The train passengers’ calm consumption of potato chips and bored checking of e-mails on the 11:43am to Birmingham suggested they had not heard the news. Their destination, a city of more than 1 million people, had become Britain’s first caliphate and a no-go zone for non-Muslims — at least, according to an “expert” on Rupert Murdoch’s US-based Fox News channel.
“There are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in,” Steve Emerson, a commentator on terrorism, told millions of Fox News viewers on Sunday.
“You know what it sounds like to me, Steve?” said the show’s concerned host Jeanine Pirro. “It sounds like a caliphate.”
Emerson, who describes himself as one of the leading authorities on Muslim extremist networks and who regularly briefs the US government, made the comment as millions of people marched in Paris against extremist attacks last week that claimed 17 lives.
On Monday, British Prime Minister David Cameron branded Emerson “a complete idiot” and said the comments had made him choke on his porridge.
Emerson issued an apology to the “beautiful city of Birmingham.”
Britain’s second-biggest city has one of the nation’s largest Muslim populations, with 22 percent of residents identifying as Muslim in the 2011 census, and it has had to wrestle with Muslim controversies.
However, on Monday, the people of Birmingham laughed off Emerson’s comments, echoing a collective guffaw that erupted on Twitter.
Adil Ray, a Birmingham comedian and creator of the BBC sitcom Citizen Khan, riffed on the common claim that Birmingham has more canals than Venice, tweeting: “One things for sure, Birmingham’s got more mosques than Venice. #FoxNewFacts.”
A cricket fan posted a picture of the Birmingham-born England player Moeen Khan wielding a bat with the caption: “Terrifying photo of how a typical Muslim from Birmingham guards the city gates against infidels.”
The Bullring shopping center was reimagined as the plaza around the sacred Kaabba in Mecca.
There is a Mecca in Birmingham — a bingo hall, located in Acocks Green, birthplace of Jasper Carrot, a veteran Birmingham comedian who some joked was the city’s true caliph.
Beneath the twin minarets of Birmingham’s central mosque, which prides itself on including Sunnis, Shiites and Sufis — as well as non-Muslims — there was bafflement at the idea.
“It is not possible for Muslims, Jews, Hindus or Christians to cover the whole of the world,” said Mohammed Talha Bukhari, a soft-voiced 54-year-old imam from Uttar Pradesh in India. “God created the world as a garden with different flowers and if there were only one type of flower, it would not be a garden.”
Carl Chinn, chair of Birmingham University’s community history project, invited Emerson to tour the city, which he said has had a growing Muslim community since the arrival of Yemeni sailors in the 1930s.
“I’ll show him how we live and work together,” Chinn said. “There are no ‘no-go’ areas in Birmingham. There has been an increased tendency for minorities of all kinds, including the white working class, to gather together and that is an issue we need to address without hyperbole. We need to share our schools, businesses and spaces more. That is facing many cities in Europe, Paris among them.”
Raja Mohammed Ishtiaq, co-owner of the Raja Brothers grocery set up in 1977 by Pakistani immigrants, said Emerson’s comments were embarrassing and insulting.
“We are not in cuckoo land,” he said. “There are lots of Muslims here, but this is a multicultural society and there are beautiful links between the different religions. How can they say this? Birmingham is one of the stable communities.”
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