Monthly Archives: October 2007

Danish-Muslim leader lampoons far-right over latest prophet cartoon

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Asmaa Abdol-HamidA far-right Danish political party controversially depicted the prophet Muhammad on election material yesterday. Now a high-profile Danish-Muslim politician has hit back with a poster lampooning the move.

The ad by the Danish People’s Party, the country’s third largest political force, showed a hand-drawn picture of the Islamic prophet under the slogan “Freedom of expression is Danish, censorship is not”. The ad was condemned as a “provocation” by at least one Danish-Muslim group, as Islam forbids representation of its most important prophet.

Now Asmaa Abdol-Hamid, a Danish-Muslim politician who could become the first MP to wear the hijab in the Danish parliament if elected in next month’s poll, has hit back with a poster showing a hand-drawn picture of the DPP leader, Pia Kjaersgaard, under the slogan “Freedom of expression is Danish, stupidity is not”.

Guardian, 26 October 2007

First Lady submits to the Islamic hordes

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“We are the king of the world. We are the best and the brightest. We are America goddammit. WTF are we bowing to Islam for? This ain’t PR no matter what Karen Hughes and Condirasha say. This is not not going to make the Islamic world hold hands and sing campfire tunes. Uh uh. This is submission and the worst message to send to Muslims.”

Pamela Geller offers a reasoned response to a photo of Laura Bush wearing a headscarf during her visit to Saudi Arabia.

Atlas Shrugs, 25 October 2007

See also the Weekly Standard, 25 October 2007

Johann Hari and his friends

Posted on by Bob Pitt

johann hari 2Johann Hari has found a new hero: “Ehsan Jami is an intelligent, softly-spoken 22-year-old council member for the Dutch Labour Party. He believes there should be no compromise, ever, on the rights of women and gay people and novelists and cartoonists. He became sick of hearing self-appointed Islamist organisations claiming to speak for him when they called for the banning of books and the ‘right’ to abuse women. So he set up the Dutch Council of Ex-Muslims. Their manifesto called for secularism – and an end to the polite toleration of Islamist intolerance. As he put it: ‘We want people to be free to choose who they want to be and what they want to believe in’.”

Independent, 25 October 2007

That would be this Ehsan Jami, would it – the ally of Dutch far-right racist Geert Wilders?

In the same article Hari happily refers to “my friend Maryam Namazie” – the Iranian sectarian nutter who discredited this year’s International Day Against Homophobia in London by launching into a paranoid rant accusing the Muslim Council of Britain of wanting to execute gay men in Trafalgar Square.

But the main subject of Hari’s piece is Namazie’s fellow member of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran, Mina Ahadi, who has just been awarded the title of Secularist of the Year by the National Secular Society. Ahadi received widespread publicity when she launched her so-called Council of Ex-Muslims in Germany, including an interview in Der Spiegel in which she stated “I know Islam and for me it means death and pain” and defended the display of racist anti-Muslim caricatures at a German carnival.

How long, you wonder, before Namazie and Ahadi join their chum Ehsan Jami in forming an open alliance with the extreme Right? If they do, they’ll evidently be able to count on the support of Johann Hari.

Update:  For Johann’s response, see here

The Crusader: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“It makes me cringe when I hear references to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. An ex-Muslim, a former Dutch parliamentarian, and a feminist, Hirsi Ali is often trotted out as some sort of spokeswoman for moderate Islam. A few years back, she wrote a book (‘Infidel’) and produced a movie ‘Submission’) that condemn harsh treatment associated with Islam; since then, she’s been a celebrity. As blogger Shadi Hamid notes, ‘people seem intent on treating her as some kind of anointed spokeswoman for oppressed Muslim women, a reformer from within the faith or, worse, a kind of pseudo-Muslim Martin Luther’.

“But Hirsi Ali is no Martin Luther. She’s condescending, elitist, and inspires no respect amongst Muslims. Hamid points out that he has ‘yet to meet even one Muslim on the planet, secular or conservative, liberal or illiberal, who actually thinks that Hirsi Ali is helping the cause of internal Muslim reform’.”

Jeb Koogler at The Moderate Voice, 24 October 2007

‘Islamisation of Europe’ suffers setback in Netherlands

Posted on by Bob Pitt

There are significantly fewer Muslims in the Netherlands than previously believed, the country’s Central Bureau for Statistics said Wednesday, after a review of its census techniques. The CBS said it was cutting estimates to 850,000, or 5.2 percent of the country’s 16.3 million population, from 1 million, or 6.1 percent.

Associated Press, 24 October 2007

A bit of a problem, you’d have thought, for fantasists like Geert Wilders, Mark Steyn, Douglas Murray and David Icke who have been predicting an Islamic takeover of the Netherlands.

