are Julie Bindel (who thinks the police are too soft on Muslims and apparently only cares intermittently about homophobia) and Paul Burston (who recently contributed to the Daily Mail article “Tower Hamlets Taliban” – see here the open letter written in reply). So unsurprisingly, the letter is hugely problematic (see my earlier post “Homophobia and Islamophobia part 3″). I’m only surprised Johann Hari hasn’t signed too.

Here are the signatories in full:

Julie Bindel, Journalist and Feminist Campaigner
David Bridle, Managing Editor of London’s gay weekly Boyz Magazine
Paul Burston, Author, Journalist, Editor of Time Out’s Gay & Lesbian Section. Named one of the 101 most influential gay people in the UK in the Independent’s Pink List in 2010 for fourth year running.
Darren Cooper, Senior Consultant at Out Now Consulting
Alex Hopkins, Journalist, Editor; Publisher, Dissident Musings blog (ETA: I notice here that most of the signatories appear in comments, wholeheatedly agreeing with an article which complains that “we [LGB people] can’t count on other minorities to be more decisive in supporting us”.)
Colm Howard-Lloyd, Trustee, Pride London
Mandy McCartin, Artist and Resident of East London
Mac McDermott, Publisher, HOMOVISIONTV
Linda Riley, Managing Director, Square Peg Media, Publishers of g3, Out in the City and Pride London Magazines
Paul Shetler, Human Rights Activist, Coordinator of London 2011 Summer of Love Campaign
Ian Sinclair Romanis, Gay Man and Resident of Hackney
Adrian Tippetts, Human Rights Campaigner and Journalist

Do you notice who hasn’t signed the letter? Anyone from the Muslim LGBT groups Imaan or Safra. Perhaps because these signatories have a better understanding of and care more about homophobia in Muslim communities than Imaan and Safra?

Below, I’ve reproduced the letter in full,with added commentary.

JUST A £100 FINE FOR WAGING A HOMOPHOBIC HATE CAMPAIGN? WHAT HAPPENED TO EQUALITY?
Many gay and lesbian people across the UK and beyond are furious that during a period of rising anti-gay hate crime in Tower Hamlets a man found guilty of distributing and placing homophobic hate stickers around the borough has been fined just £100.

I agree entirely with this first paragraph. So too do Rainbow Hamlets, one of the local groups who according to Bindel et al are covering up Muslim homophobia.

Mohammed Hasnath, of Leamouth, Tower Hamlets, admitted putting up the stickers, which declared a ‘Gay Free Zone’ and quoted a verse from the Qur’an, on the 25 bus, a bus stop in Whitechapel, Bow Church DLR station, and outside the Royal London Hospital, as well as handing them out to “random Muslim men”, between the 11 and 14 February this year.

The stickers (one sixth-A4 size) have been seen in several streets in Shoreditch, Canary Wharf and Hackney as well. Similar religiously-inspired homophobic hate stickers have also been reported in the Midlands. The campaigns lasted for several months, dating back to September of last year.

This week, some news reports inaccurately reported that the campaign to isolate, intimidate and stoke up hatred against the local gay population in East London was solely the work of one man, the convicted Hasnath.

People are upset that a coordinated, prolonged, multi-city attempt to define parts of the UK as Gay-Free Zones was treated as no more than mildly disorderly conduct. A comment on PinkNews says it all: “He was charged under section 5 of the public order act 1986 – which is often used to prosecute someone who repeatedly swears in the street – that is the level of offence that was used in the case. Shocking watering down of the impact of this on the communities by the justice system – let down by police and CPS…”

Thus far, pretty sensible – though does the emphasis on the “Muslim angle” make you wonder what direction the article is going?

There is a strong feeling that homophobia is being covered up, or ignored, in order not to ‘endanger community relations’. The paltry fine issued by the court lends weight to this fear. It sends a message that bullies and thugs can get away with it, and that homophobia is a second-class crime.

