A Muslim who advised the Government following the July 7 London bombings has been arrested after an alleged stabbing. Inayat Bunglawala, 39, was held on suspicion of attacking another man at his £300,000 home.
Author Archives: Bob Pitt
Harry’s Place and the McCarthyite witch-hunting of British Muslims
ENGAGE analyses the role of the notorious anti-Muslim website.
Raids and reports fuel Islamophobia
A high-profile counter-terrorism raid, in which 12 Pakistani students were arrested on Wednesday of last week, has raised key issues over civil liberties and the “war on terror”.
Despite days of searches of at least ten properties and the huge resources thrown into the case, at the start of this week the police had still not found any clear evidence of a terrorist plot.
No evidence had been found of bombs, bomb-making parts, chemicals to make explosives, a bomb factory, weapons or ammunition.
Peter Fahy, the chief constable of Greater Manchester police, has admitted that it is possible nobody could be charged with terror offences.
A number of other high-profile raids, including Forest Gate in 2006, have created huge embarrassment for the authorities after innocent people have been arrested.
Fahy said, “There will always be a situation where either we can’t achieve the evidential threshold or as a result of the investigation we find that the threat was not how it appeared to us at the time.”
There is deep concern and anger that the last week’s events will lead to an increase in Islamophobia. The government has attacked Pakistan for its supposed inability to tackle terrorism, and the media has blamed “lax” student visas for the problem.
Another defence of ‘Enlightenment values’
Writing at Comment is Free, Faisal Gazi (aka “Sid”, David Toube’s alter ego who posts at Pickled Politics) reviews From Fatwa to Jihad by Kenan Malik (a supporter of the former ultraleftists turned right-wing libertarians who once traded under the name of the Revolutionary Communist Party). Gazi writes:
“… the grievance culture of radical Islam is winning the battle against Enlightenment values, helped along, Malik believes, by multicultural policy and laws like the Racial and Religious Hatred Act (2006), which has made it an offence to incite hatred against a person on grounds of their religion. Its aim was to protect the faith and dignity of minority communities. But the paradox is that these laws are now exploited to undermine the civil liberties of those very same communities they were meant to protect.”
Well, we haven’t read Malik’s book, so we can’t comment on the accuracy of this summary of his argument. But if Gazi thinks that the Racial and Religious Hatred Act set a precedent for undermining civil liberties he obviously hasn’t bothered to study the subject. The legislation was in fact sabotaged by the “Lester amendment”, which produced a completely toothless law that can never be used to mount a successful prosecution of anyone.
As those who have had the misfortune to read his incoherent Harry’s-Place-inspired posts at Pickled Politics will have observed, Gazi combines an endorsement of “Enlightenment values” with a total inability to respect empirical evidence or rational argument.
Terror plot: ‘they have no evidence whatsoever’
A spat between British and Pakistani officials has followed the arrest of 11 Pakistani nationals in northern England on Wednesday.
Pakistani intelligence officials and a senior Pakistani government official claimed that there was no evidence against the Pakistanis arrested in Britain.
The government official told The Daily Telegraph that the suspects were likely to be deported from Britain. “They have no evidence whatsoever. They will release them and then repatriate them under anti-terror laws,” said the government official.
Rahimullah Yusufzai, a veteran journalist of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) traced the families of three of the men arrested.
Mr Yusufzai named the three families. He quoted the father of one of the men, who lives in Peshawar, the provincial capital, as saying: “My son has a beard and prays five times a day. Ours is a religious-minded family but this doesn’t mean that my son is part of a terrorist cell.”
In Dera Ismail Khan, also in the NWFP, the father of another student arrested told local reporters that his son was innocent. “I was paying for my son’s education in England for the last two years. He was to complete his studies in six months but his arrest could destroy his career,” he said.
The father of a third student arrested in the UK, speaking from Tank, a southern district of NWFP, said that his 26-year old son had left for UK in the first week of October 2008 to study for a masters’ degree in computer sciences at the Liverpool University. “None of my family members have any link with terrorists.”
Daily Telegraph, 13 April 2009
See also “Terror suspect’s father says Islamophobia to blame for son’s arrest” in the Guardian, 13 April 2009
Sadiq Khan: ‘appeaser of terrorism’ (according to Donal Blaney)
Sadiq Khan is the Labour MP for Tooting. Khan, whose parents were Pakistanis, has been on a fact-finding mission to Pakistan. I wonder if he got time in his busy schedule to see any relatives?
He’s worked out why it is that young muslims want to wage jihad in Britain: it’s all because of American foreign policy. His solution? Britain should distance itself from its closest ally, the United States.
There was I, thinking that this kind of anti-American sentiment was supposed to disappear after President Bush left the White House in January. The arrival of the Chosen One, Barack Hussein Obama, was to herald a new dawn. Evidently not, in the case of Sadiq Khan, who is reading straight from the George Galloway “Blame America First” playbook of terrorist appeasement and excuse mongering.