‘Every street in Britain could look like this in 50 years time’, warns Mail

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Every street could look like thisIn an article headed “Britain will be scarcely recognisable in 50 years if the immigration deluge continues”, Stephen Glover writes:

“The only question that interests me is whether a country that is recognisably British will survive in 50 or 100 years. British culture, whatever it represents, is evidently not worth preserving in the view of some on the Left.

“It is a curious paradox that some of its adherents believe that foreign cultures are worth safeguarding, but … when our own indigenous culture is threatened, we are told that it is parochial and small-minded to think about trying to defend it….

“Preserving one’s own culture is at least as important as preserving one’s infrastructure. Actually, it is even more important, because new hospitals, houses and roads can, with a struggle, be built – but culture, once it has been undermined, cannot be recovered.”

Daily Mail, 25 October 2007

And note the photograph chosen to illustrate Glover’s piece (reproduced above). It prominently features a Muslim woman wearing the niqab and is captioned: “Every street in Britain could look like this in 50 years time.”

Italy: eighth mosque attacked in Lombardy

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A mosque in a small town outside Milan has been the target of a violent attack – the eighth on mosques in the region of Lombardy surrounding the city.

Italian media reports said the Alif Baa Islamic Centre, in the northern Italian city of Abbiategrasso, 20 kilometres west of Milan, was subjected to fresh violence on Wednesday. Witnesses said a masked man was seen throwing a Molotov cocktail inside the courtyard of the mosque from his motorcycle in the late afternoon. No major damage or injuries were reported in the attack.

This is the eighth assault against Islamic centres in the region of Lombardy in recent months. The Alif Baa Islamic Centre reported other attacks on 25 July and 10 August this year. Another mosque in the nearby city of Segrate was attacked on 5 August and the car of the Imam, Hamid Zariate, was destroyed.

AKI, 25 October 2007

Daniel Pipes backs Islamo-Fascist terror group

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Danny Postel analyses the politics of the Iranian organisation the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) – “an Islamist-Stalinist cult that was on Saddam’s payroll and the State Department considers a terrorist organization” – and points out that it has some unlikely allies:

“Here you have virtually everything the Right claims to oppose all rolled into one: Islamism, Marxism, terrorism, and Saddam. Naturally, then, neoconservatives would utterly deplore the MEK and everything it stands for, right? The MEK would in fact make an ideal target for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week and Terrorism Awareness efforts, no?

“Well, no. At least one of the carnival’s acts, it turns out, is rather fond of the Islamo-Stalinist-terrorist cult group, and has repeatedly argued for the removal of the MEK from the State Department’s list of terrorist groups and indeed urged the U.S. government to embrace it. Daniel Pipes, who will be speaking at Tufts on October 24th as part of the Horowitz high jinks, has made the MEK a recurring theme in his writings going back several years.”

AlterNet, 23 October 2007

Clearly, “Islamo-Fascist terror groups” are OK with Pipes so long as their Islamo-Fascist terrorist activities are aimed at the government of Iran.

Return of the Muslim other

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Soumaya Ghannoushi2“In a few days time a cluster of far-right groups under the name the Stop the Islamisation of Europe alliance will hold rallies in London, Copenhagen and Marseilles to demand an end to what they call ‘the overt and covert expansion of Islam in Europe’. Although the events are likely to attract no more than a handful of protesters, their message resonates widely. On Saturday the rightwing People’s party, notorious for its virulent hostility to ethnic minorities and Muslims, emerged as the victor in the Swiss elections, taking 29% of the vote, the best electoral performance by a party in the country’s elections since 1919.

“The far right is on the ascendancy in many parts of Europe. Beyond its explicit party political expressions, this assumes a more worrying form. What had been traditionally confined to the margins of dominant political discourse is progressively penetrating its mainstream, with parties of the centre absorbing much of the far right’s populist rhetoric. This underlies the complaint by Jean-Marie le Pen, leader of the racist National Front, that Nicolas Sarkozy had ‘stolen his clothes’. Across the Channel, the Tory candidate for the London mayoralty, Boris Johnson, believes that ‘to any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia – fear of Islam – seems a natural reaction’….

“Beyond all the noise about Europe’s ‘Muslim problem’ lurks a growing unease about the changing texture of European society. Gone are the days of pure white, Christian Europe. Now Europe is multi-ethnic, multireligious and multicultural, a fact which many find hard to swallow. Muslims are part of this evolving reality, but the idea that the continent is being Islamised is a figment of the right’s imagination.”

Soumaya Ghannoushi in the Guardian, 24 October 2007