Author Archives: Bob Pitt

‘Our mosques are importing jihad’ – Times discovers Britain’s answer to Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Gina Khan is a very brave woman. Born in Birmingham 38 years ago to Pakistani parents, she has run away from an arranged marriage, dressed herself in jeans and dared to speak out against the increasing radicalisation of her community. ‘There are mosques springing up on every street corner’, she says, pointing them out to me as we drive to her tiny house in Birmingham, near the district where nine men were arrested last week on suspicion of plotting to kidnap and behead a British Muslim soldier….

“Over the past 15 years, she says, there has been an influx of jihadist thinking into her part of Birmingham. Bookshops sell radical literature and the mosques preach separatism and hatred. The Government and the white Establishment have allowed it to happen. And she is outraged about it. ‘It’s all happening on your doorstep’, she says, ‘and Britain is still blind to the real threat that is embedded here now. I truly believe that all these mosques here are importing jihad.’ …

“The trouble is, says Khan, that many of the Pakistanis who have come to Birmingham are all too easily swayed. ‘Most of them are ignorant, uneducated, illiterate people from rural areas. It is very easy for them to be brainwashed, very easy.'”

Times, 9 February 2007

Writing in the same paper, Mary Ann Sieghart hails Gina Khan as “A courageous voice against the Muslim bullyboys“.

And the Times even devotes its leader to Ms Khan: “In speaking out today in times2 against the extremism, bigotry and hypocrisy she finds among many Muslims, she knows that she risks the contempt of a few of her fellow believers. But she insists that it is time that she, and thousands of others, especially women, sickened at being misrepresented by extremists, spoke out.”

Times, 9 February 2007

With any luck, a right-wing US think-tank will snap up Gina Khan and the Muslim community in Brum will be rid of her.

Postscript:  Predictably, Khan is also enthusiastically endorsed (along with Taj Hargey) by Mad Melanie Phillips.

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 9 February 2007

Littlejohn says: Why not bomb Red Ken?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Richard Littlejohn comments on the recent spate of letter bombs: “I wouldn’t lose much sleep if those wicked dupes, like Red Ken The Terrorist’s Friend, who help glorify politically motivated murder and make common cause with killers, were to find themselves on the end of a bombing. Livingstone is the man who feted the IRA while it was slaughtering civilians on the streets of the capital back in the 1980s and today invites Islamist preachers of hate to tea and biscuits at City Hall, while their disciples are blowing themselves up on crowded Tube trains.”

Daily Mail, 9 February 2007

Those “Islamist preachers of hate” – they would include this man, would they?

See Jenny Jones’ post at Comment is Free, 9 February 2007

Also Osama Saeed at Rolled Up Trousers, 9 February 2007

And for another take on the letter bomb campaign see Lenin’s Tomb, 7 February 2007

Protest over school’s stand on halal meat

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Halal protestAngry parents have staged a demonstration outside a London school after its decision to serve only halal meat.

The change over to halal meat was made after a consultation with parents, which showed that 77 per cent of those were in favour of the decision. Fewer than six out of ten parents responded.

Muslim parents at Kingsgate Primary School in West Hampstead, where three quarters of the pupils are Muslim, accused the protesters of racism. Solveig Francis, a parent, said: “This is just naked racism, it’s got nothing to do with choice. They talk about keeping up English values but the most important value we have is democracy. It’s about time that was upheld.”

Staff at the school were forced to take phones off the hook after receiving abusive calls from people claiming to be from the BNP. Liz Hayward, the head teacher, had to call the police after a father came into the school to challenge her over the decision.

Jacqueline Gomm, the protest leader, said: “I totally deny being guilty of racism. We allow people to come into this country and we end up being in a minority. We accommodate other cultures at the expense of ours.”

Times, 9 February 2007

See also the Daily Mail, 9 February 2007

And Camden New Journal, 8 February 2007

 

Irish show Muslims solidarity

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Irish community leaders in Britain have spoken out in support of Muslim immigrants in the wake of police raids in Birmingham that have seen nine men arrested in connection with an alleged terror plot.

Dr Mary Tilki, chair of the Federation of Irish Societies, told an audience at a regional FIS meeting in Liverpool at the weekend that she was concerned at the series of arrests as well as police raids last year in the East End of London.

She said: “I am particularly saddened by the abuse and hostility targeted at members of the Asian community. We have been there as a community and we know what it is like. I would like to think that Irish organisations and Irish people can support the Asian/Muslim community.”

Dr Tilki said since the terrorist bomb atrocities in the city it had taken more than 30 years for Irish people in Birmingham to feel safe in expressing their Irishness. She continued: “The Asians are no different and like us the vast majority abhor any link with terrorism.”

The FIS chair said that the Prevention of Terrorism Act had made legitimate the labelling of all Irish people as terrorists. She said: “Homes were raided; people were persistently stopped and searched but the level of conviction was low”.

And she warned: “The police and security services have a difficult job to do; their intelligence is arguably more sophisticated. But they do not appear to have learned lessons from the miscarriages of justice against Irish people”.

Irish World, 7 February 2007

TV debate axed over Salma terror claims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Salma2Central TV pulled the plug on a programme about local Muslims this week after a contributor accused city councillor Salma Yaqoob of supporting terrorism.

Douglas Murray of the Social Affairs Unit, a right-wing think tank, made the allegation in a pre-recorded discussion for the Extra Tonight programme due to be shown on Tuesday night.

