Yearly Archives: 2006

Pope protests ‘show violence’ in Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Cardinal George PellSydney’s Catholic Archbishop has hit out at Muslims protesting over comments by the Pope, saying their reaction shows the link in Islam between religion and violence. Cardinal George Pell has also labelled the response of some Australian Muslim leaders to the issue as “unhelpful”.

The Pope has since said he is “deeply sorry” for the outrage sparked by his remarks and stressed they do not reflect his personal opinion. But Cardinal Pell today backed Pope Benedict, saying the violent reaction to his comments on Islam and violence illustrated his fears.

“The violent reactions in many parts of the Islamic world justified one of Pope Benedict’s main fears,” Cardinal Pell said in a statement. “They showed the link for many Islamists between religion and violence, their refusal to respond to criticism with rational arguments, but only with demonstrations, threats and actual violence. Our major priority must be to maintain peace and harmony within the Australian community, but no lasting achievements can be grounded in fantasies and evasions.”

He said the responses of Australia’s mufti, Sheik Taj Aldin Alhilali, and of Dr Ameer Ali, of the prime minister’s Muslim reference group, were “unfortunately typical and unhelpful”. “It is always someone else’s fault and issues touching on the nature of Islam are ignored.”

AAP, 19 September 2006

Pell himself, or course, is rather more hardline on this question than his boss. He is the author of an article that depicted Islam as an inherently violent faith, drawing on rabidly Islamophobic writers such as Daniel Pipes, Andrew Bostom and William Dalrymple.

Muslim world divided over Pope’s apology

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pope Benedict’s admission that he was “deeply sorry” for offending the sensitivities of Muslims does not necessarily mean that the worst crisis of his papacy is over yet. Speaking in Rome yesterday, the Pope said that the views of the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus that he quoted last week – describing Islam as “evil and inhuman” – were not his own.

In Britain, some senior Muslims welcomed the Pope’s apologies but suggested that he would have to make a further apology to stop the row escalating.

Massoud Shadjareh, of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, said: “He needs to convince that this is a genuine apology because many people are aware of the sort of things he has been saying for a long time. Threats are not the way forward but some of the things he has said have been music to the ears of racists.”

Guardian, 18 September 2006

Britain ‘resurrects culture of racism’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Britain ‘resurrects culture of racism’

Morning Star, 18 September 2006

Race relations campaigners warned at the weekend that the British and US governments have “resurrected a culture of primitive racism” after the terror attacks in both countries.

The way the terrorist threat has been dealt with has produced overarching racism in which ethnic minorities are perceived as terrorists or illegal immigrants, said Institute of Race Relations (IRR) director Dr A. Sivanandan. He told Saturday’s conference at Conway Hall in central London that the multicultural Britain created after the second world war had been “destroyed”.

“The war on asylum and the war on terror – one the unarmed invasion, the other the armed enemy within – has produced the idea of a nation under siege, and, on the ground, a racism that cannot tell a settler from an immigrant, an immigrant from an asylum-seeker, an asylum-seeker from a Muslim, a Muslim from a terrorist”, said Dr Sivanandan.

But he insisted that the damage done to the whole fabric of society and democracy was more insidious, with constraints on the freedom of speech, plus the undermining of laws and the independence of the judiciary.

He went on: “It is that adamantine resolve to deny the connection between cause and effect that has also prevented the government from seeing that in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the systematic dismemberment of Palestine, it is they and their American bosses who have declared jihad on Muslims the world over and given sustenance to terrorism.

“And having refused to acknowledge it, they have no choice but to stir up more and more fear in order to pass more and more draconian legislation that further erodes our liberties.”

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How to deal with Muslims – Martin Amis offers some advice

Posted on by Bob Pitt

martin amisGinny Dougary has posted the text of her Times magazine interview with Martin Amis, who opines:

“… the only thing the Islamists like about modernity is modern weapons. And they’re going to get better and better at that. They’re also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered….

“There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs – well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.”

Ginny Dougary website, 17 September 2006

Qaradawi urges ‘peaceful’ anger day

Posted on by Bob Pitt

YusufalQaradawiProminent Muslim scholar Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi has called on Muslims worldwide to hold a day of “peaceful” anger next Friday to protest the offensive remarks made by Pope Benedict VXI, saying that the pontiff’s expression of sorrow for the crisis still fell far short of an apology.

Qaradawi said the pope’s remarks came to entrench offensive statements made by US President George W. Bush last month that America was at war with “Islamist fascists.” The pope’s remarks “gave an international cover for what Bush is doing,” Qaradawi insisted.

Islam Online, 18 September 2006

Over at Harry’s Place, the eponymous Harry offers his take on Qaradawi’s call for the Pope to withdraw the offensive quotation: “This attempt to silence reflects the totalitarian nature of Islamism”!

