Another week, another racist onslaught against Muslims

Another week, another racist onslaught against Muslims

By Eddie Truman

“Ban The Veil” screamed the Daily Express, in Glasgow Imam Shamsuddin is subject to a violent assault, in Liverpool a Muslim woman has a veil ripped from her face by a man shouting racist abuse, in Falkirk a mosque was deliberately set ablaze.

The cause of this renewed wave of attacks on the Muslim community?

Home Secretary Jack Straw’s political ambitions. Such is the all pervading climate of Islamophobia, it is now regarded as a political badge of honour to outbid your political rivals in being seen to be racist towards Muslims.

So now we have a situation in which Labour Party, yes Labour Party, ministers are falling over themselves to match the rhetoric of the British National Party. Incredibly, Race Relations minister, yes you read that right, Phil Woolas, joined the row over the teaching assistant suspended for wearing a veil by demanding that she be sacked.

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Lecture from Ruth Kelly

Ruth KellyThe government will fund Muslim groups according to how active they are in fighting extremism, the communities secretary said today, warning that paying “lip service” to the struggle was not good enough.

Ruth Kelly urged members of Britain’s Muslim communities to do more in what she herself said would be a “challenging” message to some listeners.

She also attacked the Muslim Council of Britain – without actually naming it – by criticising organisations which had boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day.

Praising the contribution of many groups to good relations with other communities, she added:

“It’s not good enough to sit on the sidelines or pay lip service to fighting extremism. I want a fundamental rebalancing of our relations with Muslim organisations. In future our strategy on funding and engagement must shift significantly to organisations taking a pro-active leadership role in tackling extremism and defending our shared values.”

Guardian, 11 October 2006


This rather reinforces suspicions that Kelly wants to sideline the MCB and deal with the Sufi Muslim Council, whose launch she attended in July. The SMC is irrelevant and unrepresentative but has the advantage for Kelly that it places the blame for the development of extremism on the community itself rather than on the government’s foreign policy.

Postscript:  Yup, that what’s going on. See the Times, 12 October 2006

See also Osama Saeed’s comments at Rolled Up Trousers, 12 October 2006

Fascists should have right to incite hatred against Muslims – Liberty

Shami Chakrabati, director of the civil liberties organisation Liberty, explains:

“When you have someone such as Nick Griffin, the BNP chairman, saying ‘Islam is a vicious wicked faith’, if you take the emotion out, it’s essentially someone having a pop at a religion which they have a right to do…. Liberty is unequivocal in its opposition to the legislation on incitement to religious hatred. That means by definition defending all sorts of people, including possibly Nick Griffin. We are against an over-broad speech offence. We may be protecting Griffin, but we are also protecting the vulnerable minority communities.”

Times, 10 October 2006

Make sense of that if you can. Liberty supports Griffin’s right to incite hatred against Muslims … but by doing so they are “protecting vulnerable minority communities”.

Matgamna gets it (partly) right

This site has had some harsh words to say about the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty in the past, but happily we’ve found an article, by Sean Matgamna on the veil controversy, at least some of which we can agree with. Of course, you have to put up with the usual denunciations of “Muslim bigots, and their kitsch-left and invertebrate-liberal toadies”, but the core of Matgamna’s article is correct:

“To do what Straw has just done, in the atmosphere in Britain right now, is to light a match in a gas-filled room. It is to pour petrol on a fire. Inevitably Straw has given the green light to people who want to have a go at Muslims, who are not at all concerned to have a reasonable discussion about Muslim women, or with Muslims….

“Dark-skinned Muslim people are victims in this society. They are easy targets. Straw has shown just how easy a target they are. Shamelessly racist newspapers, like the Express – one of a number of similar headlines: ‘Muslims pledge to ruin Straw’! – have weighed-in to turn his words into denunciation, blame-mongering, thinly disguised hate-mongering against identifiable Muslims.”

Workers’ Liberty, 9 October 2006

However, it’s difficult to square this argument with other positions taken by the AWL. Only a couple of weeks ago Matgamna came out in support of the pope – a stance that won him the admiration of Melanie Phillips – and earlier this year the AWL reproduced the Jyllands-Posten cartoons on their website on the basis of defending freedom of expression.

But, surely, the same argument applied in those cases. If freedom of expression is exercised in such a way that it incites bigotry and hatred against a minority community, in circumstances where that community is already under siege – by associating Islam with “things only evil and inhuman”, or by portraying the Prophet Mohammed as a terrorist bomber – then anyone with any progressive principles should condemn this. Time for the AWL to have a rethink, perhaps.

