Author Archives: Bob Pitt

Media Muslim coverage scrutinised

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Hostile coverage is driving Muslims away from the rest of society says Rageh Omaar, a Muslim journalist and former BBC correspondent now with Al-Jazeera. He blames self-proclaimed “liberals” for the negative media coverage: “I think that how you show that you really are liberal is your stance against what you perceive to be the threat of Islam, which journalists see as this monolithic backward looking, extremist threat to your liberal traditions. And I think it is just a knee-jerk reaction amongst a lot of my friends and colleagues in the media.”

BBC News, 28 December 2006

See Charlie Beckett’s piece at Comment is Free, 29 December 2006

Both of these pieces confuse the issue by portraying Islamophobic bigots like John Ware and Martin Bright as honest reporters (“tough liberals”) who are only eager to get at the truth.

See also Mukul Devichand’s article at Open Democracy, 29 December 2006

The transcript of the Analysis programme is here.

Top Jewish group ‘terror’ apology

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Britain’s top Jewish body has apologised for branding a Muslim charity a “terrorist organisation”. In an out-of-court settlement, the Board of Deputies of British Jews said it should not have described Interpal in these terms.

London-based Interpal, which raises millions for Palestinian causes, had launched a libel action against the Board, due in the High Court next year. The board has now published a retraction and apology on its website.

In the statement, the Board said it had reached a settlement with Interpal in relation to a September 2003 article on its website which referred to “terrorist organisations such as Hamas and Interpal”. “We would like to make it clear that we should not have described Interpal in this way and we regret the upset and distress our item caused,” said the statement.

Interpal is one of the largest Muslim-led charities in Europe and says its funds humanitarian, educational and medical projects in the Palestinian territories. The charity, which spends approximately £5m a year, insists it keeps exhaustive records and audit trails of how its Palestinian partners spend money.

BBC News, 29 December 2005

For the BoD’s retraction, see here.

Spain cathedral shuns Muslim plea

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Cordoba cathedralThe Roman Catholic bishop of Cordoba in southern Spain has rejected an appeal from Muslims for the right to pray in the city’s cathedral, a former mosque.

Juan Jose Asenjo rejected the request made by Spain’s Islamic Board in a letter to the Pope. It had asked that the cathedral become an ecumenical temple where believers from all faiths could worship.

The bishop said such a move would not contribute to the peaceful co-existence between people of different religions. On the contrary, he said in a statement late on Wednesday, the joint use of temples and places of worship would only generate confusion amongst the faithful.

Spain’s Islamic Board, which represents a community of some 800,000 in a traditional Catholic country of 44 million, argued in its plea to the Pope that such a move in Cordoba could serve to “awake the conscience” of followers of both faiths and help bury past confrontations.

“What we wanted was not to take over that holy place, but to create in it, together with you and other faiths, an ecumenical space unique in the world which would have been of great significance in bringing peace to humanity,” the letter said.

The board’s general secretary, Mansur Escudero, said Muslims came from around the world to see Cordoba’s cathedral. But security guards often stopped Muslim worshippers from praying inside the old mosque, he added.

BBC News, 28 December 2006

[The photo shows Mansur Escudero praying outside the cathedral following the bishop’s statement that Muslims will not be allowed to pray inside the building.]

BNP sympathiser Giraldus Cambrensis comments: “… now, once more, political Islam in Spain is trying to assert itself. The trial of the Moorish terrorists and their accomplices who attacked Madrid is due to start in the New Year. On Tuesday December 26, only a day after Spain celebrated Christmas, the birth of Christ, Spain’s Islamic Commission announced that it had decided to petition the new Pope, Benedict XVI, to allow Muslim worship at the Mezquita.”

Western Resistance, 27 December 2006

Fascists announce Jihad Watch Bulletin

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The British National Party announces the latest issue of its “Jihad Watch bulletin” (no organisational link to Robert Spencer’s site – though no doubt there’s a considerable ideological overlap). It promotes a particularly barking piece from The American Daily detailing the Islamist “plan for world domination”. The BNP may have have dispensed with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but they have evidently retained their enthusiasm for wacko racist conspiracy theories.

BNP news article, 29 December 2006

Clash of civilisations conference in London

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Conference: A World Civilisation or a Clash of Civilisations

20 January 2007, Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, London SW1

The controversial “clash of civilisations” theory is the subject of a special one-day conference organised by the GLA on Saturday 20 January.

