Author Archives: Bob Pitt

New attack on civil liberties

Posted on by Bob Pitt

New attack on civil libertiesNew attack on civil liberties: Lord Chancellor calls for more rights to go in the name of “fighting terror”

By Louise Nousratpour

Morning Star, 15 February 2007

LEFT MPs condemned fresh government attacks on civil liberties on Wednesday after Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer called for allowing criminal suspects to be questioned even after charges have been brought against them.

Critics warned that ministers were looking for a “fail-safe” plan in case fresh attempts to increase the period under which suspects can be held to 90 days failed again in Parliament.

Lord Falconer backed measures to allow police to question suspects after they have been formally charged as a “very sensible thing to do.” And he suggested that it should not be limited to terror suspects alone.

At present, police officers are not allowed to continue asking suspects about a case once charges have been made.

Speaking after a keynote speech at a Royal United Services Institute conference on politics and terrorism, Lord Falconer hinted that forthcoming terror laws will include further encroachments on civil liberties.

Campaigners and MPs warned that the proposal was designed to ensure that, if Home Secretary John Reid’s renewed attempt to extend the maximum detention period is defeated, there will be other measures to keep suspects locked up.

An attempt to increase the maximum period from 14 to 90 days led to new Labour’s defeat in the Commons in November 2005 and resulted in a 28-days compromise being reached.

Left MP Jeremy Corbyn called the proposal “a fail-safe policy in the event of Parliament rejecting the 90-day detention without trial to ensure that the government has some other draconian measure to fall back on.”

He accused the government and Lord Falconer of “trying to deny basic natural justice and to use the unfortunate development of anti-terror legislation to make them part of normal English law.

“This flies in the face of natural law and the European convention on human rights,” warned Mr Corbyn.

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Dutch far right party tries to block appointment of Muslims to Cabinet

Posted on by Bob Pitt

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands: A far-right Dutch political party objected Thursday to the appointment of two Muslims to the Cabinet because they have dual nationalities.

Ahmed Aboutaleb and Nebahat Albayrak were named to become the junior ministers for social affairs and integration respectively in the new centrist Cabinet being formed by Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende. They would be the first Dutch Cabinet members who are Muslim.

An opposition member of parliament for the nationalist Freedom Party said the two should be barred because they have second nationalities – Aboutaleb also holds Moroccan citizenship, and Albayrak Turkish. They “remain the servant of two different countries and that can lead to conflicting interests, and that’s why it’s necessary to oppose this,” Sietse Fritsma said.

His remarks were interrupted by an uproar of protest from lawmakers across the political spectrum until he was cut off by the gavel of the parliamentary chairwoman, Gerdi Verbeet.

Verbeet adjourned the session, and when it reconvened she said Fritsma had withdrawn his motion to block their appointment because it conflicted with the Dutch Constitution prohibiting discrimination, which he had sworn to uphold.

Geert Wilders, the leader of the Freedom Party, told NOS television later that Verbeet, a Labor Party member, was misusing her position to support the two designated Cabinet members, who belong to the same party. “It’s unworthy, not objective and very dangerous,” he said.

Press Association, 15 February 2007

See also Expatica, 15 February 2007

Tory twits attack Qaradawi

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Qaradawi and MayorYes, it’s another denunciation of the Mayor of London for engaging with leading Muslim scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi. This one is featured in an “attack ad” on the 18 Doughty Street website (watch it here). Although the site is funded by Jeffrey Archer’s former mayoral campaign manager and almost exclusively involves a group of former or present Conservative Party candidates and employees, they pretend that they’re anti-establishment rebels who will “will endeavour to always take the working man’s side and see the Nation through his eyes” (for details see here). To that end, this bunch of upper-class Tory twits have hired some actor with a mockney accent to do an embarrassing voice-over to their ad. So much for their much-hyped path-breaking contribution to political campaigning in the UK. Back to the drawing board chaps, I would suggest.

