Monthly Archives: February 2009

South Bank demo at National Theatre over ‘racist’ play

Posted on by Bob Pitt

National Theatre demoA demonstration against the play England People Very Nice was held outside the National Theatre on Friday. At one point a large banner was displayed from a balcony.

The controversial play by Richard Bean looks at immigration in London’s East End. It is directed by the National’s artistic director Nicholas Hytner who says that the play “lampoons all forms of stereotyping: it is a boisterous satire of stereotypes of French, Irish, Jews, Bangladeshis, white East End cockneys, Hampstead liberals and many others. Every stereotype is placed in the context of its opposite and it clearly sets out to demonstrate that all forms of racism are equally ridiculous.”

The outdoor demonstration preceded a Platform event during which the play’s writer Richard Bean was due to discuss his work. The protest, under the banner “Love Theatre Hate Racism”, was organised by Bethnal Green playwright Hussain Ismail. Cllr Abjol Miah, leader of the Respect group on Tower Hamlets Council, was present with several objectors from the East End.

“I am passionate about theatre and I don’t think theatre should be used to peddle racist filth under the guise of comedy and serious theatre.” Hussain Ismail told the small crowd of passers-by on the riverside who stopped to listen to speeches. “We don’t need to be told about multi-culturalism by an elitist institution that does not represent multi-cultural London. What we need to do is to challenge the racist rubbish.”

London SE1, 28 February 2009

See also Daily Telegraph, 28 February 2009

Anti-Muslim scaremongering and shameless self-promotion – yes it’s another interview with Ed Husain

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ed_HusainThe battle for the hearts and minds of young Muslims in London is being lost because the vast majority of imams that practise here cannot speak English, leaving a vacuum that jihadist groups ruthlessly exploit.

So says Ed Husain, 34, co-director of the counter-extremist think-tank Quilliam and himself a “reformed jihadi” who knows what it’s like to be young, impressionable and subject to unchallenged Islamist rhetoric.

In London, he singles out the huge East London and Regent’s Park mosques as being of particular concern. “Hizb-ut Tahrir, an organisation which refuses to condemn suicide bombers, still holds meetings inside Regent’s Park Mosque every Saturday, despite widespread public protest but the imam there, a foreigner, does nothing to stop it,” says Husain.

“And at the East London Mosque, which has thousands of congregants, the main imam is a guy who trained in Wahabist Saudi Arabia. One of their trustees, Azad Ali, employed as a civil servant, was recently suspended from his job at the Treasury because he suggested killing British troops fighting in Iraq is justified.

“And in their bookshop there are volumes such as Milestones which is known to be Bin Laden’s bible. It has chapters entitled ‘the virtues of killing a non-believer’ and argues that ‘attacking non-believers in their territories is a collective and individual duty’.”

Husain, living in Essex with his London-born Muslim wife, Faye, 30, and their 18-month daughter, Camilla, knows the East London Mosque all too well, he says. As a former radical activist for Hizb in charge of recruitment at Newham College campus in the 1990s, it was his stamping ground, but since he wrote his 2007 memoir The Islamist – about how he became a fundamentalist at 16 only to reject it five years later – it’s too dangerous for him to return.

“I’ve received personal death threats from those quarters. I’ve had emails warning me that if I go back, I’ll be whipped and hanged.”

“When the death threats impact your family, it’s extremely hard to take,” he says. “Recently my wife was watching The Islam Channel on digital satellite television when a piece came on that was so full of hostility and hatred towards me that she fainted – clean passed out – from the shock.”

Evening Standard, 27 February 2009

Norway: Islamophobia boosts support for Right

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The right wing Progress Party (FrP) regains lost ground and now has the support of 29.4 per cent of the electorate, according to Norstat’s February poll. This is up by 6.3 points from January, and only 3.6 points behind the Labour Party.

The poll was made for the newspaper Vaart Land, shortly after FrP-leader Siv Jensen made her controversial speech in which she said that “Norway is undergoing a subtle islamification”, and after Justice Minister Knut Storberget announced his turnaround on the police hijab-issue.

