Author Archives: Bob Pitt

Who burned Toulouse mosque?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Toulouse mosque arsonMuslims in the southwest city of Toulouse woke up on Monday, April 21, to the sad view of a burned local mosque, but were divided on the possible arsonists.

“This is very shocking,” Abdul Nabi al-Hamrawi, the imam of Al-Salam Mosque, told IslamOnline.net. “We have no idea how or why this happened. We have no problems whatsoever with any of our neighbors.”

The mosque, located in the Toulouse suburb of Colomiers, was set ablaze on Sunday, April 20. Officials say a dozen firefighters quickly put out the fire, but only after it had gutted the inside of the mosque.

Investigators and rescue officials quickly concluded it was a deliberate act of arson. They say the fire broke out after a garbage can was set alight inside the Muslim place of worship. The attackers were thought to have entered the mosque through yanking its doors open.

Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie called the attack an “odious act” and vowed to apprehend the culprits. “All efforts will be exerted to indentify the perpetrators and bring them to justice.”

Local Muslims gave different scenarios about who could have attacked the mosque, inaugurated in 2006 to serve the city’s Muslim community.

“This is open to all possibilities,” Abdul Qader bin Ganna, the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF) official in Toulouse, told IOL. “It could be Islamophobia, but an inter-Muslim dispute could not be ruled out also.”

Ganna cited recent frictions involving different groups of Muslims, mainly from Moroccan origin, regarding control over the city mosques. “Some of them even traded punches inside Al-Salam Mosque,” he recalled. The Muslim activist also notes that the mosque lies in a small industrial area. “There were never complaints of hostilities with non-Muslim residents.”

But Ammar Muakkran, a Muslim resident, believes the arson attack was Islamophobic. He sees a link with the recent desecration of 148 Muslim graves in Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery, France’s biggest war cemetery, earlier this month. Muakkran suspects both attacks were the work of far-right extremists.

Islamophobic attacks have recently surged in France, home to a sizable Muslim minority of nearly seven million. The cemetery desecration was the second in a year. Last week, a mosque in the city of Besancon was defaced by racist and neo-Nazi graffiti.

Islam Online, 21 April 2008

‘Ken Livingstone defends his extremist backer’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ken with QaradawiKen Livingstone defended his decision to share a platform with a homophobic Islamic preacher as he and his challenger, Boris Johnson, were neck and neck in the race for the capital yesterday.

Yusuf al-Qaradawi has described homosexuality as an “unnatural and evil practice” and said the Koran permitted wife-beating in certain circumstances. The Qatar-based Egyptian cleric has also advocated the use of Palestinian children as suicide bombers and once claimed that Asian tsunami victims were punished by Allah because their countries were centres of perversion.

Continue reading →

‘St George’s Day parade scrapped – in case it upsets Muslims’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“A march to celebrate St George’s Day has been axed – because the authorities fear it could spark race riots. About 1,500 children were due to take part in a parade to commemorate the patron saint of England on Wednesday. But council bosses in Bradford, West Yorks, have ditched the event over concerns it could upset the Asian community, many of them Muslim.”

Daily Star, 21 April 2008

The new generation of renegades

Posted on by Bob Pitt

David Edgar“Commentators Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Andrew Anthony all had left-wing parents, and were involved in political campaigning around race, gender and class in the 1970s…. Although none of them has abandoned the whole progressive package, their main target is a left-liberal intelligentsia, which, as they see it, opposed the overthrow of a fascist dictator, Saddam Hussein, and is now in an unholy Faustian alliance – justified by modish, postmodern cultural relativism – with the far right.

“The far right in question is not the BNP, but political Islamism, represented by those main Muslim umbrella organisations that are seen to have links with Islamists in Muslim countries, particularly those who joined the coalition that organised the demonstration on February 15 2003 against the invasion of Iraq….

“Certainly, the progressive left is in alliance with a group whose traditional views run counter to some central planks of its platform. Twenty-five years on from Maydays, I have written a new play (Testing the Echo), which is partly about the temptation – on these understandable grounds – to reject any kind of religious affiliation, to brand fundamentalist Islam as brown fascism, and (thereby) to abandon an impoverished, beleaguered and demonised community.