Clearly Khan hates the United States and all it stands for. In and of itself that shouldn’t matter: he is free to hold whatever warped views he likes, even if it gives succour to our enemies who want to turn Britain into a shariah law dominated caliphate. And he wonders why he was bugged by the police.
But Sadiq Khan isn’t free to say whatever he wants to for one simple reason – he is a government minister. He is the Minister for Social Cohesion and yet delights in denigrating the nation of 500,000 people living and working in this country. How, pray, does that help social cohesion?
In attacking US foreign policy, was Sadiq Khan speaking for the British government? If not, he must surely be fired.
Blaney’s Blarney, 12 April 2009
See also “Sadiq Khan: one man MCB?” at Harry’s Place and “Muslim MP criticizes killing Muslim terrorists” at USS Neverdock.
The figures for deaths caused by US drone attacks in Pakistan (only 10 of the 60 attacks in 2006-9 hit their targets, resulting in the killing of 14 Al-Qaida members and 687 innocent civilians) are given in The News, 10 April 2009
A new presumption of guilt
“We have heard from this government before that ‘we are dealing with a very big terrorist plot’ (Student visa link to raids as PM points finger at Pakistan, 10 April).
“There was the very big ‘ricin plot’ in 2002, with no ricin, plotted by a terrorist ringleader with no ring. (That was just before the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ intervention in Iraq, the WMD being linked by Tony Blair and Colin Powell to the ‘ricin plot’.) There was the plot to bomb Old Trafford in 2004, the evidence apparently being two ticket stubs for different parts of the ground, in the hands of fans of foreign origin.
“Then in February this year there were the high-profile arrests and detentions in the north-west under anti-terrorism laws of nine men on unspecified overseas intelligence linked to a supposed terrorist activities outside Britain. Some were arrested from a convoy taking medicines, computers, toys and such to Gaza – all were innocent. Just as then, on this current occasion no specific plot is identified (despite the wild and denied stories about the Birdcage nightclub and the Trafford Centre).”
“Anyone glancing at your article might suppose that a nasty group of terrorists had already been convicted on the basis of solid evidence. In fact, as I write this, no one has been charged, let alone convicted. It is therefore a matter of serious concern that the prime minister shows such contempt for fair legal process by talking of a ‘very big terrorist plot’.”
Letters in the Guardian, 11 April 2009
‘My persecution by the Muslim McCarthyites’
“Just as Senator Joseph McCarthy ruined the lives of countless Americans during the 1950s when he and his committee smeared innocent people as communists, the Muslim hierarchy in Britain have used witchhunts to maintain their unquestioned theological power….
“Islam in Britain has been taken over by the followers of a warped manifestation of the faith. The Muslim Council of Britain, the main Muslim newspapers and many of the big mosques are dominated by men who subscribe to a virulent and backward-looking brand of Islam that has been exported from the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent.”
Poor, persecuted Taj Hargey writes in the Times, 10 April 2009
But Hargey does have his admirers – Melanie Phillips for one. And you can see why, can’t you?
Update: See the comment at ENGAGE, 14 April 2009
And by Yusuf Smith at Indigo Jo Blogs, 14 April 2009
Facebook campaign against proposed mosque in Lichfield
A leading Muslim businessman says he is “frightened” by the response a plan to build a mosque in an historic city has received. It has emerged that a group is using a social networking site which has been set up in protest at plans by Lichfield’s growing Muslim community to build a mosque in the city.
Curry entrepreneur Abdul Salam, who has lived in the city for 25 years and owns the Eastern Eye restaurant, unveiled the plan last week and as yet no planning application has been submitted to Lichfield District Council. But already more than 1,600 people have posted objections on Facebook.
Mr Salam claimed that one objection stated that if the mosque was built it would be burned down. He said: “Comments like burn up the mosque which have been left on Facebook show that we have a tremendous problem in Lichfield which we didn’t think we had. We have been left concerned and a bit frightened. We are looking to live together in peace.”
Another objector said: “There is no way we will have a mosque overshadow our beautiful cathedral city.” A third objector recorded: “I’ve been all over this world, came back to Lichfield – it’s one of the last unspoilt bastions of Englishness.”
See also “MP warns against plan for traditional mosque in Lichfield”, The Lichfield Blog, 1 April 2009
Update: See “Lichfield Cathedral in BNP advert row”, Birmingham Mail, 23 April 2009
Stopping bombs and standing up for what we believe in
“We need a twin track approach to counter-terrorism and community cohesion. It has to be both principled and pragmatic. We must work with non-violent Islamists and mainstream Muslims, while practising the values we preach.”
Andy Hull and Ian Kearns of the Institute for Public Policy Research argue in favour of a more nuanced approach than the crude anti-Islamism advocated by Policy Exchange and supported by Hazel Blears and Jacqui Smith. They write:
“… engagement with law-abiding, non-violent Islamists can play a valuable role. Shared interests, if not ideologies, are paramount: it is not in our interests or theirs for terrorists to mount another attack. That is not to say we have to agree with them on arranged marriage, homosexuality or creationism, but it does mean we have some important common ground, and we should make the most of it.”
See also the comments at ENGAGE.