More anti-Muslim propaganda from the Express

Muslims pledge to ruin StrawAnother characteristically stupid and provocative headline from the Sunday Express. The accompanying article asserts that “an unholy alliance of Muslims and far-Right extremists was last night threatening Jack Straw’s future as an MP”. Needless to say, no such alliance exists and the Express offers no evidence that it does.

The Blackburn Muslims interviewed are divided over expressing regret at Straw’s comments, asking for a discussion with him, calling for an apology and demanding his resignation. Only two of those interviewed adopt the latter position.

As for the BNP, it aims to take advantage of the anti-Muslim sentiments provoked by Straw’s comments by standing against him in the next general election. The fascists’ spokesman Phil Edwards is quoted as saying that Straw has played a “subtle” version of the race card in order to boost his standing with white voters. (The BNP, of course, will do the same thing but dispense with the subtlety.) Edwards adds: “We have been saying this about Muslim dress for some time. It’s all part of the problems of a multi-cultural Britain that he and the Labour Party helped to create.”

The article also quotes Tory defence minister Gerald Howarth as saying that parliament may be forced to change the law to ban the veil. “I don’t think we need to legislate today but the time may come – if this fashion grows – where we need to. It’s time we stood up for our Christian heritage.”

Sunday Express, 8 October 2006

Witch-hunt launched against Mohammad Khatami

KhatamiSince Gemma Tumelty took over as president of the National Union of Students earlier this year the NUS has taken a sharp turn to the right. We’ve already witnessed the NUS executive voting down a motion that called for an immediate ceasefire during Israel’s war against Lebanon and censuring George Galloway for backing Hizbollah in its resistance to Israeli aggression. (The NUS executive evidently had no problem with anyone supporting Israeli state terrorism against the Lebanese civilian population.)

If further proof were needed of the mistake made by FOSIS in blocking Pav Akhtar’s election as president, we now have leading figures in the NUS calling for public protests against St Andrews University’s decision to award an honorary degree to former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami duting his visit to the UK later this month.

The first NUS executive member to be quoted in a Sunday Times article witch-hunting Khatami (“Fury as St Andrews honours Hezbollah backer“) is, significantly, Sophie Buckland – a supporter of the rabidly Islamophobic pseudo-left sect the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty.

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Ban The Veil

expressveilJack Straw’s playing of the racist Islamophobia card in pursuit of his career ambitions has resulted in a renewed deluge of anti Muslim poison.

The Daily Express is happy to further up the tension with a front page clearly calculated to incite hatred.

“Concerned Britons gave massive backing last night to calls for Muslim women to ditch the veil. An astonishing 97 per cent of Daily Express readers agreed that a ban would help to safeguard racial harmony. Our exclusive poll came a day after Leader of the Commons Jack Straw spoke out against the veils.”

Already the BBC has reported an attack on a Muslim woman because of the remarks of the Leader of the House of Commons. We shudder to think what the effect of the Daily Express front page will be on the racist morons just waiting to be incited by this.

‘Veil is a banner of political Islam’, ultra-left sectarian claims

“The veil is not merely a piece of ‘cloth’, but a sign of the oppression of women, control over their sexuality, submissiveness to the will of God or a man. The veil is a banner of political Islam used, to segregate women born by historical accident in the so-called ‘Islamic World’ from other women in the rest of the world….

“Jack Straw’s government has always been proud of its ‘multicultural society’, in which all kinds of backward and anti-human cultures are respected and given space by the state…. Celebrating ‘different cultures’ the existence of mosques and religious schools is a place for brainwashing the young people with Islamic values which can only produce political Islamists.”

Houzan Mahmoud at the Guardian’s Comment is Free, 7 October 2006

I note that comrade Mahmoud’s profile states that she is an activist in the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, but avoids mentioning that she is a member of a bizarre ultra-left sect called the Worker Communist Party of Iraq, of which the OWFI is just a front.

Met chief orders inquiry into Muslim PC embassy row

Cop OutThe media are trying to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment over the issue of Alexander Omar Basha, a Muslim police officer guarding the Israeli embassy in London who asked to be transferred to another post during Israel’s war on Lebanon, where he has relatives.

It’s not often this site has reason to endorse the views of a Tory member of the London Assembly, but we note that Richard Barnes blames senior officers rather than PC Basha. The Evening Standard quotes him as saying: “I think it was crass management in the first place. They should have recognised there could have been a problem and not suggested this officer be posted at this embassy.”

