Tag: Global civility

Muslims Call for End to Vilification of Islam – 2012

Muslims Call for End to Vilification of Islam: A protest close to Google’s offices on Sunday 14th October 2012 called on them to withdraw a short anti-Islamic video and other Islamophobic material from their YouTube channel.

Muslims Call for End to Vilification of Islam - 2012
Muslim men show their anger over the film

The video, variously titled but mainly known as Innocence of Muslims was first uploaded to YouTube in July 2012 in an English language version but was the dubbed in Arabic in early September that year.

Muslims Call for End to Vilification of Islam - 2012
The protest was on Buckingham Palace Road, next to Victoria Station, where Google had its UK HQ

Wikipedia quotes a Vanity Fair review of the video: “Exceptionally amateurish, with disjointed dialogue, jumpy editing, and performances that would have looked melodramatic even in a silent movie, the clip is clearly designed to offend Muslims, portraying Mohammed as a bloodthirsty murderer, Lothario and pedophile with omnidirectional sexual appetites.“

Muslims Call for End to Vilification of Islam - 2012
At first the protest was in one carriageway only and a large pen was filled with Muslim men, with speakers and screen at the far end

The videos were apparently trailers for a full length film called ‘Desert Warrior’ which had been filmed as being about life in Egypt 2,000 years by US non-profit Media for Christ, but in post-production was altered by directory Nakoula Basseley Nakoula , working under the pseudonym Sam Bacile, to be crudely and explicitly anti-Islamic, much to the disgust of at least some of its actors. It isn’t clear if the full film was ever completed, although an early version was apparently screened once in California to an audience of ten people.

Muslims Call for End to Vilification of Islam - 2012

Its director was arrested in late September in Los Angeles under various charges related to the making of the film and his use of the alias “Sam Bacile”, and later sentenced to a year in prison and 4 years of parole.

Muslims Call for End to Vilification of Islam - 2012

The videos on YouTube led to protests around the world, including in the Middle East, North Africa, Asia and Europe, some violent with “over 50 deaths, including 23 in Pakistan.” The protest in London was a peaceful one, organised by the Muslim Action Forum who called on YouTube to remove the video and for the the UK Government and other organisations to endorse a ‘Declaration of Global Civility.’

Soon more men arrived and the protest spilled out across the whole road

The UK government Commission for Countering Extremism in 2024 commissioned an independent report into Blasphemy Extremism in the UK, which incorrectly states that the The Muslim Action Forum “first emerged in 2015 when it organised a large protest outside of Downing Street to express anger over plans by Charlie Hebdo to republish its 2012 cartoons of Mohammed.”

Had the authors looked at My London Diary they would have known it was organising protests in 2012, and that it was founded following a meeting of “over 100 leading Muslim Scholars, Spiritual leaders and representatives of major Muslim organisations” in Birmingham in September 2012.

I had first thought there were no women at the protest, but then saw this block beyond where the men were saying prayers

In my post on My London Diary I made my own comments about the MAF and their Declaration of Global Civility, in particular noting “What many might feel is missing from the declaration is the lack of any reference or acknowledgement to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948 and is the foundation of our ideas of what a civilised society should be.”

I also commented that “global civility should include rather more tolerance for the expression of views which are abhorrent to you, and should certainly preclude the kind of violent responses that this film has aroused in some Muslim countries.” And I commented on the way that women were marginalised in the protest, kept at some distance from the speakers and the men, with no women speakers.

You can read my lengthy account of the protest and seem many more pictures I took at the event on My London Diary: End the Vilification of Islam.

The previous weekend I had photographed another peaceful London protest against these films: Muslims against Anti-Muslim Film.

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Global Civility and Stratford Marsh – 2006

Global Civility and Stratford Marsh – On Saturday February 18th 2006 I photographed one of the continuing protests around the world which followed the publication by a Danish magazine of cartoons featuring images of the Prophet Mohammad in Trafalgar Square, then took the underground and DLR to Pudding Mill Lane station on Stratford Marsh to take more pictures of the area which was to be demolished for the London Olympics.

Proclamation for Global Civility – Trafalgar Square

Global Civility and Stratford Marsh

Muslim protesters packed Trafalgar Square for a protest by the Muslim Action Committee over the publication of the cartoons which they regard as blasphemous, but also to publicise a ‘proclamation of global civility‘. The key points of this were the recognition of human dignity as a fundamental right, the need to good manners and etiquette in serious debate, a desire to avoid irresponsible behaviour and to underline the significance of mutual respect for a harmonious co-existence.

Global Civility and Stratford Marsh

The protest in London was kept in good order by stewards who remonstrated with some of the demonstrators who were in some way not behaving as they thought they should, and also moved photographers away from them and some other groups. But other protests around the world were much less restrained and news agencies that same day reported rioting outside the Italian consulate in Benghazi, Libya in which at least 10 people were killed as well as the storming and burning of Christian churches in northern Nigeria with at least 16 deaths.

Global Civility and Stratford Marsh

“As I pointed out in my report in 2006, human dignity was recognised as vital in “the preamble to the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 217 of 10 December 1948. That declaration also contains a number of important safeguards such as ‘the right to freedom of opinion and expression‘ and states ‘in the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.'”

Global Civility and Stratford Marsh

There are still many countries around the world where the principles of human rights in that declaration are not observed, including in many in the Muslim world.

Manners and etiquette are clearly very different in different societies and different religions certainly have very different views, particularly over blasphemy and apostasy. In the west we now prioritise freedom of speech and look back in horror at the Spanish Inquisition and trails for heresy and blasphemy, although in England and Wales, the ‘blasphemy’ and ‘blasphemous libel’ laws were only abolished in 2008, and in Scotland in 2021, while they are still in force in Northern Ireland.

The last conviction for blasphemy in England and Wales was in 1977 when the editor of Gay News received a suspended prison sentence after publishing the poem ‘The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name’ by James Kirkup, and in Scotland it was more than a century earlier when a bookseller was jailed for 15 months in 1843, though until 1825 it had been punishable by death.

While we may find some of the cartoons that were published offensive, it clearly does not justify the irresponsible behaviour and criminal actions of some Muslim mobs protesting against them.

Away from the stewards as I wandered through the crowd I was generally welcomed by the protesters, with many urging me to take their pictures. I left as the speeches, most of which I could not understand as few spoke in English, were finishing and people were getting ready to march,

Scroll down the February 2006 web page for more.

Stratford Marsh – River Lea, Stratford

I’d first photographed Stratford Marsh back in the early 1980s as part of a wider project on the River Lea, once a large and important industrial area in London, but like most of British industry falling into decline, accelerated by the policies of the Thatcher government determined to transform Britain away from manufacturing and into services.

Stratford Marsh was then full of largely small businesses employing local people and many still remained in 2006, though already blighted both by government policies and the tax breaks given to the nearby Docklands area. Now Olympic blight had set in with the whole area to be remodelled, and there were also areas which would be demolished for Crossrail.

As I wrote back then and I think my pictures show:

It is still an intriguing area, where a few yards can take you from wilderness to industrial wasteland, from dereliction to busy workshops (though most were closed on a Saturday afternoon.) Parts are visibly closing down, with compulsory purchase orders hanging on lamposts, some footpaths closed and factories demolished.

There was one small sign of a kind of regeneration. the unusual lock between the Bow Back Rivers and Waterworks River at Baker Road, for many years derelict, at last seems to have been replaced.

My London Diary – Feb 2006

There are many more pictures from this walk – and others – on these pages on my River Lea site.

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All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.