Author Archives: Bob Pitt

Straw: ‘big cultural divide’ between Muslims and the rest of British society

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jack Straw waded into a race row again last night by calling on Asian women to learn English before being allowed to settle in the UK. The Leader of the House of Commons also said there was a “big cultural divide” between Muslims and the rest of British society.

The Labour MP’s comments come just four months after he stirred up fury by calling on Muslim women to remove their veils, describing the garment as a “symbol of separation”.

Speaking at an integration conference in his constituency in Blackburn, Lancs, he said he knew a family who moved to the UK in 1954 but the woman could still not speak a word of English. Mr Straw said: “One of the things we should be looking at is the subject of Asian women speaking English and whether we need to engage them and require them to speak English before they are given a settlement visa.”

He added: “One of the things we need to recognise is that there is a big cultural divide between Muslims and the rest of us, more than say with the Afro-Caribbean community.”

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Why socialists should resist Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Deepa KumarAn excellent article by Deepa Kumar in the US Marxist journal International Socialist Review analyses the “orientalist” ideological roots and pro-imperialist mythology of Islamophobia. She concludes:

“Confronting Islamophobia and challenging American racism towards the people of the Middle East is an essential precondition for the rebirth of a strong antiwar movement…. And while Bush argues that ‘the calling of our generation’ is to fight ‘Islamofascism’, we need to assert instead that the calling of our generation is to build an anti-racist antiwar movement that can challenge the attacks on Muslims and Arabs domestically and that can stop U.S. imperialism in its tracks and shape the course of the twenty-first century. Our future, quite literally, depends on building such a movement.”

ISR, March-April 2007

For orientalism, see also Grace Lally’s article in Socialist Worker, 24 February 2007

Daniel Pipes fights the worldwide threat of Islamism — from Malibu

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“Pipes calls himself a ‘soldier’ in the war against Islamic fundamentalism…. He soon plans to unveil Islamist Watch, a Web site which he describes as an attempt to monitor nonviolent radical Islam in the West…. Like his father, Daniel Pipes has a reputation for bluntness and a willingness to go against conventional wisdom – both in the academy and elsewhere. Whereas Richard Pipes sounded the alarm against appeasing the Soviets, Daniel Pipes preaches against working with radical Muslims, no matter how law-abiding, scholarly or open-minded they might appear. Instead, ‘like David Duke and Louis Farrakhan’, Pipes said, ‘Islamists should be ostracized socially and politically’.”

Jewish Journal, 6 March 2007

‘How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The appalling Phyllis Chesler (the US feminist who has compared Tariq Ramadan to Hitler) complains that “Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonised me as a reactionary and racist ‘Islamophobe’ for arguing that Islam … is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sharia in the West.”

Times, 7 March 2007

The so-called “landmark Islamic Summit Conference in Florida” that Chesler is so enthusiastic about is also boosted by the likes of Family Security Matters and Front Page Magazine.

World’s soccer chiefs chicken out

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Accusing of the International Football Association Board of “pointless cowardice” over the Asmahan Mansour case, the Montreal Gazette also lays into the Quebec Soccer Federation, who were responsible for banning her in the first place:

“You don’t have to be Muslim to wonder how a scarf, especially if tucked in at the neck, can be dangerous. One could even make a case that an exposed pony tail – common enough on the pitch – could conceivably be riskier than covered hair. So the Quebec Soccer Federation now needs to explain itself. Can it cite safety studies? Offer horrible examples of death by hijab? Provide any defence at all of this narrow-minded ruling? If not, it should reverse itself.”

Montreal Gazette, 6 March 2007

See also “FIFA hijab ruling deserves red card”, Edmonton Journal, 6 March 2007

Anti-terror laws: many arrested, few convicted

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The Government’s campaign to tackle the “terrorist threat” was again questioned today as the Home Office released the latest statistics on individuals arrested under anti-terrorism laws. Of the 1,166 arrested in the UK since September 11 2001, only 40 have been convicted under anti-terrorism legislation. More than half of those suspected of being terrorists of one form or another have been released without any charge at all.

Ummah Pulse, 6 March 2007

See also Press Association, 5 March 2007

GALHA continues to incite anti-Muslim bigotry

Posted on by Bob Pitt

GHQ-Winter0607-web.cdr“The word ‘appeasement’ is rarely used except in the context of Neville Chamberlain’s deal with Hitler in 1938, but what about the present appeasement of Muslims in Britain? … We are told that Islam itself cannot be blamed for the terrorist attacks on New York, Madrid, and London, followed by widespread carnage in retaliation for the publication of a few innocuous drawings. That is like saying that the horrors of the Inquisition had nothing to do with Christianity….

“Islam has failed to moderate its cruel practices to the extent that mainstream Christianity has done in the past couple of centuries. The Taliban, Al-Qa’eda, and the Badr Corps are certainly extremist, but they are orthodox, deriving logically from the Koran, which denigrates women and tells believers to wage jihad against heretics and infidels.”

Barbara Smoker, the former long-time president of the National Secular Society, writes in the latest issue of (pdf) Gay Humanist Quarterly.

GHQ is edited by Brett Lock of OutRage! by the way.

Readers of Islamophobia Watch will no doubt also be aware that the publishers of GHQ, the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, underwent an acrimonious split in 2005 over the publication of racist anti-Muslim material in their then magazine Gay and Lesbian Humanist. (See here, here, here, here, here and here.) GHQ is published by the faction within GALHA who supposedly rejected Islamophobic bigotry! Perhaps the two sides should consider getting back together.

It might be noted that in addition to Barbara Smoker GALHA’s vice-presidents include Labour MEP Michael Cashman, Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris and London Assembly member Darren Johnson of the Green Party. It might be an idea to draw their attention to the contents of GALHA’s current magazine.

Update:  For Yusuf Smith’s comments, see Indigo Jo Blogs, 7 March 2007

Muslims threaten Australia’s identity, says Pell

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Cardinal George PellThe Muslim community is overly sensitive and is the only migrant group to have plotted violence against Australia, Catholic Archbishop Cardinal George Pell has claimed.

Dr Pell said integration was a “key tool” for a harmonious and secular democratic society. “Equal rights however, carry with them equal responsibilities – problems arise when minorities demand special consideration that places them outside the law as it applies to other citizens,” he said.

“Flexibility and adaptability are called for when refugees and immigrants arrive in our country but there is a limit in (adopting) minority demands beyond which a democratic host society cannot go without losing its identity.”

The Australian, 4 March 2007

For earlier statements on Islam by Cardinal Pell, see here and here.