Norway Post, 27 February 2009

Dawkins on Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The young men whom you call ‘radicalised Britons’ and ‘extremists’ are just honest Muslims who take their scriptures seriously (‘We are fighting British jihadists in Afghanistan’, 25 February). They sincerely believe what all Muslims are taught to believe: that the Koran is the inerrant word of God. If Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, will Afghanistan be lost in the faith schools of Birmingham?”

Letter from Richard Dawkins in the Independent, 26 February 2009

Sun pays £30,000 damages to Muslim bus driver accused of fanaticism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Arunas RaulynaitisA London bus driver today accepted £30,000 in damages from the Sun over a claim that he ordered passengers off his vehicle so that he could pray.

The story in March last year caused Arunas Raulynaitis considerable distress and embarrassment, his solicitor, Stephen Loughrey, told Mr Justice Eady at the high court in London.

Loughrey said the newspaper now accepted that the allegations were entirely false and that Raulynaitis did not order any passengers off, there was no rucksack and no one refused to reboard because they feared he was a fanatic.

“The article went on to allege that the passengers later refused to reboard the bus because they spotted a rucksack and feared he may be a fanatic and therefore, it is to be inferred, a terrorist,” Loughrey told the court.

“While it is the case that Raulynaitis did pray on the bus, he did so during his statutory rest break, as he is of course entitled to do. Not a single passenger was inconvenienced in any way. It transpires that an individual who noticed Raulynaitis at prayer chose to film this act on a mobile phone and sent the video to the Sun, which then reproduced stills from it alongside the article, as well as the footage itself on the Sun’s website.”

Loughrey said the article not only created an utterly false impression of Raulynaitis’s attitude toward his passengers, but also wrongly cast serious aspersions on his religious faith.

He added that News Group Newspapers, the News International subsidiary that publishes the Sun, had already published an apology and agreed to pay substantial damages plus costs.

Guardian, 26 February 2009

Norway is ‘undergoing a subtle Islamification’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Progress Party leader Siv Jensen’s statement in a speech on Sunday, that Norway is undergoing a subtle islamification has sparked controversy. Conservative Party deputy leader Per-Kristian Foss likens it to the attacks on Jews in the 30s.

• There are certain points of resemblance to the 30s fear of other minorities, in this case the Jews, Foss says.

• It is of course not true that there is any islamification of the Norwegian society, he says.

In her speech to the right-wing Progress Party (FrP) national board on Sunday, Siv Jensen warned against what would happen if what she called “a subtle islamification” of Norway would continue. She pointed to what had happened to the Swedish city of Malmoe, where according to Jensen Sharia laws had been introduced in sections of the city, and where the police hardly dared to enter.

Norway Post, 23 February 2009

Ontario: former judge wants to bar Muslims from scholarships

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A retired judge wants two Ontario universities to bar Muslim students from being awarded scholarships he has established, though the spokesperson for one institution says her school won’t support a proposal that “flies in the face of everything we stand for.”

Paul Staniszewski said he objects to the “medieval violence” used by the Taliban – such as when Taliban militants recently kidnapped and beheaded Polish engineer Piotr Stanczak – and he wishes to “disqualify” Muslim students from receiving financial aid he has paid for.

“I’m reacting to what’s going on to people who aren’t even soldiers, who are having their heads beheaded and this stuff is shown on the TVs and everything else,” Staniszewski told CTV.ca in a phone interview from his Tecumseh, Ont., home, just outside of Windsor.

“I am doing the same thing these people are doing, except I’m not cutting off heads, I’m cutting off applications for help in their studies,” he added later in the interview.

CTV.ca, 25 February 2009

Civil servants pay £2,000 each (of your cash) to hear Islamic extremist

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ibrahim Moussawi“Government officials will spend thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money to attend a lecture by an Islamic extremist whom Jacqui Smith is under pressure to ban from Britain.

“Yesterday, the Mail revealed how the Home Secretary was facing demands to deny a visa to Ibrahim Moussawi – a spokesman for the Lebanese terrorist organisation Hezbollah – to come to speak at a British university. Now it has emerged that the lectures Moussawi plans to deliver are targeted at Whitehall officials who deal in foreign affairs and extremism. They will each spend up to £1,890 of taxpayers’ cash attending the Political Islam event at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) next month.

