“In an interview with Fortune, Republican presidential candidate John McCain was asked what the single gravest long term threat to the U.S. economy was. This is not an easy question, with so many choices and all. Is it the housing crisis or the credit crisis? What about the huge deficit the country is running, or the rising cost of energy? How about Social Security? McCain didn’t select any of those options; instead, he said that radical Islam was the single biggest threat to the U.S. economy. Pardon me a moment while I let this sink in a bit…nope, still don’t see it…”
Author Archives: Bob Pitt
John Rentoul on the Bushra Noah case
“Everyone thinks that the tribunal’s decision is absurd, lunatic, political-correctness-gone-mad. Everyone, that is, with the exception of a tiny minority in that strange alliance of political Islamism and revolutionary Marxism, which condemns the popular reaction as Islamophobia…. hairdressers should be free to choose whom to employ, even on strange criteria, and even on criteria that depend on what people look like…. the Liberal Democrats are best placed to lead this great liberal cause: that the law, while protecting people from racism, should have nothing whatsoever to do with the ‘injury to feelings’ sustained by the holding of religious beliefs about clothes and hair. Nick Clegg: over to you.”
Nazis attack German Muslims
Two young neo-Nazis wielding baseball bats attacked a group of Muslims on their way to a mosque in the eastern German state of Thuringia, police said Sunday. A 23-year-old required medical treatment for injuries to his arm after the attack on Saturday evening in Nordhausen, some 250 kilometres southwest of Berlin. The assailants fled after hurling verbal abuse at their victims from Morocco, Russia and Pakistan, a police spokesman said.
Attacks on foreigners are not uncommon in the eastern part of Germany, where unemployment is high and right-wing groups have an easy time recruiting new members. In a case that made international headlines last year, a mob of Germans chased a group of Indians through the eastern town of Muegeln and tried to kick down the door of the restaurant where they sought sanctuary.
Sharia courts – not such a threat after all
Remember this hysterical report in the Daily Express warning that “Muslim radicals have established their own draconian court systems in Britain. Controversial Sharia courts have been set up in major towns and cities to impose Islamic law and enable Muslims to shun the legitimate British legal system” and announcing the shocking discovery that “the Sharia court system has been set up in the heart of Dewsbury, West Yorkshire”?
Tory MP Philip Davies was quoted as saying: “I am absolutely appalled and find the prospect of such courts totally terrifying. Places like this should be closed down…. It simply can’t be tolerated.”
Well, here’s an interesting article from the Seattle Times which provides a more balanced view of the role of that very same Shariah council in Dewsbury. It’s about time the media in the UK started practising this sort of informed and reasoned reporting.
‘I despise Islamism’ says Ian McEwan
The award-winning novelist Ian McEwan has launched an outspoken attack on militant Islam, accusing it of “wanting to create a society that I detest”. The author said he “despises Islamism” because of its views on women and homosexuality. The writer of Atonement and Enduring Love condemned religious hardliners as he defended his friend, the writer Martin Amis, against charges of racism.
Amis was accused last year of being Islamaphobic after he said that “the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order”. In an essay written the day before the fifth anniversary of the bombing of New York’s Twin Towers [it was in fact in an interview with the Times], the novelist suggested “strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan”, preventing Muslims from travelling, and further down the road, deportation.
McEwan, 60, said it was “logically absurd and morally unacceptable” that writers who speak out against militant Islam are immediately branded racist. “As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark-skinned, he who criticises it is racist,” he said in an interview in Corriere della Sera.
Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, criticised McEwan’s defence of Amis.
“Mr McEwan is being rather disingenuous about his friend, Martin Amis’s remarks. Of course you should be allowed to criticise the tenets of any religion. However, Amis went much further than that,” he said. “He was advocating that the Muslim community be made to suffer ‘until it gets its own house in order’. And what sort of suffering did Amis have in mind? In his own words, ‘Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.'”
He added: “Those were clearly very bigoted remarks and the fact that McEwan prefers to whitewash them tells us much about his own views too.”
Sunday Telegraph, 22 June 2008
See also “‘I despise Islamism’: Ian McEwan faces backlash over press interview”, Independent On Sunday, 22 June 2008
Also Islam Online, 22 June 2008 and Lenin’s Tomb, 22 June 2008
Racism rears its ugly head in Cornwall
A disused chapel in a sparsely populated hamlet far from the summer tourist crowds has emerged as a crucial testing ground of Cornwall’s reputation as an easy-going haven for those looking to escape the pressures of urban life – whatever their race. For amid green rolling hills just a few miles outside the cathedral city of Truro, the slate-roofed Bible Christian church at Quenchwell, near Carnon Downs, is under sustained assault from racists opposed to a planned community centre for the county’s Asians.
The third attack in recent weeks was discovered in the early hours of Thursday morning. Obscene graffiti defaming Islam and espousing the cause of Cornish nationalism was splattered across the walls of the chapel. In earlier incidents a pig’s head was nailed to the door and “KKK” – Ku Klux Klan – was painted in red gloss on an outside wall. The most recent grafitti included BNP slogans.
For Tipo Choudhury, a local restaurateur who bought the chapel and has become the reluctant voice of the Asian communities here, the events have come as a terrible shock. The British-born father of three has been raising his family in nearby Penzance since the mid-1980s. “In 22 years I have had no uncomfortable moments, until now. When you suddenly get called a ‘Paki bastard’ here in Cornwall it makes you jump. This sort of thing just does not happen here,” he said. In addition to the attacks on the chapel, he was also racially abused by a passing motorcyclist while standing outside the building. “Racism is showing its ugly head. It shows prejudice is alive and kicking,” he added.