The view has been put forward that the world is going into an era of conflict and war driven by a clash of civilisations. The Mayor’s policies are based on the exact opposite idea: that the multicultural city is part of creating a new concept of world civilisation that corresponds to a globalised world.

This conference will debate these contrasting approaches and their implications. The conference will feature a debate between the Mayor and Daniel Pipes, Director of the Middle East Forum, an American think tank that advises US policymakers on the Middle East. He has argued that “there is not so much a clash of civilisations as there is one of civilisations vs. barbarism”.

Other sessions will see scholars and policy-makers discuss the impact of international events on London’s communities and examine issues such as religious tolerance, human rights, diversity and the approach to multiculturalism.

Further details on GLA website here and here.

East Berlin’s first mosque: The Muslims are coming!

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A citizens’ group in Berlin turned out this week for a candlelight vigil to protest plans for a new mosque in their neighborhood. It will be the first to be built in the former East Berlin, where almost no Muslims live – but no one can quite explain why it shouldn’t be there.

Spiegel, 28 December 2006

Update:  See “Local protests greet East Berlin’s first mosque”, Deutsche Welle, 2 January 2007

‘Importing ghastly patriarchal values’ – Joan Smith on the veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Joan SmithJoan Smith complains that “we now have a growing minority of the population demanding the right to go about their everyday business in masks, which is what the word ‘niqab’ means in Arabic. This, I think, is where a lot of people discover the limits of tolerance … rightly perceiving that the face-covering is not so much an obligatory religious requirement as a challenge to the values of our largely secular society….

“Of course it upsets people in an open society where we’re used to seeing each other’s faces; our identity is expressed in facial expressions, which ease everyday transactions by indicating whether someone is happy, sad, pleased to see us or lying – an important issue when so many of our dealing with strangers are based on trust. In that sense, it can’t be read as anything other than an assertion of not belonging, of separation from the majority population, a political position some Muslims have begun to take to absurd lengths….

“It’s the worst sort of identity politics, importing ghastly patriarchal values into a country where we already have enough problems with a male political class which believes it knows what’s best for us….”

Independent, 27 December 2006

Increase in race hate crimes casts doubt on ‘One Scotland’ campaign

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Racist crime is growing across Scotland despite a multi-million-pound Executive campaign to tackle the problem, new figures obtained by The Scotsman have revealed. Some 3,387 racially-aggravated crimes and offences were recorded by the country’s eight police forces between April and December this year, compared with 3,192 during the same period last year – a rise of 6 per cent.

The increase has cast doubt on the effectiveness of the Executive’s “One Scotland” campaign launched in 2002 to tackle racism in the country’s streets and classrooms, and sparked calls for Jack McConnell, the First Minister, to put the issue on a platform equal in size to the one given to sectarianism in recent months.

Ethnic community leaders are also accusing politicians of failing to wake up to the “elephant in the room” that is growing Islamophobia, saying thousands of Muslims and members of other minority racial groups are continuing to be victimised following the 11 September and 7 July terrorism attacks.

In 2005-6, 4,294 racially-aggravated crimes were recorded by police – 358 every month and more than ten times the level recorded in 2001-2. Since then, the number has continued to rise according to new figures obtained by The Scotsman, with reported verbal and physical attacks rising to 376 per month.

The biggest increase has been seen in the Lothian and Borders police area, where police recorded 970 assaults and other racially-aggravated offences between April and December this year – up 26 per cent on the 768 crimes recorded for the same period in 2005. Grampian also saw a big rise in reported race hate crimes, from 271 to 312, up 15 per cent.

Chief Inspector Doug Forsyth, who is in charge of diversity issues at Lothian and Borders Police, claimed a greater willingness to report incidents lay behind the increase, rather than more crime.

“If people don’t want to go to the police station, they can report crimes with other agencies such as the council and health service who will pass the details to us. I think the rise is mostly due to greater confidence within ethnic communities that the police will take these things seriously and investigate them thoroughly.”

But Osama Saeed, Scottish spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, disagreed, saying Asians were increasingly being victimised on religious grounds. “The police have not got to grips with the scale of the problem, which is vast. Incidents are not being reported because there isn’t a good link-up between communities and the police.

“People are more likely to be called a terrorist than a Paki. It’s more likely to be religiously-based abuse, particularly directed against Islam. The One Scotland campaign is fine but it isn’t really dealing with the changing face of racism. There’s an elephant in the room at the moment, attacks directed at Islam, which no-one is addressing. One Scotland isn’t hitting those buttons.”

The Scotsman, 26 December 2006