“Moussawi – who is among the key speakers at the week-long course – is scheduled to address two sessions on March 25 and is expected to be paid for the talks. Another speaker at the event is the UK-based extremist Dr Kamal Helbawy, a former spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood – a group said to have inspired Al Qaeda [sic].

“Last night, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, a researcher for the Centre for Social Cohesion, a respected think-tank, said: ‘In their willingness to pay extremists like Dr Helbawy and Dr el-Moussawi, SOAS are helping these men present themselves as mainstream figures. ‘It is particularly worrying that the target audience includes Government officials and the police, who may find themselves paying for advice on tackling terrorism from its very exponents’.”

Daily Mail, 26 February 2009

And Daily Mail home affairs editor James Slack writes: “So here comes the acid test: is Jacqui Smith, as she proclaims, an enemy of extremism in all its forms, or a cowardly hypocrite? In October, the Home Secretary announced ‘tough new measures’ to deny entry to Britain to anybody ‘engaged in fostering, encouraging or spreading extremism and hatred.’ In recent weeks she has put them to use by banning a Dutch MP with hugely controversial views on Islam, and a notorious anti-gay US preacher. But will she be prepared to apply the same new standards to Islamic extremists who preach a hatred of Jews?”

Update:  Entirely predictably, if a trifle belatedly, the “left-wing” blog Harry’s Place – which is increasingly indistinguishable from the Daily Mail – joins in the witch-hunt.

Germany: headscarf bans violate rights

Posted on by Bob Pitt

HRW+headscarf+reportGerman state bans on religious symbols and clothing for teachers and other civil servants discriminate against Muslim women who wear the headscarf, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

The 67-page report, “Discrimination in the Name of Neutrality: Headscarf Bans for Teachers and Civil Servants in Germany,” is based on extensive research over an eight-month period. It analyzes the human rights implications of the bans and their effect on the lives of Muslim women teachers, including those who have been employed for many years. It says that the bans have caused some women to give up their careers or to leave Germany, where they have lived all their lives.

“These laws in Germany clearly target the headscarf, forcing women who wear it to choose between their jobs and their religious beliefs,” said Haleh Chahrokh, researcher in the Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch. “They discriminate on the grounds of both gender and religion and violate these women’s human rights.”

HRW news release, 26 February 2009

Download report here.

This counter-terror plan is in ruins

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The British government’s brand new counter-terrorism strategy is already in disarray – and ministers have only themselves to blame. The souped-up plan to fight al-Qaida, confound dirty bombers, halt suicide attacks and confront “extremism” in the country’s Muslim community was unveiled by the prime minister with much fanfare on Tuesday. But even before the 175-page “Contest 2” document had been launched, the credibility of its promise to engage with the Muslim mainstream had been thrown into question by the decision of Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, to cut all links with the Muslim Council of Britain.

Blears had been gunning for the MCB, the country’s main Muslim umbrella body, which has shown increasing independence in recent years, particularly in relation to British foreign policy. The pretext was a statement about Israel’s onslaught on Gaza signed by the MCB’s number two, Daud Abdullah, which Blears interpreted as a call for attacks on British ships if they were sent to intercept arms supplies to Hamas. Ten days ago, in a tone more associated with Raj-era colonial governors than democratic politicians addressing independent community bodies, Blears delivered an ultimatum to the MCB: either it sacked its elected deputy general secretary or all contacts would be severed.

Never mind that Gordon Brown’s idea about policing Palestinian waters has been kicked into the long grass of international talks; or that Abdullah, a Caribbean-born veteran of Grenada’s leftwing New Jewel Movement (later overthrown by Ronald Reagan) made clear he was not calling for such attacks – let alone attacks on Jewish communities, as Blears claims in a letter in today’s Guardian. All links have now been suspended. And if there were any doubt that the attempt to isolate Britain’s most significant Muslim body was linked to the new anti-terror policy, the timing of the ultimatum for the eve of the launch made clear that for Blears they were all of a piece.

Seumas Milne in the Guardian, 26 March 2009