Monthly Archives: October 2007

Racist bus passenger avoids jail

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A bus driver who has been in this country for more than 40 years and driven a bus for 35 of them was told by a drunken passenger: “You are from Pakistan. You are a terrorist and you are blowing the f…… country up”.

Kurshidahmad Saiyed told Isleworth Crown Court: “I was very distressed at being abused like this. I have been a loyal public servant for so many years.” His tormentor, 42-year-old Anthony Cosgrove of Popes Lane, Ealing, was found guilty by Brentford magistrates of racially aggravated harassment, on August 28 last year.

Cosgrove was arrested in October and denied the charge, which was tried earlier this year. He was already subject to a suspended sentence for possessing firearms while prohibited.

Telling him he was very lucky not to be going straight to prison, Judge Hezlett Colgan suspended a six-month sentence for two years and told Cosgrove not to change his address for six months and to be under the supervision of the probation service. He said:

“You caused a bus driver harassment and distress and in doing that you used racist language. That is almost always an offence that means an immediate sentence of imprisonment. But you owe a great debt to your counsel who has just persuaded me not to send you to prison.”

Richmond & Twickenham Times, 20 October 2007

Posted in UK

Right wing organises to ‘resist Islamisation’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“On October 18 and 19, over 70 organizations and individuals joined together in the European and Flemish Parliaments to create a European network of activists from 14 nations to resist the increasing Islamisation of their countries.

“Keynote speakers included Bat Ye’or, author of Eurabia and Dhimmitude and Robert Spencer, author of Religion of Peace, Why Christianity is and Islam Isn’t. Additional speakers included David Littman, Dr. Arieh Eldad, member of the Israeli Knesset, Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, Director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, Sam Solomon, Director of Fellowship of Faith for Muslims and author of the Charter of Muslim Understanding, Dr. Marc Cogen, Ghent University, Dr. Andrew Bostom, author of The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, and Laurent Artur du Plessis, author of a forthcoming book on shariah finance.”

Center for Vigilant Freedom press release, 19 October 2007

Centre for Social Cohesion witch-hunts ‘Islam is Peace’ campaign

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“On 24 September, posters stating ‘Islam is Peace’ and ‘Proud to be a British Muslim’ appeared on London buses, London Underground trains and in airports around Britain – the latest phase in a campaign by the group Islam-is-Peace to ‘address the negative perceptions and stereotypes of Islam and British Muslims’, according to the group’s website. But although Islam-is-Peace presents itself as independent, its only known senior members are also prominent figures in the Muslim Association of Britain – a Hamas-linked group whose founder and a chief ideologue have publicly defended Islamic terrorism.”

Centre for Social Cohesion press briefing, 18 October 2007

Showdown at Columbia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Columbia UniversityWhen David Horowitz returns to Columbia University next Friday to mark his organization’s much-hyped “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” (IFAW), he will find a determined and “dangerous” opposition, coming from a coalition of concerned students and up to nine of Horowitz’s “101 Most Dangerous Professors”.

“NOT ON OUR CAMPUS”, counter the flyers being circulated by the hundreds from Columbia’s Intercultural Resource Center, as students prepare for a major speakout and counter-event on Friday. Many here see Horowitz’s visit as an insult and an injury to a campus community still reeling from a slew of racial attacks this semester, most recently a noose hung on the door of a Black professor at Teachers’ College.

“What it does,” added Noah Baron of Columbia Students for a Democratic Society, “is it builds on people’s fears… And it makes it more difficult to discuss things that are already difficult to discuss … racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and things like that.”

Many students at Columbia don’t buy the “Islamo-Fascism” talk in the first place. The term only gained currency after President Bush picked it up as a mantra in 2006. Rahel Aima of Columbia SDS sees it as a fiction: “Islamo-Fascism is constructed … [They say]  ‘We don’t like Islam, we think fascism is bad, let’s put them together’… And they’re like, ‘If you’re not with us, you’re fascists’.”

With IFAW, Horowitz, an ex-Leftist-gone-Right, is taking on two of his favorite enemies: Left-wing faculty and Muslim youth. In a recent statement, he claimed that “the progressive left is the enabler and abettor of the terrorist jihad”, and in the same document, he called the Muslim Students Association (MSA) a “front for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas”.

Continue reading →

Islamophobic party poised to make gains in Swiss elections

Posted on by Bob Pitt

SVP posterPeter Beaumont warns against the threat from Christoph Blocher and the racist Swiss People’s Party (SVP):

“… the reason why Switzerland is suddenly important is not because of its politics – it’s because it represents the most visible manifestation of the nasty Islamophobia currently rising throughout Europe, that has connected self-avowed liberals such as Martin Amis in the UK with men like Blocher in a spectrum of fear and xenophobia. Tomorrow, it seems likely that the most Islamophobic mainstream party on the European continent will win the largest number of votes by wrapping itself in a fake past. It is a warning to us all.”

Comment is Free, 20 October 2007

See also “Interview with Swiss Justice Minister Christoph Blocher: ‘We must tell the Muslims we are a Christian nation'”, Der Spiegel, 17 October 2007

Jewish Voice for Peace opposes ‘Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jewish Voice for PeaceNo to intolerance and Islamophobia!

