Italy today became the latest European government to announce it was considering introducing a law which would make wearing a burqa illegal. MPs from the anti-immigration Northern League party, a member of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling right wing coalition, have presented the proposal in a bill. It comes just weeks after France also said that it was considering making the wearing of burqas by Muslim women illegal.
Monthly Archives: October 2007
‘Fear of giving offence is killing our culture’
Minette Marrin complains that the struggle against the civilisation-sapping ideology of multiculturalism is not over yet:
“For at least 20 years there was a debilitating fog of moral relativism in the air, a miasma of guilty self-loathing…. Even the phrase ‘host culture’ was considered unacceptable. We have moved on since then, supposedly, and surprisingly suddenly. Many prominent multiculturalists, including the Commission for Racial Equality itself, have recently performed swift U-turns and the bien-pensant orthodoxy now is that multiculturalism has been a divisive failure….
“It might seem, superficially, that the Victoria Climbié report and the massacre of 7/7 in London, among other shocks, have brought us back at last to our cultural senses and our cultural self-respect. Not entirely so, unfortunately…. A week ago The Sunday Times reported that some Muslim workers in Sainsbury’s are refusing to check out purchases of alcohol on the debatable ground that it’s against their religion.”
Well, actually, it was just the one Muslim worker in a single branch of Sainsbury’s. But why quibble over figures when the very future of “our” culture is at stake? Marrin continues:
“This is preposterous and a depressing sign of the times. But the painful truth is it would be just as preposterous to blame the Sainsbury’s Muslims. For years now ethnic minorities have been encouraged to insist on their cultural differences and on their human right to have these differences respected and actively promoted….
“Surely the fault lies with Sainsbury’s, for cultural funk. And it lies with all those others who out of some strange abandonment of common sense – such as the government’s laissez-faire guidelines on wearing Muslim veils in schools last week – bottle out.”
Elsewhere in the same issue, the paper follows up last week’s exposé of cultural surrender at Sainsbury’s with another article, “Muslim medical students get picky“, which claims:
“Some Muslim medical students are refusing to attend lectures or answer exam questions on alcohol-related or sexually transmitted diseases because they claim it offends their religious beliefs. Some trainee doctors say learning to treat the diseases conflicts with their faith, which states that Muslims should not drink alcohol and rejects sexual promiscuity. A small number of Muslim medical students have even refused to treat patients of the opposite sex.”
“Some … some … a small number” – and how many Muslim medical students, roughly, might that be? Of course, we’re not told. Although, to be fair to the Sunday Times, its intrepid reporters have come up with a further shocking revelation: “At a Sainsbury’s store in Nottingham, a pharmacist named Ahmed declined to provide the pill to a female reporter posing as a customer”. So that makes one Sainsbury’s employee who opts out of selling alcohol, two who’ve been given exemption from stacking the drinks shelves, and one who avoids selling the pill. Clearly, the foundations of Western civilisation are under mass assault from the Muslim hordes.
Meanwhile, over at the Infidel Blogger’s Alliance, one Mark Alexander (who’s apparently the author of a book entitled The Dawning of a New Dark Age: A Collection of Essays on Islam) offers his take on the Sunday Times report:
“This latest story about the obstreperousness of trainee Muslim medical students should alarm us all. It is a harbinger of the nightmare that awaits us all in the West as a result of allowing far, far too many Muslims into the Judeo-Christian West…. If something isn’t done about the Muslim problem, then it is only a matter of time before blood will be shed. Not in the operating theatres, but in the streets.”
And the fascists of the British National Party (who are becoming great fans of the Sunday Times) present the report as evidence that “the country moves unceasingly and unchallenged to becoming part ofDar-ul-Islam (the world of Islam)”.
BNP news article, 7 October 2007
Cf. The letter of appreciation to Sainsbury’s from Ibrahim Mogra of the Muslim Council of Britain.
See also Yusuf Smith’s comments at Indigo Jo Blogs, 8 October 2007
Spain to host Islamophobia summit
Spain will host a two-day international conference to discuss the roots of discrimination and hostility toward Muslims in the West. The conference is held under the aegis of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in the historical city of Cordoba in southern Spain, once the symbol of Islamic civilization in the Iberian peninsula.
High-ranking delegations from the 56 OSCE member states from Europe and Central Asia as well as non-governmental organizations will take part in the conference which focuses on intolerance toward Muslims, its consequences and the role of media, AFP reported. The event is part of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s diplomatic push for an international effort to resolve cultural and religious differences, especially between the Western and Muslim world.
US Congress – appeasers of jihadism
The US House of Representatives has adopted a resolution commemorating Ramadan, which “recognizes the Islamic faith as one of the great religions of the world” and “expresses its deepest respect to Muslims in the United States and throughout the world on this significant occasion”.
The British National Party cannot restrain its indignation: “With ‘allies’ like those in the US Congress, who needs a fifth column of jihadists preparing for a fundamentalist take-over of Europe?”
Guardian interviews Karen Armstrong
Back in the early 1980s when she was researching the Crusades, it was the prejudice of friends and colleagues towards Islam which first alerted Armstrong to an old history:
“The Crusades was the beginning of Europe finding its soul. Islam and Judaism became the shadow side, the foil against which we [Christian Europe] measured ourselves. A righteous contempt of Islam was entwined with our anti-semitism. Ever since, our rhetoric about Muslims reflects a blind anxiety about our own behaviour – anxieties about our own capacity for violence are projected onto Muslims, similarly our attitudes towards women.”
