Catch it here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nft24/Question_Time_22_10_2009/
Anyone on this side of the pond watch it?
How do you think Nick Griffin fared?
I personally thought. whilst the whole show was full of ad hominem he quite publically failed to legitimise any of the BNP’s policies nor shake of accusations of racism within the party.
It was cringeworthy at times seeing him hide being German, French and Austrian laws and refusing to explain why he denied the holocaust.
I watched it, it was disappointing, the only thing Griffin managed to display with clarity was his own complete lack of intellectual integrity. I tuned in hoping for a decent debate but, simply, Griffin was incapable of providing and convincing positions and his attempts at playing party politics just showed how completely out of the other panellists’ league he is.
The show also reaffirmed my desire to see Dimbleby made speaker in the House of Commons 
I don’t think he is capable of real debate, most of his policies are so ridiculous he cannot defend them. He couldn’t give a clear definition of what an indigenous British person was. He was shown up for what he is, a racist playing a politics. Did you see him visably shaking?
Some of the digs were great though. I personally liked the Dr. Strangelove comparison
Yeah, I’m not entirely sure what as was expecting, some highly Charismatic, devious genius I suspect. Something dangerous. Instead we got a nervous fat man who’s slack face was only capable of expressing nervous laughter or anger. However, at the same time I don’t think that QT was conducted well. It’s easy to see why to some it felt like a stitch-up, he was rolled out in front of the baying mob, a mob at one with the other panellists, and ritually degraded. This might undermine his ability to persuade others to follow his line of politics but this will only be used to heighten the feeling that the BNP are conspired against, it can only serve to further the feeling of alienation, that the BNP are surrounded by enemies and need to stick together. Griffin in turn spent the entire night on the defensive displaying only the most moderate tip of his politics.
It was telling that, despite the amusing attacks from others, the most damaging comments that night to his case all came from Griffin himself. Dr Strangelove was good, but no-where near as powerful as his own admittance of sharing a platform ‘with a non violent KKK member’, that he found gays ‘creepy’, the section where he talks about his views on the holocaust or his ignorant spoutings on Islam. If you want to see Griffin’s politics destroyed, you have to give him the room to let him do it himself, then come in with the jibes. Less demonising more Laughing stock.
Yeah, he couldn’t stop fidgeting and shaking I saw. Also, when he called the BBC an extremist Left Wing organisation I couldn’t help but laugh. 
Edit: Monty Python for a sig, nice choice
I have yet to watch the program itself due to my slow internet but having read all the analyses, apparently 4/5 questions were to do with some aspect of the BNP and the remainder were about the article on the boyzone guy’s death. It seems like he didn’t actually say what any of his policies were, and the show was obviously just focused on him, which as has been said is only going to further the victimization appeal among his supporters and near converts. And the Churchill thing? Well really, the entire western world would join the BNP if on purely racial grounds prior to the 60s, it’s a silly comment to throw time frames out to try to claim a particular aspect of a national figure.
As a foreigner in this country though, I think it’s a shame that the immigration and islam debate has to be hijacked by a fringe party on racial grounds. I personally don’t think it’s beneficial to society to take in so many muslims who then refuse to integrate into western society, and continue to practice a book that specifically and as a matter of any kind of mainstream interpretation, teaches distrust towards Christians, Jews, and generally all non muslims. A book that glorifies war in the name of religion and can quickly mobilize a segment of the world who have been indoctrinated from youth. I went to an Islington Library the other day and looking for something in the quran picked up an interpretation of by Muhammad Al Ghazali, an influential egyptian scholar, in which he calls western society ‘corrupt through and through’ and existing only ‘due to the absence of its rightful heirs, the muslims’. A random page I happen to be reading says this, what are the odds? In an Islington public Library. And the book had been regularly checked out.
The islam debate can’t be held on multicultural grounds, because islam is not a culture, it is a religion with explosive potential for damage. Similarly, I don’t think it speaks well of multiculturalism when many of the areas with the highest amount of immigration have the least amount of cohesion due to a complete absence of a common point between neighbors. I had a link from a Times blog mapping it and I can’t find it, but the North West and Barking (having some of the highest immigrant populations) had the highest ranks in terms of lack of ‘fitting in’ in the area. That of course can then be transformed into political power for parties like the BNP through discontentment. I really don’t think discouraging integration and championing a xenophobic and potentially violent religion are a good thing; religion must not have any special place in modern secular society, not forgetting why the society is secular to begin with.
