Author Archives: Bob Pitt

Qataris slam British denial of visa to Qaradawi

Posted on by Bob Pitt

YusufalQaradawiDOHA – Supporters of Qatar-based Muslim scholar Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi staged a sit-in outside the British embassy in Doha on Wednesday to protest at London’s denial of a visa to the controversial cleric.

“Mr Brown: Why are you rejecting tolerance and dialogue?” read one of the banners raised by the protesters, who numbered around 400, referring to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Lawyer Najib al-Nuaimi, a former Qatari justice minister acting as Qaradawi’s representative in the affair, handed the deputy head of the British mission, Claire Evans, a letter of protest. The letter demands that the British government reconsider its “unfair and illegal” decision to deny Qaradawi a visa, Nuaimi said.

Qatari Muslim preacher Sheikh Mohieddin al-Qaradaghi told reporters that Britain had taken an “unfair decision” against a “symbol of centrism in Islam,” and this would “benefit extremists from both sides”.

Middle East Online, 20 February 2008

Protest to the BBC over coverage of the Williams row

Posted on by Bob Pitt

As the furore over Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ remarks about religious and civil law subsides into a more considered debate beyond the headlines, the Anglican leader is receiving backing from what might be considered some unexpected quarters.

Well-known media commentator Sunny Hundal, who is from a Sikh background but is not religious, has written a letter of protest to the BBC about its coverage of Dr Williams’ speech on Islam and the law – and in particular his Radio 4 World at One interview.

Hundal, a left-of-centre journalist who was voted the Guardian newspaper’s blogger of the year in 2007, runs Asians in Media, and has launched two of the most successful UK-based group current affairs blogs, Pickled Politics and Liberal Conspiracy, finds himself in the same camp of concern as right-of-centre commentator Matt Wardman, of The Wardman Wire.

Mr Hundal’s letter to the BBC says: “[My] complaint refers principally to coverage on BBC News 24 and news bulletins on BBC television and radio on Friday 8 February and the weekend of 9 & 10th February 2008. I found BBC News coverage sensationalist and biased against the Archbishop, muddying the waters over what he said in the speech and with no attempt at giving it context – that is, who it was aimed at, what the current law is on civil arbitration, etc.”

Hundal stresses: “[T]his does not mean I endorse sharia or want it to be fully introduced in the UK. I believe in one civil law for all citizens. However, BBC News bulletins did not make any attempts to offer any context to its own coverage.”

Commentator Matt Wardman goes further, accusing the BBC of instigating the political firestorm with a misleading headline trailing its interview with him. Of the headline, “The Archbishop of Canterbury has said that the adoption of Sharia Law in some parts of Britain is inevitable”, Wardman remarks: “No he didn’t, or not in the way that your headline was inevitably going to make people think.”

Ekklesia, 19 February 2008

Danish Foreign Ministry commits near perfect error

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The 10 members of the Danish parliament’s Foreign Policy Committee, including Denmark’s former Foreign Minister Mogens Lykketoft, erred when they canceled a trip to Iran two days prior to scheduled meetings. The purpose of the trip was to meet with members of the Iranian parliament as well as to look into such issues as the country’s human rights and uranium enrichment.

“During this same time period Danish police arrested two Tunisians and a Dane of Moroccan descent on Tuesday, accusing them of planning to kill a cartoonist who drew a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad that was published in Danish newspapers two years ago.

“One presumes that Denmark upholds due process, and that in Denmark arrests are not equated with guilt, but remarkably 15 Danish newspapers reprinted this very same cartoon on Wednesday in protest against the alleged plot. The alleged plot.

“Even if these papers had waited for a guilty verdict following due process, it would remain the case that an infantile provocation of this magnitude is beyond reproach. Considering the vast difficulties worldwide that derived from the initial printing of these cartoons, there are simply no words to describe the decision of not one or two deranged editors, but a coordinated effort among 15 newspapers in what is generally regarded as a modern nation. Publication of the cartoons two years ago led to protests and rioting in Muslim countries around the world. At least 50 people were killed and three Danish embassies attacked…..