Qaradawi is in fact particularly well known for his pluralistic interpretation of Islam. To quote Karen Armstrong:

“He believes in moderation, and is convinced that the bigotry that has recently appeared in the Muslim world will impoverish people by depriving them of the insights and visions of other human beings. The Prophet Muhammad said that he had come to bring a ‘Middle Way’ of religious life that shunned extremes, and Qaradawi thinks the current extremism in some quarters of the Islamic world is alien to the Muslim spirit and will not last…. The West, he insists, must learn to recognize the Muslims’ right to live their religion and, if they choose, to incorporate the Islamic ideal in their polity. They have to appreciate that there is more than one way of life. Variety benefits the whole world. God gave human beings the right and ability to choose, and some may opt for a religious way of life – including an Islamic state – while others prefer the secular ideal.” (Islam: A Short History, pp.157-8)

Some totalitarian!

Of course, Harry in fact knows sweet f.a. about Qaradawi – he just spins fantasies out of his own head based on general presuppositions about Islamism. Odd, you might think, that a self-styled defender of Enlightenment values so readily substitutes ignorant dogmatism for empirical analysis.

‘The Pope must die, says Muslim’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Typically, the Mail prefaces its coverage of the controversy over the Pope’s remarks with a quote from the ludicrous Anjem Choudary, leading its readership to believe that this fruitcake with a few dozen deluded followers represents some significant current of opinion within Britain’s Muslim communities.

Daily Mail, 18 September 2006

You do sometimes wonder whether the right-wing press has Choudary on a retainer.

Qur’an incites violence, Times columnist claims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Rees Mogg“Journalists should not criticise Pope Benedict XVI for his lecture at Regensburg. He has done only what every sub-editor on the Daily Mail does every day. Confronted with a long and closely written text, he inserted a lively quote to draw attention to the argument. We all do it. Sometimes the quote causes trouble, but more often it opens up an argument that is needed.

“The question is not whether the quotation from the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus is offensive: it is. The question is whether the emperor is justified in what he said. His main thrust was at least partly justified. There is a real problem about the teaching of the Koran on violence against the infidel. That existed in the 14th century, and was demonstrated on 9/11, 2001.”

William Rees-Mogg in the Times, 18 September 2006

US right-winger backs Pope against Left/Islamofascist Nietzschean alliance

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Benedict’s speech is a work of enlightened genius. He has clearly laid out the differences between Christian culture and Islamic culture and the basis of the clash of civilizations we now experience as the War on Terror. His analysis also explains the underlying cause of the alliance between the western Left and the Islamofascist Right…. The Islamist reaction proves Manuel II’s 600-year-old point. The reaction is not one of anger but a calculated attempt to force the Pope to parrot the PC line on Islam….Islamists are not responding to any ‘offense’ to their non-existent morality. They are asserting the only ‘morality’ they have – the will to power. ‘Will to Power’ is a key element of Nietzsche’s philosophy – hence the root of the term, Islamofascist. Moreover the Western ‘Left’ is today guided far more by Nietzsche existentialist thought than by Marxist thought – hence the alliance between the Western ‘Left’ and the Islamofascist ‘Right’.”

Andrew Walden at Front Page Magazine, 18 September 2006

Why do ‘we’ keep having to apologise to Muslims, Ruth Gledhill asks

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“… I do have some sympathy for the Pope’s predicament. It is indeed a tragic irony, as many have noted, that a speech intended to further interfaith dialogue and understanding has had precisely the opposite effect, actually provoking outbreaks of extremism of the very kind he was warning against. And the general population is with the Pope. In a Sky poll of viewers, nearly everyone, more than 98 per cent, said he should not apologise.

“After all, we in the West have truly suffered at the hands of the Salafi Jihadists, as the Archbishop of York suggests we call them. We’ve had 9/11, 7/7 and narrowly escaped another. There is Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, and I am among those who firmly resist placing responsibility for the ills committed in these wars solely at the feet of the West. It does seem bizarre that we do keep having to apologise to Muslims.

“‘Turn the other cheek’ says the Christian religion of the West and we do seem to keep doing just that. In spite of the fact that those responsible for the terrorist atrocities would themselves confess to being of the Islamic faith, and of committing their crimes in the name of Islam, even to write about Islam and terrorism in the same sentence is fast becoming surefire way to end up on Islamophobia Watch at the very least.”

Ruth Gledhill’s weblog, 16 September 2006

Posted in UK

Pope Benedict and holy war

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Daniel Johnson“Yesterday, the pope insisted that he did not agree with Manuel. But it is clear that he sympathized with this monarch of a doomed Christian civilization enough to use him as a mouthpiece through which he could pose his own implicit questions to Islam. Does the Muslim understanding of Allah allow rational debate about the morality of violence, given that the doctrine of jihad is a central pillar of Islam? If Allah is above reason, might violent jihad, including terrorism, be not merely justifiable but obligatory, as many Muslim scholars argue?

“By now, the answer to these questions is clear: churches firebombed in the West Bank and Gaza, a nun murdered in Somalia. Such persecution is, alas, routine in many Muslim lands, and Catholics are not the only victims. But it is clear that Muslim leaders – even those of ‘pro-Western’ countries such as Turkey or Pakistan – are not yet ready for the ‘frank’ dialogue proposed by the pope. By pointing out that violence is a part of medieval Islam, not a ‘distortion’, as Western liberals like to think, Benedict has touched a raw nerve.

“No, this pope is not naïve. It is our liberal, theologically illiterate politicians who are naïve. We are already at war – a holy war, which we may lose.”

Daniel Johnson in the New York Sun, 18 September 2006