Author Archives: Bob Pitt

Muslims must learn to appreciate football

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mike Baker offers his impressions of a conference of Muslim students in Leicester:

“They made an arresting sight. Many wore traditional caps, headscarves and flowing robes. There were plenty of beards amongst the young men. Incongruously, they met at the Walkers Stadium, the home of Leicester City Football Club. Welcoming them, the chief executive of the club asked how many of them were football fans. Only a small minority indicated they were.

“Hardly any had been to a match at the ground, even though they all came from fairly nearby, either Leicester itself, Coventry or Birmingham. This was a sharp reminder of the cultural divide that can exist. The Muslim community in Leicester is large and well-established. The football club is well supported in the city. But local Muslim students do not join their fellow white and black students on the terraces.”

BBC News, 23 September 2005

What is this – the “football test”? If so, this member of the Islamophobia Watch collective would certainly fail it.

Posted in UK

MCB and CAIR bigger threat than al-Qaeda, claims Daniel Pipes

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Qaradawi and Mayor 2Daniel Pipes asks: “Do terrorist atrocities in the West, such as the attacks of September 11, 2001 and those in Bali, Madrid, Beslan, and London, help radical Islam achieve its goal of gaining power? No, they are counterproductive. That’s because radical Islam has two distinct wings – one violent and illegal, the other lawful and political – and they exist in tension with each other. The lawful strategy has proven itself effective, but the violent approach gets in its way.”

As an example of the efficacy of the “lawful and political” strand of Islamism, Pipes points out that “political imams like Yusuf al-Qaradawi instruct huge audiences on Al-Jazeera television and visit with the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone”.

Surely an argument in favour of the West building links with that wing of Islamism, you might think, in order to isolate and weaken the “violent and illegal” tendencies? Apparently not. According to Pipes, it’s the advances made by “lawful and political” Islamists that pose the greatest threat to western civilisation:

“In tranquil times, organizations like the Muslim Council of Britain and the Council on American-Islamic Relations effectively go about their business, promoting their agenda to make Islam ‘dominant’ and imposing dhimmitude (whereby non-Muslims accept Islamic superiority and Muslim privilege). Westerners generally respond like slowly boiled frogs are supposed to, not noticing a thing…. Terrorism impedes these advances, stimulating hostility to Islam and Muslims. It brings Islamic organizations under unwanted scrutiny by the media, the government, and law enforcement. CAIR and MCB then have to fight rearguard battles.”

So, basically, Pipes regards the likes of Al-Qaida as playing an essentially positive role! This is where the warped logic of Islamophobia leads you.

New York Sun, 23 August 2005

BBC defends Panorama’s Muslim film

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The BBC has received 250 complaints about Sunday’s controversial Panorama documentary on the challenges faced by the Muslim community in the wake of the July 7 bombings, which was yesterday labelled “a complete travesty” by the Muslim Council of Britain.

The lobby group said yesterday that it planned to send a formal letter of complaint to the BBC director general, Mark Thompson, calling the programme “deeply dishonest”.

Guardian, 23 August 2005

See also “Muslims attack BBC over ‘unfair’ film”, Daily Telegraph, 23 August 2005

And “MCB demands BBC apology”, Islam Online, 23 August 2005

Irshad Manji: denial is scourge of Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Irshad Manji writes an open letter to Australian prime minister John Howard, much along the lines of John Ware’s Panorama witch-hunt, attacking mainstream Muslims and urging Howard to adopt an aggressive approach towards those attending today’s summit on religious violence. Yes, that’s the same John Howard who has been criticised for excluding more radical Muslim voices from the meeting, leading to accusations that he was only interested in talking to those who would tell him what he wanted to hear.

The Australian, 23 August 2005

Read this letter and ask yourself – is it any wonder that Manji is enthusiastically applauded by the likes of Daniel Pipes, Melanie Phillips and Anthony Browne, and almost universally loathed by her fellow Muslims?

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Panorama was a hatchet job on Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Being in denial has much in common with living a lie. The distorted picture in your mind becomes ever more detached from reality as it is challenged, to the extent that the two eventually bear no resemblance at all. That’s an apt description of the political and media reaction to the July bombings. Instead of directing the heat at politicians whose neo-colonial and Islamophobic motives led Britain into a quagmire in Iraq, the chattering classes have been digging the nation into an ever bigger hole by pointing the finger at its Muslim minority. Notwithstanding fitful spurts of interest in foreign policy, ‘the problem with Islam’ has become the dominant narrative.”

