Author Archives: Bob Pitt

Congressional report stitches up US Muslim community

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Marc LynchThe House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has released a new report, “Al-Qaeda: The Many Faces of an Islamist Extremist Threat”. Marc Lynch is less than impressed:

“Some of the sourcing is hilarious. You’d think that the House Intelligence Committee could do a better job of sourcing a translation of a major statement by Osama bin Laden than the website jihadunspun (footnote 5), wouldn’t you? But there’s one place where the report does go a bit farther: on the alleged threat of homegrown American Muslim extremism. I’d go so far as to say that the lazily produced padding about al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiya, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (!), and even Iraq, was just thrown together as a vehicle to deliver a set of rather extreme views about the threat posed by the American Muslim community…. The whole narrative thrust of the report hypes the threat of homegrown terrorism and the need for more intense scrutiny of the American Muslim community.”

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‘Fury as BBC gives preacher of hate a platform’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Abu IzzadeenThe Daily Mail reports: “The BBC sparked fury today for giving prime-time exposure to a known Islamic extremist. Abu Izzadeen appeared on Radio 4’s Today programme on the 8.10 slot normally reserved for ministers…. Listener Alan Newlands wrote saying: ‘I’m outraged by the amount of time you have given to this madman. I’m outraged by the insult to the Muslim community you perpetrated by allowing this man to appear to represent even a tiny minority.’ …  Dominic Grieve, shadow attorney general, said: ‘Abu Izzadeen is clearly a malevolent religious fanatic but he is certainly not representative of the Muslim community in Britain’.”

It’s not often I say this, but I agree with the Mail and Dominic Grieve. Muslims have repeatedly complained about the media coverage given to isolated lunatics like Abu Izzadeen and Anjem Choudary. Yusuf Smith recently commented:

“Until he sloped off to Lebanon, one of Omar Bakri’s ludicrous utterances after another were given front-page treatment by various newspapers and by the BBC, and other fringe figures were invited onto such shows as BBC Radio 4’s Today (particularly when Rod Liddle was in charge). These people are as significant as they are only because they are indulged by the media; their media profile is not matched by a similar standing in the community. The problem is that their demands are often seen by the public as ‘these Muslims’ demands’ when they are in fact the demands of a very small group.”

Sam Harris on liberals and the threat to western civilisation

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sam Harris writes in the Los Angeles Times:

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world – for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a “war on terror”. We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise….

The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world’s Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals….

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal….

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

Yes, you did read that correctly. “The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.”

The neocons’ lexicon

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Salim Muwakkil analyses the origins and meaning of the term “Islamofascism”:

“Many pundits trace the neologism to historian Malise Ruthven, who used it in a September 1990 article in the London Independent. But Ruthven used it to describe authoritarian Muslim states like Morocco, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Stephen Schwartz, the neocon author of Two Faces of Islam, insists that he is the first Westerner to use the term in the contemporary context.

“But the term gained its greatest currency in the lexicon of pro-war progressives Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman and Ron Rosenbaum, to name three. They argued that the totalitarian aspirations of theocratic groups like al-Qaeda threatened the libertarian freedoms that are the legacy of the Enlightenment.

“These polemicists were less concerned (at least, originally) with the geo-strategic issues that preoccupied the administration’s neocon warmongers, so their arguments had some resonance on the secular left. After all, how could progressives oppose the theocratic agenda of the religious right within the United States and not reject similar developments elsewhere?

“In Hitchens’ last column for The Nation, he wrote ‘the theocratic and absolutist side in this war hopes to win it by exporting it here, which in turn means that we have no expectation of staying out of the war, and no right to be neutral in it’.

“By framing the war on terror as a struggle between the liberal soldiers of the Enlightenment and the dark forces of theocracy, these progressives gave cover to warmongers with rationales much less lofty. In fact, one of the major ironies is that their support has aligned them with right wing religious groups with their own theocratic agendas.”

In These Times, 21 September 2006

Hijab-wearing television presenters? ‘I’ll dispose of my TV set’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A letter writer in the Torygraph takes issue with Ruth Kelly’s suggestion that British TV should employ hijab-wearing Muslim women in more visible roles:

“On the very day that the Islamic radical Abu Izzadeen declares our Home Secretary persona non grata in a Muslim enclave, Ruth Kelly urges that Muslim women wearing the hijab should be given front-line roles in the media.Utterly predictable, of course, but the moment I see a female television presenter wearing the hijab will be the point at which I shall dispose of my set and surrender the licence. This is Britain, not Saudi Arabia or Iran.”

Daily Telegraph, 22 September 2006

Muslims attack BBC for airing interview with extremist

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The chief Muslim organisation in Britain has condemned the BBC for giving a well-known Islamic extremist who hijacked a speech by the Home Secretary a prime-time platform to air his views today.

The decision to interview Abu Izzadeen today during the key 8.10am slot on the agenda-setting Today programme was heavily criticised by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), which described Abu Izzadeen as a “thug” and accused the BBC of deliberately trying to generate publicity.

“We have received phone call after phone call from moderate Muslims who are appalled that the Today programme gave such an utterly marginal figure this prime-time spot to spout his bile almost interrupted,” said Inayat Bunglawala, spokesman for the MCB.

