Author Archives: Bob Pitt

Blair engages with ‘moderate Muslims’ – but excludes MCB

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tony Blair will address a high-level conference on Islam in London today as part of the Government’s strategy to engage with moderate Muslims and isolate religious extremists.

Politicians and religious leaders from more than 30 Muslim countries will attend the event. It will be addressed by Islamic scholars from Britain and overseas. In a sign of the importance attached to the event, it will open with a video message from the Prince of Wales, and this evening Gordon Brown will host a reception.

David Cameron will speak at the conference tomorrow, having been asked to do so by Mr Blair, as will the Bishop of London, Dr Richard Chartres.

There has been some criticism because the programme includes no speakers from the Muslim Council of Britain.

Times, 4 June 2007

Posted in UK

$287,000 awarded in Ramadan scarf suit

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A federal jury has ordered Alamo Rent A Car to pay a Muslim woman $287,640 for firing her because she refused to remove a head scarf she was wearing during the holy month of Ramadan. The firing of Bilan Nur, then 22, came just four months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the company for what it termed a “post 9/11 backlash,” alleging that Nur was fired because of her religious beliefs in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

U.S. District Judge Roslyn O. Silver ruled last year that the government had proven religious discrimination and Alamo had shown no proof that it had taken reasonable steps to allow Nur to follow her beliefs before firing her. That left the jury in the trial that ended Friday with only the question of how much damages to award, said Mary Jo O’Neill, the regional attorney for the EEOC. The jury in the three-day trial awarded Nur $21,640 in back wages, $16,000 in compensatory damages and $250,000 in punitive damages.

Associated Press, 3 June 2007

Swiss Muslims denied landmark center

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Swiss Muslims expressed deep disappointment Saturday, June 2, at government rejection of plans to build Europe’s largest Islamic cultural and economic center in the capital city of Bern. The Umma group, which proposed the construction of the giant Islamic center, said it hoped that authorities would have a closer examination of the proposal and compared notes with Muslim leaders before turning down the project.

Muslims voiced fears that the Swiss authorities may have been influenced by the recent ferocious right-wing anti-Islam campaigns. The right-wing Swiss People’s Party and the Federal Democratic Union lunched a nationwide campaign to collect signatures to ban the construction of mosques with minarets.

Islam Online, 2 June 2007

US media ignore ‘Christian terrorists’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Mark Uhl, a student at Liberty University, was in possession of homemade bombs when he was arrested at [Jerry] Falwell’s funeral. He reportedly planned to use them against any protesters who might disrupt the festivities.

“Uhl had this to say on the social networking website My Space. ‘Christians, fear of death, fear of death. The fear of death shows you don’t believe.’ He added this eye opening statement as well. ‘God needs soldiers to fight so his children may live free. Are you afraid??? I’m not. SEND ME!!!’ Uhl sounds an awful lot like Osama bin Laden, who exhorts Muslims not to fear death when fighting in the name of their religion.

“While Americans have been told to fear Islam and all things Muslim, Christians are riding around with home made bombs. The Uhl story was mentioned by the media for only a day or two. The threat from Christians who publicly express a willingness to die for their faith goes unreported.”

Margaret Kimberley at Black Agenda Report, 30 May 2007

The Islamist – ‘a PR job for the Blair government’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Young Muslims are no more likely to join Hizb ut-Tahrir than young Christians are to join the Moonies. You have to be of a certain bent to come under the influence of a cult and join as a fully paid-up member. Fortunately, in my experience, the vast majority of young British Muslims have more sense and critical acumen than Husain.

“The suggestion that the radicalisation of Muslim youth can be laid firmly on the door of Hizb is also hard to swallow. The anger of young Muslims against the West has a much broader context. There was a great deal going on during the 1990s that agitated young Muslims and brought anti-Western sentiment to the fore – from the first Gulf War to the genocide of Muslims in Chechnya. But Husain sees the world in reductive, one-dimensional terms.

“When he finally realises his folly, and bids farewell to Hizb, Husain continues to be a reductive extremist. Now, the entire blame for the radicalisation of Muslim youth is placed on multiculturalism – the very idea that gave Husain all the opportunities he had in life! Terrorists, he tells us, are a product of sexual frustration. So we ought to provide them with generous doses of sex to usher them towards peaceful directions.

“Hizb ut-Tahir should be banned so that they can take their nefarious activities underground and become even more difficult to tackle. Muslim organisations are secret terrorist sympathisers. Husain doesn’t tell us what we should do with them. But I suspect he wants everyone locked up, leaving the terrain open for his brand of neocons to run amok….

“The occasional insight of Husain’s memoir notwithstanding, The Islamist seems to have been drafted by a Whitehall mandarin as a PR job for the Blair government.”

