Author Archives: Bob Pitt

Battle lines have been drawn

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The battle lines have been drawn. First human rights were thrown out of the window by targeting all Muslims as terror suspects. Then there has been the curtailing of the freedom of speech and right to demonstrate by invoking new laws and proposals to spy on Islamic and Muslim groups, including at universities.

“It would appear that the other democratic principle of tolerance is to be prised away in Britain. Should we now expect that the next step will be a new British version of The House Un-American Activities Committee during McCarthyism that blacklists all Muslims?

“The most dangerous path clearly spelt out by the Prime Minister is that the real intent is the sinister attempt somehow to change Islam and its basic tenets. The Government’s offer of a genuine ‘dialogue and open debate’ has proved to be nothing more than a façade as it has not shown the slightest inclination to listen, but rather, it is clear it wants brow-beat the Muslim community and force its own agenda upon it.”

Editorial in the Muslim News, 27 October 2006

Debate on veil shows how West is turning on Islam, scholar warns

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tariq_RamadanA leading Muslim scholar has said the debate on women wearing veils highlights a growing “global polarisation” between the West and the Islamic world.

Tariq Ramadan, a visiting professor at Oxford University told an interfaith conference in London yesterday that the debate sparked by Jack Straw, who said the veil hampered integration, was part of a global phenomenon in which a “them versus us” attitude was being fostered between Muslims and non-Muslims.

“The atmosphere has deteriorated in the last year or so,” Professor Ramadan said. “It’s not only a British reality, but European and American. To nurture this polarisation is the easiest way for politicians when we don’t have social policy. The most dangerous thing is the normalisation of this discourse.”

Independent, 27 October 2006

Veil hang-ups may pass

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“For years I worked in a school where a number of memorable parents wore the niqab, a full veil. These women taught me a lot about Islam. They also challenged my understanding of inclusion. However strange I felt in our first encounters, I now remember their faces with fondness. Aisha Azmi’s tribunal, coming in the wake of Jack Straw’s discomfort over veil-wearing, challenges our society from the top down.

“When government minister Phil Woolas calls for her sacking, saying she ‘can’t do her job’ I have to ask whether he’s taken any time out of publicity-seeking to explore alternatives. If not, can I call for his sacking?

“When Mr Straw clumsily complains that veils make him ‘uncomfortable’, I can’t help but wonder if the key to community relations really is to keep men like him comfy. Would he like us to fetch his slippers as well? … And when the Prime Minister refers to the veil as ‘a mark of separation’, I have to point out that he usually wears a tie. If ever a silly piece of clothing reinforced separatism it’s that absurd, class-bound strip of silk.”

Huw Thomas in the TES, 27 October 2006

Australian media blamed for Islam bias

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty believes the media is fuelling a growing bias against Islamic Australians, warning that increased vilification of Muslims is fomenting home-grown terrorism.

In a speech delivered in Adelaide, Mr Keelty played down Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali’s inflammatory comments on women, asserting that “many in the community also say offensive things and many of them are white Caucasian Australians”.

He said rising vilification of Muslims was being fuelled by irresponsible media outlets which sensationalised terrorism-related stories with little basis in fact. And he called on Australians to teach the values of democracy and multiculturalism to the younger generation so that “our future is not worse than our past”.

Mr Keelty – who clashed with Foreign Minister Alexander Downer in 2004 after the commissioner blamed the suicide attacks on Madrid train system on the war in Iraq – said he met privately with Muslim groups in Adelaide yesterday.

“You hear more and more stories of treatment of the Islamic community that really is substandard by members of our own wider community,” he said at a lunch hosted by the South Australian Press Club. “It is vilification, picking them out of the crowd because they dress differently or they speak differently. If we are not careful we risk raising a generation of Australians who will have a bias against Islam.”

The Australian, 27 October 2006

See also “Australia’s Muslims fear backlash”, BBC News, 26 October 2006

The rape of Europe

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The German author Henryk M. Broder recently told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (12 October) that young Europeans who love freedom, better emigrate. Europe as we know it will no longer exist 20 years from now. Whilst sitting on a terrace in Berlin, Broder pointed to the other customers and the passers-by and said melancholically: ‘We are watching the world of yesterday.’

“Europe is turning Muslim. As Broder is sixty years old he is not going to emigrate himself. ‘I am too old,’ he said. However, he urged young people to get out and ‘move to Australia or New Zealand. That is the only option they have if they want to avoid the plagues that will turn the old continent uninhabitable’….

“Broder is convinced that the Europeans are not willing to oppose islamization…. West Europeans have to choose between submission (islam) or death. I fear, like Broder, that they have chosen submission – just like in former days when they preferred to be red rather than dead.”

Paul Belien in the Brussells Journal, 25 October 2006

Fascists applaud result of Danish cartoons court case

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Denmark continues to lead in the way in defending the long cherished European concept of free speech after a court ruled yesterday (26th) that a Danish newspaper did not libel Muslims by printing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that unleashed a storm of protests in the Islamic world. Seven Danish Muslim organisations brought the case against the Jyllands-Posten, saying the paper had libelled the world’s one billion Muslims with the images, which included one depicting the Prophet with a bomb in his turban, by implying Muslims were terrorists.”

