Author Archives: Bob Pitt

Thousands march with family raided by police

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Forest Gate demonstrationThousands of protesters led by members of the family caught up in the anti-terrorist raid in east London two weeks ago demanded an apology from police yesterday for their “barbaric and unacceptable” treatment.

The march ended in a demonstration outside Forest Gate police station, where protesters attacked the leaking of “lies and misinformation” after the arrest and questioned the failures of intelligence which led to the disastrous raid.

“The police are doing their job, but they should be doing it properly,” said Muddassar Ahmed, a spokesman for the march organising committee. “The intelligence agencies have much more to answer for.”

March organisers estimated that 5,000 gathered for yesterday’s protest, which was the first mainstream demonstration to take place near the scene of the raid. It drew together a diverse coalition including moderate Muslim groups, Respect, the Conservatives and Stop the War.

Two elderly white women wearing floral print dresses mingled with women in hijab and men in white shalwar kameez. One of the women, Madeline Channer, 63, said: “The police were very heavy-handed and abused these two young men. I was brought up to respect the police but this sort of behaviour eradicates that respect.”

Guardian, 19 June 2006

Pass this test, Dutch government tells Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A draconian new law is expected to force immigrants to the Netherlands to sit a tough exam on Dutch history, geography and culture or face heavy fines. The rules, drafted by the country’s hardline immigration minister, “Iron Rita” Verdonk, and likely to be approved this autumn, will set a challenge for up to half a million mainly Muslim immigrants, including some who have lived in Holland for 30 years. The legislation, which is due to come into force on January 1 next year, requires immigrants to attend 600 hours of coursework before being tested. Failure to attend the course or pass the exam within five years will trigger an annual fine of almost £700, cuts in benefits or the termination of a residence permit.

Sunday Times, 18 June 2006

‘Faith crimes’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Liberals have lost some important battles in the struggle to preserve democratic standards in the face of extremism. One was lost here in Britain, and by my profession, namely the decision by all British newspapers not to reprint the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten. The papers’ decision was encouraged by the Labour government and accompanied by a good deal of sage self-congratulation that wisdom had prevailed. The fact that journalism’s central task is to relate or show to people what is happening was put to one side, even though in this case what was happening was, inter alia, murders, burnings, riots and boycotts. Now that the smoke has literally cleared, we can see more clearly what that decision was: a disastrous miscalculation.”

John Lloyd in the Financial Times, 17 June 2006

And how can we see this more clearly? Apparently because “complaint backed by believable threat of violence, laced with the undertones of cultural guilt” has only encouraged calls for censorship from other minority communities, such as the Hindus who protested about the London exhibition of the paintings of Maqbool Fida Husain.

In other words the Nick Cohen line, which fails to distinguish between causing offence and promoting racism.

The Muslim presence in the racist mind

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“In one of her last essays published in the United Kingdom, the late Susan Sontag compared the pictures of tortured Iraqi inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq with the photographs ‘of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880s and 1930s, which show smalltown Americans, no doubt most of them church-going, respectable citizens, grinning, beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree’. Sontag was amongst the few voices who opposed the collective transmutation of the transitory mood of anger after 11 September into hatred channeled primarily towards the Islamic worlds. She sensed the dangers of mobilising collective passions for political ends and the dichotomisation of the world into good and evil.

“It was that period, one remembers, that produced Anne Coulter’s demand that ‘[w]e should invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity’ and suggestion that, since ‘[t]here’s nothing like horrendous physical pain to quell angry fanatics’, ‘a couple of well-aimed nuclear weapons’ can transform ‘Islamic fanatics’ into ‘gentle little lambs’. Coulter was not the only one infusing public discourse with tightly packaged hate messages: Fred Ikle, for instance, alluded to a nuclear war that ‘might end up displacing Mecca and Medina with two large radioactive craters’; John Cooksey suggested that any airline passenger wearing a ‘diaper on his head’ should be ‘pulled over’; and Jerry Falwell asserted on 60 Minutes that ‘Muhammad was a terrorist’ and that he was ‘a violent man, a man of war’, a statement for which he later apologised.  It was that period, in short, which made the Muslim Vogelfrei culturally and, to a certain extent, legally as well.”

Arshin Adib-Moghaddam in MRZine, 15 June 2006

French Islamic institute fights Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

France’s first Islamic government-backed institute will open in October in the northern city of Lille to counter the rising Islamophobia phenomenon and groom qualified imams and preachers.

