Author Archives: Bob Pitt

Kelly continues to sideline MCB

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The government is planning to intervene in some mosques to support Muslims who want to marginalise extremists. Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly will announce a new role for the Charity Commission, strengthening its task of overseeing religious institutions. A £600,000 faith unit within the commission will help Muslims strengthen governance and leadership in mosques.

Ms Kelly’s department has changed government strategy by launching talks with a broader range of Muslim groups. But at the same time, the largest body, the Muslim Council of Britain, has fallen out of favour, leading to claims that ministers are talking only to those prepared to agree with government.

BBC News, 5 April 2007

Standard remove controversial mosque poll

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Evening Standard have removed a controversial poll from their ThisisLondon website after London Mayor Ken Livingstone highlighted an email an campaign to influence the outcome.

The poll asked readers to vote whether or not they were in favour of the Mayor spending £100 million of public money on a new Mosque in East London however Mr Livingstone has repeatedly denied any public funds would be spent on the project.

Yesterday Mr Livingstone said his office has been alerted to a series of emails being sent which make what he calls “a series of false claims about the mosque proposals in such a way as to stir up communal hatred” leading him to write to Veronica Wadley, Editor of the Evening Standard.

In his letter the Mayor asked Ms Wadley to “clarify to readers and visitors to the website that the poll will be disregarded as totally unrepresentative due to the attempt to influence its outcome through untrue mass emails likely to damage community relations in London.”

In response the Standard’s Managing Editor, Doug Willis, told Mr Livingstone the poll had been “published…last September. As is normal with daily polls, it remains on the website. We have today added a sentence to the website saying that since publication of the original poll and article, proposals for this mosque have been revised.”

Mayor Watch, 5 April 2007

Netherlands – Islamophobes split over Wilders

Posted on by Bob Pitt

geert_wildersIn the past few weeks, a debate on the alleged conflict of interest presented by the dual nationality held by two deputy ministers in the Dutch government has demonstrated the ability of right-wing Freedom Party (PVV) leader Geert Wilders to set the political agenda.

But opposition to Mr Wilders is growing among fellow politicians and journalists, and even well-known Islam critics such as Afshin Ellian and Sylvain Ephimenco are now publicly distancing themselves from the PVV leader. Their opponents, in turn, are jeering at them, saying they must be scared of the monster they helped create. These developments appear to mark a new episode in the Dutch Islam debate.

An open letter to Geert Wilders published in the 12 March edition of the magazine Opinio states: “You are using pseudo-theological one-liners about the Koran and the Prophet to intentionally create as much resentment as possible among offended Muslims.”

The letter would not have created much of a stir had it been written by anyone other than columnist Sylvain Ephimenco, who in the past years has manifested himself as a sharp-tongued critic of Islam. He is one of a group of intellectuals known as The Friends of  Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who give their unconditional support to the former Somali-Dutch MP in her campaign against the “excesses of Islam.”

Geert Wilders has never made a secret of the fact that his objections against immigrants mainly concern Muslims. But he has outdone himself with his recent diatribes against Islam. He has called the Prophet Muhammad a barbarian, an aggressive warlord and says that Muslims who want to stay in the Netherlands had better tear out and throw away half the Koran.

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No.10 website carries threats of violence against Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The extreme right have threatened violence against Muslims on Downing Street’s website in a protest over a proposed Mosque. The British National Party and other neo-Nazi groups are supporting a petition on No.10’s website which warns, ominously, of “terrible violence and suffering” should the so-called mega mosque go ahead. This is certain to be taken as a warning that physical violence could be unleashed against Muslims unless the dissenters get their way and defeat plans to build a mosque on the Olympic site in Stratford, east London.

Blink is encouraging readers to complain to No.10 over the reference to “terrible violence and suffering” if the mosque is built. Please email webmaster@pmo.gov.uk and ask for these words to be removed or failing that, the whole petition taken off line

BLINK, 5 April 2007

Relatives of interned Japanese-Americans side with Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Holly Yasui was far away when a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled last June that the government had wide latitude to detain noncitizens indefinitely on the basis of race, religion or national origin. The ruling came in a class-action lawsuit by Muslim immigrants held after 9/11. But Ms Yasui, an American citizen of Japanese ancestry, had reason to take it personally.

Her grandparents were among thousands of Japanese immigrants in the United States who were wrongfully detained as enemy aliens during World War II. And her father was one of three Japanese-Americans who challenged the government’s racial detention and curfew programs in litigation that reached the Supreme Court in the 1940s.

Now, Ms Yasui, along with Jay Hirabayashi and Karen Korematsu-Haigh, a son and a daughter of the two other Japanese-American litigants, is urging an appeals court in Manhattan to overturn the sweeping language of the judge’s ruling last year.

The ruling “painfully resurrects the long-discredited legal theory” that was used to put their grandparents behind barbed wire, along with the rest of the West Coast’s Japanese alien population, the three contend in an unusual friends-of-the-court brief filed today in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

In recent years, many scholars have drawn parallels and contrasts between the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the treatment of hundreds of Muslim noncitizens who were swept up in the weeks after the 2001 terror attacks, then held for months before they were cleared of links to terrorism and deported.

New York Times, 3 April 2007

Four years in Guantánamo – the man who said no to MI5

Posted on by Bob Pitt

guantanamo-bayBritish resident Jamil el-Banna, 44, knew Abu Qatada, a cleric accused of being al-Qaida’s spiritual leader in Europe.

In 2002 Mr Banna, a father of five from London, was seized by the CIA and secretly flown to Guantánamo Bay, after MI5 wrongly told the Americans that his travelling companion was carrying bomb parts on a business trip to Gambia.

On Friday, his companion, Bisher al-Rawi, was released without charge after four years in the US detention camp, after it emerged that he had helped MI5 keep track of Qatada. But Mr Banna’s incarceration in Cuba continues.

It has now emerged that only days before Mr Banna’s arrest, MI5 visited him at his home and attempted to recruit him as an informer, with the lure of a new identity, relocation and money. The Guardian has obtained this MI5 document in which the intelligence officer details, in his own words, that encounter.

Guardian, 4 April 2007

US right wing smears Pelosi as ‘subservient’ for wearing headscarf

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Right-wing bloggers in the US have been sneering at Nancy Pelosi for wearing a headscarf during her visit to the Umayyad mosque in Damascus – “yielding to a misogynistic culture’s expectations”, “behold Pelosi queen of the dhimmis”, you know the sort of thing. However, as one critic points out, Little Green Footballs et al are being rather selective in their Islamophobia: “Apparently they never saw Laura Bush when she visited al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.”

Think Progress, 4 April 2007

Parties unite in opposition to BNP as poll looms

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Politicians from all parties have put their differences aside in a bid to oppose the far-right British National Party. Sitting Assembly Members abandoned their campaigning and joined candidates and community members to discuss the BNP. The group is putting up a record 20 candidates in the National Assembly election, with the most high profile bid for power coming from leader Nick Griffin in the South Wales West constituency.

At a meeting in the Glamorgan Muslim Community Centre, Aberkenfig, near Bridgend, on Saturday, politicians including Environment Minister and Bridgend AM Carwyn Jones and Plaid Cymru candidate Bethan Jenkins pledged their commitment to tackling discrimination against ethnic minorities.

The Bridgend Unite Against Fascism Group, which organised the gathering, believes the BNP is a racist party which poses a threat to democracy and freedom. Unite spokesman Jeff Hurford said: “The highlight of the day was being able to get all of the parties together and a commitment to showing unity against the BNP. This all bodes well for future co-operation between the parties ahead of next year’s council elections.”

icWales, 4 April 2007