Last month we reported how a pig’s head attached to a cross was nailed to the door of the chapel in Quenchwell Road and racist graffiti were scrawled on walls. Police said yesterday that displaying a sign was not an offence in itself but they are examining the sheet for any links to the attacks on the chapel.
Author Archives: Bob Pitt
Saying ‘Islamic threat’ over and over doesn’t make it real
“Pick up any newspaper today in Britain or elsewhere in Europe, switch on the TV or tune in to any radio station, and you’re very likely to get the impression that ‘our societies’ – if not western civilisation in its entirety – face an imminent Islamic threat, on a par with the old dangers of fascism.
“Since the terrorist bombings of New York, Madrid and London, the ‘fundamentalist peril’ has become part of the air we breathe. It has become a rhetorical crutch for everyone from rightwing bigots to opportunistic politicians and repenting ‘former extremists’, each with their own agenda….
“Years of peddled fear and demonisation have had severe consequences: a widening of ignorance and bigotry, deepening mistrust between individuals and communities, and the resurrection of the pernicious language of racism and fanaticism – as journalist Peter Oborne illustrated in his Channel 4 Dispatches documentary earlier this week….
“The much hyped Islamic threat is one of the greatest lies of our time. The ‘Muslim world’ – though no such bloc really exists – is politically fragmented and economically impoverished. It is reeling under the weight of crises and a long colonial legacy. Militarily, it is of scant significance. It is laughable that we should be discussing the Islamic threat when in the past seven years alone two Muslim countries have come under direct military occupation, ending hopes that the world had firmly closed this chapter of history decades ago.
“I suspect many military experts must struggle to keep a straight face every time the subject of the ‘Islamic threat’ is broached. They know that strategic threats are not founded on mere anxieties, imagination and illusions, but on concrete military and political facts. This is not to play down the seriousness of the dangers presented by al-Qaida and other violent groups. But these constitute a security problem to be dealt with through the intelligence and security services. Whatever its braggadocio, al-Qaida does not amount to a strategic military threat, let alone a menace to ‘western civilisation’….
“In the fog of the so-called war on terror, al-Qaida, terrorism, extremism and Islamism – the list of -isms goes on – have been employed as potent weapons in a range of battles. They have been deployed to demonise vulnerable minorities – their community groups and their leaders, mosques and faith schools. They have been adopted to eat away at civil liberties. And they have been exploited to target mainstream Islamist political parties. Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development party; the Muslim Brotherhood – the largest opposition in the Egyptian parliament; and Anwar Ibrahim’s People’s Justice party in Malaysia, are among the movements cast in one terrifying category labelled ‘Islamism’, alongside al-Qaida. The huge differences are wilfully ignored to justify this strategy of unrelenting confrontation.”
Soumaya Ghannoushi in the Guardian, 11 July 2008
Labour MP sets police on Peter Oborne
The Labour Party, or at least one of its number, Huddersfield MP Barry Sheerman, does not appear to be aware of the concept of freedom of speech.
On Wednesday, he spotted Peter Oborne, the political commentator and broadcaster, handing out a pamphlet about his current bugbear, Islamophobia in the UK, in the passage between Portcullis House and the House of Commons. Instead of seeing this as a laudable example of democracy in action, the MP called the Commons police to remove him.
Says Oborne: “I was obviously committing the very offensive act of exercising democracy in the House of Commons. In honesty, the policeman couldn’t have been more charming, but when we asked him on what grounds we were being removed, he couldn’t provide an answer.”
Why Sheerman took such offence to Oborne, who along with the pamphlet’s co-author James Jones were escorted from the area, is not known. A more obvious copper’s nark would have been former Labour Home Secretary Charles Clarke, who had earlier told Oborne he was “making a fool of himself”.
Racism row in Switzerland over minaret ban referendum
Another racism row flared up in Switzerland after the country’s far-right party managed to trigger a referendum on banning minarets in the country.
