Apologists for Violence

I saw a young Muslim chap called Ashgar Bukhari on Sky News the other day who was really just another apologist for the terrible violence committed by Islamist extremists in Paris the other day.

While being careful to say that he did not support people committing such vile acts of murder, Ashgar was quick to say that the root cause of the terror was the 'war on terror' (i.e. western foreign policy), as if the individuals involved had no responsibility for their own actions which included, of course, shooting a Muslim police officer in the head, as he lay on the ground wounded pleading for his life.  

Ashgar also argued that Muslims suffer from the same kind of 'racism' that led to the black civil rights movement in 1960s America and that criticising or making fun of Islam was tantamount to demonising Muslims, a religious version of racism if you like, even though religion and race are two quite different and separate things.   

Now the civil rights movement in America never resorted to violence under the leadership of Dr Martin Luther King and, more recently, in South Africa Nelson Mandela led an anti-apartheid movement  which was committed to a largely non-violent struggle for black majority rule.

So violence, murder and terrorism are deliberate choices that people make, not the inevitable outcome of oppression, real or imagined, as Mahatma Ghandi would be happy to point out if he were still alive today.

In any event, while Ashgar's strong suit is clearly not history or politics, nor did he have anything of substance to say about Muslims being 'demonised' and turned into second class citizens because in western democracies everyone has exactly the same rights under the law, including freedom of worship, of course, while Islamists in Syria and Iraq are happily murdering Christians, non-believers and the 'wrong kind' of Muslim whenever it suits their purpose.

A quick visit to the internet confirmed my suspicion that Ashgar is just a front man for a politically sectarian group, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, with its own Islamist-friendly agenda and here's an extract from Wikipedia which shows Ashgar cosying up to the notorious holocaust denier David Irving. 

In 2006, Bukhari had sent the English writer and Holocaust-denier David Irving a £60 cheque and a letter headed with a quote attributed to John Locke, "All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good people to stand idle".[2] Bukhari said that he felt that Irving was "being smeared for nothing more than being anti-Zionist" and that the "pro-Israeli lobby often accuse[s] people of anti-Semitism". He said he was not antisemitic, and thought that Irving was just an anti-Zionist, not a Holocaust denier, when he donated money to him.[2^]

In other words Ashgar's a 'nut job' and while I'm all in favour of open debate and free speech on Sky News I think the producers ought to inform viewers about the 'credentials' of some of their commentators.