“For a government to stand behind actions that are so patently reprehensible as a unified media decision to offend religious believers around the world, and then to poison international relations by canceling a high level diplomatic mission is a near perfect error, a disgrace to the West, an offense, and a missed opportunity.”

Frank Kaufmann in the Middle East Times, 18 February 2008

Hate site comments suggest violence against Missouri mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today asked the St. Louis, Mo., office of the FBI to investigate apparent threats against a local mosque posted on an anti-Muslim Internet hate site.

Threatening comments on the Little Green Footballs hate site about a new minaret being built near that mosque included:

1. “I suppose dynamite would be considered an extreme response.”
2. “The tower would make a nice target for lots of things…Perhaps one could start by bombing the thing with pig s**t from a light plane.”
3. “Anyone got some RPGs to coat in pig fat?”
4. “Would be a shame if it were to be vandalized or destroyed. Just a shame I tell you….wink wink STL youth.”

“These types of violent comments should not be taken lightly and should be investigated by state and federal law enforcement authorities,” said CAIR Civil Rights Manager Khadija Athman.

The apparent threats come following a recent arson attack on a Tennessee mosque allegedly by three members of the “Christian Identity” movement and a fire-bomb attack on a Minnesota Muslim business.

CAIR press release, 19 February 2008

See also “Mosque threatened, Muslim group says”, St Louis Post-Dispatch, 20 February 2008

Group set up to fight mosque bid

Posted on by Bob Pitt

No mosque here 4Campaigners have set up a crisis group to plan a fresh attack on proposals to build an £18 million mosque in Dudley.

Malcolm Davis, former councillor for St James’ ward, says his phone has been ringing off the hook with residents complaining about the planning inspector’s decision to overturn the council’s rejection of the scheme. The authority had thrown out the plans to create a mosque and community centre on derelict land in Hall Street. The matter will now go to a public inquiry in June.

Mr Davis said public feeling against the mosque was just as strong as when the proposals originally emerged. Some 70 petitions containing more than 22,000 signatures were handed to the council from people protesting against the plans. “We have set up a working party and I will be asking everybody who wants to object to the mosque plan to turn up that night for the hearing, even if it brings the town to a complete standstill.”

Mr Davis has blasted the inspectorate’s decision to refer the plan to a public inquiry as “a coward’s way out”. He said: “I’m adamant the people of Dudley don’t want that thing there…. It will destroy the concept of a lovely medieval market town.”

Express and Star, 19 February 2008

PM urged to intervene over Stoke mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Campaigners are calling on Prime Minister Gordon Brown to intervene in controversial plans to build a new mosque and community centre. Residents angered by Stoke-on-Trent City Council’s decision to rent a plot of land in Shelton to Muslim developers for just £1 a year, amid suggestions it could be sold to them for £72,000, have launched an online petition.

They want the Prime Minister to order a full public inquiry into the handling of the mosque development, in Regent Road, Shelton, which they claim does not make financial sense. The concerns have already been exploited by BNP councillors in the city, who are distributing thousands of leaflets criticising the council’s handling of the issue.

Stoke Sentinel, 18 February 2008

East London Advertiser wins ban on Hizb ut-Tahrir

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Cordoba FoundationFury has erupted after it emerged that Tower Hamlets council was proposing to fund a debate involving the British chairman of an Islamist organisation banned throughout much of the world.

The East London Advertiser discovered that Town Hall chiefs were planning to subsidise up to £19,000 for a public meeting with Dr Abdul Wahid, the head of the radical Hizb ut-Tahrir organisation, which wants to create a worldwide Islamic state. He was due to share a platform with prominent community leaders, including Labour peer Lord Ahmed, at the London Muslim centre in Whitechapel later this month.

