Monthly Archives: October 2008

Veiling and security

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Metro niqab pictureThe Metro carries a story on the comments made by Admiral Lord West, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Security and Counter Terrorism, to the Commons Defence Committee meeting yesterday on “UK national security and resilience” where he said that ending radicalization among young British Muslims could take up to 30 years.

The newspaper complements the news item with a picture of Muslim women in niqab. Is it any surprise that some Muslim women have had their veils forcibly torn from their faces when newspapers allude to connections between forms of Muslim dress and stories on terrorism and security?

You can write to the newspaper via email: mail@ukmetro.co.uk or post: Metro, Associated Newspapers Limited, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT.

Engage, 22 October 2008

Can we take the opportunity to give a big plug to this excellent new website.

‘Using Halal meat is just insulting’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“I write expressing my concern at the report regarding Halal meat to be on the menu and served at Derby Schools (Evening Telegraph, October 10). England prides itself on the high quality of good meats used and served in our English schools. It is absolutely stomach-turning to even think of Halal meat, and to expect white, English Christian children to eat such unhygienic meat is an insult to our children and our schools.”

Letter in the Derbyshire Evening Telegraph, 21 October 2008

Posted in UK

Met’s most senior Muslim woman ‘ostracised even from coffee run’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Muslim woman responsible for upholding racial and religious diversity within the Metropolitan police claims she was so marginalised that she was not even allowed to make the coffee. Yasmin Rehman, 42, the force’s director of partnerships and diversity, is taking her bosses to an employment tribunal claiming she was bullied because of her colour and sex. She says one female detective told her not even to touch her coffee cup because she was Muslim, according to legal documents.

Sunday Times, 19 October 2008

Senior Anglican boosts hysterical campaign against Newham ‘mega-mosque’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Building a mosque next to the Olympic site could create a breeding ground for extremists, a senior Church of England official has warned. Dr Philip Lewis, an interfaith adviser to the Bishop of Bradford, said that the plans threaten to establish a ghetto of Muslims taught to embrace jihad.

In the first intervention by a Church figure over the controversial project, Dr Lewis raised fears that a 12,000-capacity mosque in London would lead to a segregated Muslim community. The mosque would be four times the size of Britain’s largest cathedral. “Tablighi Jamaat does not try to engage with wider society so there must be clear worries that such a mosque would lead to a ghetto,” he said. “The danger is that this becomes a self-contained world, which would be vulnerable to extremists.”

His comments follow a private meeting of Anglican and Roman Catholic clergy earlier this month who fear that the mosque could have a negative effect on east London, the proposed site for the building. Councillor Alan Craig, who leads the Christian People’s Alliance and organised the meeting, said that Dr Lewis’s contribution to the debate was a great boost to the campaign to block the mosque.

He said: “For someone of Philip Lewis’s stature and experience, who has good relations with Muslims, to make these comments is a great help to our campaign. It shows that this is a reasoned campaign against the mega-mosque and is not built on Islamaphobia, but on facts and evidence.”

Sunday Telegraph, 19 October 2008

Frankly, you’d have thought Philip Lewis would know better. It’s a matter of days since he was himself denounced for his connections to another Deobandi organisation, the Association of Muslim Scholars of Britain (JUB), which has been attacked in similar terms to Tablighi Jamaat.

Update:  For Yusuf Smith’s comments, see Indigo Jo Blogs, 20 October 2008

Colin Powell condemns Islamophobia in the Republican Party

Posted on by Bob Pitt

I’m anything but a fan of Colin Powell, and have no idea what impact (if any) his Meet the Press endorsement of Obama will have, but I was really glad to see him make the following point in explaining why he has rejected McCain’s candidacy:

I’m also troubled by, not what Sen. McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said such things as: “Well, you know that Mr.Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is: he is not a Muslim. He’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian.

But the really right answer is: What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is: No, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she can be President?

Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion: he’s a Muslim, and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

There has been much condemnation over the ‘Obama-is-a-Muslim’ line of GOP attack, but almost all of it has been on the ground that the attack is factually false as applied to the Christian Obama, not on the ground that it is a reprehensible and dangerous line of attack even if it were factually true. Powell bears much of the responsibility, and always will, for the horrific U.S. attack on Iraq (one which, just by the way, resulted in the deaths of at least hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims), but he deserves credit for using the platform he had this morning to go out of his way to make this vital point when doing so was not necessary (and perhaps not even helpful) in advancing the cause of his endorsement of Obama.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, 19 October 2008

No hijab at schools: UK minister

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Phil WoolasOnly two weeks in his post, Britain’s new immigration minister believes that hijab should not be allowed at British schools. “People wear veils for different reasons: some out of religious conviction. some because they’re forced to. It should be up to them,” Phil Woolas told The Times on Saturday, October 18. “But at school you shouldn’t wear one. It’s harder to get a good education if you wear a veil as you’re more cut off.”

