Monthly Archives: October 2007

No more torture in our name

Posted on by Bob Pitt

No More TortureNo more torture in our name

By Louise Nousratpour

Morning Star, 10 October 2007

AMNESTY International UK launched a hard-hitting campaign on Monday against human rights abuses in the name of the “war on terror.” The human rights organisation called on people to make a stand against terrorism and against civil liberties being eroded by governments claiming to fight al-Qaida. The billboard and internet campaign is called Unsubscribe, after the process that internet users use to reject unwanted emails.

Speaking at a launch event in Birmingham, Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen said: “Unsubscribe is about rejecting the false choice between terrorism on the one hand and abuse of human rights on the other.” She stressed people’s opposition to the government’s detention without charge or trial of terror suspects under the pretext of national security. “They believe people have a right to know why they are being detained and they believe in the right to have a fair trial if someone is suspected of a serious offence,” Ms Allen added.

As part of the campaign, Amnesty has launched a powerful new two-minute drama film depicting the suffering of a hooded prisoner undergoing “stress and duress” torture by an unnamed man in plain clothes. In the film, which is called Waiting for the Guard and can be seen online at www.unsubscribe-me.org, the prisoner is seen stripped to his underwear in an underground chamber and forced to sit with his head a knee level.

Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg said that the Unsubscribe film brought back unpleasant memories. “You cannot imagine that happening to anybody, let alone yourself,” said Mr Begg, who was held without charge for two years at the notorious US prison camp. “The way that I tried almost to tackle it was to say that it didn’t happen to me, it happened to someone else.”

Mr Begg said that worse abuses of human rights go on in “ghost” detention camps, referring to widely reported secret CIA “torture camps” that are scattered across the world. “These kinds of things continue to exist. Perhaps they don’t happen at Guantanamo any more, but there are other sites that people have to pass through,” he warned. “By the time I was sent to Guantanamo, I was looking forward to it.”

National Union of Students president Gemma Tumulty said that the campaign would give millions of students in Britain a voice to their “instinctive feeling that something has been going badly wrong in the ‘war on terror’.”

Amnesty will also display a series of hard-hitting billboard posters across the country. They will reproduce some of the most infamous images of human rights abuses from the “war on terror”. The images include an Abu Ghraib prisoner in Iraq being attacked by a dog and a Guantanamo Bay detainee being abused. The posters all bear the message Unsubscribe and will be displayed during October on the streets of Birmingham, London, Glasgow, Belfast, Cardiff, Leeds and Manchester.

Laughing at ‘Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“An ex-senator that opposes individual rights of women; a pundit that calls people ‘faggots’ and considers Islam a ‘cult’; a Christian scholar who is considered a ‘polemicist’ and an ‘Islamophobe’ by conservative Christians themselves; and an intellectual who has received millions from ‘far right’ organizations since 2001, are rising up for the rights of women, gays, and religious minorities in the Muslim world. This laughable spectacle is called the Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. It will be coming to a university near you on October 22-26.”

Ali Eteraz at the Huffington Post, 8 October 2007

Rebuking obnoxious views

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Terry EagletonTerry Eagleton explains his recent much-publicised polemic against Martin Amis and replies to critics:

“In an essay entitled The Age of Horrorism published last month, the novelist Martin Amis advocated a deliberate programme of harassing the Muslim community in Britain. ‘The Muslim community’, he wrote, ‘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…’

“Amis was not recommending these tactics for criminals or suspects only. He was proposing them as punitive measures against all Muslims, guilty or innocent. The idea was that by hounding and humiliating them as a whole, they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man’s law. There seems something mildly defective about this logic….

“Suicide bombers must be stopped forcibly in their tracks to protect the innocent. But there is something rather stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment.”

Guardian, 10 October 2007

Here at Islamophobia Watch we are of course rooting for Professor Eagleton. However, in the interests of accuracy, we should point out that Amis’s disgraceful comments in fact appeared in an interview with Ginny Dougary published in the Times Magazine in September 2006.

