Category Archives: Analysis & comment

Christian Voice and the power of prayer

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Christian Voice banner

Christian Voice have announced that that on 1 October they will be holding another public prayer meeting in Newham against the building of a so-called “mega-mosque” by Tablighi Jamaat – a peaceful and non-political movement described by Christian Voice as “a controversial Islamic sect whose followers have been linked to a number of planned and actual terrorist atrocities”.

We are told that “Christian Voice members have been meeting for prayer on the Greenway overlooking the site on the first Saturday of every month without fail since January 2007”.

Back in October that year Christian Voice reported optimistically that “we believe our prayer is having results. It is being felt in the existing mosque, a collection of old industrial buildings, and our prayers for confusion have, we believe, already disrupted the megamosque plans. We have also prayed in support of local councillor Alan Craig, whom the Lord has placed in Newham’s council chamber for just such a time as this.”

Alas, in the 2010 local elections Craig lost his seat on Newham council and earlier this year Tablighi Jamaat won the right to operate their temporary mosque on the Newham site for another two years while they prepare plans for a permanent building. Christian Voice supporters will have to pray a bit harder. Or perhaps it’s just that God isn’t very sympathetic to the prayers of right-wing Christian bigots who whip up hatred against Muslims.

German far right loses out in Berlin state election

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Berlin election posters

Coverage of the Berlin state election has concentrated on the remarkable rise of the Pirate Party, which won 8.5% of the vote and 15 seats in the state parliament. But it also worth taking time to celebrate the disastrous results for parties of the Islamophobic far right, who gained publicity during the election campaign with their provocative political posters but failed to attract the voters.

They didn’t win a single seat in the state parliament and the best any of them did was the 2.2% of the vote gained by the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, a more traditionally neo-Nazi party that did have the advantage of an established organisation and name recognition. Bürgerbewegung pro Deutschland, which is associated with the Austrian Freedom Party, got only 1.2%. And René Stadtkewitz’s Die Freiheit, whose founding conference was attended by Daniel Pipes and whose election campaign enjoyed the public backing of Geert Wilders, got less than 1%.

Pro Deutchland will no doubt take consolation from the fact that their main support lies in Cologne. But given that Stadtkewitz’s own political base was in Berlin, the humiliating wipe-out his party has suffered there surely indicates that it has no political future. A statement on the Freiheit website co-signed by Stadtkewitz tries to remain upbeat, claiming that the disillusioned 40% of the electorate who did not vote can still be won to his party’s Islamophobic, Eurosceptic programme. But Die Freiheit is clearly dead in the water.

As the popularity of Thilo Sarrazin’s notorious book Deutschland schafft sich ab indicates, there is a substantial section of the German people who are receptive to anti-Muslim propaganda. But so far, thankfully, no party of the extreme right in Germany has been able to translate that into significant electoral support.

Advice for the Met Police Commissioner

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Bernard Hogan-HoweBob Lambert, former head of Scotland Yard’s Muslim Contact Unit and author of the soon-to-be-published Countering Al-Qaeda in London: Police and Muslims in Partnership, has some advice for the new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

Lambert urges Bernard Hogan-Howe “to be as tough on far right terrorism, political violence and intimidation as his predecessors have been on terrorism and political violence associated with al-Qaeda and fringe Muslim extremists”. With regard to the English Defence League, Hogan-Howe should “ensure that the group is treated as a threat to community safety, and repudiate colleagues and politicians who seek to excuse them”.

“Most crucially of all,” Lambert writes, “Hogan-Howe should be tough and brave in standing up to the Home Secretary in defending Muslim organisations and groups she has wrongly branded ‘non-violent extremist’. He should support his police chief in Tower Hamlets who hails the Islamic Forum Europe (IFE) stewards and youth workers in Tower Hamlets as outstanding partners of police. By the same token, courage should be displayed in defending the outstanding work of Muslims in London who have helped to tackle the threat of al-Qaeda influence.”

Excellent advice. We can only hope it is followed.

The Platform, 15 September 2011

National Secular Society honorary associate accuses Muslims of sponging off welfare state

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Shreela FlatherBaroness Flather of Windsor and Maidenhead became a heroine of the right-wing press earlier this week as a result of her speech to the House of Lords in support of the Welfare Reform Bill, where she accused some communities of migrant origin of exploiting the welfare state. She even argued that larger familes should be penalised by reducing child benefit payments for third and fourth children.

Shreela Flather told the assembled peers: “The minority communities in this country, particularly the Pakistanis and the Bangladeshis have a very large number of children and the attraction is the large number of benefits that follow the child. Nobody likes to accept that, nobody likes to talk about it because it is supposed to be very politically incorrect.” She went on to say that “Indians … do not have large families because they are like the Jews of old. They want their children to be educated. This is the other problem – there is no emphasis on education in the Pakistani and Bangladeshi families.”

That there was an Islamophobic undercurrent to Flather’s baseless claims about migrant welfare spongers, which are of course common currency on the racist right, was strongly suggested by the fact that she specifically exempted migrants from Hindu-majority India and attacked communities originating in two Muslim-majority countries.

In a comment piece published in the Daily Mail (where else?) Flather makes this accusation quite explicit, asserting that it is “some Muslims from these two regions” who “produce ever larger families in order to claim extra payments and publicly-subsidised housing”. She goes on to criticise the fact that a couple who have contracted an Islamic marriage abroad can claim benefits for their children, and adds: “But the state handouts do not end there, for under Islamic Sharia law, polygamy is permissible. So a man can return to Pakistan, take another bride and then, in a repetition of the process, bring her to England where they also have children together – obtaining yet more money from the state.”