Islam Online, 18 October 2008

Islamophobia Watch hesitates to defend Phil Woolas, but to be fair we think he was talking about a ban on the niqab rather than the headscarf (not that we’d support that either, of course). But he should be asked to clarify his remarks.

Incidentally, we can’t help noting that Woolas’s Times interview, with its call for “a tougher immigration policy” and unpleasant talk about “putting British people first” and “not pandering to Hampstead liberals” over immigration, is reproduced with evident approval by Searchlight on their Stop the BNP site. Presumably they, like Woolas himself, think that the way to stop fascism is to adopt the fascists’ own rhetoric.

Horowitz lambastes Islam at Brown University in near-empty hall

Posted on by Bob Pitt

David HorowitzDavid Horowitz opened his lecture on terrorism – part of “Islamofascism Awareness Week,” a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center – with a joke. “I hope you checked your pies at the door,” he quipped, recalling the incident in which New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman was pied as he began his lecture in Salomon 101 last spring.

Three uniformed officers at the back and three at the front of the largely empty MacMillan 117 and Horowitz’s own private bodyguard made any pies-to-the-face unlikely.

Horowitz, a Jewish writer and activist who holds adamantly pro-Israel views, said the purpose of his lecture was to counter “liberal orthodoxy” on campus. “You have one of the worst faculties in the United States,” he said. “These people are communists – they are totalitarians.”

The lecture was titled “Helping the Enemy to Win: Support for the Jihad on American Campuses”. “Islam is a fundamentalist religion,” Horowitz said, adding that the Quran left very little room for interpretation when compared to the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.

Brown Daily Herald, 17 October 2008

Eastern Germany’s first mosque opens amid protests

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Berlin mosque protestA new mosque has opened in Berlin – the first in former East Germany. Just blocks away, some 300 people demonstrated against what they called the “Islamisation of Europe.”

Located in Berlin’s Pankow district, the 1.6 million-euro mosque has a 12-meter (39-foot) high minaret and can hold 500 worshippers. Built for members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, the mosque was inaugurated on Thursday, Oct. 16, with a celebration attended by approximately 300 people, including Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit.

According to Wowereit, the mosque symbolizes “religious and cultural tolerance” in Berlin. His comments may have been overly optimistic, though, given that hundreds of protesting residents and the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) were gathered only blocks away from the site. The demonstrators held banners with statements such as, “Stop the Islamisation of Europe” and “Stop the Abuse of Religious Freedom.” A petition against the construction of the mosque had also gathered some 20,000 signatures.

The Ahmadiyya mosque has been a source of controversy since its building plans were announced in 2006, with attacks on the site hindering its construction.

Ijaz Ahmad, spokesperson for the mosque, is hopeful however that the new two-story building will help bring clashing Muslims and non-Muslims in Berlin closer together. “The mosque will be a hub of social activity, not just for praying,” she said. “It will play a role in boosting integration and promoting dialogue with politicians and other religious groups.”

A local citizens’ group doesn’t seem to see integration in the cards though. “We have a big problem with sects that put religion above everything else, allow the beating of women and deny equal rights,” the group said on its Web site.

Deutsche Welle, 17 October 2008

Demonstrators hold banners against the opening of the newly built Ahmadiyya mosque in the Heinersdorf district of Berlin

BNP claims credit for preventing further Islamification of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne

Posted on by Bob Pitt

newcastle-patriot-oct-2008.PDFThe British National Party in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne has claimed credit for the reversal of a scheme to build a mosque and a development dubbed “Asia Town’ in the west end of that city.

“We fought long and hard against this further destruction of Geordie culture,” said Ken Booth, North East Regional Organiser and tireless BNP campaigner in the city. “The decision by the council to reverse the plans to build the mosque is undoubtedly down to the massive Newcastle BNP’s ‘Say No to Asia Town’ campaign and the second place in Elswick in the May local elections,” he said.

BNP News, 16 October 2008

Death for apostasy?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Reading AC Grayling’s latest article and listening to the protestations of the Council of Ex-Muslims, you would think that the death penalty is being gratuitously and frequently applied to those who renounce Islam or harbour thoughts of apostasy. As a Muslim who has lived most of my life in Muslim countries, this picture is hard to recognise.”

Nesrine Malik at Comment is Free, 17 October 2008