Jon Gaunt rallies to the defence of ‘our tolerant society’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yes, I know. It’s a bit like the Ku Klux Klan speaking out in support of equality.

Fanatical docs make me sick

By Jon Gaunt

Sun, 9 October 2007

LAST week Muslim zealots were refusing to sell alcohol in Sainsbury’s but this week the lunatics have really taken over the asylum. We now learn that some Muslim trainee doctors are refusing to treat people with drink or sexual problems.

These pious prats won’t be allowed to qualify as doctors if they refuse these aspects of their training, so instead of dithering and wasting our taxes on any more education for these fanatics we should simply tell them to fit in or ship out.

We should also not fall into the trap of thinking this is just an isolated incident, especially after the capitulation of Sainsbury’s over alcohol and now the news that Boots are allowing Muslim pharmacists the right to refuse to dispense the morning-after pill.

All of these zealots think they can get away with these outrages because we have singularly failed to tell people who want to live in this great country that they have to fit in with our way of life.

Even after 7/7 this Government still has the backbone of a blancmange when it comes to dealing with Muslims. Forget concerns about Islamophobia – we should be more concerned with how Muslims seem to be treated with kid gloves.

While the rest of the majority population are told to understand and tolerate their religion, certain members of the Muslim community seem to have carte blanche to walk all over our customs and traditions.

This week the amoebas in Government failed to ban outright the full veil in classrooms, leaving the decision with individual head teachers rather than laying down the law as they have done in France.

Some say we should ban all religious symbols in school but I disagree. This is a Christian country and 72 per cent of us in the last census professed to being Christian and there is a world of difference between a crucifix, a turban, a skullcap and the veil.

This face covering is not a religious symbol but is clearly a sign of repression and oppression. A woman can look modest without resorting to looking like a Dalek and almost becoming invisible in our modern liberal, tolerant society.

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Experts sound alarm on rising Islamophobia in Europe

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islamophobia is on the rise in Europe and governments should do more to protect the continent’s 15 million Muslims from discrimination, experts meeting in Spain said Monday.

“The situation is very serious,” said Mustapha Cherif, an expert on Islam at the University of Algiers who is known for his commitment to battling religious hatred. “Islamophobia is a rising phenomena,” added Jasser Auda of Britain’s Forum Against Racism and Islamophobia, which is made up of representatives of the British Muslim community.

The two were speaking at a meeting in the southern Spanish city of Jaen of some 30 non-governmental organisations from across Europe. The gathering was held ahead of the start on Tuesday in the nearby city of Cordoba of a two-day conference on the issue organised by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Spain currently holds the rotating presidency of the OSCE, which promotes human rights, democracy and conflict prevention in Europe, North America and Central Asia.

Participants said there was no easy solution to fighting Islamophobia. Turkish State Minister Meymet Aydın underlined the need to help Western societies undestand Islam.

“It is good to attract the attention of governments on the issue, to increase their level of awareness,” said Aydin Suer, the spokesman for Femyso, a confederation of Muslim youth groups from 22 European nations.

“The problems are complex, the solutions themselves are complex,” said Suer. Muslims could not just blame media stereotypes for the problem, he added. “We Muslims need to question ourselves,” he said.

The non-governmental organisations will present a list of recommendations on how to tackle the problem to delegations from the 56 nations that make up the OSCE, and that are set to take part in the Cordoba conference.

“This will be the message from civil society” to the government representatives gathered in Cordoba, said Spain’s special ambassador for relations with Muslim communities, Jose Maria Ferre.

Cordoba was chosen as the host for the event because for centuries the city was a symbolic centre of coexistence between Christians, Jews and Muslims. The city hosted an OSCE conference on anti-Semitism in 2005.

AFP, 8 October 2007

Anti-Muslim preacher ‘prepares’ Australian politician for prime ministership

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Peter CostelloThe leader of a Christian group that advocates the destruction of mosques, casinos and bottle shops has met Peter Costello to “prophetically prepare” the Treasurer for the prime ministership.

Mr Costello and John Howard held private meetings with Catch the Fire leader Danny Nalliah in August, the same month the Prime Minister met with the leaders of the Exclusive Brethren, which prohibits voting and modern technology.

