Monthly Archives: October 2007

Mohammed Atif Siddique sentenced to 8 years in prison

Posted on by Eddie Truman

When we wrote about Mohammed Atif Siddique’s conviction for terrorist related offences in September we commented that without the amended Terrorism Act of 2000 it was unlikely that the Crown would have been able to make a breach of the peace charge stick.

Today Siddique was sentenced to 8 years in prison on 3 terrorism charges, all of which are related to documents available on the internet.

During the trial there was no evidence produced that Mohammed Siddique was involved in planning any violence; a spokesman for Central Scotland Police said there was “no evidence that Siddique was involved in an actual terrorist plot”

In the days after he was found guilty the Scottish press carried ever more sensational claims about what Siddique was going to do if he had not been arrested and repeatedly referred to him as an “al-Qaeda-linked terrorist”.

The Scotsman suggested he “may” have been planning an attack in Canada while the right wing tabloids were absolutely sure he was going to behead the Canadian Prime Minister.

BNP candidate Robert Cottage was recently found guilty of possessing bomb making chemicals and was sentenced to 2 and a half years.

Mohammed Atif Siddique has been sentenced to 8 years in jail for being in possession of documents that one of the expert witnesses, Evan Kohlmann, has available on his website.

The conviction of Mohammed Siddique under the amended Terrorism Act and his 8-year prison sentence should concern every individual in the UK who questions the foreign policy of the British government; this is a piece of legislation that can be used to send people to prison without any evidence that they have actually done anything wrong.

‘Too many mosques’ in UK, says self-styled ‘communist’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Azar Majedi of the Worker Communist Party of Iran is interviewed by the French secularist magaizine Riposte Laïque (translation in Scoop). In response to the question “Que penses-tu du projet de Grande Mosquée du maire de Londres, Ken Livingstone?” Majedi replies: “Je m’y oppose complètement. On n’a pas besoin d’autres mosquées. Il y en a déjà trop.”

Too many mosques? Now where have we heard that before? Ah yes, it was here.

Smith creates ‘climate of fear’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Smith Creates Climate of FearSmith creates ‘climate of fear’

By James Tweedie

Morning Star, 23 October 2007

HOME Secretary Jacqui Smith appeared before the Commons home affairs committee on Monday for questioning on government plans to extend detention without trial for terror suspects.

The government is considering increasing the limit the current 28-day limit to 56 days – or even to an indefinite period with judicial oversight.

It is also examining the use of phone tap and other “intercept” evidence, imposing “enhanced” sentences for non-terrorist offences committed for a terrorist purpose and broadening the definition of terrorism to include acts carried out for racial and ethnic as well as political aims.

Ms Smith told MPs that the “time is right” for extending the maximum period beyond 28 days. But she admitted that there had not yet been a case where longer than the current four-week limit has been required.

Committee chairman Keith Vaz warned that extra detention power could disproportionately affect Muslims. “The worry about this is that we then stigmatise whole communities and, in my view, that is the road to ruin,” he said.

Human rights campaign Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti also warned that Britain was heading for a state of “permament emergency”.

“The Home Secretary’s revelation that the case has not been made for extending pre-charge detention will be met with considerable surprise,” she said. “There has been so much posturing by so-called experts that few people have remembered to ask for the hard evidence before any change is made.”

Fellow campaigners Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a briefing paper on counter-terrorism measures yesterday, entitled UK: Counter the Threat or Counterproductive? HRW associate Europe and Central Asia director Benjamin Ward said: “Locking up suspects without charge for months at a time is wrong in principle and wrong in practice. It violates the basic right to liberty and risks alienating British Muslims.”

The HRW paper pointed out that less than half of those detained under counter-terrorism powers have been convicted. It says:

“Adopting powers that allow terrorism suspects – many if not most of whom would doubtless be British Muslims – to be detained without charge for months at a time would be deeply damaging to the government’s efforts to win ‘hearts and minds.’ Judicially supervised pre-charge detention without time limits would amount to the reintroduction of internment, a policy widely acknowledged to have alienated communities in Northern Ireland.”

Mr Ward noted that Counter-terrorism Minister Tony McNulty has acknowledged that “the rules of the game haven’t changed” on civil liberties. “The government is finally saying the right things about human rights and security, but the proof will be in the policy,” he said. “If the government is serious about playing by the rules, it should shelve extended pre-charge detention.”

Campaign Against Criminalising Communities spokesman Les Levidow added: “The analogy with Northern Ireland is entirely correct. That is why we have always called detention without trial internment. It’s punishment without trial. The proposals to extend pre-trial detention and introduce post-charge questioning by police are designed for political harrassment.”

“These powers have been disproportionately targeted against Muslims. Clearly, the political aim is to intimidate these communities,” Mr Levidow continued. “These powers are not needed to protect us from violence. They are part of the government’s political aims of suppressing freedom of speech and creating a climate of fear.”

Another right-wing attempt to harness women’s rights to anti-Muslim bigotry

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The new video from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, The Violent Oppression of Women in Islam, is a graphic, nightmarish, and profoundly unsettling glance into the darkest recesses of our fellow man. Narrated by Nonie Darwish, this film accurately depicts the dehumanizing theology, brutal abuse, and degredation that comprise the daily lives of millions of women in the fascist portions of the Islamic world – arcing like a crescent from sub-Saharan Africa, through Iran, to north-central Asia and reaching into hidden pockets of the United States.”