The danger with this is that it enables this viewpoint: bnp.org.uk/2009/10/the-printed-m … -hysteria/
I’m not disagreeing just highlighting exactly how they choose to interpret their media portrayal, the amount of bull in that article is horrific.
I don’t like your interpretation of the Islamic faith as exactly the same thing can easily be said about the Christian faith, and it is alos equally true to say that there is a large section of both communities that either practise a). the faith in name only and it’s all pretty irrelevant or b). chose a certain core section of beliefs and use them as motivation for what they see as moderate / good behaviour. I’d prefer them to have another basis for what they believe is ethically correct, but as long as their response to the differences between this hypothetical Them and I is settled through contact and debate I have no real problem with their beliefs. This is all equally true of Christians and Muslims and the problem I have with the ‘Muslim’ debate is that, as a function of such discussions, Muslims are exposed to some florescent scrutiny that deepens every shadow and hides the high points.
To return to the BNP, and immigration more generally, the point is that the immigration of Muslims into the UK is a non-issue in the sense that the religion of the immigrant is completely irrelevant. Apart from anything else the vast majority of people who come here are not Muslims. The main problems of immigration in terms of assimilation are language and culture, things that are not independent of the person’s origin but not things that are dependent on religion per se.
Saying that Islam isn’t a culture, or that there isn’t an Islamic culture, is like saying there isn’t a Jewish culture, or a Christian culture. Yes, there are other factors, but religion has a culturally defining impact. They define family structures, what you do with your time off, provide normative guides for behaviour, both in individual and institutional terms. They mark our landscape, our history, our speech and our thought. How can you say there isn’t an Islamic culture? The grand clash of cultures, as some see it, is the main problem of immigration, it isn’t so much the different beliefs in God, Yahweh, Allah or whatever that clash, but how these beliefs lead people to actively engage and construct the world around them and what are these constructions if not expressions of culture?
And hey, this isn’t America, you’re in the UK, you don’t live in a secular society. Our head of Government is the defender of the Faith, we have our Bishops in the House of Lords, the entire institutional structure of the UK is explicitly connected to the Church of England, no matter how embarrassed we may now be about it. Furthermore, religion does deserve a certain important place in our society. It does not deserve a timeless, reserved place certainly, but a place contingent on the fact that large numbers of people in the UK express some kind of religious belief and any attempts to force secular norms throughout our culture will lead people straight into the hands of groups like the BNP as, rightly or wrongly, the British often do self identify themselves as belonging to a Christian country.
Yeah, Griffin more often than not put his foot in it. That is the most effective way of bringing down the BNP, although the trouble is a lot of people are just as ignorant as Griffin, and will see nothing wrong with a KKK member who is ‘almost non-violent’. (That one cracked me up!)
I would have liked to see less ad hominem attacks and more focus on the policies which if left to defend, Griffin would have floundered. An opportunity missed perhaps. And it also, as you said, plays into the hands of the ‘left’ being out to get them, although how the BNP can describe the Tories as ‘left’ I’ll never know
I do think Rouzbeth has a point in regards to the teachings of Islam. There are as we all know many disturbing verses in the bible, but one major difference between Christianity and Islam in general, is these verses are hidden away, never looked at, nor taught to any great extent. 21st century Christians simply don’t read the main tenet of their faith. In Islam however children are taught the Koran from an early age, and the passages which Griffin refers to, are to large extent common knowledge. Islam for the vast majority has not suffered the crisis of faith which plagues Christianity. Couple that with the fact that Islam is often the main connection Muslims have with their homeland, it makes for people very devout to their faith
From the edge of their black cliffs, I’m sure everyone appears as left to them.
