Yes, really. Well, the far-right morons of the British National Party are convinced anyway.
Author Archives: Bob Pitt
Babar Ahmad wins £60,000 damages from Met
The Metropolitan police today agreed to pay £60,000 damages to a British Muslim after a high court admission that officers had subjected him to “serious, gratuitous and prolonged” attack.
The court was told that Babar Ahmad, who is accused of raising funds for terrorism, had been punched, kicked and throttled during his arrest by officers from the force’s territorial support group in December 2003.
The Met had repeatedly denied the claims, saying officers had used reasonable force during the arrest. However, lawyers for the force’s commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, today admitted at the high court that Ahmad had been the victim of gratuitous and sustained violence at his home in Tooting, south-west London.
“The commissioner has today admitted that his officers subjected Babar Ahmad to grave abuse tantamount to torture during his arrest,” Ahmad’s solicitor, Fiona Murphy, said outside the court.
Outside the court, Ahmad’s brother-in-law, Fahad Ahmad, read out a statement on his behalf in which he said he was pleased the police had finally admitted what had happened.
“This abuse took place not in Guantánamo Bay or a secret torture chamber but in Tooting, south London,” the statement said. “The path to justice is long and difficult but, as long as you remain steadfast upon it, you will get there in the end.”
Ahmad has been in detention since he was rearrested in 2004 after a request from the US government over claims he helped raise money to fund terrorist campaigns. The court heard that no evidence had been produced against Ahmad, and he had never been charged with any offence.
He is now fighting extradition to the US in the European courts.
See also BBC News, 18 March 2009
Click here for statements by Babar Ahmad, his family and his solicitor.
Update: See “Met chief orders inquiry on beaten terror suspect” in the Independent, 19 March 2009
Metropolitan police pays Babar Ahmad £60,000 damages over ‘serious attack’
The Metropolitan police today agreed to pay £60,000 damages to a British Muslim after a high court admission that officers had subjected him to “serious, gratuitous and prolonged” attack.
The court was told that Babar Ahmad, who is accused of raising funds for terrorism, had been punched, kicked and throttled during his arrest by officers from the force’s territorial support group in December 2003.
The Met had repeatedly denied the claims, saying officers had used reasonable force during the arrest. However, lawyers for the force’s commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, today admitted at the high court that Ahmad had been the victim of gratuitous and sustained violence at his home in Tooting, south-west London.
“The commissioner has today admitted that his officers subjected Babar Ahmad to grave abuse tantamount to torture during his arrest,” Ahmad’s solicitor, Fiona Murphy, said outside the court.
See also, Victoria Brittain, “Stunning victory for Babar Ahmad”, Guardian, 18 March 2009
Students protest France anti-hijab law
Muslim students have held demonstrations in Paris on the fifth anniversary of the banning of the Muslim headscarf in French schools.
The protesters, mostly Muslim girls with hijab, described the “French law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols in schools” as racial discrimination saying people should be free to choose their dress code.
The law, which is an amendment to the French Code of Education separating state and religious activities, bans students from wearing religious symbols in schools. France’s national legislature passed the controversial bill and President Jacques Chirac signed it into law on March 15, 2004 and it came into effect on September 2, 2004, at the beginning of the new school year.
Many say the bill contradicts court decisions that had allowed students to wear religious signs, as long as they did not amount to “proselytizing”. Although the law does not mention any particular symbol, it is widely believed that it targets Muslims’ headscarves.
How the Government pays Muslims to vote Labour
Take a tour of any of inner London borough and see how many women are sporting hijabs, jilbabs or niqabs, loan words that have entered the English language since 1997. In many cases these are not women who were brought up in “that culture”, but British people who, in their teens and twenties, have chosen to adopt dress that would be considered reactionary in most of the Islamic world, let alone London.
We saw a gaggle (although that collective noun seems slightly inappropriate) of niqab-clad women last week in Luton, screaming abuse at British soldiers who had been fighting for the rights of Iraqis and Afghans to be able to protest freely.
In the same week that those “bunch of nutters”, as Baroness Warsi rightly called them, caused a scene in Luton, the Policy Exchange claimed that £90 million spent on fighting Islamic extremism had had the same effect of opening a window in a burning room. Money had gone to groups influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jamaat e-Islami in Pakistan, a scheme which Policy Exchange compared to giving money to the BNP to fight fascism.
This is not entirely fair on the BNP – they only want to return this country to either the 1950s or 1930s, depending on how sinister one believes them to be. Most Islamists would feel more at home in Viking-ruled East Anglia, where the “blood eagle” method of crucifixtion and disembowelment was the punishment for wrongdoers.
“Exotically clad Abu Hamza-style ranters are unlikely to be favoured,” the report said, “but plausible and well-mannered radicals, often representing themselves as moderate, are welcomed with open arms, however hardline their underlying philosophy.” Among the examples of radical bodies are the Muslim Council of Britain, the United Kingdom Islamic Mission, and the Islamic Society of Britain.
In Luton the taxpayer has funded seven Muslim centres under a Home Office project called “Preventing Violent Extremism”. The council has handed out £200,000, and another £400,000 has been set aside to capture the “hearts and minds” of young Muslims. Hearts and minds, or votes? Because that is what “fighting extremism” really is – paying Muslims to vote Labour.
