Yearly Archives: 2006

Pope Benedict trashes John Paul II’s legacy

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“As protests against the Pope continued to rumble around the Muslim world yesterday, Catholics began asking themselves if this highly intelligent man can really have been so crass as to have ignited the passions of millions of Muslims without realising that he was doing it.

“If the alternative version is more credible – that he knew exactly what he was doing – then the next question arises: why? The gloomy conclusion of some Vatican experts is that there was no inconsistency in the Pope’s choice of the words ‘inhuman and evil’ – quoted from the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus – to characterise Islam. Such a negative view, they say, is consistent with all his words and actions with regard to Islam.

“Their claims make for a tragic contrast with the decades devoted by John Paul II to the challenge of bringing Islam, Judaism and Christianity closer together after many centuries of hatred and bloodshed. Now all that hard work, rowing against the tide of history, seems to be at risk.”

Peter Popham in the Independent, 19 September 2006

UK Government trying to divide Muslim families

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Muslim News Tuesday expressed its exasperation at the latest call by Home Secretary John Reid for Muslim parents to spy on the behaviour of their sons as suspected terrorists.

“The Home Secretary is generating a new climate of fear against Muslims, by not only suggesting they are all potential terrorists, but appears to be also trying to divide Muslims families,” The Muslim News Editor Ahmed J Versi said.

“There are times when we must confront them to protect them from harm. So I appeal to you to look for changes in your teenage sons – odd hours, dropping out of school or college, strange new friends. And if you are worried, talk to them before their hatred grows,” he said.

Versi said that the Home Secretary suggested that it was becoming “worse than looking for reds under the bed” and that Reid could be next asking Muslims to empty the pockets of their children every night, check all their emails and log all webpages they visit.

“He is taking to extreme lengths the Government’s false premises about so-called extremism. What is he asking Muslim parents to spy on? To watch when they are ever late and then report suspicions to anti-terrorist police to intervene and have them interrogated for 28 days? It a pure farce,” he said.

“Even more dangerous is the impression the Home Secretary is giving to the rest of society that when parents can’t trust their children not to be terrorist, who can,” the editor warned.

Muslim News press release, 19 September 2006

Return to the dark ages

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The Pope’s response to the anger his statements sparked in the Muslim world was more offensive than the statements themselves. He apologised not for what he said, but for Muslims’ failure to grasp the intended meaning.

“That the Pope should have quoted from a Byzantine text on Islam is hardly surprising. The line of continuity between Emanuel Paleologos’s conception of Islam – quoted in the papal speech – and Benedict’s has never been severed. The massive body of terms, images and narratives on Islam which the church inherited from the middle ages survives intact. There, Islam is depicted as a false creed propagated through violence and promiscuity, with Muhammad as scoundrel, magician, heresiarch, and precursor of the anti-Christ…. The Reformation further developed this literary corpus and ensured its transmission into modern Europe. In a 17th-century Christian text, Muslims are described in the most chilling of terms. They are ‘poison, scabies, venomous snakes … the dogs in the church’.

“Even if this metaphorical language has retreated in favour of the profane language of reason and subjectivity, its structural foundations remain. Islam is still perceived as the other, the embodiment of evil. Only in this context can we make full sense of the Pope’s statements, and indeed of much of what is said today on the subject of Islam. We must defend freedom of expression, but freedom of expression should not be used as a disguise for the incitement of hatred of other races and religions.”

Soumaya Ghannoushi in the Guardian, 19 September 2006

US Muslims say anti-Islam bias on rise

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Fox TVAn American Muslim rights group says the number of civil rights complaints made by Muslims in the US has increased by 30 per cent.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) said in the report published on Monday that there were 1,972 cases of anti-Muslim violence, discrimination and harassment in 2005, the highest number of civil rights cases ever recorded in the Washington-based group’s annual report.

