A couple of years back a leading Scots philosopher, a friend, applied for funding to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the main public research-funding body in the UK, to study the tradition of non-violence in Islam. After much delay, he received a letter from the ESRC in which an anonymous reviewer informed him that his bid had been rejected because ‘there is no tradition of non-violence in Islam’.
On 23 March 2010, the British Home Office’s counter-terrorism communications unit RICU announced its top 20 most influential “pro-Islamic” political bloggers. Topping the list are Ali Eteraz and the Angry Arab News Service. Eteraz is a US-based writer, an aggressive self-promoter, who is known less for his ‘pro-Islamic’ views than for his self-conscious cultivation of a ‘moderate’ image which has included forging friendly ties with the notoriously Islamophobic hate site Harry’s Place. Angry Arab News Service is run by As’ad AbuKhalil, a California-based Lebanese anarchist, and atheist. AbuKhalil’s daily output includes ritual denunciations of clerics and Islamists from North Africa to Saudi Arabia. He is an all opportunities offender (sometimes indiscriminately so).
The list was compiled based on research conducted by one David Stevens of Nottingham University whose work, according to his website, is focued ‘within the area of contemporary normative political philosophy’. The man obviously gazes from such Olympian heights that he can’t distinguish between the Pope and a pagan. And to his funders, it appears not to matter.
So who commissioned this exercise in fatuity? Why the ESRC of course.
Continue reading “ESRC, Islamophobia, and the British sense of humour”
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