Mr Nalliah said in a letter to Christians that the Lord had told him to spend “personal time” with Mr Howard and to prepare Mr Costello as the “future prime minister”.

The Catch The Fire ministries sparked a row with the Islamic Council of Victoria in 2002 when it claimed in a newsletter that Muslims were demons training to make Australia an Islamic state, that the Koran promoted violence and that Muslims derived money from drug dealing.

The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal found Mr Nalliah and colleague Daniel Scot had vilified Islam under the state’s 2002 Racial and Religious Tolerance Act. However, the Victorian Court of Appeal quashed the order, ruling the VCAT had not used the proper legal test for incitement and so sent it back for a review, where the dispute was mediated.

Mr Costello wrote a letter of support to Mr Nalliah during his legal battle.

The Australian, 8 October 2007

‘Army forks out for 95 hijabs’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Politically correct MoD officials are to issue free hijabs to female Muslim troops – while front line soldiers are having to buy their own kit. Under new service dress regulations, six of the Islamic hijabs will be given to each Muslim servicewoman wanting them. But it has sparked fury amid an MoD cash crisis. Squaddies also claim the hand-out is unfair as they pay out of their own pockets to observe strict military dress rules.”

Sun, 8 October 2007

‘Islam is Peace for Britain?’ Robert Spencer thinks not

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Islam is Peace campaign has failed to impress the proprietor of Jihad Watch. Robert Spencer complains:

“There is not one word about fighting against the jihadist ideology of Islamic supremacism within English mosques and Islamic schools. Instead, point one of the campaign is to fight against undefined Islamophobia, as if the only reason why anyone regarded Muslims with suspicion was because of bigotry and hatred by non-Muslims. Well, I’ve got news for you. If ‘Islamophobia’ actually exists at all, it is a result of the over nine thousand violent attacks committed by Muslims in the name of Islam since 9/11.”

Human Events, 8 October 2007

See Jihad Watch video here.

Note Spencer’s use of an interview with Anjem Choudary to illustrate the mainstream Muslim view concerning attacks on innocent people. Spencer does not of course mention that Choudary is the leader of a tiny group of extremist nutters who represent next to nothing within Islam in the UK. But, to take the charitable view, it may well be that he doesn’t even know that. After all, this is the same Robert Spencer who once assured his readers that Al-Muhajiroun was “Britain’s largest Muslim group“.

Fascists resist the ‘creeping Islamification’ of death

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tower Hamlets CemeteryThe London Borough of Tower Hamlets is considering a proposal to re-open a disused cemetery as a multi-faith burial ground. Predictably, the British National Party has responded with a typical piece entitled “Tower Hamlets: Our dead to be dug up to make room for Muslims?”

According to the fascists: “hundreds of thousands of British bodies may be exhumed if Muslim-friendly Tower Hamlets council gives the go-ahead…. Apparently the local Islamic community ‘need’ a specific burial site – as cremation is not for them. And, in the best traditions of appeasement, the local council is determined that they shall have one…. Labour’s environment spokesman in Tower Hamlets, one Abdal Ullah, said: ‘To preserve the respect and dignity for everyone, I think most of the graves would have to be cleared out and we’d start afresh.’ And the remains of our British ancestors dumped where exactly Abdul? … Even in death, apparently, we are not free from creeping Islamification.”

BNP regional voices, 8 October 2007

Update:  Readers will be pleased to hear that the threat to Western civilisation has apparently receded. The BNP now reports that it has received a communication from Denise Jones, leader of Tower Hamlets Council, who states: “With regards to Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, there are currently no plans to re-open it as a cemetery.”

The English Defence League: not suited but booted

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Anindya Bhattacharyya provides a useful summary of the campaign by anti-racists against the English Defence League. He notes: “the fact that racist groups such as the EDL have taken to the streets with an explicitly anti-Muslim agenda has clarified what is at stake. Arguments about the nature of Islamophobia that had until now been primarily ideological are now being played out on the streets”.

Socialist Review, October 2009