Hmm, I really don’t know enough about how Islam is taught to argue so you may have a point, though I’m still hesitant to debate immigration issues on religious grounds of any kind. I like the idea of their faith being their main connection home, and how that may force increased level of devoutness in an attempt to remain connected to something, it’s also probably why they’re so keen to reinstate their faith in new lands and to give outward displays of faith, as a constant act of self-identification with the ideas they’ve left behind… hmmm…
The point of course is that it’s not my interpretation of the faith, it’s the interpretation of scholar whose work on the quran ranks among the few in an Islington library. It’s the view of someone whose works are regularly checked out. But then of course, the question then is, who are you to say what interpretation of the quran is right and what’s wrong? Society makes right and wrong, as witnessed by changing attitudes from England’s public hangings for petty theft all the way up to the socially and morally sensitive country that is England now. If someone is sane enough not to take the quran at face value, not to distrust all jews and christians for the sake of, then why do they need the quran in the first place? Clearly they’re well placed to make distinctions between right and wrong. There are a fair number of both Hindus and Muslims who are that only in name, but I believe it is to a signficant extent because of the laissez fair attitude of the British government towards foreign cultures, an inversion of its previous racial and imperial policies, that is making these muslims and hindus prisoners to the cultural and religious conservatism of their parents. The image is one where children go to school to learn independent thought free of religion and conservatism, but are told by their parents that it’s western propaganda.
The problem I have with islam is that though Christianity has been subject to criticism and critical thinking since the enlightenment, islam remains sacred in the countries where the population is predominantly muslim and becomes protected in a secular country that should at the very least accept it as a religion that has a large number of pretty awful stuff. If Hitler decreed the importance of friendly neighbours, it wouldn’t fool you knowing that those neighbours had to be fellow Aryans. The same is true for islam. Sure, it has good things, but it’s a downright xenophobic and violent religion the betrays its inception. Again, if someone is reasonable enough not to cite Gomorrah as justification for the murder of gays and the demonization of the west, doesn’t that take away from the holiness of the book? At the very least, it must be accepted that islam is not a ‘god ordained’ book, so that it can be open to criticism and progress towards societies where women aren’t FORCED to conform to religious values, and where a man won’t get 1000 lashes and so many years in prison for TALKING about picking up prostitutes (edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast … .braggart/). And having run the risk of making this a very long post, I’ll assert the inevitability of an islamic society on the grounds that islam is most definitely a political and socially powerful ideal. It makes tax distinctions on the basis of religion, has clear rules on inheritance division, law and crime such as the infamous 4 witnesses to a rape statement, and has rules on aspects of slavery.
To keep it brief(er), I’ll just try to quickly go through the second part. The west is founded on Christian values. Sure. So why not let muslim society develop past religious ideals and literality by dropping the protectionism that grants a muslim the right to ironically, and without any kind of criticism that we’d certainly see for any other non religious group, go outside Geert Wilders’ press meeting and hold a placard saying “Sharia for Netherlands”? I’m sure you can make plenty of arguments for the Christianness of England. Maybe the Church of England is the propagator of the isolationism Britain favors over the continent. Maybe. And plenty for the harm of Christianity. The abortion doctor who was recently killed in the US comes to mind. But England as a society is not religious by any means. There’s statistics, I think I remember England being about half half. It is certainly more religious than Norway or Sweden who have something like +80% non affiliation, but compared to the US, or Italy, it does pretty well. The important point is that England has only become so because its intellectuals were allowed to question its ways and destroy the impentrability of religion. My argument is that the same should be done now for islam, but only as a subset of open criticism of all religions and ideals without the protectionism that affords people the right not to be offended.
This is a major problem with integration of Islam into Western society. We largely take for granted our freedom of speech and thought. And Britain is for the most part secular, and we generally don’t take Christianity verbatium.
As I said earlier Islam has not suffered the same criticism and interrogation Christianity has. Obviously Muslim leaders and to a certain extent Muslims themselves realise the potential for a ‘crisis of identity’ to occur within the Muslim faith who have moved from a very insular society to a multicultural and open society. It leads to a protest from Muslims that they are being discriminated against. Obviously I’m not advocating oppression against Muslims, and I don’t mean to over generalise, but in Britain, Islam is offered a protection from questions for fear of offending people.
Also in context: when “freedom of speech” was most earnestly developed and popularised in Britain, the nation was coming out of a couple of centuries of bloody sectarian violence between Catholics and Protestants, Royalists and fundamentalists, and at the same time as it grew, a very rigid code of social politeness also developed. The freedom granted was to allow people to carry out their private devotions unmolested, the politeness gave space to allow that.