Finding these long historical roots to current attitudes towards Islam has given Armstrong a passionate sense of her own personal crusade: “Even before 9/11 I was gripped by a sense of dread: our lack of criticism about what we were doing in the Middle East – the slagging off of a whole religious tradition. It is part of a habit of prejudice that made the death camps possible. It’s as if we hadn’t learnt anything from the 1930s.”
Christian Voice holds prayer meeting against Islam
The right-wing evangelical organisation Christian Voice – the same group that threatened to prosecute Islamic bookshops under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act for selling the Qur’an – has announced that it is holding a prayer meeting this morning at the site of the proposed Islamic centre at Newham in East London. They explain:
“With the threat of a planning application for the megamosque any day now, the need for prayer at the site, which is less than a mile from the 2012 Olympic village, is urgent. Certainly, one can pray in church or at home, but the act of going to the site has a spiritual dimension. It focuses our prayer and the effort of going shows God our prayer is serious, an important matter when we are praying for miracles.
“And we believe our prayer is having results. It is being felt in the existing mosque, a collection of old industrial buildings, and our prayers for confusion have, we believe, already disrupted the megamosque plans. We have also prayed in support of local councillor Alan Craig, whom the Lord has placed in Newham’s council chamber for just such a time as this.”
But don’t get the idea that Christian Voice is moved by hostility towards adherents of another religion. Not at all: “Love for God and for our neighbour is what motivates us, so while we shall pray against Islam, we shall also pray for salvation for Muslims and for them to be brought into the kingdom of God by faith in the incarnate Son of God, the crucified, risen, ascended Lord Jesus Christ.”
The other, invisible suffering of Burma
Here’s an interesting article on the position of the Muslim minority in Burma, which points out that media coverage of recent events in that country demonstrates that there are “some hard stereotypes which affect how the mass media represent religions … Buddhism is the most peaceful religion; Islam the aggressive and violent”.
While the author makes clear that the primary responsibility for the current oppression of the Rohingya Muslims lies with the Burmese military regime, he also observes that there is a history of Buddhist monks organising pogroms against the Muslim minority:
“Muslims in Burma are not considered to be citizens. They have no rights and often suffer discrimination and indiscriminate killings. Many of them, in particular after 1962, had to flee the country and still today live in refugee camps in Bangladesh, which actually do not welcome them. Although Muslims have taken active part in the 1988 revolt, and paid the consequences more than the Buddhist population, the majority of monks and Buddhists in Burma have anti-Muslim sentiments, in particular based on the fear of possible intermarriages.
“Pamphlets glorifying race purity and Buddhism and actually reinforcing anti-Muslim sentiments have been distributed since 2001 (i.e. Myo Pyauk Hmar Soe Kyauk Hla Tai or The Fear of Losing One’s Race). These inflammatory publications, preaching against the Muslim minority, as well as rumors spread about Muslims raping children in the streets, provoked a series of monk-led riots against Muslim families and the destruction of mosques. Muslims were killed and mosques destroyed, and again the Rohingya Muslims had to flee to Bangladesh.”
Australian Labor Party hits out over attitudes to Muslims
The Federal Opposition has called on political leaders to stop equating Islam with terrorism, saying the support of Australia’s Muslim community is critical to fighting extremism. Seeking to differentiate Labor from the Government on national security, homeland security spokesman Arch Bevis called for “responsible leadership” in tackling fundamentalism.
He said Australia’s Muslim community was the country’s greatest asset in fighting terrorism, pointing out that Australian Muslims had provided essential information that prevented attacks in the past. “We are in real danger of losing that support as political leaders, community leaders and the media opt for simplistic and ultimately harmful characterisations that juxtapose ‘terrorist’ with ‘Muslim’,” Mr Bevis said.
For an alternative Australian view see ASSIST news service, 4 October 2007
Veil not banned, Mail not happy
Veils will not be banned in schools, ministers have decided. Guidelines issued by the Government yesterday state that heads “may be justified” in outlawing religious dress that covers pupils’ faces. But ministers stopped short of issuing an outright ban on full-face Islamic veils, saying it was up to schools to decide uniform policy for themselves.
Yesterday’s updated guidance follows the case of a 12-year-old girl whose campaign to be allowed to wear the niqab at her Buckinghamshire school was rejected by the Law Lords after a lengthy appeal process.
A draft version of the new rules published in March suggested that schools would be allowed to outlaw certain religious dress in order to ensure proper learning, prevent bullying and maintain security on school grounds. But an extra paragraph inserted in the revised version makes it clear there is no automatic right to ban veils. It states that the judgment against the 12-year-old girl and two other similar cases do not imply schools can impose a blanket ban.
Tory MP Paul Goodman, whose Wycombe constituency includes the school challenged in court over its policy on the niqab, said the guidance had been weakened by the Human Rights Act, which provides for “the right to education and to manifest religious beliefs”.
Fascists protest against new mosque in Antwerp
ANTWERP – Followers of right wing party Vlaams Belang gathered on Thursday evening to protest the construction of a new mosque in the Antwerp district of Deurne. Police say about 150 people with banners and protest signs gathered at the Boterlaarbaan, the planned site for the mosque, at about 7.30 pm last night.
The protestors’ message was loud and clear as expressed by prominent VB member Filip Dewinter. He shouted slogans like “Adapt or go back where you came from” through a megaphone. The protest is part of a larger campaign started by the VB a few weeks ago calling for a stop to the “further Islamisation of Antwerp.” Banners with the slogans “Keep Europe European” and “Keep Muslims out” were carried as well.