Monthly Archives: October 2007

US protesters shout down Nick Griffin

Posted on by Bob Pitt

BNP dustbinEAST LANSING – When British Nationalist Nick Griffin took the podium at a Friday night Michigan State University event, he tried to explain how Islam is a threat to Western civilization.

Protesters wouldn’t have it. Hurling obscenities and using chants to interrupt his address, rambunctious student organizations forced Griffin to abandon his speech and allow an informal question and answer session.

“We have all come from different backgrounds,” said Authra Khreis, 17, a pre-med student and a protester. “We should accept one another. I don’t think he should be allowed to speak. You can use free speech until you hurt another person.”

Griffin was invited to campus by a conservative student organization called Young Americans for Freedom, or YAF. Kyle Bristow, chairman of YAF, said his organization invited Griffin to promote intellectual debate.

Bristow said he doesn’t believe in many of the ideas Griffin has preached, particularly his alleged denial of the Holocaust, but does agree that the Islamic faith is a threat to America.

“I’ll stop saying their religion is terrible when they stop flying planes into buildings,” he said. “Islam is horrible. The extreme in Christianity is ‘love thy neighbor,’ with Islam it is violence.”

One student who engaged in a particularly long debate with Griffin was Junaid Mattu, a finance junior from India. “I am a supporter of free speech, but at the same time there has to be a benchmark,” he said. “Why does MSU time and time again show its insensitivity to minorities by inviting racists?”

Lansing State Journal, 27 October 2007

See also Indigo Jo Blogs, 27 October 2007 and CAIR press release, 26 October 2007

Melanie Phillips advocates war with Iran

Posted on by Eddie Truman

“The consequences for the Jews of a strike on Iran are therefore fearsome. But the alternative, a nuclear Iran, is worse – not just for Israel but for the world, which from that time forth would be held hostage to nuclear blackmail by an Iran hell-bent on regional and global Islamic domination. This is not a choice between a good outcome and a bad outcome. This is a choice between a terrible outcome and a cataclysmic one. It is the choice between a rock and a very hard place; and those who now advise that there is no alternative but war with Iran do so with the heaviest of hearts.”

Spectator, 28th October 2007

Increased mosque attendance is evidence of terrorist associations say police

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A hard core of 20 Islamic extremists with links to foreign terror groups is operating north of the Border and poses a “significant” risk to public safety, Scotland on Sunday can reveal. Senior intelligence insiders have revealed the suspects – many of them born and brought up in Scotland – pose a similar threat to that of Mohammed Atif Siddique, the Scottish Asian who was last week given an eight-year prison sentence for terrorist offences.

Scotland on Sunday can also reveal that concern at the terror threat is now so great that up to 1,000 Scottish Asians will be placed under surveillance in coming months because they associate with known radicals. Special Branch, backed by MI5 officers, will carry out checks on the individuals looking for evidence of radicalisation such as changes in clothing and increased mosque attendance.

Scotland on Sunday, 28 October 2007

Racial and religious attacks up 12 per cent

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Racially and religiously motivated attacks have risen 12% in the past year, according to government figures to be released this week.

The Ministry of Justice statistics show there were 41,000 racially or religiously aggravated offences in 2005-06, the latest year for which figures are available. Experts are likely to link the increase to fears related to terrorism and immigration.

Following the attack on Glasgow airport in June, racist incidents across Scotland have soared, with sharp rises in violent attacks, abuse and harassment in the four weeks after the car bombing. The worst cases included attempts to blow up an Asian shop and a mosque.

The statistics showed the proportion of Asians killed by “sharp instruments” had risen from 4.5% to 8.5%. There was a surge around the time of 9/11, with such killings doubling to 30 between April 2001 and March 2002.

The rise in Islamophobia in Britain after 9/11 was charted in a report by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, which found increases in assault, verbal abuse, damage to property and Muslim women being spat at.

Times, 28 October 2007

15 lonely fascists protest in central London

Posted on by Bob Pitt

SIOE London demoThat’s how Indymedia reported the Stop the Islamisation of Europe (SIOE) “Stop Kuffarphobia” demonstration in London yesterday. So few people turned up for the protest march from Whitehall Place to Temple tube station that the police refused to allow them to march along the road and insisted that they walk on the pavement.

Strictly speaking, SIOE England is more accurately described as a hard-right anti-Muslim racist – rather than fascist – organisation. And our information is that fully 30 SIOE supporters attended the closing rally at Temple Place to hear SIOE head Stephen Gash (of the tiny English Democrats party) warn against the Islamist plot to impose sharia law on Europe.

Admittedly, the attendance was slightly down on the thousand demonstrators Gash had told the police he was expecting.

It would be easy to mock Gash as a sad little man afflicted by organisational incompetence and delusions of grandeur – and we have no hesitation in doing so. But the humiliating failure of the “Stop Kuffarphobia” demo should not blind us to the fact that, as Soumaya Ghannoushi recently pointed out at Comment is Free, SIOE’s message of anti-Muslim hatred and paranoia has a much wider resonance.

Canada: Tory bill would ban voting while wearing veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A bill requiring visual identification when voting in federal elections has come to Parliament, largely due to controversy in Quebec over veiled women voting. The controversy over veiled voters arose when a ruling from Elections Canada allowed veiled women to cast ballots in three recent Quebec by-elections.

The Conservatives decided legislation was necessary after Marc Mayrand, Canada’s chief electoral officer, rebuffed efforts by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to get him to adjust voting rules to force women to bare their faces at polls. “I think it is necessary to maintaining public confidence in … the electoral process,” Conservative House Leader Peter Van Loan told the Toronto Star yesterday.