“The need was so pressing to have such an institute to counter prevailing Islamophobia,” the institute’s dean Mohammad El-Beshari told IslamOnline.net.

“The institute, which is affiliated to the University of Lille, will project the tolerant image and openness of Islam,” added Beshari, also the deputy head of the French Council for Muslim Faith (CFCM).

He said the Muslim minority, estimated at some six millions, were in a dire need to have such an educational establishment.

The institute is co-financed by the French and Qatari governments and its premises are donated by Lille Municipality.

Islam Online, 15 June 2006

Daniel Johnson on Forest Gate

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Daniel Johnson offers his take on the Forest Gate police raid for the benefit of US readers:

“At a press conference on Tuesday, the two Muslim suspects [sic] were flanked by ‘civil liberties heavyweights’. They included Gareth Pierce, a left-wing lawyer who also represents Guantánamo detainees and sundry other extremists, and Asad Rehman, a former sidekick to George Galloway (founder of the Respect Party) and self-appointed spokesman for every anti-Western, anti-war, anti-capitalist cause. Looking slightly out of place among the shaven-headed, bushy-bearded Islamists was Canon Ann Easter, a dean of the Church of England. Canon Easter had turned her church into a television studio for the benefit of this leftist-Islamist media circus. Somehow, it does not surprise me that the local mosque had declined to do this. The Islamists disapprove of women priests, but they presumably see in Canon Easter what Lenin called a ‘useful idiot’ who can reassure the infidels. Unfortunately, Canon Easter is by no means untypical. England’s established church has a deplorable record of ‘internalizing the hatred of the West that defines the shared universe of radical Islamism and the revolutionary left’, as Melanie Phillips puts it in her book Londonistan.”

New York Sun, 15 June 2006

Forest Gate Two – victims? Nah, says Simon Heffer

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Forest Gate press conference“First he heard a scream. The next thing Mohammed Abdulkayar remembered was making eye contact in the darkness with the man who stood at the bottom of the stairs. At that instant, without warning and, he says, without provocation, the police officer fired a shot which tore through his chest and exited through his right shoulder. He slumped against the wall, bleeding and senseless….

“Visibly distressed, with his wound still bandaged and with his arm in a sling, Mr Abdulkayar gave his first full account of the events of June 2…. ‘I was begging the police “please, please, I can’t breathe”. He just kicked me in my face and kept on saying “shut the fuck up”. One of the officers slapped me over the face. I thought they were either going to start shooting me again or were going to shoot my brother. I still didn’t know that it was the police because they hadn’t said a word about police’.”

Hugh Muir reports on yesterday’s press conference by the two innocent men targeted in the Forest Gate police raid.

Guardian, 14 June 2006

For his part, Telegraph journalist Simon Heffer complains that “pacifists, anti-racists, radical Marxists, anarchists, anti-Blairists and others of varying degrees of conviction and opportunism” have “branded the two brothers in the Forest Gate raid ‘victims’ – a word used by the chairman of their press conference yesterday. It is a word that is clearly losing its force in our language. There seems to be a pursuit of moral equivalence with the more usual idea of a ‘victim’ of terror.”

Daily Telegraph, 14 June 2006

Islamophobia in Europe

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tariq RamadanThe anti-Islam discourse in Europe is not only coming from politicians and international media but also from intellectuals, a conference on Islamophobia in Europe held in Brussels on Monday was told.

Jocelyne Cesari, an associate professor from Sorbonne, Paris, said Muslims in Europe are facing discrimination in the cultural and religious domain as well as in immigration, housing, education and employment “Muslims belong to the underclass of Europe,” she noted.

Well-known European Muslim thinker and intellectual Tariq Ramadan said “there is a discourse built on racism and Islamophobia.” “What we heard about the Jews in the 1930s-40s now is coming back to Muslims. Yesterday it was said by right-wing parties. Today it is the mainstream parties which are carrying out the anti-Islam propaganda,” he said.

Speakers in the conference cited the example of Italian writer Oriana Fallaci who, along with other insulting remarks, was quoted as saying Muslims “multiply like rats.” These western intellectuals are blaming Islam per se for all the problems of the Muslims, Ramadan said.

Ramadan, who is president of the Brussels-based European Muslim Network (EMN), also called for a debate among Muslims in Europe to respond to such criticisms and provide answers to Islamophobia.

The conference was organized by the European Policy Centre in cooperation with the King Baudouin Foundation as part of their “Multicultural Europe” program.

Islamic Republic News Agency, 13 June 2006