This article appears in The Times tomorrow.
THREE YEARS ago the telegenic BBC journalist Rageh Omaar was on the brink of “televisual superstardom”, according to one gushing newspaper profile.
Superstardom was not so easily obtained. Omaar’s book about the Iraq war generated a huge advance and poor sales. But Omaar has re-emerged as a presenter for al-Jazeera’s English-language channel, columnist for the New Statesman and author of a new book on being a Muslim in Britain. Unfortunately his output suggests a reason for his thwarted promise. He is no thinker and no writer.
Critics of the BBC often accuse it of political bias. Omaar exemplifies the untruth of the charge. Instead of bringing preconceptions to his reporting, Omaar is susceptible to the touch of whoever spoke to him last. “Britain and the US are now seen by ordinary Iraqis as having made victims of those they say they want to liberate,” he declared in March 2003. “For (Iraqis), the darkness of the last 20 years under Saddam was crumbling,” he hastily corrected himself on the fall of Baghdad.
In his book, Only Half of Me, Omaar tells of coming to Britain from Somalia as a boy, being prevented from returning by war, and becoming a journalist. Unfortunately the book’s policy inferences are either banal or pernicious. How to curb the influence of jihadist ideology is not adequately dealt with by the vapid speculation that “perhaps the things we share as British Muslims are much stronger than the things that divide us”.
One of the few aspects of the book that rises above the commonplace is Omaar’s opinion of himself. In his account of the US assault on Najaf, he pays tribute to his understanding of the significance of Iraq to Muslim identity. In recounting certain travel difficulties in Ethiopia, he compares himself to Gandhi.
Less original are his use of the idle propagandist’s term “Islamophobia” and his habitual coupling of the importance of free speech with the conjunctions “but” and “yet”.
Nothing prepared me, however, for his comparison of the Somali-born former Dutch MP, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a critic of Islam, to a suicide bomber. If this disgraceful analogy is how Omaar understands argument within a liberal society, his journalistic career is destined to tell us even less than it has already.
N.B. In the published online version (though it may have been changed in later editions) there is a small error in the penultimate sentence, where '7/7' appears before the phrase 'suicide bomber'. In his book Omaar compares Ayaan Hirsi Ali to a 21/7 suicide bomber, Yasin Hassan Omar. The analogy is disgraceful in any case (Omaar is making a point about their supposedly comparable zeal).
