Author Archives: Bob Pitt

Schools where children don’t speak English

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The interesting thing about this story is the use of a picture of some Muslims to illustrate a negative immigration story. Again. Sod Godwin’s Law – this sort of thing works on the same level as ‘Der Ewige Jude’, the Nazi propaganda film that intercut a documentary about the migration of Jews with shots of teaming rats to create a connection between the two. Here we have negative stories about immigration and ethnicity mostly illustrated with pictures of Muslims to create hamfisted links between the two. How many of the girls in the picture are actually British? How many speak English? Doesn’t matter for the Express.”

Five Chinese Crackers on another scaremongering piece in the Daily Express.

Sir Salman’s long journey

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Salman Rushdie“Driven underground and into despair by zealotry, Rushdie finally emerged blinking into New York sunshine shortly before the towers came tumbling down. Those formidable literary powers would now be deployed not against, but in the service of, an American regime that had declared its own fundamentalist monopoly on the meanings of ‘freedom’ and ‘liberation’.

“The Sir Salman recognised for his services to literature is certainly no neocon but is iconic of a more pernicous trend: liberal literati who have assented to the notion that humane values, tolerance and freedom are fundamentally western ideas that have to be defended as such.

“Vociferously supporting the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq on ‘humane’ grounds, condemning criticism of the war on terror as ‘petulant anti-Americanism’ and above all, aligning tyranny and violence solely with Islam, Rushdie has abdicated his own understanding of the novelist’s task as ‘giving the lie to official facts’.”

Priyamvada Gopal in the Guardian, 18 June 2007

Muslim officer is first on the beat donning hijab

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Rukshana Begum is, without question, one of a kind. This week, the 23-year-old will become the first police officer ever to wear the Muslim hijab, or headscarf, on duty in Cambridgeshire. And she can’t wait. “I’ve struggled to get where I am,” she admits. “But I feel that my generation is the one which is going to break barriers. I hope that people will look at me and think, ‘If she can do it, so can I’.”

Cambridge Evening News, 18 June 2007

Launch of the Council of ex-Muslims of Britain

Posted on by Bob Pitt

namazie and racist placards 2Maryam Namzie of the Worker Communist Party of Iran is pleased to announce: “A British branch of a new Europe-wide phenomenon is to be launched on Thursday 21 June in London. The Council of ex-Muslims of Britain is building on the stunning success of other branches already operating in Germany, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The British Humanist Association and National Secular Society are sponsoring the launch and support the new organisation.”

A comment on Namazie’s blog indicates the support that the new organisation can expect to attract: “Congratulations to this new group. I hope that you have much success and contribute to the end of Islam in Europe. Islam, like facism [sic] and totalitarianism, has no place in a modern Europe. These dead ideologies must be swept aside so that we can all move together into the future. A world without Islam is a world much closer to peace. Thanks for standing up and providing hope for the millions of people who are held captive by Islam – freedom is possible!!”

Maryam Namazie’s blog, 18 June 2007

Muslims under attack at centre

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslims are being pelted with eggs and stones in anti-Islamic attacks on the South Woodford Muslim Community Centre seven years after it was destroyed in a petrol bomb attack.

“A few weeks ago there were people throwing eggs at children leaving the centre,” said Qaiser Malik, secretary of the Qurani Murkuz Trust behind the centre in Mulberry Way. “People have thrown eggs and stones from the flyover. They spit on our doors and have left ham and bacon on the doorstep. Apparently the same things are happening to people at bus stops in Woodford.”

Dr Mohammmed Essam El-Din Fahim, head Imam and chairman of the South Woodford centre, said Islamic hatred has been stirred up by BNP leaflets being distributed in the area condemning Islam and the mosque.

Wanstead & Woodford Guardian, 14 June 2007

Anti-Muslim protest by Master Race flops

Posted on by Bob Pitt

NF Islam Out of BritainThe Al Muhajiroun demonstration against “British Oppression” in Downing Street on Friday apparently passed off without incident. Reports indicate an attendance about 150, while the counter-protest initiated by Terry Blackham of the National Front attracted about 30 protestors according to the fascist website Stormfront – though photographs suggest it may have been even fewer.

Evidently expecting a huge response to his call for an anti-Islamist demonstration, Blackham had originally intended to march the vanguard of the White Race over to City Hall at the end of the demo to stage a mass protest against Ken Livingstone, so given the pathetic turnout he was well advised to abandon that idea. And over at YouTube you can watch an excerpt from Blackham’s inspirational address to his troops in which he predicts “world media attention on this event today”. Another slight misjudgement there, eh Terry?

On a more serious note, in a further speech to the demonstrators Blackham objected to the fascists being separated from the Al Muhajiroun protestors and declared that in future, instead of co-operating with the police, the NF will take direct action against Muslim communities: “This fucking barrier is a joke…. Let’s not have it…. You lot organise with me and we’ll turn up and we’ll oppose these [Muslims] at their mosques. I can’t wait until we can take their mosques down brick by brick.”

Surely there are grounds for Blackham being charged under the Public Order Act? Or are far-right racists – unlike Islamist extremists – immune to prosecution for inciting violence?

‘We cannot compromise with the cultures that are creating terrorism’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Basing himself on Shiv Malik’s “exceptionally penetrating article” in Prospect magazine – based on “research” that the BBC had the nerve to reject as “anti-Muslim” – Alasdair Palmer asserts that the problem of home-grown terrorism arises from allowing people from backward barbaric cultures into “our” liberal secular society:

“The central fantasy has been that immigrants from very different cultures to our own share our commitment to tolerance, personal freedom and the separation of politics from religion that has evolved in this country over the past 300 years…. One of the remarkable things about Mr Malik’s piece is that it is based around a recognition that it is impossible to explain how Khan, Tanweer and Hussain became suicide bombers without examining the culture from which they came…. Mr Malik’s article shows in arresting detail how a conflict within the culture of an immigrant group can lead to the radicalisation of the next generation. British foreign policy, which has been blamed for the creation of home-grown Islamic terrorists, has had very little to do with it…

“The reality is not all doom and gloom. The right to pursue happiness will surely eventually take root in a less violent and more liberal form among people from cultures that are inimical to it…. There are things that can be done to speed up the rate at which that happens, such as … ensuring that new arrivals learn English. Education is not an immediate panacea, however: the fundamentalist, tribal mentality has a remarkable ability to persist even after a successful education….

“The conflict between our culture and one that insists a father is obliged to kill his daughter if she marries outside her tribe, or which says that democracy should be forcibly replaced by theocracy, is a conflict for which there cannot be a compromise solution…. Government policy still seems based on the myth of multiculturalism: denying that the conflict is real. The Government has not even found the heart to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, the group that openly recruits Muslims to violent jihad. It may even be on the receiving end of a government grant.”

Sunday Telegraph, 17 June 2007

For an alternative view of the causes of terrorism, see the Scotsman, 17 June 2007

Fascists claim to defend gay rights

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Following on from a post at Home of the Green Arrow, another BNP member denounces the recent Time Out fantasy about life in a Muslim-majority London. Taking inspiration from the Pim Fortuyn strategy of whipping up racism under cover of defending liberal western values against the Islamic takeover of Europe, the article notes that “one can only wonder how gays, who make up a substantial proportion of Time Out readers, feel about the prospect of a deeply homophobic Islamic London”. That would be as distinct from a gay-friendly fascist London, would it?

Meanwhile another Nazi group, the tiny British People’s Party, has characterised the Time Out piece as “a wake up call to White Londoners who still cherish their heritage and identity”.