Author Archives: Bob Pitt

Inciting racial hatred and murder – double standards?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A British Muslim called for American and Danish people to be murdered, at a protest against cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, a court has heard. Umran Javed, 27, of Washwood Heath Road, Birmingham, took part in the event on 3 February last year after the cartoons were published in Denmark. Prosecutor David Perry QC told the Old Bailey Mr Javed “encouraged killing and incited racial hatred”. Mr Javed denies charges of soliciting murder and stirring up racial hatred.

BBC News, 3 January 2007

Of course, if Javed is guilty of these charges there can be no objection to convicting him. However, there do appear to be some double standards at work here, when websites like this are able to consistently stir up racial hatred and even solicit the murder of their political opponents without any action being taken against them. (It’s not as though the police would have any difficulty identifying who is behind this loathsome website – see here and here.)

German Muslim held, denied US entry

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A German businessman of Syrian descent who wanted to surprise his daughter with a holiday visit was detained for four days in a Las Vegas holding cell before being sent back home without explanation. A civil rights group called authorities’ treatment of Majed Shehadeh a case of anti-Muslim discrimination.

Shehadeh touched down Thursday afternoon on a direct Condor Airlines flight to McCarran International Airport, where his American wife was waiting to pick him up. The couple had planned to visit family in the Las Vegas area, before surprising their daughter for the New Year and celebrating her wedding anniversary in Central California.

“I gave them my German passport, and he looked to see which countries I visited. He found I had stamps that looked like Arabic and asked if they were fake,” Shehadeh said Tuesday in a phone interview from his home in Alzenau, a small Bavarian village. “Nobody ever informed me why I was being questioned,” he said. “All that was ever told to me was this had to do with Washington.”

After being interrogated by Border Protection and FBI agents for more than 12 hours at the airport, Shehadeh said he was handcuffed and transported in the back of police car to a North Las Vegas jail. Once in the holding facility, Shehadeh said he was stripped of his shoes, jacket and prescribed heart medicine and locked in a cell with about 25 other detainees. There was one toilet in the middle of the room, and access to a telephone was extremely limited, he said. On Sunday, he was released and sent back to Frankfurt on the same charter airline.

Associated Press, 2 January 2007

See also CAIR news brief, 2 January 2007

Local protests greet East Berlin’s first mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Heinersdorf mosque protestorScattered protests Tuesday accompanied a ground-breaking ceremony for the first-ever mosque in what used to be Communist East Berlin.

The two-story building with a 12-meter-tall minaret is being built for the Ahmadiyya Muslim community on the site of an old sauerkraut factory in the east Berlin suburb of Pankow-Heinersdorf.

The mosque, which will be able to accommodate 500 worshippers, is expected to be completed by the end of next year or in early 2008, said the chairman of the sect’s Berlin branch, Abdul Basit Tariq.

Scattered protests Tuesday accompanied a ground-breaking ceremony for the first-ever mosque in what used to be Communist East Berlin.

The two-story building with a 12-meter-tall minaret is being built for the Ahmadiyya Muslim community on the site of an old sauerkraut factory in the east Berlin suburb of Pankow-Heinersdorf.

The mosque, which will be able to accommodate 500 worshippers, is expected to be completed by the end of next year or in early 2008, said the chairman of the sect’s Berlin branch, Abdul Basit Tariq.

In Berlin, the first mosque was constructed in 1924. Now there are some 30 Muslim places of worship in the German capital. But most of them are in Neukölln and Kreuzberg, in the western part of the city.

These are the neighborhoods in which guest workers, mainly from Turkey, moved to when they first arrived in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. Today the multi-ethnic districts are still home to Berlin’s largest Turkish community as well as to large numbers of Arab and east European immigrants.

In the former Communist and, at the time, internationally insular East Berlin, there were no mosques which might explain the protests, Tariq says.

“These are unfounded fears,” Tariq says. “People listen to the news, see scenes on television and that’s why they’re scared of Muslims. They think Muslims are terrorists and suicide bombers. Their heads are full of these things.”

Opposition to the planned mosque has underlined Germany’s problems in integrating its 3.2-million strong Muslim community. The problem is especially acute in formerly communist-ruled east Germany where few Muslims and other immigrants have settled.

Deutsche Welle, 2 January 2007

Muslims in South Australia subjected to unfair treatment, report finds

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslims in South Australia are being racially abused “like never before”, a Government report has found. The trend has prompted the Equal Opportunity Commission to launch a new project to work with the SA Muslim community, described in the commission’s latest annual report as being “under pressure”.

SA Equal Opportunity Commissioner Linda Matthews said in the annual report that a “small minority are behaving in an unacceptable way” towards newly arrived Muslims. “For generations, South Australian Muslims have been an integral part of our community,” she said. “But in the last five years, the heightened global attention on Islam has seen local Muslims singled out for unfair treatment like never before.”

Roman Catholic Church Vicar-General Monsignor David Cappo, who also heads the State Government’s Social Exclusion Unit and is a member of the executive committee of Cabinet, told The Advertiser‘s Rex Jory racism was widespread among young Adelaide people. “They are very harsh to Asian communities. Now the Muslims are going to get it as well,” he said.

