Author Archives: Bob Pitt

Freedom of speech or Islamophobia?

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Freedom of speech or Islamophobia?

By Owen Jones, Poplar & Limehouse Constituency Labour Party

Labour Left Briefing, March 2006

The publication of a dozen caricatures of the prophet Mohammed by newspapers across Europe has sparked a global explosion of Muslim rage. Particularly incensed by the portrayal of Mohammed wearing a bomb-shaped turban, thousands of Muslims have protested across Europe and the Islamic world, culminating in the torching of Danish embassies in Beirut and Damascus and the deaths of several protesters.

According to Jyllands-Posten, the rightwing Danish newspaper that originally published the cartoons, the right of freedom of speech is under siege. France-Soir launched an impassioned defence of secularism with the assertion that: “Yes, we have the right to caricature God.” The Daily Telegraph has gone even further. In a recent editorial it demanded that: “Muslims must accept the predominant mores of their adopted culture… Those Muslims who cannot tolerate the openness and robustness of intellectual debate in the West have perhaps chosen to live in the wrong culture.”

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Sucking up to Islam will never appease the zealots, Wheen warns

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Francis WheenSucking up to Islam will never appease the zealots

By Francis Wheen

Evening Standard, 21 February 2006

I toddled down to Trafalgar Square last Saturday to observe the latest mass rally against Danish cartoonists.

The protesters were on their best behaviour, unlike the demagogues who addressed them. Certain placards – “Don’t they teach you manners in Denmark?”, “Learn to apologise properly” – suggested this whole crisis could have been avoided had the Danes studied Lady Troubridge’s Book of Etiquette more attentively.

The most common placard, however, was a simple equation: “War on terror = War on Islam”. What could be more moderate and well-mannered than that? It’s an article of faith for many secular British liberals, too.

The reasoning behind it is that Britain set out to topple Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim. Yet the victims of Saddam’s regime – Kurds and Shias – were themselves Muslims. Did anyone at the rally claim that Saddam also made war on Islam? Of course not.

Nor would they make the accusation against Iran – even though Iranian police arrested 1,200 Sufi Muslims in Qom last week and destroyed their prayer hall. This was an act of straightforward religious persecution, but only Amnesty International has made the slightest fuss.

If Tony Blair really is waging war on Islam, it must be the first struggle in history in which the belligerent continually prostrates himself before the foe he is supposedly attacking. Only last month the Government tried to push through a law criminalising people who criticise religion, a measure introduced purely to placate leading Muslims.

Now we learn from the New Statesman that the Foreign Office wants to establish “working-level contacts” with supporters of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, an extreme Islamist group. In a leaked memo to ministers, an FO official explains that “interacting with ‘political Islam’ is an important element of our Engaging With the Islamic World strategy”.

Our ambassador in Cairo seems unconvinced. In another memo leaked to the New Statesman, he complains of “a tendency for us to be drawn towards engagement for its own sake” and a reluctance to notice “the very real downsides for us in terms of the Islamists’ likely foreign and social policies”.

Just so. Since 9/11 earnest progressives have argued that we must work with militant Islam rather than challenge it. Hence the grotesque pantomime horse known as the Respect Coalition.

Meanwhile Tony Blair has been engaging away like billy-o with the famous “Muslim moderates”, awarding them knighthoods and seats on quangos. He insists religion is the solution rather than the problem, since “Jews, Muslims and Christians are all children of Abraham” – overlooking the fact that Abraham’s example was cited by one of the 9/11 hijackers as his chief inspiration.

So far, however, this ardent wooing seems to be unreciprocated. An ICM poll has found that 40 per cent of British Muslims want sharia law in parts of the country, and one in five sympathises with the “feelings and motives” of bombers who killed 52 people in London last July. Alarming news: but will it prompt a demo in Trafalgar Square? No chance.

BNP to use Prophet cartoon in campaign

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BNP turban cartoon (3)The British National Party is seeking to exploit controversies involving Muslims in its campaign for local authority elections in May.

The extreme right-wing party, which hopes to field 1,000 candidates in England, will include in its campaign material one of the cartoons which sparked outrage among Muslims across the world, showing the Prophet Mohamed with a bomb in his turban.

One leaflet asks voters: “Are you concerned about the growth of Islam in Britain? Make Thursday 4 May Referendum Day.” It adds: “We owe it to our children to defend our Christian culture.”

Labour MPs condemned the BNP’s attack on Muslims while also urging their party’s leaders to take more seriously the threat from the BNP in its working-class heartlands.

Mainstream parties say the BNP’s campaigning has become more sophisticated. The party is using telephone canvassing for the first time and playing down its hostility to blacks and Asians in order to focus on Muslims. Other campaign literature contrasts the jailing of the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza for inciting murder and racial hatred with the partial acquittal of Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, who faces a retrial on unresolved racial hatred charges on 15 May.

