Author Archives: Bob Pitt

The Muslim conquest of Europe (part 655)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“There’s a truly awful piece in Telegraph blogs by, no not Damian Thompson, but Ed West, entitled ‘Here’s an inconvenient truth: the Islamisation of Europe‘. West tries to rationalize what is nothing more than a racist diatribe against Muslim immigration and Muslim citizenship in Europe. While he tries to couch his article in language that conveys anxiety over mass immigration and the costs to social cohesion, he betrays his barely concealed Islamophobia by singling out Islam and Muslims as the scourge of Europe.”

ENGAGE, 7 May 2009

Update:  See also Indigo Jo Blogs, 9 May 2009

British, Muslim and loyal: MCB welcomes Gallup poll findings

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Daud Abdullah, Muhammad Abdul Bari, Inayat BunglawalaThe Muslim Council of Britain today welcomed the findings of an ongoing poll conducted by Gallup and the Coexist Foundation showing that Muslims in the United Kingdom feel more loyalty towards the country in which they live than the general public believes they do.

The poll reveals a triumph of fact over opinion – it challenges the idea that Muslims have divided loyalties, are separatist and, because of their faith and religiosity, have nothing in common with fellow Britons.

MCB press release, 7 May 2009

The Gallup poll can be consulted (pdf) here.

See also Shelina Zahra Janmohamed’s post at Comment is Free, 7 May 2009

Racist thugs attack Stortford mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Herts & Essex MosqueBishop’s Stortford’s Muslims are living in “distress, fear and isolation” after their mosque was attacked by hammer-wielding thugs who abused and intimidated their religious leader.

Imam Humayun Islam was forced to flee his community’s place of worship at Millars 2, off Southmill Road, and seek refuge in an Indian restaurant when he was chased by the drunken yobs.

The group of about five men, aged in their 20s and 30s, first struck on Monday last week while worshippers were praying for the fourth time, just before 9pm. The imam said: “They came inside and started throwing our shoes out. They were heavily drunk.”

The cleric said that when he remonstrated with the intruders and asked them to leave, he was threatened with a hammer and called a “suicide bomber”. A punch was thrown and the gang started breaking glass in the mosque door, before running off as police arrived.

After the officers left, the imam and his fellow Muslims began clearing up the damage and were horrified to hear the attackers return, this time wielding bottles. Several worshippers fled and the imam was chased. He managed to avoid harm only by giving the gang the slip and hiding in the takeaway.

On Tuesday, he told the Observer: “It was a serious racist attack.” He said that it was the most frightening of a series of problems for the town’s Muslims amid a growing atmosphere of Islamophobia.

Herts & Essex Observer, 6 May 2009

Update:  See “Police appeal for witnesses after Stortford mosque attack”, Herts & Essex Observer, 6 May 2009

Arson attack on Islamic centre in Luton

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Luton Islamic CentreAn Islamic centre in Bedfordshire has been gutted by fire in what police believe was an arson attack. No-one was injured in the blaze, which started just after midnight at the centre in Bury Park Road, Luton.

A police spokesman said there was “considerable damage” and the road was likely to remain closed while forensic teams investigated the cause. Insp Martin Peters said: “It appears an accelerant was used and our immediate priorities include who started this fire and why, and making motorists aware.”

BBC News, 5 May 2009

Update:  Never a paper to pass up an opportunity to exacerbate tensions between communities, the Daily Star reports:

“Fears of a race war grew yesterday after right-wing extremists were accused of firebombing a mosque…. The attack will inflame the town gripped by race tension since riot cops broke up a ‘Reclaim The Streets’ rally aimed at police and council inaction over the taunting of the troops.”

The Star goes on to quote rent-a-mouth idiot Anjem Choudary – “there’s no telling how young extremist Muslims will react” – and a supporter of the Facebook group “Ban the Terrorists” who stated: “I think this centre was firebombed because these Muslim extremists tend to hang out nearby.”

The anti-jihadist theatre of the absurd

Posted on by Bob Pitt

At Comment is Free Sunny Hundal takes pleasure in the outbreak of in-fighting among the “anti-jihadist neocons”, exemplified by Little Green Footballs’ falling-out with Jihad Watch and Pamela Geller. He notes “the role mainstream media and thinktanks play in supporting this lunatic fringe and their paranoid fantasies”.

See also “Civil war raging in right-wing blogosphere”, Washington Independent, 23 April 2009

The Muslim conquest of Europe (part 654)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Reflections on the Revolution in EuropeMark Mazower reviews Christopher Caldwell’s new book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:

“His argument, baldly put, is that Enoch Powell was more right than wrong. Europe is in decline from an ‘adversary culture’, and Muslim immigration, in particular, poses a mortal threat….

“Throwing off the shackles of political correctness, he plays fast and loose with the data and switches between talk of immigrants, Muslims and ‘non-natives’ as it serves his argument. Europeans, he alleges, are fleeing abroad out of fear of Islam.

“But the best case of ‘white flight’ he can find is of emigrating Jews and even this is unpersuasive since the number of those leaving for this reason is small and almost certainly exceeded by the reverse flow from Israel and elsewhere. Oddly, Caldwell unselfconsciously invokes the Jews as indigenous Europeans when just two generations ago they were regarded much as he regards Muslims….

“Caldwell’s fast-breeding, over-sexualised immigrants have already established what he calls ‘beachheads’ – the idea that the immigrants are the vanguard of a larger invading force – and engineered a reverse ‘colonisation’ of historic cities abandoned by their native inhabitants. Muslim immigration, apparently nothing less than a ‘project to seize territory’, is well on the way to bringing Europe within the House of Islam.”

Financial Times, 4 May 2009