 URL hamza s horrid but we must tolerate him rod liddle wednesday august NUMBER NUMBER the guardian sheikh abu hamza al masri our maddest of mad mullahs and a cartoon bogeyman to scare the kiddies spent a quiet and contemplative bank holiday playing with his own children in victoria park hackney i ve often wondered what incendiary islamic fundamentalist clerics do on statutory public holidays head for the beach and maybe swing by b q on the way home i had hoped i had this beguiling vision of hamza paddling in the sea an ice cream cone in his one good hand the waves tickling his shins and the sheikh mentally preparing to fix those pesky shelves in the kitchen for once instead of planning the extermination of zionism and america and maybe me and you too but b q and a day at the seaside is probably beyond hamza s budget since the bank of england froze his assets so victoria park had to do but he sounded happy enough when i spoke to him with the babble of tiny cheerful islamic proto warriors in the background you must know hamza he s the imam designed it would seem by the daily mail s cartoonist mac large metal hook in place of a left hand one eye covered by a patch the other a baleful watchful milky white we don t mock the disabled any more these days unless it s someone like hamza whom we don t like then if you ll excuse the inapt phraseology the gloves come off so hamza is known with that vaulting imagination typical of the british right as captain hook in articles which usually call for his arrest or extradition to the us or deportation back home to egypt or maybe off to pakistan or afghanistan where he fought the russians for years and thus sustained his disabilities anywhere really just out of here and if we can t lock him up or chuck him out of the country maybe we can force him to shut up because we don t like hamza very much we weren t that fond of him before september NUMBER but afterwards in that nervy paranoid few months when we all thought the sky might fall in our disapprobation turned into political persecution and now the daily mirror is agitating again for his arrest because they ve got hold of secret videos of the man behaving in an even more inflammatory manner urging warfare on and looting of enemies of islam all out of context and a very long time ago says the imam not unduly bothered but perhaps he should be because our reputation for broad mindedness and tolerance towards people like hamza was thinning even before the mirror s scoop hamza preaches or preached at the scary finsbury park mosque so earlier this year the charity commissioners banned him from doing so because of his allegedly inflammatory remarks i didn t know charity commissioners were meant to do stuff like that he has had his passport seized and not returned his assets have been frozen he is tailed by the police every now and then and his access to the media is restricted by internal policing within broadcasting corporations and the press and this last point is because we tell ourselves endlessly repeating the mantra over and over again and fervently wishing it to be true hamza is not representative of british muslims as if british muslims were a simple homogenous thing with a single voice that one could turn to every now and then for explanation and perhaps succour the trouble is in the first month or so after the twin towers attack he was revealed to be rather more representative than the list of those government approved muslim spokesmen who were uncomfortably i suspect dragooned briefly into statements of support for the war against terrorism and a blanket condemnation of the taliban an opinion poll commissioned by radio NUMBER s today programme revealed that an overwhelming majority of british muslims were against george bush s crusade one in six were to put it mildly ambivalent about the attack on the us the remainder condemned the attack unequivocally a large majority thought the war against terrorism was a war against islam which is what hamza said repeatedly but it was something that at the time we didn t want to hear now if you quiz the man on present policy at home and abroad he comes across superficially at least as someone from the liberal left no war against iraq britain to become independent of us foreign policy and attempt rapprochement with arab states stronger action against israel mistrust of global capitalism redistribution of wealth nor is he particularly anti semitic so far as i can tell although i don t suppose he will be holidaying in eilat this year in yesterday s guardian the chief rabbi expressed a willingness to talk to hamza and was grateful for the sheikh s message of condolence when a london synagogue was attacked which is not to say that hamza is a peaceable jeffersonian democrat who has been wilfully misrepresented he is without question rather more inflammatory in private sermons to his own people than he is in public his ideology is an arid and uncompromising interpretation of islam he would be happy in a truly islamic society to stone women to death for adultery for example you and i would find many perhaps most of his views utterly repellent and that s the point because hamza is the true test of our apparent desire to be multicultural multiculturalism is not surely the cheerful appropriation of bits of inoffensive minority cultural behaviour by the ruling hegemony that is a sort of syncopated monoculturalism multiculturalism is rather the ability of society to tolerate views that are antithetical to the dominant culture and maybe learn from them the fbi has been investigating hamza but of course has found nothing remotely incriminating the real reason for his vilification and persecution is simply the pungency of his views it is often said that we should shut him up or arrest him because his rhetoric increases hostility against the muslim population generally this is a perfectly noble argument but it does not wash you don t defuse a difficult situation by pretending it doesn t exist and if british muslims maybe a minority maybe not feel a growing sense of unease or mystification at the direction of western foreign policy it is not because they have been led in that direction by hamza shutting the man up therefore won t make a difference it is rather as louis macneice had it the glass is falling hour by hour the glass will fall for ever but if you break the bloody glass you won t hold up the weather yahoo groups sponsor NUMBER dvds free s p join now URL to unsubscribe from this group send an email to forteana unsubscribe URL your use of yahoo groups is subject to URL 