Mayrand noted the revised federal electoral law that Parliament passed in June did not compel women with veils to remove them as part of voter identification, explaining that if MPs want that to be a rule, they should pass a new law.

The Conservative government’s obsession with women having to lift their veils is seen by some as much ado about nothing. “This so-called veil problem is not even a problem that’s been raised with the Muslim community,” NDP Leader Jack Layton said.

Toronto Star, 27 October 2007

Let people wear cross or veil, says Archbishop

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Archbishop of Canterbury today warns politicians not to interfere with a Muslim woman’s right to wear the veil in public and cautions against a march towards secularism in British society.

In a dramatic intervention Dr Rowan Williams, who is backed by other senior church leaders, said that the Government must not become a “licensing authority” that decides which religious symbols are acceptable.

Writing in The Times he adds that any ban on the veil would be “politically dangerous”. His comments reflect concern within the Church that some members of the Government want to see Britain follow the same route as France, where secularism is close to being a national religion.

“The ideal of a society where no visible public signs of religion would be seen – no crosses round necks, no sidelocks, turbans or veils – is a politically dangerous one,” he writes. “It assumes that what comes first in society is the central political ‘licensing authority’, which has all the resource it needs to create a workable public morality.”

But secularists said that the Archbishop was misguided. Terry Sanderson, of the National Secular Society, said: “The way we are going in this country with the rise of Islam, the churches should look at secularism as their best friend.”

Times, 27 October 2006

Sanderson’s comment is of course entirely in line with the Islamophobic approach of the NSS, who happily formed an alliance with the evangelical Christian right in a campaign against the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, the primary purpose of which was to defend Muslims against incitement to hatred.

In January 2004, in the NSS Newsline, Sanderson wrote: “Secularism is under sustained threat from a resurgent Islam – and not just in France. In this country, too, it is becoming difficult to even discuss minority religions in critical terms without landing in trouble. We need to resist.”

Religious gesture of understanding turns into usual debate on hate

Posted on by Bob Pitt

An ethnic advisory commission set up by the Governor of Oklahoma printed copies of the Quran, the Islamic “bible”, had them embossed with the State Seal and offered to distribute them to the 149 members of that state’s legislature. What was to be a gesture of understanding has turned into a battle of hateful words.

Oklahoma legislator Rex Duncan, a Republican from Sand Springs, rejected the offering and returned his copy of the Quran. Had it just been that, maybe we would not have noticed. But then like many other confused and uneducated Americans, Duncan added a little hate-politicking to the mix.

Duncan sent a nasty letter to his legislative colleagues and about two dozen said they would return the Islamic holy books, too, asserting that Islam is an evil religion that encourages its followers to kill innocent people.

“Most Oklahomans do not endorse the idea of killing innocent women and children in the name of ideology,” Duncan asserted, adding in an interview with the Associated Press that he has “researched the Quran”, on the Internet, of course, and believes it supports killing. “That’s exactly what it says,” Duncan insisted.

Notorious for spewing anti-Muslim and anti-Arab hatred, Duncan probably is mindful of the fact that Americans are not knowledgeable about Islam, and that makes for a great opportunity to exploit them for political purposes.

Muslims and Arabs in America are under siege by a wave of ignorance-driven hatred. They should know that even the simplest, kindest gesture will be exploited by some to create angry debate rather than understanding.

The American Muslim, 27 October 2007

See  also “Lawmaker objects to getting copy of Quran”, Associated Press, 23 October 2007

And “Okla. lawmakers return Qurans”, Associated Press, 24 October 2007

Are US Muslims not real Americans?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sheila Musaji replies to an article in the St Louis Dispatch by one Z. Dwight Billingsly: “Mr. Billingsly is upset that a Chicago school district has allowed Muslim students to have crescent moons and stars to mark Ramadan included in school decorations along with decorations for other holidays like Christmas that already are included in the schools.”

She quotes Billingsly as writing: “In other words, mainstream Americans had agreed to subordinate their cultural traditions and accept another culture’s traditions as equivalent to their own. This is a prescription for our society’s destruction, a dangerous appeasement in the cultural wars. The school board should have told the Muslim parent that America’s cultural norm is to celebrate and value Christmas, not Ramadan. The board should have told her that if she wanted to celebrate Ramadan in her home or at her mosque, she was welcome to do so, but that at public schools, only Christmas and other traditional American cultural celebrations would take place.”

As Sheila Musaji points out, what Billingsly is asserting is that “American Muslims must accept that they are not equivalent to real Americans“.

Austria: provincial parliament demands ban on mosque construction

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The provincial parliament in the southern Austrian province Carinthia called on its provincial government to prepare legislation banning the construction of mosques or minarets. The province’s governor, the populist former leader of the rightist Freedom Party, Joerg Haider, had repeatedly called for anti-Muslim measures along those lines.

The proposal was adopted with the votes of the conservative People’s Party, Freedom Party, and the support of the Alliance for Austria’s Future, an equally rightist breakaway party from the Freedom Party, founded by Haider. Alliance floor leader Kurt Scheuch said his party wanted to prevent the creeping Islamization by radical forces. “We prefer churchbells to the muezzin’s chants,” he said.

Carinthia’s Social Democrats and Greens, who had voted against the measure, slammed the proposal as a move to “prevent integration (and) hinder religious freedom” and called it an “open attack on democracy and the rule of law.” The Social Democrats pointed out that currently there were no plans for for building mosques in the province, unmasking the proposal as an attempt to “attract the right-wing vote,” Social Democrat floor leader Peter Kaiser said.

Earth Times, 25 October 2007