The Australian, 31 December 2006

Muslims victimised over mosque plan

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Forza Nuova flagOne of Tuscany’s oldest and most idyllic hill-top towns is in turmoil over the building of a large mosque, with a golden dome and an illuminated glass minaret.

For 20 years, the 14,000 residents of Colle di Val d’Elsa have had a community of around 300 Muslims living among them. A small Islamic cultural centre was established years ago, but the atmosphere of peaceful cohabitation has turned sour after proposals for a much bigger centre incorporating a mosque.

A severed pig’s head was left outside the gates of the site, where work has begun. Anti-Muslim graffiti has appeared on walls and local Muslims have been pelted with sausages. Last weekend, 500 people, many of them fascists from a group called Forza Nuova (New Force), staged a protest.

“The things that have been happening are very wrong, and out of character for the town,” said Paolo Brogioni, the mayor of Colle, whose Muslim community now does not venture out on to the cobbled streets.

Daily Telegraph, 1 January 2007

Americans oppose Dutch Islamic veil ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Many adults in the United States are against a proposal developed by the Dutch government that seeks to ban Islamic veils, according to a six-country poll by Harris Interactive published in the Financial Times.

59 per cent of Americans believe Islamic women should have the right to wear the garments if they wish to do so.

Support is significantly lower in the five European nations surveyed, with Spain at 39 per cent, Italy at 34 per cent, Germany at 33 per cent, Britain at 23 per cent, and France at 23 per cent.

Angus Reid Global Monitor, 31 December 2006

Dutch veil ban poll

‘The Veil… and why these leading Muslims won’t wear it’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“As Channel 4 controversially celebrated women covering their faces and critics are dismissed as Islamophobics, Joan Smith talks to a group of women who fear the consequences of the veil’s acceptance.”

Independent on Sunday, 31 December 2006

Yes, it’s the familiar strategy pursued by Islamophobes of finding some Muslims who agree with them on a particular issue and then using this as a cover for attacks which feed into the wider media campaign being waged against the entire Muslim community. You’d have hoped that people wouldn’t fall for this, but they do. The irony here is that Khadijah Atkinson, the presenter of Channel 4’s “alternative Christmas message”, is a member of Minhaj-ul-Quran, which has aligned itself with an Islamophobic campaign against the proposed so-called “mega-mosque” in Newham. And now some of her fellow Muslims are collaborating with an anti-Islamic bigot like Joan Smith in attacking Khadijah and other veiled women. It’s not really the business of Islamophobia Watch to intervene in these matters, but surely some basic solidarity and an elementary sense of tactics wouldn’t come amiss here?

For the sort of comment Smith’s article has prompted from right-wing bloggers, see here and here.

Daily Mail ‘unmasks’ woman behind alternative Christmas message

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“She was presented by Channel 4 as an authentic – but anonymous – voice of moderate British Islam. And on Christmas Day the veiled woman described only as ‘Khadijah’ was given a national televison platform for propagating her views in an ‘alternative Christmas message’ designed to rival the Queen’s. She told viewers Jack Straw was wrong to criticise the veil, claiming concealing facial features ‘liberated’ women. But the Daily Mail can now unveil ‘Khadijah’ – and reveal that she is in fact Elaine Atkinson, an English convert to Islam who travels the country working for a radical muslim group trying to take political control of Pakistan.”

Daily Mail, 29 December 2006

The “radical Muslim group” is Mihaj-ul-Quran, an organisation associated with a political party – Pakistan Awami Tehrik – that gained precisely 0.7% of the popular vote in the last parliamentary elections in Pakistan and elected just one MP. So clearly it has some way to go before it takes political control of Pakistan.

And although the Daily Mail pours scorn on Khadijah’s “claims of being moderate”, the same paper recently quoted another supporter of Minhaj-ul-Quran as an example of the “moderate Muslims” who the Mail claims are opposed to Tablighi Jamaat building a new mosque in Newham.

The BNP have applauded the Mail for exposing Khadijah Atkinson’s “rejection of her traditional English background, and her determination to embrace radical Islam”. BNP news article, 30 December 2006

Ethnic smears hinder good government

Posted on by Bob Pitt

More on the “Islam won” story (see here). The statement was originally attributed to Omar Alghabra after he was selected as a Liberal Party candidate in Canada. When that account was shown to be a fraud, the accusation was shifted to another Muslim politician, Khalid Usman.

“It’s an allegation Mr. Usman vehemently denies. ‘I know for a fact I never said Islam won. It was nothing about Islam taking over something,’ he said. ‘There is no way in the world. I never would have said it.’ Mr. Usman said he was out of the room for much of the meeting and, when he came in, was invited to the stage to make a few comments. He allows he may have uttered a traditional praise to Allah, but not with the intention of bringing religion into politics. If a Christian politician were to shout ‘hallelujah’ after a victory, would there be a controversy?”

Yorkregion.com, 29 December 2005