The ‘politics of inclusion’ takes a hit
A disgraceful thing happened at Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena earlier this week.
Americans were discriminated against by other Americans who thought head scarves would send the wrong message about their candidate’s religious affiliation. In other words – the soft bigotry of Islamophobia is finally ready for its close-up in the Obama campaign.
Hebba Aref was born in the United States 25 years ago to Egyptian immigrants. She is a lawyer and a taxpaying citizen. Ms. Aref is also an American Muslim, though there is some debate in this country whether her religious affiliation undermines her claim to be a “loyal American.”
Ms. Aref and her friend, Shimaa Abdelfadeel, were among the 20,000 Americans who made the pilgrimage to downtown Detroit to cheer for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama in person.
For months, Mr. Obama has been traveling the country, assuring audiences that the success of his campaign is proof America is turning the corner on the politics of racial and religious suspicion. Mr. Obama promises that he’ll be an exemplar of a more inclusive politics. He insists that the old divisions of race, gender and religion that polarize our politics today will not find favor during an Obama administration.
So the question must be asked: Why were two Muslim women wearing hijabs told by Obama campaign workers that they couldn’t sit behind the candidate during a televised speech because of the “sensitive political climate”? On what planet would such cowardice and discrimination be consistent with a politics of inclusion?
The Obama campaign issued an apology as soon as the incident was reported: “It is offensive and counter to [our] commitment to bring Americans together and simply not the kind of campaign we run,” the campaign statement read. “We sincerely apologize for this behavior.”
Fair enough, but how did lowly campaign workers decide that Muslim head scarves weren’t ready for prime time with Barack Obama? Could it be that the Obama campaign’s almost pathological fear of being associated with Islam when so many Americans continue to believe the candidate is a “secret Muslim” has trickled down to the ushers?
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 20 June 2008
See also “Obama calls 2 Muslim women to apologize for snub at rally” in the Detroit Free Press.
Meanwhile the inimitable Debbie Schlussel is witch-hunting Hebba Aref and Shimaa Abdelfadeel with accusations of terrorist sympathies and antisemitism.
Nazis recommend Harry’s Place
Yes, when it comes to hysterical articles about the supposed threat posed by shariah law, the white supremacist forum Stormfront evidently finds much to admire at the self-styled voice of the “decent left”. Given the readiness of the increasingly unbalanced David T to label political activists from the Muslim communities as fascists, it’s interesting to see how much common ground he and his friends at HP have with actual fascists.
Tory peers warn of threat of sharia law
Baroness Park of Monmouth told the House of Lords: “My concern is with the effects on civil society and community relations arising from the existence of two parallel legal systems: Sharia law with its own courts, and our own civil law, the law of the land. We are, however, tacitly accepting the formal Muslim view that Sharia itself must be regarded as the ultimate criterion of justice when measured against the law of the land….
“This situation exists because we have for some years been more concerned to respect other cultures than actively to protect the interests of citizens of this country…. my objective today is to remind us that there are aspects of Sharia law which do active harm in terms of the national interest, in particular, in the increasingly combustible area of civil society.
“When we condone the practice of allowing girls to be withdrawn from school from 12 years old onwards so that they may be sent to Pakistan to marry and thus facilitate the entry of a young husband who may be illiterate and innumerate, we are not only allowing her to be unlawfully deprived of education, when she is required by law to be educated up to the age of 16, but the country is losing a potentially skilled and valuable citizen. This is being done with the connivance of the schools on the grounds – as I was told when I visited a school in Bradford – that the council believes we must respect the culture of the Muslim community….
“Respect for the right of the Muslim communities to conduct their lives according to Sharia law should be matched by equal respect for our own Christian religion…. We should note the lack of support shown by many local authorities, and indeed by Government sometimes, to Christians of every denomination.”
Her fellow Tory, Baroness Verma, concurred: “I would be very wary of the slow creep of Sharia law into our legal system…. The noble Baroness, Lady Cox, is absolutely right to point that out. We have a twin-track system developing in this country.”
See also Daily Mail, 20 June 2008
Pa. lawmaker’s anti-Muslim comment derails measure
HARRISBURG, Pa. — State lawmakers Wednesday held up voting on a resolution in recognition of a Muslim group’s upcoming convention after a legislator protested that “the Muslims do not recognize Jesus Christ as God.”
Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, a Republican from Butler County, north of Pittsburgh, said he opposed the House’s formal recognition of this weekend’s 60th annual convention in Harrisburg of the U.S. chapter of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. “The Muslims do not recognize Jesus Christ as God and I will be voting negative,” he said on the House floor.
The two-page resolution, sponsored by Speaker Dennis O’Brien, a Republican from Philadelphia, noted that the convention’s mission was to “increase faith and harmony and introduce various humanitarian, social and religious services.”
The remarks by Metcalfe drew a rebuke from Democratic Rep. Jewell Williams of Philadelphia. “We should be careful in making these remarks and we should support all people in America,” Williams said.
A Jewish lawmaker, Democratic Rep. Babette Josephs of Philadelphia, also protested and said she would seek to have Metcalfe’s remarks stricken from the official record. She said Metcalfe’s position places a religious test on House resolutions, which generally clear the chamber quickly and unanimously.
“I wonder what I would not also qualify for – being on the floor myself?” she said later. “Having the right to vote? Having the right to practice my religion? That’s what I was responding to. And we have other people who are not Jewish and not Christian on the floor – some elected, some not.”
Associated Press, 19 June 2008
See also “CAIR: Penn. Muslims ask legislature to reject religious ‘litmus test'”, CAIR press release, 19 June 2008