“I do not want thousands of Iranian students in my country, and if we allow the Iranians, what about the Saudis, Syrians and Lebanese? … Those Islamic students will return to their respective countries with the same deadly, ingrained hatred for us they grew up with, only better educated and much more sophisticated…. Under no circumstances should Middle Eastern students be allowed into this country by the ‘thousands’. That would be pure suicide.”
Letter in Florida Sun-Sentinel, 14 March 2007
Thugs threw bottles of Buckfast through the windows of a mosque while worshippers prayed inside, it emerged yesterday. Five panes were broken at the Central Scotland Islamic Centre in Stirling at about 8.30pm on Sunday. The imam, Mohammed Arif, said: “Those who were praying were frightened and alarmed at what happened.” About 30 people were inside the mosque at the time. Three men in their early 20s were seen running away.
In 1993 the center was targeted in an arson attack.
“I recently read one of the best and most insightful columns I’ve ever seen. ‘How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam: Is it racist to condemn fanaticism?‘ by Dr Phyllis Chesler originally appeared in The Times of London on March 7, 2007…. If every American were to read ‘How my eyes were opened’ I honestly believe that all but perhaps half a dozen Marxist holdouts would be all for leveling Teheran and Damascus tomorrow, at the very least.”
Erik Rush at Renew America, 12 March 2007
Abdiel Abdalhayy comments: “Smart, well-lettered racists and Islamophobes like Dr Chesler have to consider that semi-literate racists and Islamophobes like Erik Rush will, more than anyone else, wrap their meaty fists around articles like ‘How my eyes were opened’ and drag them through their dark, stupid world. Once likeminded racists who aren’t smart enough to blog on RenewAmerica.us have someone read articles like Rush’s to them, they’ll distill the message even further, and maybe take action. That’s the real weapon Chesler points at people like me, whether or not she realises it – or cares, for that matter.”
In the current issue of the New Statesman Johann Hari reviews Mark Steyn’s Islamophobic fantasy America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. Hari writes: “… if Steyn’s ‘warnings’ have a historical precedent, it is the hysteria among even liberal Americans such as Jack London in the early 20th century that anticipated Chinese immigrants would outbreed white Americans and take over the US. London’s solution was extermination; what is Steyn’s?” A fair point, except that Steyn’s book does in fact provide a clear indication of where he stands on this issue.
Hari’s review repeats the basic error of an earlier article in the Independent – namely that, while he’s excellent at demolishing the paranoid delusions of anti-Muslim racists like Steyn and Bat Ye’or, he has swallowed quite a bit of Islamophobic mythology himself, specifically over the issue of Islamism.
In the Independent piece, Hari wrote that Islamists fall into two categories: “the people who will lash and stone gays after winning at the ballot box and the people who will lash and stone gays after seizing power in a coup”. In the Steyn review, Hari describes Islamism as “a fascistic menace”. This is a wilfully ignorant attitude that does Hari no credit. He doesn’t even attempt to define Islamism. However, if you accept Graham Fuller’s definition of an Islamist – “one who believes that Islam as a body of faith has something important to say about how politics and society should be ordered … and who seeks to implement this idea in some fashion” – it can be seen that the term covers a wide variety of political views.
For example, according to Fuller’s definition, Tariq Ramadan is an Islamist. Does Hari categorise Professor Ramdan as a fascistic menace? Some people do. But it is difficult to see how this differs in any respect from the ravings of Mark Steyn.
As Soumaya Ghannoushi has pointed out: “Islamism, like socialism, is not a uniform entity. It is a colourful sociopolitical phenomenon with many strategies and discourses. This enormously diverse movement ranges from liberal to conservative, from modern to traditional, from moderate to radical, from democratic to theocratic, and from peaceful to violent. What these trends have in common is that they derive their source of legitimacy from Islam.”
Politically engaged Christians encompass a similar range of tendencies, from representatives of the evangelical Right such as Pat Robertson to anti-war activists like Bruce Kent. As Tariq Ramadan has observed, in the case of Christianity people are prepared to recognise these political distinctions. However: “In the case of Islam, engaging in the defence of the poor or carrying the most reactionary ideas does not make any difference. Judgement here falls like a chopper: ‘fundamentalists’.”
Australia should give priority to Christians wanting to flee persecution in Muslim countries the leader of the Christian Democratic Party, the Reverend Fred Nile, says. Mr Nile, a member of the NSW upper house, has called for a 10-year moratorium on Muslim immigration to Australia.
There had been no serious study of the potential effects on Australia of the more than 300,000 Muslims who are already here, he said. The CDP leader wants a study to look at the examples of the Netherlands and France, where the Muslim minority has become large enough to “flex its muscle”.
“The same thing is happening in our city of Sydney … they (Muslims) concentrate and virtually by population numbers they dominate that actual community,” he told Southern Cross Broadcasting today.
The NSW Greens called on the major parties to publicly reject Mr Nile’s call for an immigration moratorium and cancel any preference deals with his party. “Rev Nile’s statement makes NSW look ugly and racist,” Greens MP Lee Rhiannon said. “All public figures should distance themselves from such an unacceptable policy.”
Sydney Morning Herald, 12 March 2007
Australian Muslims announced on Monday, March 12, plans to form a political party to fight the spiraling Islamophobia in the country, opening the membership door for people of different faiths. “The political parties are focusing too much unfair attention on Muslims,” Kaysar Trad, spokesman of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia (IFAA), told Agence France-Presse (AFP). “We have to do whatever we can to make politicians focus on real issues rather than diversions on Muslims.”