On October 22-26 the so-called Terrorism Awareness Project will send extremist speakers to campuses across the country to spread a message of intolerance and Islamophobia, in a campaign billed as “the biggest conservative campus protest ever.”

The list of speakers includes:

• Ann Coulter, who recently made quite a splash with her unabashed Jew-hatred;
• Robert Spencer, who calls Islam “the world’s most intolerant religion”;
• Rick Santorum, who compared homosexuality to incest and bestiality;
• And of course, David Horowitz whose long history of racism has included attacks on affirmative action and the statement that “guns don’t kill black people, other blacks do”.

These and other hate-mongers will be demonizing Islam and portraying a one-sided and bigoted view of a faith held by billions of people around the world.

Join Jewish Voice for Peace in our condemnation of this campaign of racism and bigotry!

Blair accuses Iran of fuelling ‘deadly ideology’ of militant Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tony Blair has accused Iran of backing and financing terrorist attacks, and warned that the threat of militant Islam is similar to that posed by fascism in the early 20th century.

In his first major speech since leaving office, Mr Blair said that Iran was prepared to destabilise peaceful countries in support of the “deadly ideology” driving Muslim extremism.

Speaking at a charity event in New York, Mr Blair said that the US, Britain and their allies risked being “forced into retreat” if they do not show “even greater determination and belief” in their common values. Mr Blair, who is now an envoy for the Middle East Quartet, said: “Analogies with the past are never properly accurate and analogies especially with the rising fascism can be easily misleading, but in pure chronology I sometimes wonder if we’re not in the 1920s or 1930s again.”

He said: “This ideology now has a state, Iran, that is prepared to back and finance terror in the pursuit of destabilising countries whose people wish to live in peace.”

Guardian, 19 October 2007

See comments by David Cox and Inayat Bunglawala at Comment is Free, 19 October 2007

Conservative Muslims back Ahmadinejad shock

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Conservative Muslim ForumWell, that’s the line the Daily Telegraph is taking anyway, and Conservative Home is joining in. What’s got them so worked up is the document submitted by the Conservative Muslim Forum in response to An Unquiet World, the report of the Tories’ National and International Security Policy Group chaired by Dame Pauline Neville-Jones.

The CMF’s response hits some nails on the head. It has a good line on Israel and Iran, which particularly outrages the Telegraph and Conservative Home (though the Torygraph is no less appalled by the CMF’s proposal that the history curriculum in schools should give “full recognition to the massive contribution that Islam has made to the development of Western civilisation”).

Conservative Home for its part is dismayed by the CMF’s defence of the Muslim Council of Britain, who were grossly misrepresented by Neville-Jones’ policy group, providing the basis for an ignorant attack on the MCB by David Cameron. The CMF asks:

“What is the evidence for the statement ‘the MCB does not have as one of its aims, the integration of members of Muslim communities into the wider society of the UK’? … it should be noted that one of the formal aims of the MCB is ‘to foster better community relations and work for the good of society as a whole’, which is what integration is about. The Policy Group did not specify what MCB activities they consider to be incompatible with integration. The Conservative Party should recognise that the MCB is well-respected by many Muslims and non-Muslims.”

Also by implication the Conservative Muslim Forum opposes Cameron’s call for a ban on Hizb ut-Tahrir: “… it is the mark of a mature and liberal democracy that it accepts people’s freedom to disagree. If a political party wishes to campaign, constitutionally, for the abolition of democracy in the UK and its replacement by a totalitarian system, why should it not be free to do so?”

Neville-Jones’ An Unquiet World report contains a ludicrously inaccurate attack on Dr al-Qaradawi. To which the CMF replies: “While we may disagree with many of the views of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, it is inaccurate for the Policy Group to question his status as a leading Islamic scholar…. Yusuf al-Qaradawi is considered a leading scholar by many Muslims, including other Muslim scholars.”

Conservative Home complains: “It is deeply troubling to learn of a group within the Conservative Party giving comfort to this extremist.”

An Unquiet Word: A Response can be downloaded from the Conservative Muslim Forum website.

For earlier criticisms of Neville-Jones’ report by Conservative Muslims, see here.

Martin Amis – neither a racist nor an Islamophobe (it says here)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“We are used to attacks on freedom of speech these days. At present Martin Amis is coming under heavy attack from radical Muslims for his trenchant criticisms of the violence that is inseparable from extreme Islamism….

“In so doing, he has attracted the ire of Professor Terry Eagleton – a mediocre but always modish literary critic. Having, in my view, distorted Amis’s words, Eagleton claimed that the author was ‘hounding and humiliating’ Muslims – and the usual suspects have followed in his wake with shrieks of ‘Islamophobe’ and ‘racist’.

“Amis is neither. For while Islam is one of the world’s great religions, he is surely correct when he says that Islamic extremists are ‘anti-Semites, psychotic misogynists and homophobes’. He has every right to say our society is more evolved than repressive and brutal Muslim states like Saudi Arabia, which is being permitted through political inertia to fund Europe-wide centres peddling the pernicious doctrine of Wahhabism (which promotes global Jihad) to impressionable young men.”

Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Daily Mail, 19 October 2007

For an alternative view, read Soumaya Ghannoushi at Comment is Free, 18 October 2007