‘Time to round up the enemy within’, says Jon Gaunt

Time to round up the enemy within

By Jon Gaunt, The Sun, 11 July 2006

Now that cricket-loving ordinary Brit Shehzad Tanweer has released his video will, can we stop all the conspiracy theories and demands for a public inquiry into July 7.

Tony Blair was completely right to say that so-called Muslim leaders need to openly condemn the cancer that exists within their communities. And whether they like it or not this is a MUSLIM problem.

That doesn’t mean all Muslims are terrorists but it does mean that all the terrorists we are facing at the moment were or are Muslims, so the prime responsibility lies with the Muslim community.

Now after the disgusting statistic that 13 per cent – or more than 200,000 – British Muslims consider these scum to be martyrs, it is time for action and even more harsh words from Blair.

Forget about Muslim taskforces, social deprivation and exclusion. I want madmen like this cleaned off the streets. This 13 per cent needs to be identified and rounded up.

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Racist attack on imam in Rhyl

Naeem MohammadBeaten… for being Muslim: Sickening attack on a family man

Daily Post, 11 July 2006

THIS is the battered face of a Muslim man beaten unconscious in a racist attack as he walked to morning prayers.

Assistant imam Mohammed Naeem was attacked after being racially abused on his way to Rhyl’s Islamic Cultural Centre in Water Street. He was punched mercilessly and left unconscious, bruised, bleeding and needing 15 stitches in his mouth.

He also lost two teeth in the attack, which happened at about 2.30am last Wednesday – just two days before the first anniversary of the London bombings. He was taken to Ysbyty Glan Clwyd, Bodelwyd-dan, for treatment.

The 29-year-old family man, who has a wife and three children, was yesterday still recovering in hospital following the horrific attack by two men. Last night outraged Muslim leaders appealed for anyone with information to contact police.

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France angered by Italy senator’s racist slur

France has complained to World Cup winner Italy about a right-wing senator’s racist comments that the defeated French team was made up of “blacks, Muslims and communists”, the Italian media reported on Tuesday.

Racism has already threatened to cloud Italy’s victory, with reports that Italian defender Marco Materazzi provoked French star Zinedine Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, by calling him a “terrorist”. Materazzi denies making such comments.

There was no such denial from Roberto Calderoli of the Northern League, who lost a ministerial post in a centre-right government earlier this year for wearing a T-shirt with cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad offensive to Muslims.

As the victorious Azzurri returned to a heroes’ welcome in Rome on Monday, Calderoli celebrated it as a “political victory” over a mixed-race French team.

Italy had “beat a team which, in the quest for results, sacrificed its own identity by selecting blacks, Muslims and communists”, the senator said, in comments that were rejected by members of Italy’s new centre-left coalition government.

Reuters, 11 July 2006

Sunny boosts Bright

Sunny Hundal gives a plug to Martin Bright and his forthcoming Channel 4 attack on the MCB and Mockbul Ali. “When asked his thoughts on whispered accusations of him being Islamophobic, he says he finds the idea ‘laughable’.”

Asians in Media, 10 July 2006

Yeah, right. This would be the same Martin Bright who told a FOSIS conference last year that he had no problem describing himself as an Islamophobe because, he explained, there is a lot in Islam to be fearful of.

I note that on Wednesday Bright is addressing a seminar organised by Policy Exchange, the right-wing Tory think tank headed by the appalling Dean Godson. Godson is a notorious opponent of the Peace Process in the north of Ireland, and the purpose of the seminar is evidently to draw a parallel between the the UK government’s supposed capitulation to Irish Republican “terrorists” and its capitulation to Islamism. In both cases, Godson’s line is that the government should reject dialogue and co-operation with organisations that have mass support in the community and instead turn to other individuals with more “acceptable” politics who represent nobody but themselves.

People like … well, Sunny Hundal.

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More on Orr

Letters in today’s Independent responding Deborah Orr’s disgraceful article are mainly supportive of her views. For example: “Deborah Orr is ‘offended’ by the sight of veiled women swathed in black in the streets of London. Offended? Walking past women who cover their hair with scarves, their faces with veils, their bodies in shapeless garments for so-called religious reasons does not offend me: it makes my blood boil.” Another correspondent describes the niqab as “the most sinister garment since the IRA balaclava”.

For Yusuf Smith’s comments see here and here.

Another outbreak of Islamophobia from Nick Cohen

As IslamExpo builds bridges between Muslims and Britain’s other diverse communities, Nick Cohen – with the assistance of Martin Bright – sets about smashing them. While responsible media commentators emphasise that the 7/7 bombers were a tiny unrepresentative minority within Muslim communities in the UK, the message from Cohen and Bright is that the terrorists are part of a general problem of extremism among British Muslims and their organisations.

See “The Foreign Office ought to be serving Britain, not radical Islam”, Observer, 9 July 2006

‘Britain’s Muslims at Alton Towers’

“On 17 September this year Alton Towers is to be handed over to the Muslims for a day. There will, therefore, be no music, no gambling and of course no alcohol. The rides will be segregated between men and women and your usual ten quid botulo-burger’n’fries will be prepared in accordance with halal practice. There will be prayer mats scattered around, so that you can give thanks to Allah for not having been thrown head first out of the big dipper. Who knows – perhaps they will adapt some of the rides for the day: maybe the chamber of horrors will be full of Hasidic Jews wreathed in sinister smiles.”

Rod Liddle in the Spectator, 8 July 2006

Karen Armstrong on 7/7

Karen Armstrong (3)“It is a year since the London bombings, an act committed in the name of Islam by a viciously disaffected minority, but which violated the essential principles of any religion. Doubtless with this anniversary in mind, the prime minister has complained that British Muslims are not doing enough to deal with the extremists. The ‘moderate’ Muslims, he said testily, must confront the Islamists; they cannot condemn their methods while tacitly condoning their anger. The extremists’ anti-western views are wrong, and mainstream Muslims must tell them that violent jihad ‘is not the religion of Islam’.

“This regrettable step will put yet more pressure on a community already under strain. It ignores the fact that the chief problem for most Muslims is not ‘the west’ per se, but the suffering of Muslims in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Iraq and Palestine. Many Britons share this dismay, but the strong emphasis placed by Islam upon justice and community solidarity makes this a religious issue for Muslims….

“It is disingenuous of Tony Blair to separate the rising tide of ‘Islamism’ from his unpopular foreign policy, particularly when Palestinians are being subjected to new dangers in Gaza. He is also mistaken to imagine that law-abiding Muslims could bring the extremists to heel in the same way that he disciplines recalcitrant members of his cabinet. This is just not how religious groups operate.”

Karen Armstrong, author of Islam: A Short History, in the Guardian, 8 July 2006

BNP in Barking & Dagenham

“The man from the BNP breezes up in a white linen suit looking like some latter-day Martin Bell and says: ‘Can you believe it? Two of our schools are having Muslim days tomorrow – on 7/7! It’s like chucking mud in people’s faces’.”

The Guardian profiles Richard Barnbrook, fascist councillor in Barking & Dagenham.