“Every attempt to appease ‘Muslim opinion’ preserves, promotes, and emboldens our enemies. Every concession to angry Muslim mobs gives hope to the Islamist cause. Every day we allow terrorist regimes to exist gives their minions time to execute the next Sept. 11. America needs honest leadership with the courage to identify and defeat our enemies – ‘Muslim opinion’ be damned.”
Another commentator unconvinced by the Bush administration’s “Muslim outreach” strategy.
“One of President Bush’s closest confidants, Karen Hughes, on Friday addressed the annual conference of an organization whose primary purpose is the propagation of Saudi-sponsored Wahhabist Islam – and which has praised suicide bombers, whose president has publicly denied that al Qaeda was behind 9/11, and whose web site to this day sells a book that lavishes praise on Osama bin Laden.”
The “Muslim outreach” strategy comes in for some stick from Joel Mowbray.
Townhall.com, 6 September 2005
See also Frank Gaffney in the Washington Times, 30 August 2005
A radical Islamic group yesterday drew 1,000 delegates to a London conference as it debated how to fend off Prime Minister Tony Blair’s plans to ban it in Britain.
Hizb ut-Tahrir leaders also used the forum to react angrily to new claims that the organisation – already barred from operating in universities – is engaged in a secret campaign to recruit students to its cause.
The political group, which advocates the establishment of a theocratic state and Islamic governance in the Middle East, is likely to be targeted by the Government in any crackdown on alleged radicals in the wake of the London bombings.
Dr Imran Waheed, the Birmingham-based spokesman for Hizb ut-Tahrir in the UK, denied accusations the group has supported violence or is responsible for the radicalisation of young Muslims.
He said the conference, held at a Quaker meeting house in Euston, central London, was intended to prove his organisation was not engaged in “evil ideology”.
Melanie Phillips (“Britain’s Foreign Office fifth column”) has a rant at the Foreign Office memorandum recommending that Yusuf al-Qaradawi should not be banned from Britain, as Mel and her mates have been demanding.
As always when reading Phillips’s tirades, you have the sense of stepping into a parallel universe – one in which Britain’s “own Foreign Office is acting as a kind of appeasement fifth column in the very heart of government”; one in which “there has never been a single authoritative challenge to the veracity or integrity of MEMRI’s authoritative translations, which have opened the eyes of the west to what the Arab and Muslim world is really saying”.
As for Mockbul Ali, the author of the FO’s document, with its accurate characterisation of MEMRI’s role, Mel comments: “when Ali gets to the Jews, his guard slips and he endorses the conspiracy theory which is the signature of the Islamic extremist.”
But Mel does have a good word for one person. Yes, it’s our old friend Nick Cohen, whose “fine polemic in the Observer” receives her enthusiastic endorsement.
Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 5 September 2005
Meanwhile over at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer too rallies to the defence of Yigal Carmon and his associates: “What did MEMRI do? It printed what Qaradawi said. And once again doing so has been characterized by jihadist Muslims and their allies as ‘hatred’.” As for the memo’s point that Qaradawi’s view on Palestine and Iraq are not unusual amongst mainstream Muslims, Spencer retorts: “That’s true: they’re not unusual. Neither was Nazism among Germans.”
In the comments section to this post we have the usual paranoid ravings about how the FO’s policy on Qaradawi “will grant the jihadists every single thing that they wish for, without having to fire a shot, and reduce us all to dhimmi servitude” … plus declarations of support for Peter Tatchell and the Worker Communist Party of Iran.
It was less than genteel, not the kind of thing a Londoner liked to admit, but Matthew Pickard couldn’t help himself when drawn into a discussion about the recent bombings on the city’s transit system. There is an “undertow”, he said, a feeling of resentment toward ethnic communities that had long been welcomed.
“My friends, who are all educated and professionals, they’re saying, ‘What gives those people the right to come up from other countries and set up homes and set up families and then start bombing and maiming people?’,” the 33-year-old engineering consultant said. “They just don’t move in and integrate with society. They move in and take over. I just think enough’s enough.”
The Mail on Sunday makes an issue of the fact that Inayat Bulglawala’s father was convicted of smuggling heroin back in the 1980s. As Inayat patiently explained to them: “We have a principal in Islam that sins are not inherited. It wasn’t me who committed the crime.” Other papers, to their credit, appear to have ignored the Mail‘s crude stitch-up. However, it did strike a chord with the fascists.
Daniel Pipes returns to the theme of who qualifies as a “moderate Muslim”. Well, it’s not Tariq Ramadan, Yusuf al-Qaradawi or Azzam Tamimi.
Daniel Pipes blog, 3 September 2005
So who does receive the Pipes seal of approval? See here.
US congressman Tom “nuke Mecca” Tancredo continues his anti-migrant campaign, the East Valley Tribune reports.
“Tancredo has … called for a reduction in legal immigration, saying American culture is in danger of being overwhelmed and washed away by a tide of foreign residents who aren’t assimilating quickly enough. And he has actively encouraged the Minuteman Project and other unauthorized civilian groups who claim to be helping the federal government by conducting their own border patrols. ‘The situation on the border is tinderbox with some people armed to the teeth who are racists or affiliated with hate groups and who are being urged on by elected officials such as Tancredo’, said Mark Potok, director of a Southern Poverty Law Center project that tracks hate groups.
“Tancredo added fuel to the criticism in July when he told a Florida radio station the U.S. would have to consider using nuclear weapons against Islamic holy sites such as Mecca if Muslim terrorists ever detonate a nuclear device in an American city. Even many fellow immigration control advocates said Tancredo had gone too far. But Tancredo refused to apologize, as his statements fit into his belief the war on terrorism is fundamentally a fight against a religion that desires the destruction of Western civilization, instead of a battle against a small, radical element at the edges of mainstream Islam.”
A close aide of US President George Bush told an annual convention of American Muslims that hatred directed at Muslims was no more acceptable than violence done in the name of Islam.
“As we want Muslim voices to speak out against terror and violence and extremism, it is equally important that we be mindful of speaking out against all voices of hate and incitement including those raised against Muslims themselves,” Karen Hughes told the opening of the annual meeting of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) on Friday, September 2.
Hughes, one of Bush’s closest communications advisers, urged people of all faiths to speak out against the “backlash and widespread demonization of Islam and Muslims” that followed the 9/11 attacks and the London bombings, blamed on Muslim extremists.
Reprinting an article that originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Telegraph devotes a whole page to boosting the Italian racist Oriana Fallaci, recently in the news after her “supporters” leaked the information that she had held a private discussion with the pope.
Sunday Telegraph, 4 September 2005
Given that Brett Lock of Outrage! recently attacked this site for criticising right-wing Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it can only be a matter of time before he and Peter Tatchell declare their solidarity with Fallaci too.