BNP news article, 27 October 2006

Manchester imam ‘backs execution of gays’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“A row has blown up over a claim a prominent Manchester Muslim has defended the execution of sexually-active gay people as ‘justified’. Arshad Misbahi, a junior Imam at the city’s Central Mosque is alleged to have confirmed that it is an acceptable punishment in Iraq and Iran. His comments are said to have been made to psychotherapist Dr John Casson who is researching the persecution of gays in Islamic states. But they have been condemned as ‘encouraging conflict between the area’s large gay and Muslim communities’.”

Manchester Evening News, 26 October 2006

Predictably, this “story” originates with Outrage! – who dedicate most of their efforts these days to encouraging conflict between the gay and Muslim communities. Outrage! issued a press release a week ago, based on alleged remarks made by Arshad Misbahi in a private conversation initiated by Casson. This was then taken up by Pink News and Gay.com. As Massoud Shadjareh of the Islamic Human Rights Commission told BBC News: “Just one man talking to another becomes an issue, Muslims are being put under a magnifying glass. I think that this is part of demonising Muslims.”

Why this fear of Islam?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“It’s fashionable nowadays for Britain’s politicians to complain about immigrants who refuse to assimilate. The more right wing among them infer that the presence of a large Muslim community threatens ‘our way of life’ without going into details as to what that way of life actually entails. Not surprising when Britain has become such an eclectic multiethnic melting pot. There no longer is a stereotypical British way of life other than in the pages of an Agatha Christie or a P.G. Wodehouse novel.

“It’s interesting, too, that those who feel intimidated or threatened in the presence of a woman wearing the veil don’t appear to be concerned by the sight of a nun’s habit, Hassidic garb or side locks, Sikh turbans or the shaved heads and orange robes of Hare Krishna devotees.

“Moreover the current ministerial focus on Muslim assimilation is having the opposite effect. Moderate Muslim leaders resented being told by John Reid, the home secretary, to monitor their children for signs of hate. And reports state that since Jack Straw’s comments on the veil, more and more young women are adopting the niqab in protest – a predictable reaction.

“Indeed, the British government appears to be going out of its way to foment an enemy within in keeping with Blair’s struggle against what he calls an evil ideology. It’s no wonder that British Muslims are beginning to feel demonized and marginalized when their own government calls for mosques, faith schools, community centers and Islamic bookshops to be monitored.

“If British Muslims tend to live in close proximity to one another it isn’t the only community to do so. London’s Stamford Hill was and is more reminiscent of Mea Sharim in Israel than a British city suburb. Brick Lane resembles a corner of Bangladesh while Soho is predominantly Chinese. These ghettoized areas aren’t new. They’ve existed for more than half-a-century in some cases and nobody seemed to mind.

“The governmental message is further having an effect on the attitudes of ordinary people. Reports of Muslim women wearing the hijab being insulted in the streets or suffering the indignity of having their head scarves pulled from their heads are rife. In short, Muslims have become fair game for racists and bigots.”

Linda Heard in iViews, 25 October 2006

‘My years in a habit taught me the paradox of veiling’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Karen Armstrong (3)“I spent seven years of my girlhood heavily veiled – not in a Muslim niqab but in a nun’s habit. We wore voluminous black robes, large rosaries and crucifixes, and an elaborate headdress: you could see a small slice of my face from the front, but from the side I was entirely shielded from view. We must have looked very odd indeed, walking dourly through the colourful carnival of London during the swinging 60s, but nobody ever asked us to exchange our habits for more conventional attire.

“When my order was founded in the 1840s, not long after Catholic emancipation, people were so enraged to see nuns brazenly wearing their habits in the streets that they pelted them with rotten fruit and horse dung. Nuns had been banned from Britain since the Reformation; their return seemed to herald the resurgence of barbarism. Two hundred and fifty years after the gunpowder plot, Catholicism was still feared as unassimilable, irredeemably alien to the British ethos, fanatically opposed to democracy and freedom, and a fifth column allied to dangerous enemies abroad.

“Today the veiled Muslim woman appears to symbolise the perceived Islamic threat, as nuns once epitomised the evils of popery.”

Karen Armstrong in the Guardian, 26 October 2006

The ‘long Eurabian night’ closes in on us

Posted on by Bob Pitt

SteynBill Murray summarises Mark Steyn’s paranoid ravings about the Islamisation of Europe in his new book America Alone:

“Birthrates in many European countries fall well below the replacement rate of 2.1 for every woman, compared to regions of the Muslim world where women typically bear seven children each. The result, Steyn posits, will be a dramatic shift in global power in the coming decades, with the chief beneficiary being radical Islam. ‘How bad is it going to get in Europe?” he asks. ‘As bad as it can get, as in societal collapse, fascist revivalism, and then the long Eurabian night, not over the entire Continent but over significant parts of it.’

“… Steyn’s choicest attacks are reserved for a Europe run by closeted elites. For the past 60 years, he insists, they have sustained an environment of weak social contracts where the relationship between rights and responsibilities for a European and his or her government ‘is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship’. A European welfare state that promotes dependency and extended adolescence is, in Steyn’s eyes, as grave a cultural sin as can be committed, leading to divided communities, large-scale violence and a wholesale replacement of Europe’s dominant culture.”

Bloomberg.com, 26 October 2006