The problem lies not with the judge, who was constrained by the charges under which the case was brought, but primarily with the law itself which treats mounting an inter-city, coordinated anti-gay intimidation campaign as nothing more serious than illicit flyposting or spitting in the street. Such a light penalty would be unthinkable if we were considering groups operating across UK to create Jew-free, Black-free, Muslim-free or Christian-free zones.

The absurdity of the sentence points to the need to change the laws so that gays receive the same protections as Muslims, blacks or Jews. For the words human rights to mean anything they can’t be applied only to people who belong to certain religious, sexual, racial, class, national or other groups. Human rights are for everyone or they are not at all.

And around about here is where alarm bells start ringing. The first paragraph suggests that the court only issued a ‘paltry fine’ for fear of ‘endangering community relations’. But then as the next paragraph makes clear, the judge was ‘constrained by the law’. I agree that it is appalling that current laws treat ‘inter-city, coordinated anti-gay intimidation campaign as nothing more serious than illicit flyposting or spitting in the street’.

But what does the law have to do with ‘endangering community relations’? Well, apparently the laws don’t give the same protections to LGB people as to “Muslims, blacks or Jews”, and apparently this is because there is a bias towards protecting some communities at the expense of others.

What. The. Fuck. Firstly, although there are some differences in the way hate crimes and incitement to hatred are defined in relation to different protected groups, if this is what the signatories of this letter are alluding to, they haven’t made a very clear (nor, it would appear, accurate) case that these differences in definition would have led to a different outcome in Hasnath’s case (I made a bit of a hash of summarising these differences in earlier versions of this post, so see comments here and here).  But secondly and more importantly: there is no oppression Olympics, and raising legitimate concerns about inadequate equality legislation should not take the form of playing a game of “who gets discriminated against the most?” It trivialises people’s very real experiences of racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, and suggests that different oppressed minorities are somehow in competition with each other rather than natural allies.

The “Gay-Free Zone” campaign was deliberately committed to fill gay people with fear in an area where they have already have been subject to vicious assaults and intimidation by gangs and ideologues for years

The arrest and conviction of a low-level patsy on risible charges and the resulting arguments over the case – as well as the misinformation which had previously been knowingly spread by certain “community representatives” about the true identity of the culprits – are a sideshow and a distraction from the urgent business of investigating and stopping those who are behind this campaign of intimidation.

So one second – now they want to downplay the seriousness of Hasnath’s role?? Though other than that this all seems fine EXCEPT HOLD ON THERE what is this: ‘the misinformation which had previously been knowingly spread by certain “community representatives” about the true identity of the culprits’. You mean – community representatives were deliberately conspiring to hinder a police investigation? That’s quite a serious allegation, do you have any evidence for that? Any at all?

A BACKGROUND OF RISING HOMOPHOBIC HATE IN EAST LONDON
While it is often claimed that homophobic hate crime is ‘falling’ in Tower Hamlets, the most recent statistics released by the Metropolitan Police Service show that homophobic hate crime is UP in Tower Hamlets by 21% over last annual reporting period, from 67 attacks to 81; during the same period, religious/racial hate crime remained flat. (see: http://www.met.police.uk/crimefigures/datatable.php?borough=ht&period=year). Many gay people have been forced out of the borough, unable to cope with the harassment.

Homophobic hate crime in Tower Hamlets is indeed very high, though in other boroughs it is higher still (and in those boroughs, incidentally, it is carried out disproportionately by attackers who are not Muslim).

A particularly vicious attack – ignored by national media – occurred in late August 2008, when a 21 year-old art student, Oliver Hemsley, was butchered just after leaving the George & Dragon pub on Hackney Road in Shoreditch.

He was set on by a gang of 8 Bengali youths, his wine bottle snatched from him, smashed and the broken glass driven into his torso; they kicked him to a pulp, and finally a stabbed him in the neck, a knife partly cutting his spinal cord to leave him quadriplegic. A 15 year old, Nasrul Islam, was the only gang member to be brought to justice. Incredibly, the police released him on bail – only for him to mug a 12 year-old girl just days later. On his sentencing in March 2009, as an act of revenge, 30 youths attacked the George & Dragon and its customers with baseball bats (see: http://www.timeout.com/london/around-town/article/1058/gay-londoners-see-attacks-rise) For months, LGBT people walking along Hackney Road were subject to abuse and assaults, pelted with stones and eggs.