The Struggle for Equality study said that was a 29.6 per cent increase from 2004’s 1,522 cases. Nine states accounted for almost 79 per cent of all civil rights complaints made to the civil rights group. California and Illinois recorded the highest number of all complaints with 19 and 13 per cent respectively, and New Jersey had the lowest with 4 per cent.

Arsalan Iftikhar, CAIR’s legal director, blamed the media. “We believe the biggest factor contributing to anti-Muslim feeling and the resulting acts of bias is the growth in Islamophobic rhetoric that has flooded the internet and talk radio in the post-9/11 era,” he said. “By all accounts, racial profiling, harassment, and discrimination of Muslim and Arab Americans have increased since 9/11.”

Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas congresswomen, said in response to the study: “We cannot allow xenophobia, prejudice, and bigotry to prevail, and eviscerate the constitution we are bound to protect.”

Al-Jazeera, 19 September 2006

Another bigot backs the Pope

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jon_GauntJon Gaunt throws his considerable intellectual weight behind the Pope in today’s Sun:

“We are constantly being told to be tolerant and understanding of the Muslim faith. Well, do you think it would be possible just for a minute for Muslims to be tolerant of our humour, culture and literature? Why, as the former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey said, can’t the Muslim community take criticism? … There’s no sound of laughter around this religion and if there were it would be drowned out by the sound of feet treading on eggshells. Why?

“It started with the West’s capitulation to the religious nutters and fanatics of Iran who declared a fatwa on Salman Rushdie over his novel The Satanic Verses nearly 20 years ago…. The row over the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad was an absolute joke, and again the West gave in to the mad mullahs and extremists of the Muslim world who stirred up trouble, protests and intimidation by circulating the pictures around the globe.

“Not content with intimidating artists, politicians and newspaper editors, these people are now even trying to deny the Pope free speech. The Pope wasn’t preaching hatred. He was basically saying there is no place for violence in any religion. Who can take offence at that?

“The truth is, of course, that the Pope was showing he had more moral backbone than most leading politicians. He has previously demanded that Muslim clerics condemn ‘any connection between your faith and terrorism’.”

BNP applauds Mad Mel

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Mad Mel Phillips, the Daily Mail’s ranter-in-chief, says in a typically temperate post on her blog that the positive response to young Dave Fotherington-Cameron’s recent anti-neocon foreign policy speech from the ‘profoundly anti-Jew, anti-Israel, simply vile’ Muslim Public Affairs Committee is proof positive of the ‘moral and intellectual decline’ of the present-day Conservative party.

“Now if we read this right (and one can never be entirely sure with Mel), she’s saying that if an ‘extremist’ group expresses agreement with a part of your work, you’re lost. Heartening, then, to hear from the eminently mainstream British National Party that in general, ‘the opinions of the Daily Mail … and columnist Melanie Phillips are those that most closely match our own’.”

Jon Henley in the Guardian, 19 September 2006

For the BNP’s quoted endorsement of Mad Mel, see here.

‘Muslims must shop their extremist kids’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

John ReidIn today’s Sun John Reid suggests that Muslims in Britain are not doing enough to combat terrorism. Following some initial conciliatory remarks, he writes that “the Muslim community must choose between accepting the propaganda of the terrorists and taking on would-be terrorists at every opportunity”.

It boils down to a lecture to parents on controlling their children, though it is clear that the families of the 7/7 bombers didn’t have the slightest idea what they were up to. However, Reid offers some handy hints on how to spot the danger signs: “look for changes in your teenage sons – odd hours, dropping out of school or college, strange new friends.” By those criteria, there must be an awful lot of terrorist suspects out there.

And I thought this bit was priceless: “Some may think it is better to accommodate extremists in the hopes of influencing them for the better, but as I know from the bitter experience of dealing with militants in the Labour Party, you cannot compromise with fanatical beliefs.”

The Militant Tendency as al-Qaida, Ted Grant as Osama bin Laden! And a lecture on the impossibility of influencing extremists to take a more moderate course sounds all the more bizarre coming from Labour right-winger who is a former member of the Communist Party.