Deborah Orr interviews Tariq Ramadan.
More hysterical nonsense from Anthony Glees.
As Britain’s wartime prime minister, he led the fight to crush Nazism and its plans to exterminate the Jewish race. Yet, even as Hitler was stepping up the persecution and Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) were fomenting unrest in Britain, Sir Winston Churchill believed that Jewish people were “partly responsible for the antagonism for which they suffer”.
Churchill penned the controversial views in 1937, only a year after Mosley’s blackshirts had clashed with Jews and other locals on Cable Street in east London and just months after Jews in Germany were banned from holding many professional occupations.
In comments that foreshadow the current debate on multiculturalism, Churchill argued that a tendency to form a “distinct and separate community” runs counter to the idea that settlers should be “100 per cent British” irrespective of their race and religion.
“The central fact which dominates the relations of Jew and non-Jew is that the Jew is different,” he added. “He has a different tradition and background. He refuses to be absorbed. In every country the Jews form a distinct and separate community – a little state within the state.”
Sunday Telegraph, 11 March 2007
Now, what does that remind you of? This perhaps?
Last month the notoriously homophobic mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, attended a mayoral summit meeting in London hosted by London’s mayor Ken Livingstone, prompting a protest by Peter Tatchell and the gay rights organisation OutRage! The website Gay.com reported:
“The Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, has denounced same-sex relationships and gay pride events as ‘satanic’, ‘unnatural’, ‘deviations’, ‘blasphemy’ and ‘deadly moral poison’. In February 2006, Grand Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin was quoted as saying about Moscow gay pride marchers, ‘If they come out on to the streets anyway they should be flogged. Any normal person would do that – Muslims and Orthodox Christians alike.’ For these reasons Outrage are co-ordinating a protest at London’s City Hall.”
Although the criticism of Luzhkov was right on the button, the reference to the Grand Mufti appeared, on the face of it, inexplicable. It is a well-established fact that, as Gay.com itself reported at the time, the attack on Moscow Pride in May 2006 was carried out by “skinheads and militant Orthodox Christians”. Yet the idea that the leader of Russia’s Muslims was the main instigator of the violent suppression of Moscow Pride has now apparently entered folklore among a section of the LGBT community in the UK.
The mayor of London had his own view on where this myth originated. In a statement issued by his press office in response to the controversy over Luzhkov’s visit, Livingstone condemned attacks on LGBT rights in Russia and Eastern Europe and the role of politicians in legitimising homophobia. But he continued: “The attempt of Mr Tatchell to focus attention on the role of the grand Mufti in Moscow, in the face of numerous attacks on gay rights in Eastern Europe which overwhelmingly come from right wing Christian and secular currents, is a clear example of an Islamaphobic campaign.”
Tatchell and his supporters responded with predictable indignation. Pink News quoted Tatchell as stating: “A year ago we once criticised the grand Mufti after he urged his followers to violently attack gay people in the streets. But the main focus of our criticism during that campaign was on the homophobia of the Chief Rabbi, the Russian Orthodox Church, neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists. To suggest that this was an Islamophobic campaign was nonsense, despicable and brings the Mayor’s office into disrepute.”
In a post on the neocon website Harry’s Place (to which he is a regular contributor) Brett Lock of OutRage! denounced Livingstone as “a shameless liar” and “a man without principles or integrity”. Lock insisted that “Tatchell didn’t say Russian Muslims were the leading force attacking gay rights”. He also accused the mayor of hypocrisy, on the grounds that in May 2006 Livingstone himself had condemned “support given by the Russian Orthodox Church, the Grand Mufti, and the Chief Rabbi” to the ban on Moscow Pride.
Somewhat contradictorily, George Broadhead of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA) – a group closely associated with OutRage! – weighed in with a further attack on the mayor, accusing him of refusing to criticise Muslim homophobia. “Mr Livingstone is clearly determined to treat Islam with kid gloves no matter how stridently homophobic its adherents are,” Broadhead declared. “The slightest criticism of Islam is immediately branded Islamaphobic.”
What was the actual practice of Tatchell, OutRage! et al during the run-up to Moscow Pride 2006? Is Lock correct in claiming that Tatchell “didn’t say Russian Muslims were the leading force attacking gay rights” in Moscow? Is there any truth to Tatchell’s assertion that they condemned the Grand Mufti only “once”, and that “the main focus of our criticism during that campaign was on the homophobia of the Chief Rabbi, the Russian Orthodox Church, neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists”? Let us examine the record.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is untrammeled and unrepentant: “I am supposed to apologize for saying the prophet is a pervert and a tyrant,” she declares. “But that is apologizing for the truth.” She does not believe that Islam has been “hijacked” by fanatics, but that fanaticism is intrinsic in Islam itself: “Islam, even Islam in its nonviolent form, is dangerous.”
The most grievous failing of the West is self-congratulatory passivity: We face “an external enemy that to a degree has become an internal enemy, that has infiltrated the system and wants to destroy it.”
Ms. Hirsi Ali notes Muslim birth rates are vastly outstripping those elsewhere (particularly in Western Europe) and believes this is a conscious attempt to extend the faith. Muslims, she says, treat women as “these baby-machines, these son-factories…. We need to compete with this,” she goes on. “It is a totalitarian method. The Nazis tried it using women as incubators, literally to give birth to soldiers. Islam is now doing it.”
Wall Street Journal, 10 March 2007
Robert Spencer is impressed.