Category Archives: Analysis & comment

Nick Cohen lines up with Mad Mel

Posted on by Bob Pitt

As we’ve repeatedly pointed out on this site, Islamophobia is the issue over which a whole section of the Left has lost its political bearings and adopted positions barely distinguishable from the racist Right.

Nick Cohen is of course a prime example. In his latest Evening Standard column, he denounces liberals for opposing the imprisonment without trial of the Tipton Three at Guantánamo Bay (“the Americans had reasonable grounds for picking them up”) and for attacking the intended illegalisation under the government’s proposed new anti-terror law of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an organisation that has repeatedly stated its opposition to terrorist attacks such as the London bombings. As for 7/7 itself, Cohen lectures us that it had nothing whatsoever to do with the crimes of western imperialism but was solely motivated by the “psychotic ideology” of Islamism.

A very similar argument is presented by Mad Mel, with whom Cohen increasingly finds common ground, in today’s entry in Melanie Phillips’s Diary.

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Clarke criticises Danish ‘mistake’ over cartoons

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The British government has accused its Danish counterparts of making “a serious mistake” in the way it handled relations with Muslim countries after the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. The home secretary, Charles Clarke, criticised the decision by the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, to snub a request from 11 Muslim countries for a meeting after the cartoons were published in the Jyllands Posten newspaper in September. Mr Clarke told a public meeting in Willesden that Mr Rasmussen had not even responded to the request.

Guardian, 8 March 2006

And why hasn’t this appeared on Dhimmi Watch? Is Robert Spencer prepared to sit idly by while British politicians sell out western civilisation to the Muslim hordes?

Postscript:  This was quite unfair on Robert. Shortly after our comment was posted, he laid into Clarke: “Britain’s Home Secretary criticizes Denmark’s Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen for not throwing freedom of speech overboard and rushing into dhimmitude.”

Dhimmi Watch, 9 March 2006

Why the Lib Dems?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A few days ago Liberal Democrat spokesperson Kishwer Falkner attracted some media attention when she stated that Muslims should have “broader shoulders” when it comes to issues of free speech such as the Danish cartoons – a statement that Osama Saeed rightly dismissed as “patronising drivel”.

I missed Kishwer Falkner’s speech at the Trafalgar Square rally against Islamophobia on 11 February (I’d sneaked off for a coffee). However, a contact has provided this account: “She came on directly after Azzam Tamimi and attacked him from the platform for his lack of ‘self restraint’ (without of course specifying what this meant). She ended her tedious and patronising speech with the inspiring slogan ‘Moderation is more important than militancy’ – and walked off to a chorus of boos.”

I notice that another leading Lib Dem, Evan Harris MP, is billed as a platform speaker at the so-called “March for Free Expression” in London on 25 March, which has been called basically in support of the right to incite hatred against Muslims.

I can understand why Muslim communities have been alienated from Labour by the actions of the Blair government, but why anyone should regard the Lib Dems as any sort of alternative beats me.

Islamophobia Watch helps target Tatchell for murder (really!)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

OutrageLast week the Peter Tatchell Human Rights Fund Campaign Report 2005 was published. Among the list of Peter’s marvellous accomplishments over the course of the year, the report includes the following nugget: “The website, Islamophobia Watch, regularly (but falsely) denounces Peter as anti-Muslim. It is feared this could make him a target for Islamic fundamentalists who monitor the website to compile their hit-lists.”

Peter is of course noted for keeping a low profile – indeed, within a Left not short of inflated egos and narcissists, his self-effacing approach to political activism is one of his most appealing qualities – and without the efforts of Islamophobia Watch we doubt that anyone would have the slightest idea who Peter Tatchell is. Furthermore, were it not for our harsh criticisms of Peter’s attitude towards Islam, we are convinced that the majority of Muslims would long ago have recognised him as the friend and sympathiser that he is.

As for the claim that “Islamic fundamentalists” monitor our site to “compile their hit-lists”, some might suspect that this is a baseless slander on Peter’s part aimed at silencing his critics. However, as anyone familiar with Outrage’s campaign against Yusuf al-Qaradawi can confirm, Peter is the last person in the world to make an accusation against anyone without solid evidence to back it up. We look forward to to Peter providing his own list of the fundamentalists who use our site for the purpose of targeting people like himself for murder.