Faisal Bodi in the Independent, 23 August 2005

‘Talking freely about the enemy’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Daniel Pipes takes exception to the US State Department’s description of Tom Tancredo’s call to nuke Mecca as “insulting and offensive”, and to the sacking of radio talk show host Michael Graham for describing Islam as “a terrorist organisation”. Daniel explains:

“I do think it vital that they and others be able to conduct a freewheeling discussion about the Koran, jihad, radical Islam, Islamist terrorism, and related topics, without fearing a reprimand from the U.S. government or a loss of their livelihood…. nothing can be off limits in this debate; and there must be no penalty for those who express their views.”

Daniel Pipes blog, 22 August 2005

If these are ‘moderate’ Muslims, give me the lunatic fringe any day, says Liddle

Posted on by Bob Pitt

If these are ‘moderate’ Muslims, give me the lunatic fringe any day

By Rod Liddle

Evening Standard, 23 August 2005

I hope you’ve already got your tickets for today’s gig at the London School of Economics by Imam Zaid Shakir. It’s going to be a sell-out and Zaid will be reprising his popular hit: “We Are All Collateral Damage in the War Against Terror”.

The good imam is one of those “respected” and “moderate” Muslims who has “condemned” the terrorist attacks upon London last month “unequivocally”.

You may judge for yourself whether that cumbersome superfluity of quotation marks is warranted by mulling over his assertion that both the 7 July terrorists and our own Prime Minister are “self-righteous murderers whose motives and proclamations mirror each other.”

For Mr Shakir, there is no distinction whatever to be made between a democratically elected politician and a fanatical medieval nutter with seven pounds of gelignite strapped to his waist. There’s condemned unequivocally and “condemned unequivocally”.

I don’t know if Ticketmaster has any seats left for Zaid’s performance, but you can always check the man out by tapping “Muslim Council of Britain” into Google and scrolling down its list of affiliates: Zaid’s gig is keenly awaited by a whole bunch of respected, moderate Muslims (you can supply your own quotation marks from here on in).

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MCB demands BBC apology

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Flooded by a torrent of support e-mails and messages from Muslims and non-Muslims, Britain’s biggest Muslim group demanded the BBC Tuesday, August 23, investigate and apologize for a “dishonest” piece of journalism made by the broadcaster on the respectable Muslim organization.

“Today, we sent a formal letter to the BBC with a point-by-point response to the Panorama program, demanding an investigation into the dishonest and distorted piece of journalism and a clear apology,” Inayat Bunglawala, media officer of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), told IslamOnline.net by telephone. “It is a calm and factual letter about the distortions in Panorama,” he added. “The BBC must apologize not only to the MCB but to all British Muslims.”

The program was broadcast Sunday night, August 21, entitled “A Question Of Leadership.” It suggested the MCB is “in denial” about extremist views among its members. The BBC program quoted former MCB member Mehboob Kantharia as saying the MCB was unwilling to accept the reality of the situation and therefore unable to deal with the issue in hand. But when contacted by the MCB, Kantharia said his statements were taken out of context.

“We have spoken with Mr. Kantharia, who asserted to us that he did not mention the MCB by name but his remarks were edited by the BBC to create suspicions about the MCB,” Bunglawala told IOL.

Earlier, MCB Secretary General Sir Iqbal Sacranie said in a statement e-mailed to IOL that the program was “deeply unfair”. He said the program used “deliberately garbled quotes in an attempt to malign the Muslim Council of Britain and with the barely concealed goal of drawing British Muslims away from being inspired in their political beliefs and actions by the faith of Islam.”

After Sunday’s broadcast, the MCB has received a torrent of support e-mails and messages from across the UK, denouncing the program for tarnishing its image, Bunglawala said.

“It has the opposite effect to what the Panorama team and the pro-Israeli lobby intended to do,” he said. “Instead of dividing British Muslims, it brought about an unprecedented unity and even Muslim organizations that have been critical of the MCB in the past like Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Islamic Human Rights Commission have issued statements of support on their Web sites.”

Islam Online, 23 August 2005

For the MCB’s letter to the BBC, see (pdf) here.