MPAC and Irving

Three months ago I had the depressing experience of appearing on Sky News with a man called Asghar Bukhari. We were debating the supposed links between Western foreign policy and Islamist terrorism. I wrote about the debate here. Mr Bukhari is a spokesman for a lobby group - not a representative organisation - called the Muslim Public Affairs Committee. I would not be overstating it if I said that Mr Bukhari's grasp of foreign affairs and acquaintance with the conventions of political debate were, respectively, slender and remote. I concluded our discussion by wishing that an organisation ostensibly representing British Muslims would concentrate on issues of rectifying discrimination and economic disadvantage rather than engage in demagogic statements on foreign affairs.

The issue that MPAC's statements raise particular concerns about is Israel. A sober and well informed report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism, published in September, commented on MPAC's role (paragraph 140):

The activities of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, MPACUK, have given cause for concern. Although its rhetoric is often extremist, MPACUK identifies itself as part of the mainstream British Muslim community, describing itself as “the UK’s leading Muslim civil liberties group, empowering Muslims to focus on non-violent Jihad and political activism”. Originally set up as a web-based media monitoring group, MPACUK’s declared first mission was to fight the perceived anti-Muslim bias in the media and to redress the balance. However, MPACUK has been criticised for publishing material on its website promoting the idea of a worldwide Zionist conspiracy, including the reproduction of articles originally published on neo-Nazi and Holocaust Denial websites, and is currently banned from university campuses under the NUS’s ‘No Platform’ policy. MPACUK are known to have removed an offensive posting from their website on one occasion, after complaints were made, but thereafter continued to publish similar material.

The report further remarks on MPAC's expounding antisemitic conspiracy theories. On examining MPAC's material at some length in preparation for my exchange with Mr Bukhari, I was clear that the organisation crosses the boundary where criticism of Israel becomes something more sinister and visceral.

Well, The Observer reports today (link taken from Harry's Place) that Mr Bukhari has donated money to, of all people, David Irving:

One of Britain's most prominent speakers on Muslim issues is today exposed as a supporter of David Irving, the controversial historian who for years denied the Holocaust took place. Asghar Bukhari, a founder member of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC), which describes itself as Britain's largest Muslim civil rights group, sent money to Irving and urged Islamic websites to ask visitors to make donations to his fighting fund.

Bukhari contacted the discredited historian, sentenced this year to three years in an Austrian prison for Holocaust denial, after reading his website. He headed his mail to Irving with a quotation attributed to the philosopher John Locke: 'All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good people to stand idle.'

Having gained a sceptical impression of Mr Bukhari's intellectual reach when I conversed with him, I am unsurprised that he manages to get wrong not just a quotation but a spurious quotation at that. (The sentiment he cites is usually attributed, in some form, to Edmund Burke - indeed it's the only thing that some commentators who invoke it know about Burke - but it appears nowhere in Burke's writings.) But I confess I'm still less surprised at his catholic taste in anti-Israel campaigners.

The Observer report gives too much credit to Irving even in describing him as a historian. The trial in which he sued Penguin Books and its author Deborah Lipstadt for libel in 2000 established Irving as, in the words of Mr Justice Gray (The Irving Judgment, 2000, p. 348), "an active Holocaust denier [who is] anti-semitic and racist and ... associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism". But preceding this description was an extraordinary finding about a man who cultivated a reputation as an authority on the Third Reich: "The charges which I have found to be substantially true include the charges that Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; [and] that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews...."

As the historian Richard Evans, who served as an expert witness for the defence in the trial, remarks in his definitive account of the case, Lying About Hitler, 2001, p. 103: "Irving's deceptions were there from very early on in his career and had remained an integral part of his working methods across the decades."

Irving is thus not a historian in the recognised and accepted sense of the term. Evans points out that the more usual term for Irving is thus "historical writer" rather than historian. Irving fabricates the historical record in order to generate conclusions congenial to his antisemitic ideology. To him, Asghar Bukhari wrote: "You may feel like you are on your own but rest assured many people are with you in your fight for the Truth."

How predictable and feeble is MPAC's response to this news. The fault apparently lies not with Bukhari but with The Observer for reporting Bukhari's actions, which were quite innocuous anyway. The paper is "twisting an innocent gesture of support (even if gravely mistaken) into more than it is", and thereby perpetrating "just another Islamaphobic [sic] attack aimed at undermining and harming the brave individuals who support the Palestinian cause and the cause of Muslims within Britain."

I am strongly opposed to the policy of the National Union of Students, referred to in the parliamentarians' report that I've quoted, of allowing "no platform for racists". But I do consider that MPAC ought not to be treated, as Sky News evidently does treat it, as some sort of representative organisation. It is a promoter of bigotry. If its spokesman Asghar Bukhari and I meet again in the television studios, I shall be sure to do him the disservice of reporting succinctly and accurately the history of his political interventions.

UPDATE: I am not starry-eyed on this matter, but even so I had underestimated the desperation and intellectual disrepute of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee. On its website today it maintains simultaneously that Asghar Bukhari made a mistake and that he was acting out of principle (emphasis added):

Asghar Bukhari's mistake 6 years ago was to judge on the basis of the limited number of David Irving's articles he had seen, and assume that accusations of anti-Semitism against him were simply another smear campaign. In 2000 when this incident occurred Irving was fighting a libel case and the key principle in our legal system is 'innocent until proven guilty'. Now that it has become clear that Irving does in fact hold such dispicable [sic] views Asghar Bukhari has no hesitation in opposing him.

To put it another way, now that Asghar Bukhari has been exposed as a financial contributor to a man found in an English court to be a Holocaust denier and an antisemite, he has no hesitation in denouncing the bearers of such disturbing news - even at the price of demonstrating further his incompetence. In the libel case MPAC refers to, Irving was the plaintiff and not the defendant. Irving had brought a libel action against Penguin Books and its author Deborah Lipstadt, for identifying him as a "Hitler partisan wearing blinkers" who "distort[ed] evidence ... and misrepresent[ed] data in order to reach historically untenable conclusions".

Professor Lipstadt's remarks were true. Yet, as the journalist Anthony Lewis remarked in his preface to Professor Lipstadt's account of her trial, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving (2005, p. xiii), "it was David Irving who sued [Professor Lipstadt], who forced her either to swallow his lies or spend five years of her life proving him to be what he was, a racist faker".

We now know a little more than we did about who gave money to the racist faker.