Anti-Muslim manifesto

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Another anti-Islam stunt involving a roster of characters, “left”, right and liberal, who have featured regularly on this website. They have signed a manifesto denouncing “the new totalitarianism”. It begins: “After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism.” Maryam Namazie of the Worker Communist Party of Iran, who is one of the signatories, has posted the text on her blog, accompanied by the announcement that the manifesto would be “published in Charlie Hebdo, a French leftwing newspaper”.

Maryam Namazie’s blog, 2 March 2006

In fact, the manifesto first appeared in Jyllands-Posten, the right-wing Danish paper responsible for publishing the offensive anti-Muslim cartoons. The manifesto has also been enthusiastically welcomed by the likes of Little Green Footballs, Jihad Watch and Western Resistance.

In his book The Future of Political Islam Graham Fuller defines an Islamist as a person who holds the view that “Islam as a body of faith has something important to say about how politics and society should be ordered in the contemporary Muslim World and who seeks to implement this idea in some fashion”. Islamism is thus a category that includes a huge variety of ideologies and individuals, from Tariq Ramadan to Osama bin Laden.

As Soumaya Ghannoushi pointed out in an article entitled “The many faces of Islamism”, published in the Guardian last October: “Islamism, like socialism, is not a uniform entity. It is a colourful sociopolitical phenomenon with many strategies and discourses. This enormously diverse movement ranges from liberal to conservative, from modern to traditional, from moderate to radical, from democratic to theocratic, and from peaceful to violent. What these trends have in common is that they derive their source of legitimacy from Islam.”

By lumping all these trends together under the heading of “totalitarianism”, the signatories to the manifesto merely demonstrate their own ignorance and bigotry. It is all too reminiscent of Cold War propaganda that depicted all proponents of radical politics, from liberals leftwards, as “commies” who were intent on destroying democracy and imposing a totalitarian political system.

Another MEMRI attack on Qaradawi

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yusuf_al_QaradawiYes, another attempt by the Middle East Media Research Institute to stitch up Yusuf al-Qaradawi as an anti-semite.

It’s the usual cut and paste job, with paragraphs and even individual sentences taken out of a much longer speech and amalgamated. At least in this case MEMRI has actually provided ellipses which allow the reader to see how the thing has been chopped up and put back together, which is more than they did on a previous occasion. Even from MEMRI’s butchered version of Qaradawi’s speech it’s quite clear that his remarks – “Our war with the Jews is over land, brothers. We must understand this. If they had not plundered our land, there wouldn’t be a war between us” – are directed against Israelis, not against the world Jewish community. Just over a year ago, at a time when it was under pressure over its misrepresentation of Qaradawi, MEMRI published a much longer transcript of an interview in which he outlined his real views on Jews and Judaism.

Of course, this hasn’t prevented the warmongers at Harry’s Place from uncritically endorsing MEMRI’s latest stitch-up of Dr Q. Yet, only a few weeks ago, when MEMRI published an equally dishonest hatchet job on Tariq Ramadan, David T and his friends ignored this. The reason is rather obvious. Even Harry’s Place readers have posted favourable comments on Professor Ramadan during the Danish cartoons controversy, and a discussion of MEMRI’s distortion of his role would have exposed that organisation as the bunch of lying propagandists that they are, thus making it a bit difficult to present MEMRI as a reliable source of information on Qaradawi’s views.

But what can you expect from Harry’s Place? David T recently launched a witch-hunt against Christian CND treasurer Neil Berry, whom he falsely accused of writing anti-semitic articles. They were in fact written by an entirely different Neil Berry. But, what the heck, it was the same name, and that was good enough for David T. And this from a blog that claims to uphold Enlightenment values. You know, respecting scientific evidence rather than relying on irrational prejudice, that sort of thing.

I note that David Aaronovitch, who repeated David T’s slurs on Neil Berry in an article in the Jewish Chronicle, has also retracted and apologised.