The BNP, which now has 19 councillors, is expected to focus efforts in areas where it has performed strongly in the past such as parts of Lancashire, Yorkshire, the West Midlands and east London, where it won 35 per cent of the vote in recent by-elections in Barking. Its share of the vote rose from 1 per cent at the 1992 general election to 4.2 per cent last year.

Labour MPs are worried that the BNP could capture more council seats by exploiting the disenchantment with the Government among traditional Labour supporters and stoking fears about the Muslim community. The MPs fear that Tony Blair’s determination to retain the support of Middle England could leave Labour vulnerable to a BNP advance in working-class areas.

Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham, said: “The BNP’s pitch is to be more Labour than New Labour with a virulently anti-Muslim agenda.” He said Labour’s strategy of targeting swing voters in marginal seats was “diametrically at odds” with the need to reassure traditional supporters about the Government’s record.

Independent, 22 February 2006

See also BBC News, 22 February 2006

 

Lawyer lambasts arrest of actors

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Clive Stafford SmithLawyer lambasts arrest of actors

By Daniel Coysh

Morning Star, 22 February 2006

Human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith said yesterday that the arrest of two actors last week, who portrayed former Guantanamo Bay detainees was “an ugly farce.” The actors, along with the former prisoners that they played in Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo, were held at Luton Airport after returning from the Berlin Film Festival last Thursday.

The story was reported in the Morning Star on Monday after its online exposure by former British ambassador Craig Murray, but mainstream media sources have been reluctant to follow it up.

Human rights group Reprieve insisted yesterday that the four men had been “detained” at the Bedfordshire airport after returning from Germany on an easyJet flight.

Reprieve legal director Clive Stafford Smith said: “This may be a farce, but it is an ugly farce. First, the Special Branch adds insult to injury by harassing innocent men who suffered for two long years in Guantanamo Bay before being released without charge. As if that were not enough, the Special Branch then detains the actors who portray them in a film.”

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‘Now we are taking our tolerance to extremes’

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Sue Caroll says the appeasement of Muslims is getting out of hand: “how much more respect can we pay a religion which is alien to most of us in almost every sense? Already some parts of Britain have virtually abandoned any recognition of Christmas as a Christian celebration. As taxpayers, we fund Islamic schools and the English flag is no longer allowed in English prisons, in case the red cross offends Muslims. Meanwhile, Cherie Blair is defending the human rights of Shabina Begum in her fight to wear a head-to-toe jilbab to school.”

And despite the fact that “we” bend over backwards to conciliate this alien faith, “we” are blamed for the alienation felt by Muslim communities: “Sorry, it won’t wash. If anyone is to blame, it’s the fundamentalist and extremist mullahs and clerics who rule Muslim communities. They seem determined to impose on us all a set of sharia rules, laid down in the 10th century, which are totally out of step in a civilised world.”

Daily Mirror, 22 February 2006

Posted in UK

Another example of religious extremism

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Tempers are reaching boiling point in the French Jewish community after the torture and murder of a young Jewish man by a suburban gang calling itself “the barbarians”.

Police had said that the gang kidnapped Ilan Halimi, 23 using a beautiful, young, blonde woman as bait to extort money from his family. However, the victim’s family and many other Parisian Jews are convinced the crime was, at least partially, racially motivated.

A Parisian member of parliament, Claude Goasguen, said yesterday the city could face “extremely serious intra-community violence” unless the authorities abandoned their “persistent silence on the real motives for this murder”.

At the weekend, a mainly peaceful protest march by Parisian Jews was marred by a number of violent actions by radical young Jewish men. A black man was beaten up, allegedly for “smiling” at the protest. An Arab-run grocery was attacked. A motorist who was caught up in the march was assaulted and had to be rescued by demonstration marshals.

Tracts were handed out by Jewish radical groups which claimed that Ilan Halimi, a mobile telephone salesman, was a victim of “Islamo-fascism”.

Independent, 21 February 2006

Which only goes to show that there are extremists and thugs within every ethno-religious community. However, in this case, I rather doubt that “clash of civilisations” rhetoric will be wheeled out to explain the actions of an unrepresentative minority of demonstrators or that liberal and right-wing commentators will produce articles asserting that Judaism is incompatible with western values. Islamophobia is so much more acceptable than anti-semitism.

SOAS, Nasser Amin and Islamophobia

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SOAS academic John Game writes on the victimisation of Nasser Amin, which he says raises “the question of racism and Islamophobia. We should speak plainly. SOAS is easy to target in this way because a large part of the student body come from the Arab world and a larger part are Muslims. In our society today it is possible to say anything one likes about Muslims (rather like asylum seekers)…. One of our students, the author of the article on political violence, has been subjected to a vicious witch hunt in the pages of the national press and the response of our college has been to force the SU to initiate disciplinary proceedings against him. Islamophobia in the wider society means that SOAS’s ‘reputation’ is under assault. Either one aggressively stands up to such Islamophobia or one decides to sacrifice a few students to it, sending the message that one regards Muslim students as a liability (despite perhaps privately knowing that the whole business is an artificial storm in a tea cup) and promising the relevant authorities that there is no need for them to keep ‘a close eye’ on Muslim students because, you see, we are doing it for them”.