These incidents are awful and shocking; but it’s unclear what they tell us (or even what they’re supposed to tell us) about the bigger picture. They certainly show a snapshot of the kind of homophobic violence that exists across London. They also show (if the reports from 2 years after the event are accurate) that the violence in this case was perpetrated by men of Bangladeshi origin. Are we supposed to draw conclusions from these incidents as if they are representative of homophobic violence across London? If so, is the conclusion supposed to be that homophobia is rooted in race and religion, rather than in social and economic deprivation (which is higher in Tower Hamlets than in any other borough, and especially so among those of Bangladeshi origin)? Note, incidentally, that 42% of those proceeded against for the high numbers of homophobic crimes in Tower Hamlets in recent years were white (as opposed to 50% of the local population) and not of Bangladeshi ethnicity.

EAST LONDON MOSQUE / LONDON MUSLIM CENTRE – INFILTRATED BY EXTREMISTS, HAS HOSTED A STRING OF HATE PREACHERS
The East London Mosque (ELM), the main mosque in East London, was quick to distance itself from, and to condemn, the “Gay Free Zone” stickers. It has, however, many links with the extremist Islamic Federation Of Europe (IFE), which seeks to impose Shariah law in Europe. The IFE was founded after Jamaat-e-Islam’s members fled Bangladesh during the violent struggle for independence in 1971. Some were wanted for murder and escaped justice by seeking asylum in London. Of 22 IFE trustees, only 5 have not also been trustees of themosque.

One second – how have we ended up here? The letter starts by condemning the inadequate legal response to homophobic hatred, but now the target appears to be the East London Mosque. Is there a non-arbitary reason why this discussion of ELM has been appended?

We must stop assuming that the ELM/IFE represent the larger Muslim community. There are 80,000 Muslims in Tower Hamlets. About 4,000 of them, or 5%, attend the ELM. Last June, a host of Tower Hamlets organisations, including the Bangladeshi Welfare Association, the Brick Lane Mosque, the Bangladesh Youth Association and numerous other other local groups signed a joint release condemning the IFE as fascist. (see:http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2010/06/453923.html)

OK good, I never assumed that the ELM or the IFE represented the larger Muslim community anyway, even if some other people are apparently happy to assume or insinuate that homophobic criminals and extremists do represent the larger Muslim community. I’m not quite sure I’m happy to equate ELM and IFE – I can’t actually find lists of current trustees for either ELM or IFE, but I note that the assertion is that 17 of the 22 IFE trustees were, at some unspecified point, trustees of the Mosque – but I don’t really know enough about either organisation.

In addition to its IFE connections, the ELM has also hosted numerous hate preachers who have promoted the most vicious homophobia imaginable over the years.

While it is doubtful that many gaybashers are regular mosque attendees, the ELM’s preachers have created an atmosphere in which hate is socially acceptable; they have spread a message in which maiming and violence is the most dutiful, honourable, devout thing to do.

Notice the subtle insinuation that all of the ELM’s preachers stir up hate, not just those among them who have been homophobic extremists. And also the confusion: gaybashers are not devout enough Muslims to regularly attend mosque, but apparently they are devout enough to be motivated to do what homophobic preachers tell them ‘is the most dutiful, honourable, devout thing to do’.

The preacher Uthman Lateef, who even hosted a gala dinner to highlight the Mosque’s supposed commitment to combatting homophobia earlier this year, is on record as saying to students at nearby Queen Mary University of London in 2007: “We don’t accept homosexuality… we hate it because Allah hates it”.

Apparently this is untrue, he wasn’t at the dinner. However, I wasn’t there either so I can’t confirm this.

At the adjacent London Muslim Centre, Abdul Karim Hattin incorporated a ‘spot the fag’ contest into his sermon, with images of Elton John and the bloody corpse of a slain 2Pac at the mortuary.

