Blaming terrorism on some unspecified evil ideologues within the Muslim community may please warmongers, but it won’t help us defeat the violent extremists, argues Inayat Bunglawala.
Author Archives: Bob Pitt
Just ignore Rushdie’s knighthood
Salman Rushdie’s recent knighthood has once again led to protests across Pakistan and Iran, yet British Muslims have refused to be provoked. Salma Yaqoob explains why.
London mayor defends Muslims as bomb plot foiled
London Mayor Ken Livingstone called on Britons Saturday not to demonize Muslims after a double car bomb plot was foiled in the capital, amid fears of a Islamist terror threat. “In this city, Muslims are more likely to be law-abiding than non-Muslims and less likely to support the use of violence to achieve political ends than non-Muslims,” he told BBC Radio. “They have played a good and active and growing role in creating a multi-cultural society,” he added.
He noted that terrorist acts had been carried out in London over the years by various groups including for example far-right groups. For years the British capital was wracked by violence by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). It was crucial to understand “that that doesn’t mean that all white men are potentially a threat to society any more than all Muslims are,” he added.
Fascists blame Glasgow car bomb on local Muslims
“Glasgow is Scotland’s largest city and home to an estimated 25,000 Muslims. We can expect the usual knee-jerk reaction from the establishment liberals that the alleged high levels of poverty found in the Muslim community is a factor driving young male Muslims to extremism. This is of course nonsense as high levels of poverty in Glasgow does not turn native Scots youths into suicide bombers. In reality the fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran, the Islamic holy book is the compelling factor behind these kinds of attacks; commanding as it does a holy war against non-believers to spread the word of Islam by any means necessary, including murder and mayhem. Suicide bombers are held in esteem by their immediate families and the wider Muslim community and those who die for Islam are promised ‘unlimited sex with 72 virgins in heaven’ … ‘beautiful like rubies, with complexions like diamonds and pearls’.”
BNP news article, 30 June 2007
Update: Never a model of consistency, the BNP now argues that the terrorists were not in fact homegrown at all. Utilising a police report that “none of the suspects is British in origin”, the fascists demand: “Doesn’t common sense suggest that we should refuse entry into Britain to all would-be immigrants and ‘asylum-seekers’ either known, or suspected, to be adherents of a certain religion?”
Magistrate walks out over Muslim woman’s veil
A magistrate is facing an inquiry after refusing to deal with a defendant wearing a full Muslim veil, the Judiciary of England and Wales said yesterday.
Ian Murray walked out of the case at Manchester magistrates’ court yesterday because Zoobia Hussain, 32, of Crumpsall, Manchester, was covered by a hijab. Hussain’s lawyer, Judith Hawkins, said her client was “shocked and distressed” and found Mr Murray’s treatment of her “insensitive and unacceptable”.
Miss Hawkins said she would submit a formal written complaint to the court on Monday. When the complaint is received, the judiciary will launch an internal investigation into Mr Murray’s behaviour, a spokesman said.
A spokesman for the Ramadhan Foundation said: “It is despicable that the judiciary is ignoring the guidelines about the wearing of the hijab set out only in February by the Judicial Studies Board. They require that magistrates and judges be ‘sensitive’ to a woman’s religious requirement to wear the hijab and work around it when possible.”
Mr Murray does however receive the support of the BNP who opine: “Those pushy Muslims never let up trying to change the way we have done things in this country for centuries.”
Update: See “Veil row magistrate reprimanded”, BBC News, 8 January 2008
Anti-Muslim attacks on the rise in the West
The level of hate crimes targeted towards Muslims and those who are thought to look like Muslims within Europe and North America is dramatically high according to a new survey released June 6 by a human rights organisation. It was revealed at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Bucharest, Romania, by Human Rights First, a leading human rights group based in America, and was part of their annual hate crime survey.
Executive Director of Human Rights First, Maureen Byrnes, claimed that violence against Muslims was extremely high in 2006. In criticising governments for lack of actions, she said, “Efforts to combat these crimes are greatly hampered by the fact that majority of governments in Europe still fail to collect date on these attacks.”
The annual report looked at the level of crimes committed against Muslims during 2006 and the growing trend of Islamophobia around the world since the attacks of September 11 and 7/7 bombings.
