Author Archives: Bob Pitt

Muslim groups warn tabloids inspire attacks

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Express front pageMuslim groups warn tabloids inspire attacks

Morning Star, 29 July 2005

Muslim community leaders accused “xenophobic” tabloids such as the Daily Express yesterday of sparking a violent upsurge of racial attacks in the wake of the recent terror attacks.

The Muslim Association of Britain said that the “hysterical” gutter press – the Express, the Daily Mail and the Sun – had stoked up racial unrest, simply to sell papers, putting British Muslims in danger.

The Islamic Human Rights Commission said that violent attacks have increased 13-fold since July 7. Committee chairman Massoud Shadjareh revealed that verbal and physical assaults have increased from a base rate of six or seven per week to more than 170 in the last fortnight.

Nine mosques have been attacked, a garage has been fire-bombed, people are being assaulted on the street and homes have had their windows broken, he revealed.

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‘When will you Brits wake up?’ French journalist asks

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“In the ten years I have lived in London, I often wondered when it would happen. I don’t mean when British-born suicide bombers would blow themselves up, killing dozens of their fellow citizens – I would never have thought that possible – but rather, when British multiculturalism would finally show its inherent weaknesses.

“France and Britain have always had opposite views and policies about foreigners and their integration into society. British people often fail to understand the underlying principles of the French approach, prefering to brand it as intolerance, or even blatant racism – as, for example in the recent headscarf ban.”

Agnes Poirier of the French “leftist” newspaper Libération – who goes on to argue that “The message to Muslims has been, in effect, that it is all right for them to be a separate country-within-a-country” – joins the right-wing campaign to blame the London bombings on multiculturalism.

Evening Standard, 29 July 2005

MEMRI plays let’s pretend

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“Within the Arab mainstream, two sides are battling for the future of Islam. One is the establishment, which includes regimes and their elitist supporters in the press, academia, mosques, and elsewhere. For years, they have used a mechanism that nurtures incitement against others to stay in power – without free elections – and encourage the Islamist movement now terrorizing the world…. On the other side is the reformist camp, which is fed up with the establishment. Its supporters are allying with the West and backing the struggle against ideological sources of terrorism. They include opposition political figures, student movements, intellectuals, authors, and columnists.”

Steven Stalinsky gives a boost to the pro-imperialist Bush-admirers backed by MEMRI’s “Reform Project”, pretending that they represent a significant ideological force in the Middle East.

Front Page Magazine, 29 July 2005

In an open letter to MEMRI last year, written at the time the organisation was threatening Juan Cole with legal action for telling the truth about them, Marc Lynch had this to say about the Reform Project:

“it tends to select statements by pro-American reformers who concentrate on criticizing other Arabs … with little regard for the real debates going on among Arabs. Your selective translations therefore offer a doubly warped perspective on the Arab debates: first, over-emphasizing the presence of radical and noxious voices; and second, over-emphasizing the importance of a small and marginal group of Arabs who share your own prejudices. What you leave out is almost the entire Arab political debate which really matters to Arabs: a lively debate on satellite stations such as al Jazeera and al Arabiya and in the elite Arab press about reform, international relations, political Islam, democracy, and Arab culture which English-speaking readers would greatly benefit from knowing about.”

Abu Aardvark blog, 24 November 2004

‘Terrorism expert’ denounces US fatwa

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Terrorism expert” Steven Emerson (you remember him – the man who insisted that Muslims were responsible for the 1995 Oklahoma bombing) pours scorn on a recent fatwa against terrorism and extremism (see here) issued by Muslim leaders in the US and Canada:

“In fact, the fatwa is bogus. Nowhere does it condemn the Islamic extremism ideology that has spawned Islamic terrorism….. It does not condemn by name any Islamic group or leader. In short, it is a fake fatwa designed merely to deceive the American public into believing that these groups are moderate…. I spoke with Judea Pearl, father of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl who told me that the fatwa was ‘vacuous because it does not name the perpetrators of Islamic terrorist theologies and leaders of Islamic movements like Yousef Al Qaradawi, Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahari, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc.’”

Counterterrorism Blog, 28 July 2005

That would be the same Qaradawi who was the subject of a sympathetic article by Daniel Pearl in the Wall Street Journal, would it? (See here.)

Al-Qaida: The wrong answers

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Soumayya Ghannoushi“Perhaps the one thing al-Qaida militants have proven good at, apart from the shedding of innocent blood, is fanning the flames of hostility to Islam and Muslims. From the darkness of their caves and hiding places, these self-appointed spokesmen for about one and a half billion Muslims worldwide have excelled in stirring latent negative images of Islam within the Western psyche. Through their senseless crimes, Islam, in the minds of most, has become a euphemism for mass slaughter and destruction. Thanks to them, racism, bigotry and Islamophobia could rear its ugly head unashamedly in broad day light.