The demand for a popular vote was driven by the nationalist Swiss People’s Party (SVP), which used an image of a white sheep kicking a black sheep off the Swiss flag to illustrate its anti-immigration policies in last year’s election campaign.
The SVP has a record of using the country’s system of direct democracy to provoke debate about immigration. This year it lost a referendum on moves to make it harder to obtain a Swiss passport.
The party said it had chosen minarets because they were “symbols of political-religious imperialism” rather than simply traditional architecture. Dominique Baettig, an SVP MP, said: “It is like the veil, it is a symbol of non-integration. We hope that this initiative sends a clear signal that we are calling a halt to the Islamisation of Switzerland. Our hard-won individual liberties are being eroded and that is not acceptable.”
Jasmin Hutter, vice-president of the party, added: “Many women, even socialists, signed this petition because not one Swiss woman can tolerate the way that Muslim men treat their wives.”
Canadian mosque targeted with hate messages
Codiac RCMP are attempting to link a series of spray-painted messages, including swastikas and racist declarations, at five different Moncton locations during the last 48 hours.
Two large swastikas and racist messages were spray-painted on the side of Moncton’s two-year-old mosque on High Street. One swastika was painted in black, while the other and the message were painted in red.
“Why?” asked worshipper Abdullah Delancey as he attempted to scrub the thick paint off the vinyl siding during yesterday afternoon’s heat wave. “It scares our kids. In fact, it scares a lot of our members. That’s probably why I am the only one here working on this. Some of our members are afraid to come back.”
Other offensive messages were found during the last two days at the Tiferes Israel Synagogue on Steadman Street, the Mapleton Road Shell station and Beaverbrook School and St. Hubert restaurant, both on Mountain Road.
At the mosque, Delancey, who also serves as a volunteer chaplain at The Moncton Hospital and is the father of seven and nine-year-old children, was confused by the hate crimes. “It’s sad because people come here to pray and it is a place of peace,” the 38-year-old Monctonian said. “In the past, we’ve had people throw rocks through the front window and now we have this.”
Italy: Mosques must recognize Israel
Italy may take its discriminatory practices to a new level, calling for measures to make mosque leaders quit unless they recognize Israel.
Action must be taken so that mosque supervisors recognize Israel, said European Affairs Minister Andrea Rochi. We must force those who do not recognize Israel to leave the mosques, he added, according to Italian news agency Il Tempo.
Update: Over at Atlas Shrugs mad Pamela Geller applaud’s Rochi’s statement: “How lucid and human is that. Of course the jihad loving media is calling that “discrimination”. Ugh. Theeir hatred of the Jews infects everything they say, do — every position they take.”
Maajid Nawaz explains the root cause of terrrorism
A former leader of a radical Islamic organization told Congress extreme Muslims are motivated by an ideology similar to Marxism and that Islamism has much in common with the former Soviet Union. Maajid Nawaz, a native of England and once prominent figure in the London-based extremist group Hizb ut-Tharir [sic], testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that the root cause of Islamic terrorism was its fanatical ideology.
The paranoid ravings of Bat Ye’or
The Jerusalem Post interviews Gisèle Littman, aka Bat Ye’or, who expounds her familiar conspiracy fantasy about the Islamic takeover of Europe, with the Organisation of the Islamic Conference playing the role of the Learned Elders of Zion:
“As for OIC influence on Europe: It is visible in immigration policy toward Muslims, and in the Muslims’ refusal to integrate into European societies. The OIC considers nationalist-European movements, European history, European culture, European religions and European languages as Islamophobic. Why? Because Europeans have begun to feel that they are losing their own identity, due to their efforts to welcome immigrants who don’t want to integrate….
“Europeans fear losing their historical and cultural assets – particularly those of democracy and human rights – to Shari’a law. They want one law for everybody – and it’s not Shari’a, which involves things like honor killings. It is thus that in all international forums, the OIC attacks Europe and demands that it apply multiculturalism.