Ziauddin Sardar reviews The Islamist in the Independent, 1 June 2007

Muslim women players fight to wear hijab on the pitch

Posted on by Bob Pitt

FootballA national five-a-side Muslim women’s football team is fighting for the right to play in their religious headscarf. Team captain and chairwoman of the Muslim Women’s Sport Foundation Rimla Akhtar is leading the campaign.

Under rules of the International Football Association Board, scarves such as the hijab cannot officially be worn. Individual referees can decide whether to let women flout the regulations or send them off. Miss Akhtar, from north London, said the attitude towards the hijab was causing resentment and is demanding legislation be altered to allow it.

The IFAB is yet to make an official decision but Miss Akhtar said that if football bosses continued to drag their feet, sides such as Iran could lose their best players. “I wear the hijab and it is kept on very securely, so it is not a safety problem”, she said. “There is as much chance of a player pulling on your shirt as there is of them pulling on your hijab.”

IFAB guidelines state a player must not “use equipment or wear anything that is dangerous to himself/herself or another player”.

Liverpool supporter Miss Akhtar, who was the only Muslim girl in her school team, belongs to the British Muslim Women’s Futsal Team. Futsal is a form of football first developed from street football in South America.

Miss Akhtar said five years since Bend It Like Beckham was released, in which a young Sikh player fights against prejudice, discrimination has not been stamped out. “We should be clear that wearing the hijab is not an issue.”

Evening Standard, 31 May 2007

MCB commends UCU stand on spying

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Muslim Council of Britain welcomes the decision taken by the University and College Union (UCU) to reject government guidelines on how to supposedly tackle extremism on British campuses.

“Of course, if people come to know of violent acts being plotted then they have a clear civic duty to share that information with the police without delay. However, our universities must remain institutions which facilitate and encourage rigorous intellectual inquiry and discourse. The role of lecturers must be to facilitate and encourage critical thinking, not to stifle it or abort the process,” said Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, Secretary-General of the MCB.

It is ironic that some of the politicians who now recommend these measures were themselves victims of intelligence spying because of their political views when they were students in the 1970s. Just as intellectual freedom was priceless then, it should remain so today.

The MCB fully supports the UCU’s stand that there is no corroborative evidence of British universities being used as ‘hotbeds of Islamic extremism.’ Hence the directive to target Muslim students would only give rise to greater discontent, alienation and discord.

“Whatever the challenges that beset our society we should not resort to the dangerous ways of intellectual censure and religious witch-hunt,” added Dr Abdul Bari.

MCB press release, 31 May 2007

Who’s afraid of Tariq Ramadan?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tariq Ramadan New RepublicPaul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism, which has become the bible of ex-leftist supporters of the “War on Terror” like Nick Cohen, has a major article in The New Republic devoted to attacking Tariq Ramadan.

Mad Melanie Phillips hails Berman’s “magisterial piece of writing” which she claims “not only manages to disinter the extremism that Ramadan goes to such lengths to conceal but he also comprehensively shreds the various useful idiots who have sanitised Ramadan’s thinking for public consumption”.

Mel expresses her outrage that “despite the fact that Ramadan was excluded from the US because of his suspected links with extremism, Oxford university has given him an academic berth – and the British government appointed him as one of its advisers on how to deal with … Islamist extremism. Berman’s article shows just how deeply the west’s collective brain has been put to sleep.”

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 30 May 2007

Petition against Muslim girls’ school in Belgium

Posted on by Bob Pitt

BRUSSELS – A petition has been started in protest of plans to set up a secondary school in Molenbeek exclusively for Muslim girls. Many people are opposed to the idea, citing the separation of church and state in Belgium as grounds to block the plans.

The petition calls for a ban on “any ostensible sign of philosophical or religious membership in the context of a school, for students and especially for teachers.” They want this ban in effect for all schools that receive state subsidies.

“I don’t think that setting up an Islamic school is a fantastic idea, but that is what happens when people feel shut out by a traditional school,” was the response from Francophone antiracism foundation Mrax.

Expatica, 30 May 2007

‘I took a picture of Tower Bridge and was arrested for terrorism’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Socialist Worker Tower BridgeGovernment ministers and police chiefs are demanding new powers to allow the police to stop and search people in the streets if they suspect them of terrorism. These powers echo the notorious “sus laws” of the 1970s.

Then the laws created an atmosphere of fear as police targeted young black men. Those laws were abandoned after widespread rioting in the early 1980s.

A glimpse of what these new laws would mean was shown last week when two foreign students were arrested for “terrorism” after taking snapshots of Tower Bridge.

Socialist Worker, 2 June 2007