“This is just the latest in a seemingly never ending torrent of negative portrayals of Muslims and Islam. Both films and television will claim to tackle any number of difficult issues, yet they find it impossible to show Muslims in a realistic manner. If there is no room for our reflection in their media mirror, then it’s time we made our own mirrors.”
A Muslim blogger responds to the Channel 4 drama Britz.
Scotland Yard yesterday faced fresh controversy after it emerged that the man accidentally shot by police during an anti-terrorism raid in east London last year has claimed armed officers again threatened to shoot him and subjected him to racist abuse during a second recent incident.
Mohammed Abdul Kahar, 23, who was shot in the shoulder during a raid by police on his home in Forest Gate in 2006, says he and his brother Abul Koyair, 20, were stopped by armed police with one officer shouting “shoot him, shoot him”.
According to their account they were on a motorbike near their home two months ago when they stopped to watch a police operation at a pizza takeaway. As they drove off, they were followed by police and ordered to stop. According to the brothers, one officer emerged from the car carrying a handgun. A second officer allegedly shouted “shoot him, shoot him, put him down.” Mohammed Kahar said that he then replied: “Don’t shoot me, my hands are in the air.”
The brothers say they were manhandled off the motorcycle and one was pushed to the ground while the other was handcuffed. They claim that they were called “Paki”, “tossers” and “wankers”. Mohammed Kahar said he heard one officer say “that’s the two brothers” and another asked “how many millions do you get?” – presumably a reference to compensation to be paid to the men over last year’s raid. Their sister, who was passing by on a bus, intervened and was charged with a public order offence for which she has been issued with a fixed penalty notice.
More on The Hijacking of British Islam: Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain debates Dean Godson of Policy Exchange on Al Jazeera.
A young North Wales thug who yanked off a Muslim woman’s veil was today spared jail after he made a public apology in court.
Damien French, 21, of Brighton Road in Rhyl, admitted charges of racially aggravated common assault and a racially aggravated public order offence when he appeared before Mold Crown Court this morning. The judge, Mr Recorder Robert Trevor-Jones, said that French’s behaviour in grabbing the hijab had been “deplorable, despicable and quite disgraceful”. French was given an 18-week prison sentence suspended for two years.
Mold Crown Court heard how victim Shahenna Hussain, 23, was walking with her sister and two nieces, pushing push chairs along the street at the junction of High Street and Wellington Road one afternoon in April. French was seen by a witness in a nearby shop to be initially hurling foul racial abuse at a coach which appeared full of Asian passengers.
Miss Hussain saw the defendant and his group, realised what was happening, put her head down to avoid eye contact and continued on her way. The defendant and his group noticed her and her sister as she crossed the road and he shouted and swore in racial terms towards her. Prosecutor Gareth Parry said: “She suddenly felt a violent grip to the top of her head, connecting with her hijab, which was fixed with two pins. But pins were forced open.” She was “extremely upset and angry” and felt violated, explained Mr Parry.
See also BBC News, 2 November 2007
Diana Johnsto
ne reviews Bernard-Henri Lévy’s new book Ce grand cadavre à la renverse. According to BHL there is, Johnstone writes, “a new ‘fascist’ enemy to combat: ‘Islamofascism’ or, as he prefers to call it, ‘Fascislamism’.”
This is evidently a fairly broad category, as BHL identifies Fascislamism “even in the relatively moderate positions of Tariq Ramadan, for instance, not to mention veiled women and Muslims who object to cartoons portraying the prophet Mohamed as a terrorist bomber.”
EAST LANSING – The fallout from the appearance of controversial British National Party leader Nick Griffin at Michigan State University last Friday continues.
Griffin was originally supposed to deliver a lecture on the dangers of radical Islam but protesters demanded he answer questions. In a two-hour cantankerous give and take with more than 75 protesters and 30 supporters, Griffin delivered a range of views.
“Muslims gang rape women in Norway and other cultures. Only Muslims do this,” he told the crowd.
Explaining why he was qualified to lecture at MSU about Islam, Griffin responded, “My credentials are I have a degree in history and law. I am significantly older than most of you are here, and I have spoken with many, many Muslims.”
Griffin also called protesters stupid, accused them of being bussed in from Detroit, and of being lesbians. He also told protesters he would “shove” homosexuals back in the closet and “kill them.”
Prior to the speech protesters complained of Griffin’s party’s racist agenda that includes the removal of all non-white people living in Britain, and his alleged Holocaust denial. He reiterated during Friday night’s session that “it is a well known fact that the chimneys were added” to concentration camps after the war.
Cherie Blair has criticised Muslim religious dress for women where it fails to acknowledge “the woman’s right to be a person.” The wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair warned against the full-face veil, or niqab, worn by strictly Islamic women worldwide because it could prevent a woman from expressing her personality.
Mrs Blair, a practising Roman Catholic who is to publish her own memoirs in October next year, admitted that she had herself been educated by Catholic nuns who wore veils. She said she had no problem with women covering their heads. But on Islamic veils, she said: “I think however, that if you get to the stage where a woman is not able to express her personality because we cannot see her face, then we do have to ask whether this is something that is actually acknowledging the woman’s right to be a person.”
Mrs Blair’s own Church forbids the ordination of women, forbids women from using condoms even when their husband has been infected by HIV while working away, and denies the sacrament of communion to women who are divorced and remarried without an annulment, even when a woman’s first marriage has broken down because of abandonment for a younger woman by their husband.
She nevertheless focused her criticisms on Islamic countries. She said the laws on divorce and custody of children remained unfair to women in many Islamic countries, such as Egypt. “I think the facts speak for themselves,” she said.
The Washington Post reports that Donald Rumsfeld has argued that their inherent laziness makes Muslims susceptible to terrorist propaganda.
In an internal memo from May 2004 the then US Defense Secretary wrote that oil wealth had detached Muslims “from the reality of the work, effort and investment that leads to wealth for the rest of the world”.
“Too often Muslims are against physical labor, so they bring in Koreans and Pakistanis while their young people remain unemployed,” he wrote. “An unemployed population is easy to recruit to radicalism.”
Gabriele Marranci questions the methodology behind The Hijacking of British Islam.
Islam, Muslims, and and Anthropologist, 30 October 2007
For Yusuf Smith’s comments, see Indigo Jo Blogs, 31 October 2007
The chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque has accused the Government of failing to do enough to tackle those peddling extremist Islamic literature. Dr Mohammad Naseem also criticised “irresponsible” reports of a study by think-tank Policy Exchange, which found material attacking gays and non-believers was available at several UK mosques.
“A mosque is an open, public place and anyone can distribute literature or leave literature in a mosque,” Dr Naseem said. “The real question is who is publishing these leaflets? These are people that spread hatred and the people who do publish this literature generally don’t put their name on it. If such literature comes to our notice we will confiscate it and we will report it to the police.”
Researchers for Policy Exchange spent more than a year visiting nearly 100 Muslim religious institutions across the country, and found extremist material was available – either openly or under the table – in about 25. Extreme statements in the documents included a call for jihad against “tyrants and oppressors”, which is “best done through force if possible”.
But Dr Naseem added: “My presumption is that these leaflets have nothing to do with the mosques – it’s irresponsible to suggest that a quarter of mosques are involved with this.”