Another example of religious extremism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tempers are reaching boiling point in the French Jewish community after the torture and murder of a young Jewish man by a suburban gang calling itself “the barbarians”.

Police had said that the gang kidnapped Ilan Halimi, 23 using a beautiful, young, blonde woman as bait to extort money from his family. However, the victim’s family and many other Parisian Jews are convinced the crime was, at least partially, racially motivated.

A Parisian member of parliament, Claude Goasguen, said yesterday the city could face “extremely serious intra-community violence” unless the authorities abandoned their “persistent silence on the real motives for this murder”.

At the weekend, a mainly peaceful protest march by Parisian Jews was marred by a number of violent actions by radical young Jewish men. A black man was beaten up, allegedly for “smiling” at the protest. An Arab-run grocery was attacked. A motorist who was caught up in the march was assaulted and had to be rescued by demonstration marshals.

Tracts were handed out by Jewish radical groups which claimed that Ilan Halimi, a mobile telephone salesman, was a victim of “Islamo-fascism”.

Independent, 21 February 2006

Which only goes to show that there are extremists and thugs within every ethno-religious community. However, in this case, I rather doubt that “clash of civilisations” rhetoric will be wheeled out to explain the actions of an unrepresentative minority of demonstrators or that liberal and right-wing commentators will produce articles asserting that Judaism is incompatible with western values. Islamophobia is so much more acceptable than anti-semitism.

Islam threatens Old Masters shock

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Spencer and PipesOur friend Robert Spencer was over in the Netherlands last week attending the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference at The Hague, along with other sensitive students of all things Islamic such as Daniel Pipes (pictured, with the lovely Robert himself), Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom.

All that was required was the presence of Melanie Phillips and Peter Tatchell to present a complete picture of Islamophobic hell.

It was, Robert tells us, “delightful to be in Holland in the company of so many interesting people”. And he treats us to a little anecdote about visiting the Mauritshuis museum to admire the works of Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer:

“I couldn’t help but notice that while hijabbed women were common on the streets of The Hague – I’d guess that one out of every 5 or so women I saw in the center of the city was wearing one – there were absolutely none inside the museum. Of course, for a pious Muslim the works of the masters are so much jahiliyya – the products of the society of unbelievers – and hence worthless.

“Of course, everyone is free not to go to a museum, but there is more to it than that. The ideological kin of those who blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan have entered the Netherlands in large numbers…. But did the people moving through the Mauritshuis with Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye’or, David Littman and me realize how much that ideology imperils the paintings they were so coolly admiring, and the museum in which we were admiring them? I do not think they did. That ignorance, of course, was what our Conference was trying to address.”

Jihad Watch, 20 February 2006

Sookhdeo calls for ban on Qur’an

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Noble Qur'anPatrick Sookhdeo talks to the Telegraph:

“The whole approach towards Muslim militants was based on appeasement. 7/7 proved that that approach does not work – yet it is still being followed. For example, there is a book, The Noble Koran: a New Rendering of its Meaning in English, which is openly available in Muslim bookshops. It calls for the killing of Jews and Christians, and it sets out a strategy for killing the infidels and for warfare against them. The Government has done nothing whatever to interfere with the sale of that book. Why not? Government ministers have promised to punish religious hatred, to criminalise the glorification of terrorism, yet they do nothing about this book, which blatantly does both.”

Sunday Telegraph, 19 February 2006

The reference is evidently to a translation of the Qur’an by two Sufi scholars, Abdalhaqq and Aisha Bewley, which has been praised in the Middle East Quarterly for its “excellent, readable English”. (The MEQ, if you didn’t know, is published by the Middle East Forum, whose director is Daniel Pipes.) And Sookhdeo proposes, in all seriousness, that the government should ban it!

This proposal, predictably, is enthusiastically endorsed by the BNP, who (as we have noted before) are great admirers of Sookhdeo. As usual, though, the fascists feel that he fails to draw the necessary conclusions: “we believe that nothing but total separation of the majority of Muslims from the secular and Christian West will ensure the latter’s survival…. The pattern of very recent mass migration from the Islamic world into the west must be at first halted and then reversed.”

BNP news release, 19 February 2006