As for 18 Doughty Street’s repetition of the discredited story, which derives from the equally discredited Middle East Media Research Institute, that Qaradawi “has described suicide bombings as a duty”, see here and here.

BBC Leicester gives platform to fascist

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Fascist scum (4)The fascist British National Party boasts: “BNP Head of Publicity and co-defendant in the famous Free Speech Trial, Mark Collett was last week invited to participate in a studio debate at BBC Radio Leicester about multiculturalism in the city. Mark was born and went to school in Leicester so is well acquainted with life there. The most striking aspect of the debate was that Muslims, and opposition MPs sat in the same studio with Mark giving a lie to the ‘No Platform for the BNP’ stance.”

BNP news article, 13 February 2007

It is of course absolute disgrace that Collett should be given a platform by a publicly funded radio station. This is the man who called asylum seekers “cockroaches” and urged cheering BNP supporters to “show ethnics the door in 2004”. A couple of years earlier he stated his admiration for Nazi Germany:

“National Socialism was the best solution for German people in the 1930s…. When people say ‘Do you take any inspiration from that?’, I mean, I honestly can’t understand how a man who’s seen the inner city hell of Britain today can’t look back on that era with a certain nostalgia and think, yeah, those people marching through the streets and all those happy people out in the streets, you know, saluting and everything, was a bad thing … would you prefer your kid growing up in Oldham and Burnley or 1930s Germany?”

The BBC’s own report illustrates how the racist propaganda of the fascists is given legitimacy by the anti-Muslim comments of mainstream politicians, with Collett echoing Jack Straw’s comments on the niqab and David Cameron’s warnings about the threat of Sharia law: “The BNP’s Mark Collett condemned the wearing of the veil by some islamic women, and said that wearing a full veil was ‘a powerful statement against integration’. He also claimed a high proportion of young Muslims want Sharia law in the UK.”

BBC Leicester, 8 February 2007

UAF conference this Saturday

Posted on by Bob Pitt

UAF conference 2007Unite Against Fascism National Conference
17 February 2007 9.30am-5pm
TUC Conference Centre, Great Russell Street, London WC1
Nearest tube: Tottenham Court Road

The British National Party (BNP) is receiving the highest levels of support for a fascist party in British history. In recent years its vote has increased in a context of rising racism, Islamophobia and attacks on multiculturalism. At the 2006 local elections it polled over 238,000 votes compared to 3,000 votes in 2000, and now has a record 49 local councillors.

The BNP is a fascist organisation. As history shows, fascism stands for the total annihilation of whole communities, freedoms and democratic rights.

In 2007 the BNP will be targeting the local elections in England and Wales and elections to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly.

Active campaigning can stop the BNP. In the 1930s the Jewish and Irish communities, trade unions and others defeated the fascist Blackshirts at Cable Street, and in the 1970s the National Front was defeated by mass anti-Nazi campaigns. More recently the BNP was defeated in Millwall and Oldham. Learning lessons from these campaigns is crucial.

Unite Against Fascism is organising this national conference to look at the impact of increasing BNP support, to discuss strategies that have been successful in stopping the BNP and to bring together the broad opposition that is needed to halt the rise of fascism including from trade unions, Muslim, Jewish and other faith communities, black, Asian, lesbian, gay and disabled communities and students.

Further details on UAF website.

Clareification controversy

Posted on by Bob Pitt

We’ve been remiss in not posting on the Clare College controversy, involving the publication of anti-religious caricatures – including one of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons – in the student magazine Clareification.

In a typically stupid open letter to Clare College, Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society argues that anti-Muslim caricatures can’t be racist because, don’t you see, Muslims are not a race: “We would like to remind all concerned that satirising religion – even if that religion is Islam – is not racism, as this episode has been dubbed. Religion and race have very different characteristics.”

So, according to Sanderson’s warped reasoning, the most vicious Islamophobic propaganda produced by the BNP can’t possibly be racist because it is directed against adherents of a religion – which is, of course, precisely the argument that the fascists themselves use.