The event is one of a series of debates being organised by the Cordoba Foundation and funded by Tower Hamlets council as part of its efforts to tackle extremism.

East London Advertiser, 18 February 2008

The meeting in question, at the London Muslim Centre on 26 February, is a debate on the subject “Has Political Participation Failed British Muslims?” (pdf here) and poses the question: “Should Muslims become more politically active or should they shun politics altogether?” So by their stupid witch-hunt of Hizb ut-Tahrir the East London Advertiser has in fact removed the opportunity for Osama Saeed to publicly take on and defeat HT’s abstentionist arguments. And who precisely will gain from that?

Update:  It now appears that Dr Abdul Wahid, the HT speaker, has been reinstated.

Sharia law at the Treasury and a drift to Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“It is strangely shocking to find that Her Majesty’s Treasury, that very matter-of-fact department, should be issuing bonds that comply with the ancient rules of sharia law. It is as if your bank manager were suddenly to break off from warning you about your overdraft, fetch out a prayer mat and start offering devotions in the direction of Mecca….

“… there is still something slightly unsettling about the news. Is it coincidental that ours is the first major Western country to offer this facility? Official Britain has a startling enthusiasm for adjusting itself to make Muslims comfortable. The Home Secretary has weirdly described terrorist activity as ‘Anti-Islamic’. The Foreign Office was recently revealed by a whistleblower to be giving undue status to militant strands of Islam.

“… it coincides with an increasing tendency to reduce the privileges of the Christian religion in Britain. Christian worship in State schools has been deliberately allowed to fade into nonexistence. Recent legislation on adoption, stem-cell research and the employment rights of homosexuals has directly challenged Christian practice and belief.

“Yet multicultural liberals, many of whom profess themselves Godless and despise Christianity, are strangely ready to suck up to Islam, whose views on such topics are far fiercer than those of the most militant Christian moralist.

“It sometimes seems as if we are slowly drifting, without really thinking about it, or meaning to, towards the Islamic world. It is time we did think about it, or who knows what may rush in to fill the religious vacuum left at the heart of our State by the slow death of the Church of England?”

Editorial in the Mail on Sunday, 17 February 2008

Predictably, the fascists of the BNP seize on this latest example of western-civilisation-succumbs-to-Islam scaremongering.

‘I don’t hate Muslims. I hate Islam,’ says Wilders

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Geert WildersA TV addict with bleached hair who adores Maggie Thatcher and prefers kebabs to hamburgers, Geert Wilders has got nothing against Muslims. He just hates Islam. Or so he says. “Islam is not a religion, it’s an ideology,” says Wilders, a lanky Roman Catholic right-winger, “the ideology of a retarded culture.”

Wilders has been immersing himself in the suras and verse of seventh-century Arabia. The outcome of his scholarship, a short film, has Holland in a panic. He is just putting the finishing touches to the 10-minute film, he says, and talking to four TV channels about screening it.

“It’s like a walk through the Koran,” he explains in a sterile conference room in the Dutch parliament in The Hague, security chaps hovering outside. “My intention is to show the real face of Islam. I see it as a threat. I’m trying to use images to show that what’s written in the Koran is giving incentives to people all over the world. On a daily basis Moroccan youths are beating up homosexuals on the streets of Amsterdam.”

Wilders echoes some of the arguments against multiculturalism that have convulsed Germany in recent years. Like many on the traditional German right, he wants the European Judaeo-Christian tradition to be formally recognised as the dominating culture, or Leitkultur. “There is no equality between our culture and the retarded Islamic culture. Look at their views on homosexuality or women,” he says.

“Islam is something we can’t afford any more in the Netherlands. I want the fascist Koran banned. We need to stop the Islamisation of the Netherlands. That means no more mosques, no more Islamic schools, no more imams… Not all Muslims are terrorists, but almost all terrorists are Muslims.”

Observer, 17 February 2008