The report found that the violence towards Muslims was aggravated after September 11, fuelled by “the perpetuation of stereotypes and generalizations about Muslims,” and that terrorism acts done in the name of Islam caused “random reprisals against those identified rightly or wrongly as co-religionists of the perpetrators.” It described horrific incidents towards Muslims, from verbal and physical assaults including fatal incident at individuals to arsenic attacks at mosques and desecration of the Islamic books including the Qur’an.
‘Muslims hate dogs’ – shock revelation
“Recently, your paper carried an article about dogs being sent to Turkey by an animal charity in the Borders. I read the item with a sinking heart and it is still worrying me. Surely, everyone must know that Muslims hate dogs.
“Respect and compassion, let alone kindness, towards animals is not part of Islamic culture and the wicked cruelty to animals that is commonplace in Islamic countries has never been a secret from the rest of the world.
“Turkey is an Islamic country. Expats living there do what they can to help the numerous abused animals. Why on earth would anyone think to send dogs from the UK, and ones that have already been unlucky enough to end up in a shelter, to an Islamic country?”
Letter in the Southern Reporter, 27 June 2007
We’re of course familiar with Islamophobia being packaged as a defence of women’s rights or LGBT rights, but the use of animal rights as a cover for anti-Muslim bigotry is now gaining ground. See for example the BNP’s attempt to win support by opposing halal slaughter as “the most barbaric and primitive method of killing animals imaginable”
Tutu calls for better media reporting of religion
LONDON – Archbishop Desmond Tutu called on the media on Wednesday to be more careful in their choice of words when reporting on religious conflict.
“I would hope that you in the media would be passionate about letting people judge for themselves, that you would be careful about some of the language that you do actually use,” he said. “‘Muslim terrorism’ – have you ever read anywhere ‘Christian terrorism’? – as if Islam propagates violence, but you have never spoken about what happened in Northern Ireland as Christian terrorism,” he said.
Tutu added that understanding different religions required peoples of all faiths to understand different perspectives. “We Christians ought to get off our high horse and learn to be a great deal more humble, when you look at our history, the bloody things that we did in the name of religion,” he said.
SANE Works for US: coming to a Masjid near you!
“So you’re at prayers at your local mosque, and a pasty white guy in a pantomime Arab costume and fake beard comes up to you. He says, ‘Asalaamun alaykum, dear brother! You can speak freely in front of me. Would you like to discuss violent jihad against the kaafirs?’ You look around. Is your cousin Mustafa setting you up? Is there a hidden camera in the mihrab? Because when anything this patently ridiculous happens, there’s got to be an angle. And there is. Congrats! You’ve just been selected by the Mapping Shari’a Project for inclusion in their latest study.”
US border guards deport Canadian Muslims
Milgo Noor had an appointment at 3:30 p.m. this past Sunday to look at bridesmaid dresses in a Buffalo bridal shop. She never arrived. When the young bride-to-be tried crossing the border with her three bridesmaids – two sisters and a cousin – the women were detained for more than eight hours and two of them were escorted back into Canada in handcuffs.
Shortly after Noor, 26, showed her citizenship to a U.S. border guard at the Peace Bridge, more than a dozen customs officers “charged” at her vehicle, starting an ordeal that she said stripped her of her dignity. For three of the eight hours, Noor and her eldest sister Rukia, 32, were held in solitary holding cells. After asking repeatedly why they had been detained, they were laughed at by U.S. border officials. “You have no rights here,” they were told. “You came to us.”
Their rooms had a chair bolted to the floor, a wall-mounted surveillance camera and an alarm that sounded every 30 minutes. They were searched by border officials wearing gloves, the women said, as well as being fingerprinted and photographed. Noor said they were held without food or water. They sat while border officials ate pizza in front of them. “We asked for water and no one would even look at us. They told us to ‘Shut up and sit down’,” Noor said.
Mohamed Elmasry, national president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, said the incident does not surprise him. He says his organization receives about five complaints per week from Canadian Muslims who feel they have been treated unfairly at a U.S. entry point. “They’re brown and they have a Muslim name. There’s two strikes against them,” Elmasry said, adding that had the women been wearing the hijab it would have been three.
His organization advises Canadian Muslims to avoid travelling to the United States, and issues alerts before the annual Hajj pilgrimage urging Muslims to ensure their flights do not have U.S. stopovers.