“The terrible irony is that Muslims currently find themselves helplessly trapped between two fundamentalisms, between Bush’s hammer and Bin Laden’s anvil, hostages to an extreme right wing American administration, aggressively seeking to impose its expansionist and hegemonic will over the region at gunpoint, and to a cluster of violent, wild fringe groups, lacking in political experience or sound religious understanding.”

Another excellent piece by Soumayya Ghannoushi.

Al-Jazeera, 29 July 2005

British school students get ‘know Islam’ kits

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A British council has presented resource packs covering the basic teachings of Islam to primary schools across the London borough of Harrow in an effort to provide a better understanding of the Muslim faith, according to a local paper.

“The new resources will help school staff further develop their approach to high quality teaching of Islam – a religion that is far too often misunderstood,” the Harrow Times quoted as saying Councillor Navin Shah, leader of Harrow Council, which has become the first to fully fund the teaching of Islam in primary schools.

The resource packs include books, artifacts, CDs, videos and teaching aids covering the basic Muslim beliefs and practices through interactive class projects.

Resources for secondary schools are also being developed and will be available to schools across the borough, according to the paper.

The packs for primary schools were produced by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), in partnership with the Department of Education and Skills.

“We believe education is the key to creating a vibrant and understanding society,” MCB Secretary General, Iqbal Sacranie, told Harrow Times. “These resources, developed by our team of educationalists, aim to support the teaching of Islam in schools by making available creative, engaging and child-friendly resources on Islam and Muslims.”

Islam Online, 28 June 2005

Robert Spencer is understandably outraged that an extreme Islamist organisation like the Muslim Council of Britain should be allowed this opportunity to undermine the foundations of western society.

Dhimmi Watch, 29 June 2005

Nuke Mecca? Nope

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Robert Spencer reassures us that he doesn’t support nuclear attacks on Islam’s holy sites. Aside from anything else, “it contravenes Western principles of justice which, if discarded willy-nilly, would remove a key reason why we fight at all: to preserve Western ideas of justice and human rights that are denied by the Islamic Sharia law so beloved of jihad terrorists”.

Front Page Magazine, 28 July 2005

Well, we certainly look forward to Spencer explaining how the proposal made by his colleague Rebecca Bynum yesterday – that terrorist outrages should be met with reciprocal attacks on Muslim civilians – can be implemented while remaining true to those well-established Western principles of justice and human rights.

And it’s worth noting that Spencer’s supporters are quite taken aback by his refusal to support what they regard as Tancredo’s perfectly reasonable call for nuclear retaliation. See Jihad Watch, 28 July 2005

Take off hijab to avoid harm: UK Muslim scholar

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Zaki BadawiA leading British Muslim scholar has said that Muslim women living in the European country, where Muslims have been suffering mounting abuse and harassment since the July 7 London attacks, can take off their hijab.

“I have issued a fatwa that Muslim women in Britain have an Islamic right to take off their hijab at this point of time if attacked or fearing to be attacked,” Dr. Zaki Badawi, the Dean of the Muslim College in London, told IslamOnline.net over the phone from the British capital.

Badawi said they have registered more than 1500 assaults against hijab-clad women during the past three days only, in addition to a flood of threat letters.

He asserted that in Islam hijab is originally meant to identify Muslim women, so that they might not be attacked or harassed. The scholar cited the Qur’anic verse which reads: “O Prophet! Tell thy wives and thy daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks close round them (when they go abroad). That will be better, so that they may be recognized and not annoyed. Allah is ever Forgiving, Merciful.” (Al-Ahzab: 59)

“If hijab becomes a reason of harm for Muslim women in Britain at this time, then I tell them to take it off so that they would not be recognized and consequently attacked,” said Egyptian-born Badawi. “Muslims (in Britain) are scared and each feels he/she is a suspect. The picture is, indeed, gloomy and we are trying all we can to address it.”

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Hate crimes ‘rise after UK bombs’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The number of attacks on Asians has risen significantly since the London bombings, police and Muslim groups say. The number reported to the Islamic Human Rights Commission – not including those reported to police – has risen more than 13-fold, its chairman said. The total number of “faith-related” attacks reported across London rose 500% compared with the same period last year, the Muslim Safety Forum says.

This “backlash” is “exactly what those who promote terrorism want” police say. Association of Chief Police Officers community and counter-terrorism head Assistant Chief Constable Rob Beckley told BBC News the police would protect Asians and Muslims. “We have to, and we will, sustain a response to this.”

The police have gone to great lengths to stress those suspected of involvement in the bombings are not from any single ethnic group.

But the Muslim Safety Forum, which works closely with the police monitoring the total number of incidents reported, blames “prominent people within our society” and the media for saying all British Muslims share something in common with the bombers. A spokesman told BBC News “bigots” now felt they had the “right to commit these atrocities”. The 7 July bombings were “a single criminal act” and all British Muslims could not be held responsible, he added.

British Muslims would not continue to allow themselves to be victimised and criminalised without a further “backlash” from them, the spokesman told BBC News.

BBC News, 28 July 2005