The upshot was that there was space for people to believe, but punishment ensued for impoliteness - read accounts at the time of people being thrashed (by peers, not judicially) or utterly shunned by society for ungentlemanly conduct - and there was still a rigid social structure within which behaviour was confined.
Several points on this:
It is no surprise to see Griffin is a slimey racist. We already knew that.
The BBC did this to garner higher ratings, though they should have done it due to the BNP’s ‘democratic’ following.
The British media (as per usual) crowed with one triumphant voice the following day, laying into Griffin to prove their anti-racist credentials. These so-called ‘liberal’ fuckwits allow very serious racism to go on in this country, particularly from the metropolitan police, yet focus their efforts on a small band of assholes who will never achieve anything. The institutional racism is the real problem, but it isn’t as easy a target.
Griffin is a former holocaust denier and in truth any explanation he gave for why he’s changed his mind would be in breach of various laws on (Nazi) holocaust revisionism. That’s not quite as absurd as he managed to make it sound.
Treating Islam, an entire way of life, as purely a religion like Christianity, is fallacious and betrays a serious misunderstanding. Islam is already ‘integrated’ into ‘western life’ in many ways. The difference is that when Muslims object they are encouraged to attack the notion of ‘freedom of speech’ and so it is easy to characterise the conflict as ‘Islam vs. the free west’. However, their objections are typically based on the same sorts of things Jews, atheists and many others object to, but those groups are not treated as being ‘anti Western’ as a result.
Christianity was an entire way of life until the enlightenment. Cultural conservatism is not the way to encourage dialogue. I can’t get into a conversation with a muslim about islam without being directly attacked, at times close to direct physical confrontation, for challenging particular aspects. The problem here is that it’s accepted to be my fault for daring to challenge a belief system that has had a tremendous (negative) effect on millions.
I don’t recall atheists refusing to handle containers containing alcohol at Sainsburys, or being awarded 10k for applying to a barber that clearly can’t work with someone who refuses to show the hair they do business with. Their objections are based on the sort of things that a book born to a neglected nation in the 7th century that was at war 2/3 of the year and buried their daughters alive says, and there’s no disputing that. We can debate this at source if you want to get your quran out. Orthodox Jews do plenty of silly things. The point, as has already been repeated many times, is not the problem of islam in particular, but that of all religions, except that the liberal west are afraid of criticising islam for fear of being racist, as if the two are connected, and the conservative voices often don’t understand islam and can only ever appeal to their own base. There is no publicized debate on the issue, which only politicizes it.
Perhaps it is because you approach Islam as a problem that it is your responsibility to solve that results in your conversations with Muslims becoming confrontational. I’ve met dumbass, backwards, anachronistic, dogmatic Muslims, but for ‘Muslims’ one could substitute any other broad category of people. I see nothing in Islam per se that is conservative or damaging.
This weekend’s Grand Prix is taking place in a Muslim country. Look at the architecture, look at the advertising hoardings, look at how they’ve built the track around hotels and helipads rather than vice-versa.
Let me guess, you are an atheist, right?
In the centuries after the holy Koran was written Islamic countries led the world.
Hardly. Undogmatic religious people are among the most productive and benevolent in society and have been for millenia. Who do you think provided healthcare and shelter for the homeless before we invented socialism and the insurance industry?
Whereas atheists who engage in political and social issues generally spend their time picking fights and slating all religions as if they were one distinct set of ideas and behaviours and as though the atheists were the expert authority on the matter.
Note, I am agnostic.
They’re happy to lock up innocent Muslims for no good reason, and as I said before Islam is represented as somehow contradictory to our sacred western liberal ideals. When Ghandi was asked what he thought of Western civilisation he replied ‘I think it would be a very good idea’. Had a point.
True enough. But that is hardly the fault of Muslims, as they are not the ethnic minority who own the vast majority of the mainstream media. Indeed, that group are the ones who largely remain uncriticised due to the threat of being called racist.