See local press coverage here and national coverage here. A correspondent points out that the editor of the magazine is “in hiding without a single threat having being made”.

For a comment on the Clareification controversy, which concedes that the magazine contained “the most vile and unambiguous Islamophobia”, see Constitutional Lore, 13 February 2007

Bedworth by-election result

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islam a threat to us allThe BNP came second in a council by-election in Bedworth, Warwickshire, last week. This disturbing result demonstrates how the climate of racism and anti-Muslim hysteria is playing into the hands of the Nazis.

Labour held on to its seat in Bede ward on Thursday of last week, polling 658 votes, but the BNP’s Alwyn Deacon, a pub landlord from Nuneaton, took 546 votes. The Tory vote fell to 301, less than two fifths of its previous vote in the ward.

In recent council elections voters in Bede have been faced with a choice of just Labour or Tory candidates. The by-election saw a wider field of candidates, with the Liberal Democrats standing and winning 119 votes.

The efforts of anti-fascists to hold back the BNP were not helped by a leaflet put out locally by the Searchlight organisation. These echoed Tory leader David Cameron’s recent remarks, equating the BNP to “Islamic extremism”.

Socialist Worker, 14 February 2007

Wilders: get rid of half of Koran!

Posted on by Bob Pitt

geert_wildersAMSTERDAM – If Muslims want to stay in the Netherlands, they should tear out half the Koran and throw it away. And they shouldn’t listen to the imam.

Faction leader of the Freedom Party (PVV) Geert Wilders said this in an interview with daily newspaper De Pers on Tuesday.

He said the holy book of Islam contains “plenty of terrible things.” Wilders said once again that Islam is a violent religion. “If Mohammed lived here today, I would propose he be tarred and feathered as an extremist and driven out of the country,” he said.

The politician wants to impress on people that Islam is “the greatest danger threatening us.” He says that other political parties avoid topics like this. “Everything we are proud of, we are selling to the devil. Former head of the Mossad Efraim Halevy says that World War III has begun. I would not use those words, but it’s true,” said Wilders, who in the past has voiced his fear of a “tsunami of Islamisation in the Netherlands.”

Wilders: “Take a walk down the street and see where this is going. You no longer feel like you are living in your own country. There is a battle going on and we have to defend ourselves. Before you know it there will be more mosques than churches!”

Expatica, 13 February 2007

Iain Dale discovers media double standards over Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A post yesterday on Iain Dale’s Diary reveals that the eponymous Tory blogger has belatedly woken up to the double standards practised by the media in connection with the Robert Cottage trial. He writes:

“Last October the police raided two peoples’ homes in Pendle and uncovered explosives, rocket launchers, chemicals, BNP literature and a nuclear biological suit. A former British National Party member, Robert Cottage, who stood in last year’s local elections in Colne has now subsequently been accused of possessing the largest amount of chemical explosives of its type ever found in the country.

“Maybe I have missed the story, but I have not seen this covered in any of our national newspapers or national broadcast media. Why? If these kind of things had been discovered in the home of a British Muslim I suspect the media would be playing a rather different tune. Think of the front page headlines recently when similar discoveries were made elsewhere in the country.”

Iain Dale’s Diary, 13 February 2007

Perhaps Dale should consider raising this issue with his own party. The heavily publicised report Uniting the Country (pdf here), prepared by the Conservative Policy Group on National and International Security under Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, dismisses talk of media double standards over the Robert Cottage case as a product of Muslims’ victim mentality. The authors complain (p.11) that Muslim perceptions of discrimination have created:

“an environment in which distortion also finds ready, if unwitting, acceptance. The Group was told a story in two widely separated towns of the alleged suppression by mainstream media, on anti Islamic grounds, of the discovery of a BNP chemical weapons factory. This had been manufactured from four separate reports over the space of a month in different local newspapers. The story began with a report of a BNP member being charged with possession ‘of chemical components which could be used to make explosives’. It ended, despite there being no new facts, with the claim of the discovery of ‘chemical weapons’.”