“There was no attempt to balance the interview or challenge his views by having a mainstream Muslim view featured. This really plays into the hands of those who think of Muslims as bigots. People are very upset about this misrepresentation of Islam.”

Times, 22 September 2006

Muslim schoolchildren ‘more liberal and tolerant’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim pupils are more liberal and tolerant than their white counterparts, according to a study released on Wednesday. Nearly a third of white youngsters questioned in Burnley, Lancashire believed that one race was superior, compared with 10% of Asians who thought the same. Almost half of the white pupils felt that respecting others regardless of religion was not important and a quarter did not feel it was important to tolerate people with different views.

More than 400 15-year-olds were surveyed about their attitudes towards race, religion and cultural integration earlier this year. The research was conducted by Lancaster University’s religious studies department. The pupils came from three unnamed non-religious schools, all in deprived areas. One in Burnley, attended mostly by white pupils, and two schools in Blackburn, where one had mostly Indian or Pakistani pupils and the other was ethnically mixed.

Study author Dr Andrew Holden said a “disturbing” finding of the survey was the response to the question of racial superiority. Nearly a third of the white pupils believed one race was superior compared with a tenth in the Asian school and under a fifth in the mixed school. Dr Holden said: “The greater degree of racial tolerance in an overwhelmingly Asian/Muslim populated school again calls into question the common sense assumption that mixed schools represent the most tolerant environments.”

TES, 20 September 2006

See also “Research reveals Muslim pupils more tolerant than non-Muslims”, Lancaster University news release, 20 September 2006

Families of bombers to blame for 7/7 – Paul Routledge

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Paul Routledge“John Reid, the Iraq war boaster, may not have been the right man to say it and an East London Islamic centre may not have been the right place to say it. But it still had to be said – even at the risk of upsetting Muslims. There is a threat to the public from home-grown Islamic fundamentalists and British Muslims have a duty to monitor their own community for signs of incipient terrorists.

“They know better than anyone if young Ali is going off the rails, or has come under the ideological spell of a fundamentalist cleric. They see the signs better than a whole station full of coppers. They have a responsibility to take whatever action seems right, including informing the authorities, if someone they know seems to be on the brink of violent jihadism against fellow Britons. That includes parents, siblings, friends, clerics, youth workers and elders of the Muslim community.

“I’m sorry, but as Dr Reid admitted, there is no easy way of saying this. Silence, however, would be more culpable than speaking out. Just imagine if this habit of mind had been the norm before July 7 last year: the young Muslim bombers might have been apprehended before they set out on their deadly mission to London.”

Paul Routledge in the Daily Mirror, 22 September 2006

So, according to Routledge, it would appear that the families of the 7/7 bombers knew, or at least suspected, that the young men were “on the brink of violent jihadism against fellow Britons” but they kept quiet about it.

There is no easy way of saying this, but it still has to be said, even at the risk of upsetting Paul Routledge – he’s an ignorant, bigoted idiot.

‘Confronted by the Islamist threat on all sides, Europe pathetically caves in’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Last week we had the tragicomic spectacle of European Nato countries lining up to decline politely the request to beef up their forces in Afghanistan, many of whom are now fighting in perilously under-resourced conditions against a resurgent enemy. Then on Monday Jacques Chirac went to New York to upend the long, delicate diplomacy designed to deny Iran nuclear weapons. He said France no longer thought the UN should impose sanctions if Iran did not end its uranium enrichment programme…. Then, of course, we have had the predictable European outrage following the latest apparent provocation of Islamic extremists by free speech in the West – Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks last week on Islam….

“… the scale of Europe’s moral crisis is larger than ever. Opposing the war in Iraq was one thing, defensible in the light of events. But opting out of a serious fight against the Taleban, sabotaging efforts to get Iran off its path towards nuclear status, pre-emptively cringing to Muslim intolerance of free speech and criticism, all suggest something quite different. They imply a slow but insistent collapse of the European will, the steady attrition of the self-preservation instinct. Its effects can be seen not only in the political field, but in other ways – the startling decline of birth rates across the continent that represent a sort of self-inflicted genocide….

“The symptoms of this moral collapse may be far away from the affluent and still largely peaceful cities and towns of the old continent – in the mountains of Afghanistan, the diplomatic reception halls of Tehran and the angry Pope-effigy-burning streets of the Middle East. But there should be no doubt that it is closer to home where the disease has taken hold.”

Gerard Baker in the Times, 22 September 2006

‘Deadly peril of allowing Muslim ghettos to flourish’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In today’s Daily Express, Mark Palmer warns of the threat from “Muslim ghettos”. He makes a comparison with “… the Chinese community, whose members do tend to live in various Chinatown areas of big cities but who, by virtue of their businesses and their appreciation of what this country has to offer, readily feel integrated…. The new Muslim ghettos by contrast are ideal breeding grounds for fanatics and unless we cut off the supply then we might as well admit defeat to the terrorists…. And it is no good Cabinet Minister Ruth Kelly saying that Muslim women wearing hijab, or headscarves, should be employed in front-line roles in the public eye. She thinks hijab-wearing Muslims presenting the news on TV will encourage more Muslim women to apply for jobs in the media. It might – but it will also encourage the likes of Izzadeen to push on with their relentless battle to ‘implement’ Islam. Rather than making Muslims feel more a part of British society, it could just as easily provide them with a further incentive to separate themselves.”