It’s my problem to address as someone who was born a muslim to parents who were born muslims to… so on, even though none really had the choice, and faces execution should they wish to remove the formality of the label, and also as someone who has significant vested interest in his country only to see it tarnished by the excesses of religion. The west may not remember how it was screwed by Christianity, but I certainly remember being screwed by islam. Again, we can take out our qurans and debate the conservatism of the book, or we can simply refer to modern islamic countries to conclude whether or not islam really is or isn’t conservative.
I wouldn’t refer to western technology in an Arab country as a symbol of religion’s positive influence, but solely the effect of extensive natural resources bringing investment and promoting business.
Let’s not confuse cause and effect. I’ve become who I am (which is not necessarily an atheist by the way let’s keep personal categorizations away) and defend my views not as a political decision, but as a result of my views having developed through education and personal interest.
Scientific progression as a result of greater wealth, communication and consolidation of nations is unrelated to the strict code that islam advocates. Is Algebra ‘islamic math’? Its use is independent of and uninspired by, but so happens to have occurred during a period of islam’s political dominance.
The majority of scientists and engineers are not religious, and certainly not in the conventional sense. I don’t know who you’re referring to, but I’d say unreligious men of hard science have been the most productive for the past century or two. Although religious people gave money to the poor, they in many ways perpetuated or were the cause of that poverty. Catholics, for example, continue to do so by refusing to use contraception, which on the one hand ruins young lives and on the other spreads various diseases.
As Dawkins put it, I don’t have to be a fairyologist to tell you the color of fairy wings. If I have read the quran, if I have been in an islamic society, if I have read various religious teachings, I very easily have more authority than the majority of muslims who only trust their leaders to tell them what’s good and not, and should of course have the choice to criticise a religion whose ‘priests’ mobilize villagers and the dumb in retaliation for any supposed transgression. I don’t know where the benefits of secularism were outnumbered by the benefits of accepting a religion that seeks to subjugate all other religions as a matter of mainstream interpretation, and convert or kill unbelievers (tough choice?).
Criticise the government then. Fine. They’re the culprits. Let’s open the discussion and start criticising islam when the various crimes that happen happen in its name. Islam is not a peaceful religion, by any means, this has to be understood. But it won’t be if we go back to the argument of the ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’.
But what if Christians owned the vast majority of the mainsteam media? We’d get Fox. This is not a war of religions, and it’s not a matter of everyone getting their fair air time to talk about how much better their religion is and how angry their god(s) would be if you went to any other religion, and what god hates today, this is about secularist educated free speech trumping all nonsense, which happens to include religions as a specific point due to their significant influence.
I’m sorry, but Dawkins is not an authority on religion. He’s an authority on biology (and indeed his theories in that field are interesting, relatively original and quite compelling) but he has no background in philosophy, theology or the history of religion and as such is in no position to be commenting on such subjects.
Or at least, if you take your criticism of ‘conspiracy theorists’ seriously, you are bound to this position regarding Dawkins.
The rest is just mindless prejudice and abstraction on your part. You go into these exchanges assuming so much, but having researched so little, that it would be a waste of my time explaining to you each of your individual mistakes.
The response to what you said is in the quote itself: “As Dawkins put it, I don’t have to be a fairyologist to tell you the color of fairy wings.”. He doesn’t have to be a theologist to be able to say that burning witches is immoral. In this instance, I quoted him not on his biology, nor on his philosophy, but only to make a point which I thought he wrote well.
Judging by what is to me a random statement: ‘mindless prejudice and abstraction’, in response to the above, you’re not one to be debating this subject from a standpoint that doesn’t hinge on racial or religious conservatism. Fine. We can discuss islam’s nature and the resulting culture further when you read the quran.
Try again. If conspiracy theorists are guilty of discussing subjects on which they are not experts then so is Dawkins. If conspiracy theorists should be dismissed out of hand for doing this then so should Dawkins.
When you’re capable of and willing to apply something approximating a consistent set of intellectual criteria and modes of thought then this exchange might get somewhere, but until then it’s just a hypocrite atheist wanking off his priest.
What?
I have. I’m not interested in discussing Islam’s nature with someone who has already made up their mind that secular beliefs = good (regardless of what they are) and religious beliefs = bad (regardless of what they are). However, I am interested in what motivates your atheistic prejudice and bias. If you could outline that, preferably without reference to your high priest Dawkins, then maybe this can continue.