Author Archives: Bob Pitt

Mistrial in Muslim air force guard case

Posted on by Bob Pitt

GREENBELT, Md. — A federal judge declared a mistrial Monday in the case of a former Andrews Air Force Base security guard accused of failing to include his Muslim name on a background check to hide his ties to an outspoken Washington imam and mosque. U.S. District Judge Deborah Chasanow made the ruling after jurors failed to reach a verdict for Darrick Michael Jackson after two days of deliberations. Jackson, 37, of Washington, was charged with making a false statement for not listing “Abdul-Jalil Mohammed” as an alias on the federal form he was required to fill out in 2005. He could have been sentenced to five years in prison if convicted.

Jackson’s defense was that he did not know he had to include his religious name for the background check he needed to work at the suburban Washington base, which is home to Air Force One. His attorney accused the government of going after the security guard for religious and political reasons. Jackson reacted to the judge’s decision by thanking God. “I didn’t do anything on purpose,” he said. “I don’t think I should be here.”

Associated Press, 4 December 2007

Does US tolerate anti-Muslim hate-speech?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Savage NationLu Gronseth listens regularly to WWTC, a conservative talk-radio station in Minneapolis, and even advertises his mortgage-loan business on the station. But when he learned that a nationally syndicated radio show host had told WWTC listeners that Muslims should be deported and made rude comments about what they could do with their religion, Mr Gronseth pulled his ads from the station.

So have at least two other Minnesota businesses, at the urging of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, D.C., as have a handful of national companies, including OfficeMax, JCPenney, Wal-Mart, and AT&T. But the comments by host Michael Savage in October – and previous anti-Muslim speech – have not created the furor that knocked radio icon Don Imus off of MSNBC and CBS Radio after he denigrated a black women’s basketball team. That leaves many Muslims-Americans – and non-Muslims like Mr Gronseth – suspicious that Americans have a double standard when it comes to Islam.

“My sense is that you could say anti-Muslim comments that you could never get away with, saying for example, as anti-Jewish comments,” said Stephen Wessler of the Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence in Portland, Maine. “There’s a much greater public level of acceptance of denigrating Muslims.”

Christian Science Monitor, 4 December 2007

Meanwhile, Michael Savage is suing the Council on American-Islamic Relations for breach of copyright after the CAIR website rebroadcast excerpts from his show in which he called the Qur’an a “book of hate” and said Muslims “need deportation”.

San Francisco Chronicle, 4 December 2007

‘The real moral of poor Mrs Gibbons’s ordeal’

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Michael Burleigh“Doubtless the safe return of Ms Gibbons from a sinister and genocidal rogue regime, which from 1992-1996 hosted Osama bin Laden, will be spun as a great triumph for multicultural diplomacy…. The true moral of the affair is that we are dealing with a concerted onslaught on our values by people whose barbarism is evident to anyone with eyes to see it but which has effectively been ruled out of polite usage by government and the security services who witter on abstractly about ‘ideas’ and ‘ideology’ as if they have no apparent connection with one religion.

“Certainly political Islamism owes something to secular political ideologies, notably those sects which claim sole monopoly of the truth and which believe in purifying violence but it is also embedded within the religion whose concepts and language it uses…. If there is any hope, it is that the small voices of a moderate Islam will multiply against the self-appointed bullying fanatics who draw their inspiration from the most extreme exemplars in Islam’s history. But we can’t easily establish what ‘distorts’ or ‘misrepresents’ Islam since any discussion is liable to have lethal consequences – beyond the chill draught that Islamism exudes wherever it establishes a presence.”

Michael Burleigh in the Evening Standard, 4 December 2007

Arson-hit Muslims scared to return

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sarfraz SarwarA Muslim group is refusing to return to its meeting place because members fear arsonists who burned down the building could strike again.

Triangle Community Centre in High Road, Langdon Hills, is ready to reopen, but Basildon Islamic Centre members say they won’t go back becasue they fear they will be targeted by racists. Basildon Council has had the centre restored and improved with £7,000 of security, including fire-proof doors, CCTV and fire alarms, but the group has asked if its lease on the premises can be revoked.

Sarfraz Sarwar, head of the Islamic centre, said: “No one has been brought to justice for what happened and the culprits are still on the streets. Many members, particularly women and children, are terrified of more arson or racist attacks.”

The group believe the fire was the work of racists who wanted to drive them out, because there had been two previous arson attempts on the building and some members were racially taunted.