Central replaced the scheduled item with a documentary comparing education in Sweden and Britain.

Coun Yaqoob said that she was shocked by Murray’s smear: “He made all sorts of wild claims about me. He said that I was a supporter of terrorism, that I didn’t care about Muslims in Iraq and that I’d taken part in an anti-war riot. It was all such libellous nonsense I thought they would just halt the recording there and then, but they carried on.”

Yaqoob raised the issue with the show’s producers after filming finished on Monday night, but was told they planned to go ahead with the broadcast. It was only cancelled at the 11th hour on Tuesday when Central’s lawyers apparently became concerned the company might get sued.

“I’m glad about it,” Yaqoob said. “I’m willing to have a serious discussion with anybody, but people like Murray don’t want a proper debate, they just want to throw a load of mud and hope some of sticks. That kind of behaviour just clouds the real issues.”

Murray told The Stirrer he stands by his claims and said that Yaqoob’s Respect Party “is as vile as the BNP”.

Birmingham Mail, 8 February 2007

Islamic school ‘rips pages from textbooks’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Saudi-funded Islamic school at the centre of allegations of extremist teaching insisted yesterday it had “ripped out” the offending pages from all textbooks. The King Fahad Academy, in Acton, west London, which receives more than £4 million a year from the Saudi royal family, has been accused of institutional racism by a sacked teacher.

Colin Cook, a Muslim convert, alleges children as young as five are taught using books which describe Jews as “apes” and Christians as “pigs”. One textbook allegedly asks for “examples of worthless religions … such as Judaism, Christianity, idol worship and others”.

Dr Sumaya Alyusuf, the principal, denied that teachers employed the offensive chapters, which had been “taken out context”. However, she said that the material had now been torn out. “The press interest in these unused chapters has shocked us,” she added. Dr Alyusuf said that, since the claims emerged, pupils and parents had been abused by local residents.

Daily Telegraph, 8 February 2007

See also BBC News, 7 February 2007

Campaigners seek new policies to regain trust of Muslim community

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Peace campaigners reiterated calls for a reverse of Britain’s warmongering foreign policy on Wednesday after ministers boasted about a new £5 million initiative to fight so-called Muslim extremism.

Ministers unveiled plans to allocate £5 million to local authorities in the fight against extremism as part of what Prime Minister Tony Blair has called a “radical and head-on” confrontation. Despite failures in Iraq and calls for him to step down, Mr Blair stubbornly declared his determination on Tuesday to “stand up” to Islamist extremism at home and abroad.

But Muslim Parliament of Great Britain deputy leader Jaffer Clarke dismissed the initiative as “unfocused, unworkable” and far from what the Muslim community needs, which is an end to wars in the Middle East and a new direction in foreign policy.

A Respect coalition spokesman called the move “mere window dressing, given that the government is demonising Muslims daily.” He said that, if ministers were sincere about “fighting Muslim extremism,” they should “reverse the foreign policy alliance with US President George W Bush.”

Morning Star, 8 February 2007

See also the Guardian which reports that “there is concern in the Muslim community that the government is marginalising groups which represent large parts of the community, such as the Muslim Council of Britain. Massoud Shadjareh, chair of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, said it was puzzled by some of the remedies for extremism presented by the government: ‘The overwhelming majority of Muslim organisations are the solution, not the problem’.”

Guardian, 8 February 2007

Ex-terror plot suspect speaks out

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Maktabah bookshopA man freed after he was arrested over an alleged plot to kidnap a UK Muslim soldier has criticised the police investigation.

Abu Bakr, who works in the Maktabah bookshop, targeted in anti-terror raids in Birmingham, also told BBC News the UK was “a police state for Muslims”. Mr Bakr, one of nine men arrested in raids, was released without charge along with another man.

Mr Bakr, who is studying for a PhD in Political Islam at the city’s university, said he became aware of the police forcing their way into his house early last Wednesday morning by his wife screaming. Asked how he felt about his arrest, he said: “It’s a police state for Muslims. It’s not a police state for everybody else because these terror laws are designed specifically for Muslims and that’s quite an open fact,” he added.

He had been released by police on Wednesday morning and told to “go back to things how they were”, he added. “But they don’t realise that, after seven days of virtual torture for my family, it’s going to be hard to readjust,” he added. “This is going to affect me for the rest of my life.” Mr Bakr said his parents had told him they had aged 10 years while he had been in custody.

He also criticised what he called “amateur-type interrogation” by the police who, he said, had subjected him to “random questioning” about notes written on pieces of paper by his young children.

BBC News, 8 February 2007

In books, a clash of Europe and Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Award nominations are generally occasions for exaggerated compliments and air kisses, so it was something of a surprise when Eliot Weinberger, a previous finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, announced the newest nominees for the criticism category two weeks ago and said one of the authors, Bruce Bawer, had engaged in “racism as criticism.”

The resulting stir within the usually well-mannered book world spiked this week when the president of the Circle’s board, John Freeman, wrote on the organization’s blog (bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com): “I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept,” he wrote. “Its hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia.”

The fusillade of e-mail messages on the subject circulating among the Circle’s 24 board members mirrors a larger debate over a string of recently published books that ominously warn of a catastrophic culture clash between Europeans with traditional Western values and fundamentalist Muslims – books including Londonistan by Melanie Phillips, The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion by Robert Spencer, and America Alone by Mark Steyn.

New York Times, 8 February 2007