Continue reading →

Ministers preach against ‘evil’ new mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

POMPANO BEACH, Fla. — A coalition of ministers led by the Rev. O’Neal Dozier plan to distribute comic strip booklets about the Islam religion, which they believe “teaches evil and hatred,” in opposition to a zoning change that allows the Islamic Center of South Florida to begin construction on a new mosque in a predominantly black community.

The city council voted 3-2 in June to change the zoning of the proposed site from residential to commercial, allowing the Islamic Center to erect a larger mosque on undeveloped land on Northwest 16th Avenue.

Dozier, who is black, said he hopes the booklets he and his religious peers plan to distribute Saturday morning will “educate the public concerning the Islamic fascism.” Although the booklets are comic strips, the message they deliver is serious.

Altaf Ali, executive director of the Council of American Islamic Relations, called Dozier a “bigot” and “prejudiced.” “I think his information and knowledge of Islam is very limited,” Ali said.

Despite the ongoing protests, Islamic Center leaders said they hope to break ground on the new mosque within a year.

Click10.com, 19 September 2006

Muslims must submit to dominant Christian culture

Posted on by Bob Pitt

J. Peter Mulhern endorses Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus’s observation that “you will find things only evil and inhuman” in Islam, and draws the appropriate lessons:

“Almost nobody pauses to consider that Manuel might have something to teach us. Instead our conversation centers on whether the Pope is to blame for riling Muslims up and what he (and we) can do to mollify them.

“Our preoccupation with such trivial matters says something important about the chattering class – it is incapable of seeing our problem with Islam. Even the shock of September 11 failed to open many eyes, and the shock wore off long ago. Very few people who comment on public affairs for a living have the courage to face a long, bloody world war. Instead they pretend that our problem with Islam is vastly more manageable than it is.

“They pretend that terrorism is the work of a few demented individuals who have Hijacked a Great Religion for their own perverted purposes. That way they don’t have to deal with the grim reality that tens if not hundreds of millions of people want us all dead. Nor do they have to face the horrible truth that this urge to destroy us is as much a part of Islam as facing Mecca to pray….

“We are the heirs of a culture built on Christian foundations and we are not Muslim. Anything we do to placate our enemies will only make them bolder and more dangerous. Winning our war means nothing less than separating the Muslim world from one of the central tenets of its faith. We have to teach a proud culture a bitter lesson. We have to convince it that Islam can only survive in the modern world by adapting to the reality that the infidel calls the shots. Muslims have to accept that our culture is dominant over theirs.”

American Thinker, 19 September 2006

Political error or calculated move?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The pope’s speech is an embarrassment. He is mistaken on the factual level when he says the Koranic injunction against forced conversions appears in an early sura, when every beginning scholar of Islam knows it appears in a late one, whose prescriptive force is greater. He also erred by selecting, of all Christian comments made during Islam’s 1,500-year history, the particularly harsh and insulting statements of a 14th-century Byzantine emperor. No Muslim (or Jew) could forget that the Byzantines had taken part in the Crusades 200 years earlier. The very term ‘holy war’ was coined by Pope Urban II, who sent his Christian soldiers off to massacre Muslims and Jews simply for refusing to convert to Christianity….

“Perhaps he was unaware of the consequences his remarks would bring. But maybe this was a calculated move. A few months ago, when the issue of Turkey’s accession to the European Union was mentioned, Pope Benedict opposed it in the name of preserving Europe’s Christian character. A few months ago he downgraded the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and merged it with the Council for Culture. Now the talk is of reciprocity: Europe cannot provide religious freedom to Muslims when the Muslim world does not give Christians religious freedom.”

Meron Rapoport in Ha’aretz, 18 September 2006

Tariq Ali poses the same question and concludes: “I think he knew what he was saying and why.”

Counterpunch, 16 September 2006