Another member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, Peter Herbert, has described the row as a “ridiculous fuss about nothing”. He added: “From a security point of view, the Met would be seriously criticised if this guy has relatives in Lebanon and his picture was used around the world to demonstrate the irony about having a Muslim defending the Israeli embassy in the UK.”

Glen Smyth, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers, said just one two-hour slot outside the embassy had been affected. The officer had not refused to do duties and had made a simple request which it was “fairly sensible” to grant, Mr Smyth said.

Postscript:  It turns out that PC Basha was never posted to the Israeli embassy in the first place, according to a statement by Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson.

Metropolitan Police news report, 5 October 2006

The Markaz – Freedland takes a ‘balanced’ view

Following on from the editorial in yesterday’s issue, the Evening Standard has published an article by Jonathan Freedland on the proposed West Ham mosque.

Freedland takes a “balanced” view of the issue, condemning “knee-jerk” responses both from the mosque’s opponents, who believe it will become an al-Qaida training camp, and equally from “the planned mosque’s defenders, poised to brand any opponent of the project as an Islamophobe”. It is difficult to believe that, in the event of a proposed new synagogue provoking a similar outburst of hostility towards the Jewish community and its beliefs, Freedland would be quite so ready to place an equals sign between the anti-semitic opponents of the plan and those who took a stand against them.

Freedland tells us that Tablighi Jamaat, the organisation behind the scheme, is “aligned with the Saudi strain of Wahhabi Islam”, when the movement in fact originates in the Deobandist school of Islam from South Asia. It is pretty clear that he has carried out no research whatsoever into the subject.

Freedland recycles the by now well-worn quote attributed to French intelligence that Tablighi Jamaat is an “antechamber of fundamentalism”, whatever that means. He also claims that Tablighi’s “roll call of alumni is damningly said to include the 7 July bombers Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer”. Given that Tablighi has millions of adherents, how can it be “damning” that out of all these millions a couple of terrorists should have once been involved with the movement? Freedland goes on to say that Tablighi’s name has been “linked” (he doesn’t say how) to Richard Reid and Zacarius Moussaoui, and concludes: “Small wonder that locals in West Ham are wary of a Tablighi Jamaat megapolis on their doorstep.” To which we can only reply – small wonder that locals should hold such views if they share Freedland’s ignorance and prejudice.

Freedland’s article contains the obligatory quote from the discredited self-styled expert on Islam, Patrick Sookhdeo, whose claim that the mosque would lead inevitably to “a completely Muslim community … a parallel society”, Freedland asserts, “should not be dismissed out of hand”. Given that Sookhdeo is a forceful proponent of a paranoid fantasy about Christian culture being submerged beneath an alien tide of Muslims, I would suggest that this is exactly how Sookhdeo’s opinions should be treated.

As Sookhdeo told the Sunday Telegraph in a notorious interview earlier this year: ” … in a decade, you will see parts of English cities which are controlled by Muslim clerics and which follow, not the common law, but aspects of Muslim sharia law. It is already starting to happen and unless the Government changes the way it treats the so-called leaders of the Islamic community, it will continue.”

And this is the man whose views are given credence by Freedland, who argues that the very size of the proposed centre “could make Sookhdeo’s fears come true”.

Freedland goes on to lecture those dealing with the planning application that “they should insist it is built to be open and accessible to everybody, including those non-Muslims who would never dream of going inside to pray.”

Freedland is evidently oblivious to the fact that Mangera Yvars, the architects responsible for designing the Markaz, state quite explicitly that it is intended as “a place for Muslims and Non Muslims to interact, debate and promote a greater understanding between ideology, faith and humanity”. Abdul Kalik, project director for Tablighi Jamaat, was quoted in Andrew Gilligan’s article (Evening Standard , 17 July) as saying that the centre “would welcome people of all faiths”. The Standard (25 July) published a letter from Ali Mangera of Mangera Yvars responding to Gilligan’s piece, which again emphasised that: “Our aim is to create dialogue between peoples and provide an inclusive centre open to all faiths….”

Not only has Freedland failed to research his article properly, but it appears that he doesn’t even read the paper he writes for.

Freedland concludes by arguing that the Mayor of London should have the final say over whether the scheme goes ahead and advises that “he should put aside the multiple prejudices this question has stirred up”. Freedland might set an example by putting aside a few of his own.