Yearly Archives: 2011

Don’t worry, Islamophobia isn’t a problem – we have Andrew Gilligan’s word for it

Posted on by Bob Pitt

EDL Close East London Mosque NowAndrew Gilligan has a piece on his Telegraph blog, titled “Islamophobic crime fell in London last year – MCB spins the opposite”, in which he responds to the Independent on Sunday report on rising anti-Muslim hatred in the UK.

Gilligan accuses the Muslim Council of Britain’s secretary-general Farooq Murad of falsely claiming that hate crime against Muslims has risen in London. Now, I realise that Gilligan is the Telegraph‘s London editor and has a bit of an obsession with events in the capital, but if he had bothered to read the Independent report properly he would see that Farooq Murad was referring to the situation nationally, and made no reference to London.

Gilligan goes on to assert that “anti-Muslim hatred in Britain … is, thankfully, diminishing”, although he offers no real evidence for this. True, as the Independent article points out, police data on Islamophobic offences are not collated centrally and many forces do not compile such statistics at all, so hard evidence regarding hate crime nationally is lacking. However, you might have thought that the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain would be in a better position than Gilligan to make an informed judgement on whether anti-Muslim hatred is on the increase across the UK.

And then there is the question of whether the figures for London are themselves reliable, given that a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police accepts that hate crime against Muslims has been significantly under-reported. Indeed, taking the Met’s figures at face value, Gilligan would be forced to conclude that between 2008 and 2009 there was a massive rise in anti-Muslim hatred in London, with Islamophobic offences increasing from 106 to 368 and incidents of religiously motivated violence against Muslims from 96 to 303.

Of course, you can understand why Gilligan might have an interest in denying that there is a problem with rising Islamophobia in the UK, and in accusing the Independent of having fallen for “the Islamists’ grievance-mongering agenda” – because his disgraceful witch-hunting of the East London Mosque has fed the very anti-Muslim hatred whose existence he denies.

Update:  See also “Andrew Gilligan on anti-Muslim hate crimes”,ENGAGE, 14 June 2011

The sharia myth sweeps America

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“If you are not vitally concerned about the possibility of radical Muslims infiltrating the U.S. government and establishing a Taliban-style theocracy, then you are not a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. In addition to talking about tax policy and Afghanistan, Republican candidates have also felt the need to speak out against the menace of ‘sharia’.”

Amy Sullivan in USA Today, 12 June 2011

Update:  See also  “Muslim coalition asks GOP debaters to reject Islamophobia”, CAIR press release, 13 June 2011

And “Republicans debate Muslim loyalty tests and Sharia courts on CNN”, Mediaite, 13 June 2011

Bulgaria: chief mufti says state has failed to act against Islamophobic violence, calls on Muslims to organise self-defence

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Volen Siderov, leader of Bulgaria's nationalist party "Attack", attends protest in front of Banya Bashi Mosque in central Sofia
Ataka leader Volen Siderov heads the protest against Sofia mosque on 20 May

Part of the Bulgarian society is plagued with Islamophobia, the Bulgarian Chief Mufti’s Office has declared in a special statement urging the Bulgarian Muslims to take measures to defend themselves against attacks.

Monday’s statement of the Chief Mufti’s Office comes a day after on Sunday the warden of the main mosque in downtown Sofia suffered a brutal assault at the hands of unidentified attackers just minutes before the start of the morning prayer on Sunday.

In it, the Chief Mufti’s Office refers to the incident of May 20, 2011, when extremists from the nationalist and far-right party Ataka assaulted praying Muslims outside the Sofia Mosque Banya Bashi when an Ataka rally against the loudspeakers of the mosque got out of hand.

The Chief Mufti’s Office, however, complains that numerous similar incidents have followed ever since, and that the Bulgarian state institutions have failed to protect the Muslims in Bulgaria and their temples.

“After this next case of violence against a Muslim and the desecration of a mosque, the Bulgarian Muslim community has received a clear message that the state is either unable to protect us, or doesn’t want to do that, which leaves us in a very hard situation as citizens of the EU who were still hoping that there are sufficiently good democratic mechanisms for preventing repressions against us,” reads the statement of the religious leadership of the Bulgarian Muslims.

“Unfortunately, our hope turned out to be illusionary, our expectations were not met, and we are now aware that we have to provide for our own security and rights. Nnumerous cases, some of them rather shocking, in the recent years lead us to assume that Muslims are unwanted in this country, and that pressure against us will continue… [They] show that part of the Bulgarian society is hostile and aggressive against Islam, Islamic values, and the Muslim community,” the Chief Mufti’s Office says stressing that the above-described incidents should not be treated as hooliganism or criminal acts “but as a common strategy and intolerance against the Muslims, which could probably lead to more large-scale operations.”

“This kind of islamophobia and pressure expressed as threats, insults, restricting religious rights, and physical violence should be treated as an attempt to instigate inter-religious conflicts, a civil war, and a threat to the national security,” the Chief Mufti’s Office declares.

The statement further explains that even though after the attack on the Banya Bashi mosque on May 20, 2011, the Bulgarian Muslims “received the support of the politicians, the intelligentsia, and part of the society”, similar incidents have continued to occur.

The Chief Mufti’s Office says that on May 30, 2011, it alerted Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov about several more cases of physical assaults on praying Muslims but that it did not see any reaction from human rights organizations, the government, the civil society, the political parties.

“Why? Probably because we are now used to such incidents and because some circles acquiesce to the violence against us?.. The National Assembly of the Republic of Bulgaria adopted a declaration stating that the Muslims do not need to defend themselves because the authorities can do that. It turns out that this is not really true, and it is an attempt to put out the problem, to win time, and to blunt our feelings,” says the office of the Bulgarian Chief Mufti.

It further calls upon the Muslims in the country to organize day and night guards as volunteers “in order to protect what the state fails to protect – the honor and dignity of Islam and Muslims.”

“These steps are the beginning of a self-protection campaign. We are going to inform you of your next steps depending on the development of the problems and the desires of the community. In conclusion, we turn to our state leaders, institutions, and authorities, to all evil-minded people, to all Islamophobes, to all attackers – do you think that we love Bulgaria less than you?”, concludes the Chief Mufti’s Office.

Novinite, 13 June 2011

EDL animals object to being treated like animals

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The leader of the far-right English Defence League has vowed to stage a large national protest in Dewsbury after complaining that supporters were treated like “caged animals” at a demonstration in the town on Saturday.

A protest by 400 EDL supporters passed off without serious incident but leader Tommy Robinson was angered that the protesters were contained within high steel barriers. He said the EDL should have been allowed to protest at Dewsbury Town Hall, rather than a tightly cordoned area of the railway station car park.

Mr Robinson said Saturday’s protest was a regional demonstration but the next one in would be national and “the EDL bandwagon will be coming back to Dewsbury in our thousands”.

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Harry’s Place applauds LSE for offering platform to anti-Muslim bigot who supports ethnic cleansing

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Benny MorrisOver at the Islamophobic blog Harry’s Place Michael Ezra can scarcely contain his excitement at the news that Israeli historian Benny Morris will be speaking at the London School of Economics tomorrow at the invitation of the LSE Middle East Centre. The organisers state: “The lecture will look at various aspects, some of them innovative, of the 1948 War, the first between the Arabs and Israel.”

Benny Morris is the man who, in a notorious interview with Haaretz in 2004 entitled “Survival of the fittest”, supported the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs in 1948 and only regretted that the Zionist leadership had not gone further.

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