He is quoted as saying: ‘This image will show you to the reality when you try to live a life you don’t live, and proclaim a life you never had…. So this man who proclaimed the gangster and fag – FAG – lifestyle: he ended up nothing more than a dead body on an autopsy table.” (2007)

Another preacher, Khalid Yasin, said: “The Koran gives very clear position regarding homosexuality, lesbianism and bestiality – these are aberrations, they are immoralities and …if convicted, punishable by death.”

Abdullah Hakim Quick who has led Friday prayers, also said in a speech at Kings College London: “They said, what is the Islamic position on homosexuality? And I told them. Put my name in the paper! The punishment is death. And I’m not going to change this religion.”

And Abdul Raheem Green on his blog called for gays to be stoned to death.

Bilal Philips, another who has led Friday prayers, wrote ‘the punishment could be death… it’s a punishment for deviant behaviour which threatens the family structure of a society.

Yasir Qahdi, another who has led Friday prayers, advised Muslim gays to marry a woman.

There’s no doubt that these are all pernicious homophobic views, and that preachers who advocate death for LGB people should not be given platforms to spout hatred.

Despite all this, the East London Mosque claims to have no responsibility over those who speak there. The East London Mosque also claims to be opposed to the “gay-free zone” campaign and homophobia. We demand that the East London Mosque live up to its stated word, take ownership of its platform, and stop allowing its premises to be used to promote gayhate campaigns.

Apparently, however, there is some doubt about whether ELM has control over who speaks there. Why would there be doubt? I don’t know – I don’t know how speakers are selected and how feasible it is to bar them, whether these homophobic speakers have been invited back, whether homophobic speakers are still being invited and if so what the ELM is doing to stop this happening, whether the speakers in question had expressed hateful views before or after they spoke at ELM, or how Muslims who attend the ELM reacted to these speakers. But before condemning ELM I would want to know the answers to all these questions – yet this letter glosses over them all, even though most readers will have no more understanding of these matters than I do.

[Edited to add: Here's a statement from Salman Farsi at ELM

"Any speaker who is believed to have said something homophobic will not be allowed to use our premises, whether that is us organising an event or someone else. As for the condemnation of homophobia, our director has gone on the record on this.

"I can see where the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community is coming from. That £100 fine was a slap on the wrist. One of the things that needs to be noted is that there are a small number of extremists in our community that are stirring things up. We have done as much as we possibly can. The LGBT community need to take that in good faith."]

But regardless of whether there are issues of homophobia at ELM: what connection does the fact that one organisation may (or, for all I know, may not be) responsible for promoting homophobic hatred have to do with the supposed fact that homophobia is being ignored in the interest of community relations? Homophobic religious extremists and organisations that give them platforms should be condemned – but why, in the context of this letter, has this particular one been singled out, as opposed to the numerous churches that allow priests who have uttered homophobic bilge to continue to preach?

Supposedly, the ELM is “allowing its premises to be used to promote gayhate campaigns” – which is stronger than what has been shown, namely that the ELM gives a platform to homophobic preachers. Only in one instance has it been asserted that the ELM premises (in fact, the adjacent London Muslim Centre) have been used as a platform for homophobia. And nowhere has it been shown that the ELM has any connection to the particular “gay hate campaign” mentioned at the start of the letter – namely the “gay free zone” posters.]

Do you know what is conspicuously absent from this letter? Any mention whatsoever of the EDL.

The letter, intent on harumphing about how LGB people are treated worse than other minorities in the name of ‘community relations’, completely neglects to acknowledge the context in which it appears. This is a context in which the very same gay hate campaign that they describe was also seized upon by EDL supporters and sympathisers as an excuse to spread hate against Muslims (one of the organisers of the East End Gay Pride planned in response to the gay-free zone posters was a founding member of the EDL; the other organisers were his close personal friends and had ties to other extremist groups and individuals, though many liberal commentators have chosen to consistently downplay this). It is a context in which Muslims are persecuted and stigmatised by the police, politicians and the media.

Let’s be clear: homophobic organisations and individuals should be condemned. But our condemnation shouldn’t take the form of, or contribute to, a systematic campaign against a particular community.