“Now, Europeans do not want multiculturalism. But this is a problem, because European governments – and especially the European Union – do not want to fight the OIC, and so they collaborate with it…. The environment is one of jihad on the one hand and of dhimmitude on the other. European countries are becoming dhimmi countries…. Muslim politics are conducted in Europe by Europeans themselves, based on the interests of Muslim lobbyists.”
The tentacles of these Muslim lobbyists apparently reach into all areas of society, including the education system: “European universities – like those in America – are totally controlled by the Arab-Islamic lobby, as are the schools.”
Still, all is not lost: “Look what Europe has given to the world: democracy and human rights, the love of peace. Look at its achievements in the field of literature, music, law, architecture. There is a tremendous richness. But we have to fight for all those values and accomplishments. Otherwise, we will be living as dhimmis in barbarity.”
Huge rise in number of racist attacks
Record numbers of racist incidents – from verbal abuse to stabbings – are being reported to police, fuelling fears that levels of Islamophobia are rising.
More than 61,000 complaints of racially motivated crime were made in 2006-07, a rise of 28 per cent in just five years, with increases reported by most police forces in England and Wales. Officers classified 42,551 of the complaints as racially or religiously aggravated offences. Nearly two thirds were offences of harassment, 13 per cent wounding, 12 per cent criminal damage and 10 per cent assault.
In a report on race and the criminal justice system, the Ministry of Justice also disclosed that police used their powers to stop and search one million people. Black people were seven times more likely to be searched than white people and Asians twice as likely.
The biggest surge in racist incidents was recorded last year in South Yorkshire, where the number leapt by 77 per cent, and Thames Valley, where it rose by 46 per cent. The Metropolitan Police recorded a fall against the national trend of 19 per cent.
Inayat Bunglawala, spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, said: “We’re getting more British Muslims reporting to us that they feel anti-Muslim prejudice is increasing in society. There are incidents of attacks against mosques and Islamic schools.” Last week, Shahid Malik, Britain’s first Muslim minister, criticised what he described as growing hostility to Muslims in the UK.
The Islamisation of Brooklyn
“I was Brooklyn bound – or so I thought. I took the subway to see a fellow alumna of New York’s High School of Music and Art (as today’s LaGuardia High School for the Arts was then called). I looked forward to the nostalgic reunion. I hadn’t been in NYC for ages, and catching up with an old classmate seemed an indispensable component of walking down memory lane.
“What’s more, Kathy still lives at the same address in the cozy middle-class neighborhood where I sometimes visited her way back then. It was common for the house-proud Irish to keep property in the family, and hence I’d soon reenter the two-story red-brick home in whose wood-paneled rec-room we occasionally whiled away hours.
“But when I climbed up the grimy station stairs and surveyed the street, I suspected that some supernatural time-and-space warp had transported me to Islamabad. This couldn’t be Brooklyn.
“Women strode attired in hijabs and male passersby sported all manner of Muslim headgear and long flowing tunics. Kathy met me at the train and astounded me by pointing out long kurta shirts as distinguished from a salwar kameez. She couldn’t help becoming an expert. She’s now a member of a fast-dwindling minority because ‘people are running away. We’re among the last holdouts of our generation. My kids have fled’.
“Pakistani and Bangladeshi groceries lined the main shopping drag, and everywhere stickers boldly beckoned: ‘Discover Jesus in the Koran’. An unremarkable low-slung building on the corner of Kathy’s block was now dominated by an oversized green sign identifying it as Masjid Nur al-Islam (the Light of Islam Mosque) and announcing that ‘only Allah is worthy of worship and Muhammad is his LAST prophet’. Here too Christians were urged to ‘turn to the Koran’ if they were ‘genuinely faithful to Jesus’.
“It wasn’t hard to identify the remaining non-Muslim residences. Kathy’s was typical. A huge American flag fluttered demonstratively in the manicured front yard, accompanied by a large cross on the door and an assortment of patriotic/jingoistic banners.‘We’re besieged,” she explained. ‘Making a statement is about all we can do. They aren’t delighted to see our flag wave. This is enemy territory’.”
Sarah Honig in the Jerusalem Post, 7 July 2008