Author Archives: Bob Pitt

Muslim pilot reveals shock at being ordered off flight

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A British Muslim airline pilot yesterday described the “humiliating” moment when he was hauled off a transatlantic flight just before take-off. Amar Ashraf, 28, who was born in Wrexham, North Wales, said he felt “demoralised and humiliated” after being told to leave the flight from Manchester to Newark by a stewardess, and then being questioned by armed police. He believes his removal was down to having a “Muslim-sounding name”.

Independent, 22 August 2006

For the case of Dr Ahmed Farooq, to which the article refers, see CBC News, 19 August 2006

Dr Farooq was thrown off a plane in Denver last week after a fellow passenger observed him engaged in the “suspicious” activity of reciting his evening prayers. Robert Spencer has little sympathy for Dr Farooq: “These are the same prayers that jihad terrorists have prayed….”

Jihad Watch, 21 August 2006

Postscript:  Yusuf Smith draws our attention to the case of Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi-American blogger who suffered harassment when he tried boarding a plane from New York to California wearing a T-shirt with Arabic writing on it.

Racial profiling lobby would provoke breakdown in community relations

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In a statement today Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said:

“It is important that anti-terrorism policing in London is intelligence-led and targets those engaged in terrorist activity. As Sir Ian Blair has repeatedly stressed community support is essential to isolate and bring to justice terrorists.

“Racial profiling as increasingly advocated in some sections of the media is a totally opposite strategy. It alienates entire communities by making them potential suspects. That would destroy the community confidence on which our defences against terrorism depend and fuel a sense of injustice amongst young people affected by it.

“It will also legitimise outbursts of racism which destroy good community relations. If the media and some politicians are allowed to put whole communities under suspicion, then incidents like the passengers who demanded that two entirely innocent Asian men be removed their plane, or the family who were apparently turned away from the London Eye because they spoke Arabic, will become common.

“If those kind of incidents are tolerated they will provoke precisely the breakdown in community relations which the terrorists and the extreme right want to see.”

GLA press release, 22 August 2006

Muslims should stop whingeing about Islamophobia – Jon Gaunt

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jon_Gaunt“When pasty-faced fat white blokes start blowing planes out of the sky in protest at the Government’s anti-obesity guidelines then I will be the first in the queue to be profiled and frisked. I’ll assume the position quicker than George Michael on Hampstead Heath.

“But until then I’m afraid young Muslim men should stop bleating about Islamophobia and racism and get used to the idea that if we are going to get our airports back to any sense of normality then they are the people who will be more likely to be stopped and searched.

“I don’t understand the fuss about the Monarch passengers who refused to fly with two blokes acting suspiciously on a flight from Malaga. We’ve been told to be vigilant and that’s what these people were being. Now the usual suspects are accusing them of paranoia, racism and Islamophobia….

“If Islam, as we are repeatedly told, really does mean peace then why aren’t the million-and-a-half moderates demonstrating that on London’s streets? I’m sure that the terrorists’ mate and fanatics’ friend Ken Livingstone could donate Trafalgar Square for a rally. He could even divert a bit of funding away from flying in mad Muslim clerics who want to slaughter gays and justify suicide bombings in Israeli pizza parlours, to help pay for peace banners.

“Of course there’s more chance of me going to paradise and deflowering 72 virgins than this happening.

“Despite being told since 9/11 that this isn’t a war against Islam I’m increasingly feeling as if Islam is engaged in a real and propaganda war against us and our way of life….

“John Reid now wants to bypass the Human Rights Act and intern terror suspects. He should go further and rip up the Act, secure our borders, investigate every young Muslim who has been to Pakistan and immediately stop the farce of airline restrictions for all and replace it with ethnic and religious profiling.”

Jon Gaunt in The Sun, 22 August 2006

The war of fundamentalisms

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Soumayya Ghannoushi“Perhaps the one thing al-Qaida militants have proven good at, apart from the shedding of innocent blood, is fanning the flames of hostility to Islam and Muslims. From the darkness of their caves and hiding places, these self-appointed spokesmen for one and a half billion Muslims worldwide have excelled in stirring latent negative images of Islam within the western psyche. Through their senseless crimes, Islam, in the minds of most, has become a euphemism for mass slaughter and destruction. Thanks to them, racism, bigotry and Islamophobia could rear its ugly head unashamedly in broad daylight.

“The terrible irony is that Muslims find themselves helplessly trapped between two fundamentalisms, between Bush’s hammer and Bin Laden’s anvil, hostages to an extreme rightwing American administration, aggressively seeking to impose its expansionist and hegemonic will over the region at gunpoint, and to a cluster of violent, wild fringe groups, lacking in political experience or sound religious understanding. Although the two claim to be combating each other, the reality is that they are working in unison; one providing the justifications the other desperately needs for its fanaticism, ferocity and savagery.”

Soumaya Ghannoushi at Comment is Free, 21 August 2006

Dubai family turned away from Eye

Posted on by Bob Pitt

london eyeLondon Eye bosses have apologised to a family from Dubai who were initially stopped from boarding, apparently after being overheard speaking in Arabic.

Syed Husain, 65, of Manor House, north London, was stopped while showing his sister and brother-in-law the sights. They joined the queue at the London Eye, on the South Bank, and went through the usual security checks. But Mr Husain said: “As soon as the security guard heard my sister speak to her husband in Arabic, the attitude towards us changed. They said: ‘Sorry, you can’t carry a bag with you’.”