Front Page Magazine, 22 October 2007

Update:  For Yusuf Smith’s comments, see Indigo Jo Blogs, 23 October 2007

Mirror pays damages for Al Qaeda slur

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A leading Malaysian politician has accepted substantial undisclosed libel damages from the Daily Mirror over his wrongful identification as the third in command of Al Qaeda.

Abdul Hadi Awang, who is currently the president of Malaysian opposition party PAS, was caused great embarrassment and distress by the incorrect use of his photo in the Daily Mirror in May as part of a series concerning a number of terror plots in the UK, his solicitor-advocate, Adam Tudor, told Mr Justice Eady at the High Court on Friday.

Solicitors Carter-Ruck said later that Hadi Awang’s complaint was one of a number it had brought over the past 12 months on behalf of Muslims falsely accused of involvement with terrorism. To date, these had led to the payment of more than £700,000 in damages plus legal costs.

The article stated that Mr Hadi Awang was third in command of Al Qaeda, and was being held in Guantanamo Bay following his capture, he said. Trinity Mirror plc, the newspaper’s publisher, acknowledged that Hadi Awang had no involvement whatsoever in Al Qaeda – on the contrary, he had always been vehemently opposed to its “barbarous acts”.

The newspaper had explained that the photograph, which was published in error, was intended to refer to the suspected Al Qaeda terrorist, Abdul Hadi Al Iraqi, with whom Hadi Awang had no connection. It had published an apology and had agreed to pay Hadi Awang substantial damages and his legal costs.

Press Gazette, 22 October 2007

Rightwing SVP tightens grip in Swiss election

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Add NewChristoph BlocherSwitzerland’s rightwing People’s party, accused of racism and fanning Islamophobia, strengthened its position as the country’s leading political force yesterday, gaining more than 2 percentage points to win a general election for the second time in a row, according to projections.

Led by the populist industrialist Christoph Blocher, the People’s party, or SVP, was projected to have taken almost 29% of the vote, securing six more seats in parliament and two seats in the seven-strong cabinet that is always a coalition of the four strongest parties.

Guardian, 22 October 2007

Young U.S. Muslims struggle against prejudice

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Speaking with kids from high schools and youth organizations in the Dearborn area, Y-Press learned about some of the stereotypes many Americans hold about Arab-Americans and Muslims. The issues affecting Arab teens range from everyday high school challenges to discrimination.

The Abusalah family, natives of Palestine, ordered their meals at a restaurant and watched as the white family next to them got more attention from the waiter: Their order was taken first, the food arrived faster, and the waiter was simply friendlier. He barely smiled at the Arab-American family.

“It’s all the time,” said Reema Abusalah, 15. “We always get the dirty looks and stares. It’s not around Dearborn usually, but when we leave Dearborn, we see people who are not Arab stare at us, give us dirty looks and look funny at us.”

Reema feels that people who don’t live in diverse communities such as Dearborn rely on biased opinions to generate a picture of Arab-Americans.

For example, a lot of movies cast Arabs as villains, and the news media reports more negative stories about Arabs than positive ones. Yusef Saad, 16, saw a documentary called “Real Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People.” Arabs come out looking bad in such films as “Back to the Future” and even the Disney movie, “Aladdin,” Yusef said.

For Muslim teenage girls wearing the traditional Islamic hijab, or headscarf, stereotypes are sometimes intensified. “They think that all Muslim girls are oppressed and forced to put on the hijab. Well, it’s actually the other way around,” said Nour Hijazi, 17. “We want people to look at us and not evaluate how we look, but actually how we are and the way we treat people.”

Indianapolis Star, 21 October 2007

German neo-Nazis stage mosque protest

Posted on by Bob Pitt

NPD mosque protestBERLIN — Members of a German neo-Nazi party demonstrated Saturday in Frankfurt against the construction of a mosque in an area which already has two.

About 200 people marched shouting “Stop the Islamisation of Germany,” said Joerg Krebs, a spokesman for the local branch of the NPD, a neo-Nazi party. “We don’t want a big mosque in Hausen,” a Frankfurt quarter, “as there are already two mosques.”

The mosque is expected to cost about 10 million euros. Germany is home to some 3.4 million Muslims and there are 159 mosques scattered over the country. Some 900 people in the city held a counter-demonstration Saturday against the neo-Nazi rally.

AFP, 20 October 2007

Amis finds another supporter

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Henry Porter joins the likes of Ruth Dudley Edwards in rallying to the defence of poor misunderstood Martin Amis:

“Amis prefaced his remarks with: ‘There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it too? – to say…’ He was confessing to an urge that millions of people felt after the 7 July attacks or the attempts to blow up a nightclub full of young women in the summer. He was not recommending a campaign of persecution but owning up – bravely, as it turned out – to what amounted to a revenge fantasy. This is what writers are meant to do – to experiment, to give vent to the things so many of us feel but do not express, to allow reason to assert itself and to come out the other end with a view.”

Observer, 21 October 2007

For Amis’s actual words, see here. You’ll note that, in the same interview, Amis also came out with a “Muslims are outbreeding us” line that was plainly inspired by paranoid right-wing fantasists like Mark Steyn: “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.”

But that’s par for the course with Amis. Just over a year ago, to take another example, he wrote an article for the Observer containing formulations that were indistinguishable from the sort of bigoted nonsense that appears on sites like Jihad Watch:

“Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is ‘a civil war’ within Islam…. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it…. Islam, in the end, proved responsive to European influence: the influence of Hitler and Stalin. And one hardly needs to labour the similarities between Islamism and the totalitarian cults of the last century.”