Labour’s policy of buying Muslim votes has not benefited Muslims at all, but has given taxpayers’ money and power to some very dangerous people, who have turned the mental gulf between Muslims and the rest of the society into a chasm.
Trevor Kavanagh on Binyam Mohamed, Shiraz Maher and Ed Husain
“… lying is the default position for Islamists. Which is why we should question Guantanamo inmate Binyam Mohamed’s claim he was tortured by America and hung out to dry by the British.On balance, I prefer the word of our security services.
“The Ethiopian asylum seeker is another ex-druggie convert, deluded by fantasies of Islamic purity in hellholes such as Chechnya and Afghanistan. Yet we are giving him sanctuary, at huge cost and potential risk.
“He is not British. He should be sent home, along with ALL foreign terror advocates who trade off the freedoms they are so determined to destroy.”
Trevor Kavanagh in the Sun, 16 March 2009
Needless to say, while mounting this vile attack on Binyam Mohamed, Kavanagh declares his admiration for Shiraz Maher and Ed Husain.
Mail smears Inayat Bunglawala
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.
Mr Bunglawala, who also briefed former Security Minister Tony McNulty on the threat posed by Islamic radicals in the UK, was arrested two weeks before Christmas last year. The identity of the alleged victim is unknown and it is not clear what circumstances led to the alleged attack in the early hours of December 13 last year.
Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, who worked as a security adviser to Mr Brown, said of the alleged incident: “This calls into question the Government’s vetting of its Islamic advisers.”
As is the way with this type of smear article, buried right at the end of it we find a quote from Inayat’s lawyers that he “vigorously denies having committed any criminal act whatsoever in relation to this incident”. So who could possibly accuse the Mail of unbalanced reporting?
On the face of it, this sounds like a possible altercation with a burglar. In which case, you’d have thought Inayat would have the full support of the Mail. After all, this is a paper that treated Tony Martin as some sort of hero after he murdered a fleeing would-be burglar by shooting him in the back. But then, Martin was a white BNP supporter, so that was different.
Update: See MPACUK who report:
“Today, the CPS said they would not take any action against Inayat. There was simply no case at all…. What actually happened for those who do not know, is an intruder tried to break into the house of Inayat in the middle of the night. Inayat’s 3 year old child was sleeping as was his pregnant wife, woken by the noise of a man who at first tried to kick in the front door and then failing that, smashed the downstairs window. Inayat confronted the intruder and in the scuffle the intruder was stabbed.”
‘We must stop appeasing Islamist extremism’ says Ed Husain
“We can expect Luton-style protests and worse in the years to come unless the Government gets a grip on Islamism, says Ed Husain.”
Sunday Telegraph, 15 March 2009
What Ed really means, of course, is that the government should stop working with organisations that represent real forces in the Muslim communities, and instead restrict their links to stooge groups like Ed’s own Quilliam Foundation, which represents virtually nothing and is regarded with general contempt.
Meanwhile, over at the Observer, Ed and his self-serving prescriptions for combating extremism are treated to a puff piece by liberal warmonger Nick Cohen, who has never forgiven mainstream Muslim organisations for mobilising opposition to the invasion of Iraq.
Cohen directs his attack on the East London Mosque. This has a mass base in the local Muslim community, for whom it provides a vital resource, with a library, conference rooms, classrooms, a gym and space for 10,000 worshippers, but Cohen says the governent should have nothing to do with anyone associated with it.
He claims this is because of the mosque’s links to the Bangladeshi political party Jamaat-e-Islami, though some of us might suspect that Cohen’s hostility is not unconnected with the fact that the East London Mosque played a crucial role in organising support for the mass demonstration against the Iraq war in February 2003.
Headscarves: the wrong battle
Throughout Europe, over the past decade, there has been a loud – and at times openly xenophobic – debate about whether a Muslim woman should be allowed to wear a headscarf while on duty in a government job. Various types of bans have been enacted in several countries, including France, Germany, and Turkey.
Some feminists seek these bans in the name of helping Muslim women, whom they often see as uniformly oppressed. Anti-immigration politicians seek these policies because they see people who refuse to “fit in” as a threat to western society. But these arguments are detrimental both to women’s rights and to peaceful integration, and the women most likely to be affected are rarely consulted.
“I suddenly felt like a stranger in Germany,” one elementary school teacher said, describing her reaction to a ban in her state. “I will never forget that.”
She was one of many people interviewed by Human Rights Watch in Germany, where 8 of 16 federal states have these bans for teachers (in two states the ban also covers other civil servants). Some of these laws are openly discriminatory, banning religious symbols, but excluding symbols of “Christian heritage.” Other German bans appear to be neutral, but almost exclusively affect Muslim women.
Gauri van Gulik at Comment is Free, 14 March 2009
Charles Moore explains Islamism
“There is a strong strand in the current state of Islam which sees the religion as a political project. This creed, often called ‘Islamism’, holds that no society is legitimate unless it imposes sharia – the law of God. There is no doctrine of tolerance, and a complete rejection of secular or Christian rule.”
Daily Telegraph, 14 March 2009
Which only goes to show that, when it comes to Islam, you can write whatever ignorant nonsense you like and still get it published in the right-wing press.
See also ENGAGE, 13 March 2009