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US evangelist launches swine attack on Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

An American evangelist has jumped into the fray over the fate of a British teacher facing calls for death over a teddy bear named “Muhammad”. Bill Keller, host of LivePrayer, has posted a video on YouTube featuring a pink, toy pig named Muhammad after the Muslim prophet.

“Indeed Muhammad was a man of murder,” the pig, voiced by Keller himself, states in the video. “He was a pedophile, having a wife at the age of six. And I came to find out that the Quran really is nothing more than a book of fairy tales.”

World Net Daily, 2 November 2007

Opposing the mega-mosque … on the basis of bigotry and ignorance

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Andy Armitage, former editor of Gay & Lesbian Humanist and the man responsible for its notorious “Sick face of Islam” issue (“redundant churches are sprouting onion domes and minarets. We are becoming strangers in our own land”), offers his insights into the dispute over the proposed Newham mosque:

“The ultra-orthodox Muslim group Tablighi Jamaat are behind the building. Among their adherents has been the Glasgow airport bomber, Kafeel Ahmed, the ‘shoe bomber’ Richard Reid and two of the 7/7 bombers…. And the fact that it could be stuck right in the middle of the British landscape is obviously worrying its opponents.”

Armitage warns that the building “could become Europe’s biggest mosque, with a capacity [of] 70,000 (according to last weeks Sunday Times), which is only 10,000 fewer than the proposed Olympic stadium only 500 yards away”. The Sunday Times article he links to is in fact from November 2005 – and the plans by architects Mangera Yvars to which the article refers have since been scrapped.

But don’t get the idea that the atheist Armitage is dogmatically opposed to all religions. Not at all. He’s happy to recommend the Christian Peoples Alliance website MegaMosqueNoThanks.com as “full of links and ideas for opposing the mosque”.

The Freethinker, 2 December 2007

Right and left Islamophobes – so difficult to tell them apart

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Robert Spencer comments on the Gillian Gibbons case: “Even Muslims in the West who condemned the arrest and sentencing of Gibbons did so in disquieting terms…. Muhammad Abdul Bari of the Muslim Council of Britain said: ‘There was clearly no intention on the part of the teacher to deliberately insult the Islamic faith’. But what if there had been? If Gibbons had named the teddy bear Muhammad in order to mock the Muslim prophet, would Muhammad Abdul Bari have approved of her being arrested, imprisoned, lashed or even executed?”

Jihad Watch, 3 December 2007

Now, where have we heard that stupid argument before? Yes, it was from Maryam Namazie and the self-styled Council of Ex-Muslims. Narrow-minded bigots think alike, eh?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sudanese embassy demoBritish Muslims protested outside the Sudanese Embassy over the treatment of jailed teacher Gillian Gibbons. The small but noisy group demanded the immediate release of Mrs Gibbons, who is currently serving a 15-day prison sentence in Sudan after her class of seven-year-olds named a teddy bear Mohammed.

Chanting “free, free Gillian” and “let her go, let her go”, demonstrators attempted to hand over a “goodwill teddy” to the embassy, but a staff member refused to accept the gift.

Some 20 British Muslims, including MP for Tooting Sadiq Khan and chairman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission Massoud Shadjareh, gathered outside the Sudanese embassy in Piccadilly. Leaders of the protest said they wanted to show that British Muslims supported Mrs Gibbons. Some arrived with their own teddy bears.

At the London demonstration, Catherine Heseltine, a 28-year teacher and member of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, condemned the action of hard-line Islamists. She said: “They are dragging the name of Islam through the mud. The overwhelming feeling in the Muslim community in the UK is that it is really sad the way Gillian Gibbons has been treated. I haven’t met a single British Muslim who has taken the naming of the teddy to be an insult.”

Mr Shadjareh, chairman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, said: “I find it offensive that Islam is being used in this way by the Sudanese government and the media. It is totally unacceptable by the Sudanese government and the press are trying to make this into another cartoon or a Salmon Rushdie issue.”

Press Association, 1 December 2007

Posted in UK

MCB finally embraces ‘British values’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Muslim’s Council of Britain’s uncompromising backing for Gillian Gibbons has rather thrown Islamophobes. How to register grudging support for the MCB’s stand while at the same time maintaining the implication that they are at heart dangerous extremists? Jasper Gerard finds the appropriate tone: “Could a row over a teddy have finally convinced them that the values of their homeland – Britain – are more sympathetic than a violent interpretation of Islam?”

Observer, 2 December 2007