“For, let’s be clear, the alliance to which the new defectors object – the alliance enabled by a multiculturalism that sought to give visibility and confidence to entire communities – is not just between a few deluded revolutionaries and the odd crazed Muslim cleric. Martin Amis denies he’s declaring war on the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, but his ‘thought experiment’ about meting out collective punishment on Muslims (travel restriction, deportation, strip searching) ‘until it hurts the whole community’ makes no distinction between followers of Hizb ut-Tahrir and the man in the Clapham mosque. Cohen is careful to point out that ‘Islamism has Islamic roots’, and, clearly, the group that he dubs the ‘far right’ goes beyond the adherents of Jamaat-e-Islami.”

David Edgar in the Guardian, 19 April 2008

‘Reject the support of Islamists’ urges Toube

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Writing in the Jewish Chronicle, Harry’s Place blogger David Toube argues that politicians should reject endorsements from the Muslim Association of Britain.

“Like the BNP, the MAB/Muslim Brotherhood is desperate to participate in mainstream politics, and to be recognised as the pre-eminent moderate Islamist voice, capable of acting as a bulwark against al Qaida. That is rather like turning to the BNP in the hope that they’ll help hold back fascist terrorist groups like Combat 18…. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party should move quickly to make it clear that mainstream politics can do without the support of fascists.”

London mayoral election: It’s really no contest

Posted on by Bob Pitt

GEORGE GALLOWAY argues why the choice facing Londoners couldn’t be clearer.

Morning Star, 19 April 2008

Any doubts about the topography of the battlefield in the race for London Mayor ought to have been dispelled this week with the shrill escalation of the Evening Standard’s attacks on Ken Livingstone.

Hundreds of billboards across the capital repeated the front page headline, “Suicide bomb backer runs Ken’s campaign.” It was a masterful piece of propaganda straight out of the playbook of the 1930s fascist propagandists whom Associated Newspapers were so attached to at the time.

The story actually amounted to little more than the fact that the British Muslim Initiative (BMI), an organisation that has co-hosted the major anti-war demonstrations, is working with others to ensure a large turnout of Muslim voters in the capital and is strongly advocating a vote for Livingstone for mayor.

The BMI is also calling for a vote for myself for the assembly and for Respect’s candidate in the City and East London constituency, Hanif Abdulmuhit.

Now you might have thought that Muslim activists arguing for democratic political engagement and taking part in lobbying, meetings, leafleting and all other activities that attend elections in Britain would receive plaudits from the self-styled defenders of the mother of parliaments. But no – the worthy aim of getting hundreds of thousands of Muslim voters to turn out at the polls is apparently evidence of a sinister, anti-democratic plot.

Continue reading →

Binmen in Muslim areas ordered by police to snoop in residents’ rubbish bins

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Police chiefs ordered binmen to act as spies by sifting through rubbish to look for pamphlets produced by Islamic terror groups. Town halls responsible for areas with large Muslim populations were summoned to London and told to get their refuse collectors to search bins for discarded documents or material that might identify and incriminate Islamic extremists. But the bin-searching instruction was deemed so potentially damaging to community relations that councils simply refused to carry out any sort of spying.

Bradford City Council leader Kris Hopkins said: “We were asked to snoop on our own residents by getting our binmen to rummage around people’s rubbish. But the idea that our binmen should be rooting around a wheelie bin to see if they can spot dodgy bits of paper or funny wires is ridiculous. Our binmen aren’t there to act like the secret police. They’re there to empty our bins. It goes without saying that if any of our staff spotted something illegal they’d call the police. But our job is to bring communities together, to help our communities live side by side, not do the dirty work for MI5.”

Mail on Sunday, 19 April 2008

Colleagues jailed for race abuse

Posted on by Bob Pitt

McDermott, Skett and MelaneyThree men have been jailed for three years for a campaign of racial harassment against a Muslim colleague.

Amjid Mehmood was tied to railings and force-fed bacon while a rucksack with protruding wires was put on his locker, Wolverhampton Crown Court heard.

Fellow road maintenance workers Lee McDermott, of Rowley Regis, and Sean Melaney and Phillip Skett, both from Birmingham, admitted racial harassment.

The nine-month campaign of abuse came to light when Mr Mehmood told police.

McDermott, 31, from Blue Stone Walk, Sean Melaney, 28, of Steatham Grove, Kingstanding, and Skett, 39, of College Road, Erdington, were each jailed for three years.

BBC News, 17 April 2008