Mr Husain’s bag was searched and he was told to bring it to a locker at Waterloo Station, while his sister and her husband were held in a secure area nearby. He returned without the bag and the three queued again but were confronted by the same security guard, who asked if he was carrying knives. “I was surprised, he had already searched me, now he is asking for knives. I said ‘no’, then he pushed his hand inside my pocket, searching for knives. He couldn’t find any knives. He then let us inside the capsule.”

BBC News, 21 August 2006

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‘British Muslim leaders’ and ‘sharia law’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Shahid_MalikAfter some thirty Muslim representatives met with Ruth Kelly on 14 August, the media spin on the discussion was that “Muslim leaders” had proposed that holidays should be introduced to mark Muslim festivals and that Muslim communities should be allowed to operate Islamic legal codes for marriage and family life.

This was reported in the Daily Mail  under the headline “Muslims call for special bank holidays“, while the Daily Mirror headlined their report “We must not give in to Muslim blackmail“. The Daily Star informed its readers that “British Muslims have demanded special bank holidays for religious festivals…. They also called for the UK to have Sharia law, which in the Middle East includes penalties such as stonings and amputations”, and the fascists of the British National Party echoed the Mirror with “Labour ministers threatened with Islamic blackmail“.

Ever eager to grasp the opportunity for a spot of self-promotion, Labour MP Shahid Malik contributed an article to yesterday’s Sunday Times, headlined “If you want sharia law, you should go and live in Saudi“, in which he wrote that he had been “asked by the media whether I agreed that what British Muslims needed were Islamic holidays and sharia (Islamic law). I thought I had walked into some parallel universe. Sadly this was not a joke. These issues had apparently formed part of the discussion the day before between Prescott, Ruth Kelly, the communities minister, and a selection of ‘Muslim leaders’. I realised then that it wasn’t me and the media who were living in a parallel universe – although certain ‘Muslim leaders’ might well be…. When Lord Ahmed, the Muslim Labour peer, heard my comments – I said essentially that if Muslims wanted sharia they should go and live somewhere where they have it – he accused me of doing the BNP’s work.”

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Daily Express attacked for ‘disgraceful’ headline

Posted on by Bob Pitt

An article by Gabriel Milland in the 17 August issue of the Daily Express, reporting on a YouGov poll which found that three-quarters of respondents believed that Britain was engaged in a battle against “Islamic terrorists”, carried the misleading headline “Britain says: we’re at war with Islam“.

Asians in Media reproduces a letter of complaint sent to the editor of the Express: “I was disgusted to read your article headlined ‘Britain says: We’re at war with Islam’. This article is a disgrace because the headline does not in anyway correctly portray the contents of the article and has obviously been chosen purely to sell more newspapers.”

Asians in Media, 20 August 2006

Complaints can be sent to the editor at peter.hill@express.co.uk and to Mr Milland at gabriel.milland@express.co.uk.

Johann Hari – correct on Bat Ye’or, wrong about Islamophobia Watch!

Posted on by Bob Pitt

johann hari 2Johann Hari has a go at Melanie Phillips et al in today’s Independent:

“There are intellectuals on the British right who are propagating a conspiracy theory about Muslims that teeters very close to being a 21st century Protocols of the Elders of Mecca. Meet Bat Ye’or, a ‘scholar’ who argues that Europe is on the brink of being transformed into a conquered continent called ‘Eurabia’.

“In this new land, Christians and Jews will be reduced by the new Muslim majority to the status of ‘dhimmis’ – second-class citizens forced to ‘walk in the gutter’. This will not happen by accident. It is part of a deliberate and ‘occult’ plan, concocted between the Arab League and leading European politicians like Jacques Chirac and Mary Robinson, who secretly love Islam and are deliberately flooding the continent with Muslim immigrants. As Orianna Fallacci – one of the best-selling writers in Italy – has summarised the thesis in her hymns of praise to Ye’or, ‘Muslims have been told to come here and breed like rats.’

“Rather than dismissing her preposterous assertions, high-profile writers such as Melanie Phillips, Daniel Pipes and Niall Ferguson laud Ye’or as a suppressed hero, silenced by (you guessed it) ‘political correctness’. Her name is brandished as a gold standard in right-wing Tory circles. It’s interesting that writers so alert to anti-Semitism have lent their names to an ideology that is so startlingly similar. In this theory, the Star of David has simply been replaced by the Islamic crescent. If the term has any meaning, this is authentic Islamophobia, treating virtually all Muslims as verminous sharia-carriers. So why are these people still treated as serious and sane by the BBC and its editors?”

Great stuff. And who could disagree? Unfortunately, having made these excellent points, Hari goes on to denounce Islamophobia Watch.

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The meaning of ‘Islamo-fascism’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The increasingly common juxtaposition of the words ‘Islam’ and ‘fascism’ in America is a result of the efforts to poison public opinion by the Neo-cons. They cut the White House to fit their own lines. President Bush first used terms with a Neo-con stamp like ‘Islamo-fascist’, ‘Islamic radicalism’ and ‘Islamo-fascism’ in a speech he made on October 6, 2005 at the National Endowment for Democracy. He later used such terms between the lines on different occasions. This subject caught Turkey’s attention the most last week by way of a statement Bush made after the London terror operation. It was reported by many Turkish press organizations that Bush used the term ‘Islamist fascist’. Actually, the U.S. president mentioned a war against ‘Islamic fascists’. The adjective ‘Islamic’ is used in two ways in English. The first means Muslim. The other means something conforming and belonging to the Islamic religion. If the first meaning was intended, it points to certain Muslims encouraging fascism. In the second meaning, fascism is directly linked to Islam. While Neo-cons, most of whom are enemies of both Muslims and Islam, say ‘Islamo-fascism’, let there be no doubt that they intend the latter meaning.”

Ali H. Aslan in Zaman, 21 August 2006