Muslim Weekly, 17-23 February 2006

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Islam threatens Old Masters shock

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Spencer and PipesOur friend Robert Spencer was over in the Netherlands last week attending the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference at The Hague, along with other sensitive students of all things Islamic such as Daniel Pipes (pictured, with the lovely Robert himself), Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom.

All that was required was the presence of Melanie Phillips and Peter Tatchell to present a complete picture of Islamophobic hell.

It was, Robert tells us, “delightful to be in Holland in the company of so many interesting people”. And he treats us to a little anecdote about visiting the Mauritshuis museum to admire the works of Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer:

“I couldn’t help but notice that while hijabbed women were common on the streets of The Hague – I’d guess that one out of every 5 or so women I saw in the center of the city was wearing one – there were absolutely none inside the museum. Of course, for a pious Muslim the works of the masters are so much jahiliyya – the products of the society of unbelievers – and hence worthless.

“Of course, everyone is free not to go to a museum, but there is more to it than that. The ideological kin of those who blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan have entered the Netherlands in large numbers…. But did the people moving through the Mauritshuis with Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye’or, David Littman and me realize how much that ideology imperils the paintings they were so coolly admiring, and the museum in which we were admiring them? I do not think they did. That ignorance, of course, was what our Conference was trying to address.”

Jihad Watch, 20 February 2006

McKinstry invokes George Orwell

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Why do we insist on being friends with the enemies of freedom?

By Leo McKinstry

Daily Express, 20 February 2006

George Orwell’s epic work 1984 painted a nightmarish picture of Britain under a brutal totalitarian regime. In this grim police state, all dissent had been crushed.

Orwell’s book, published in 1949 shortly before his death, was a powerful warning against the tyranny of socialism. But more than half a century later, with the Berlin Wall having fallen, the greatest threat to our liberty now comes from the potent dogma of radical Islam.

Orwell’s 1984 may have been a work of fiction, yet the soul-destroying oppression he so brilliantly described was all too real, since most of Eastern Europe and all of Russia was under the dictatorship of Stalin.

As a passionate democrat and patriot, Orwell came to despise the refusal of British Left-wingers to challenge the horrors that were being practised in the name of socialism.

He loathed their moral relativism and shameful eagerness to ally themselves with the enemies of freedom.

Today, in the face of Islamic aggression, such cowardice and appeasement is not confined just to the Left but has infected all the civic institutions of Britain.

While they prattle about the joys of multiculturalism, the British authorities, led by the Labour government and the police, cower before militant Muslims. In their mood of continual surrender, they prefer to oppress the ordinary public rather than stand up to the hardliners. So they allow London to be turned into a haven for terrorists and then, in the resultant chaos, tell us that we will all have to carry ID cards.

They allow Abu Hamza to operate with impunity for almost a decade, then impose restrictions on our freedom of speech. So thanks to the outlook of the Government, a climate of genuine fear now prevails in Britain because of Islam. While we are all threatened by terrorism, few dare to speak their minds for fear of being on the receiving end of a bomb – or a visit from the local constabulary for daring to “offend religious sensibilities”.

The July bombings and the Danish cartoon protests have only intensified the efforts of the State to disguise the menace of radical Islam. Even now we are told that we must celebrate diversity, since the vast majority of Muslims are moderate and Islam is really a peace-loving religion. That kind of propaganda always seemed dubious.

If the adherents of Islam are so moderate, then why have they only taken to the streets to wail, often in extreme language, about the Danish cartoons?

Since 9/11 there has not been a single march in Britain to protest about the worldwide atrocities being committed in the name of Allah.

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Guantanamo film stars were held under terror laws, claims Murray

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Guantanamo film stars were held under terror laws, claims Murray

Morning Star, 20 February 2006

Police arrested the stars of director Michael Winterbottom’s new film The Road to Guantanamo under the Prevention of Terrorism Act when they returned to Britain after winning a major award, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray said yesterday.

Mr Winterbottom had been showing the film at the Berlin Film Festival, where he won the best director award.

Mr Murray claimed that police arrested and interrogated three of the film’s stars on Friday, together with the three ex-Guantanamo detainees on whose story the film is based. They were held by Special Branch and questioned for several hours about where they had been and who they had met. Mr Murray also said that they had been questioned on Mr Winterbottom’s politics.

However, following legal intervention by human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, the group were eventually released.

The Road to Guantanamo traces the true story of Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Ruhal Ahmed, three Muslim friends from Birmingham who were picked up as aliens in Afghanistan by US forces and ended up in Guantanamo for three years, where they suffered brutal and humiliating treatment.

Mr Murray said that people had been questioning his source for the story and, “particularly, querying why it is not in the mainstream media if it is true. “Well, I was in Mr Winterbottom’s office and heard it first hand, from people who were there when it happened,” he said.

For more details, visit www.craigmurray.co.uk