An honorary associate of the National Secular Society, Flather regards herself as a cultural Hindu in much the same way that Richard Dawkins says he is a cultural Christian, though the term Flather prefers is “Hindu atheist”. Interestingly, this is the very same term that Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, founder of the (Hindu-supremacist, anti-Muslim) Hindutva movement, used to describe himself.

Only a few weeks ago we saw another NSS honorary associate, David Starkey, declaring that Enoch Powell was right. And now we have Shreela Flather ranting about about immigrants milking the benefits system. Will the NSS take any action against Flather over this? Don’t bet on it. The NSS president, Terry Sanderson, is on record as stating that “immigrants are importing their own brands of religion into Britain” which are “primitive, hysterical, fanatical and alien”. And he dismissed criticisms of Starkey on the grounds that there was nothing wrong with “voicing a well-intentioned but off-beat opinion in an important debate”.

Teenager admits sickening attack on elderly Muslim outside Kilmarnock mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

------Wire Picture Name:sfkst190711mosque-1.jpgA teenager shouted racial abuse as he kicked and stamped on a 71-year-old grandfather’s head for 10 minutes. And he later sent a sickening text boasting about his horrifying actions.

At Kilmarnock Sheriff Court on Monday, the 16-year-old – who cannot be named for legal reasons – pleaded guilty to carrying out the vicious attack outside the Ayrshire Central Mosque in July.

His victim, who had already suffered a stroke, sustained severe facial injuries in the unprovoked attack which took place in the early hours of the morning.

Nancy Beresford, prosecuting, said that the former Crosshouse shopkeeper had gone to the mosque, in Hill Street, Kilmarnock, to prepare for Friday prayers at around 1.40am. As he approached the door, clad in white robes, he noticed a male and two females, along with young children, standing in the street, with another group of females nearby.

The 16-year-old then came towards him shouting abuse, including “Paki bastard”. He punched the pensioner in the chest, causing him to fall to the ground. The teenager continued the assault, while still shouting abuse.

Interviewed, he denied the assault and racial abuse. The 16-year-old told police that he couldn’t understand “why somebody was praying at that time in the morning”.

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Islam is ‘closing in’ on Israel, claims Benny Morris

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Benny MorrisIsraeli historian Benny Morris has an article in the National Interest warning of the Islamic threat to Israel and indeed to civilisation in general.

According to Morris: “Islam these past two weeks has definitely been closing in on the Jewish state, with Israel’s ambassadors in the two major Middle Eastern states with which it had good relations, Turkey and Egypt, being sent packing.”

In both countries, Morris asserts, “it was Islam which gradually eroded secularism and brought down pragmatic, prudent governments in the region, which drove the diplomats from their posts”. From this standpoint the Arab Spring, and indeed any democratisation of Muslim-majority countries in Middle East, is to be opposed.

Morris pours scorn on those Westerners who “deluded themselves into believing that the popular uprisings sweeping the Arab world were presaging a new birth of freedom”. If the Muslim citizens of these countries are ever going to be capable of governing themselves it will only be in the distant future, and possibly not even then – “over the span of a century or two, who knows? maybe democracy will evolve in Cairo and Sana and Damascus (though I wouldn’t bet on it)”. In the meantime, “what this tumult is certainly delivering is the ruination of responsible government, chaos … and a surge in, and possibly, finally, a takeover by, radical Islamism”.

And it’s not just the Arab Spring that’s got Morris worried. Elsewhere he warns that the “threat of resurgent Islam” has emerged within Israel’s own borders: “The Israeli Arab landscape is increasingly dominated by minarets and veiled women.” Minarets, veils – this is the language and imagery of the European far right, transposed to the Middle East.

Of course, from Morris’s standpoint it was a historical blunder to have allowed Arabs to remain in Israel in the first place. They should have been ethnically cleansed back in 1948, according to him, allowing for the construction of a purely Jewish state. Indeed, in Morris’s opinion, it is a mistake to allow Muslims into any country with a non-Muslim majority. He takes the view that “mass Muslim penetration into the West and their settlement there is creating a dangerous internal threat”.

This is the man who was recently invited to speak at the London School of Economics, with the enthusiastic approval of Harry’s Place, who are fully in favour of hate preachers so long as they’re Zionists.

Are the EDL’s opponents motivated by contempt for the working class?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Joanne DickensAccording to Brendan O’Neill they are. In a piece on his Telegraph blog headed “A glimpse into the class hatred at the heart of the anti-EDL clique”, the Spiked editor expresses his indignation at a widely publicised YouTube clip in which “anti-EDL campaigners describe a female supporter of the EDL as ‘the most tattooed, horrible scrote of a woman’ they have ever seen and then laugh as they talk about how she was ‘kicked up the arse’ by a left-wing protester”. For O’Neill, the video “confirms what draws many young middle-class liberals towards anti-English Defence League campaigning: it provides them with a semi-legit cover for expressing their fear and loathing of the white working classes”.

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Resisting Islamophobia in Rutherford County

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Rutherford Reader 9-11Over at the Huffington Post Janell Ross profiles Anthony Mijares, a Roman Catholic pensioner who has waged an admirable one-man campaign to persuade businesses and shops to boycott the Rutherford Reader, a rabidly Islamophobic free weekly newspaper that has played a prominent role in the right-wing propaganda war against the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro.

Ross quotes Peter Doughtie – the editor, publisher and owner of the Reader – as writing in last week’s issue:

“Muslims are not in America to assimilate. They are here to change our system…. Our preachers should go beyond telling us more than ‘we must love our enemies.’ That is simply passing the buck. They should be getting every Christian ready and armed with the Word of God and an understanding of the Quran and Hadith, to defeat those who are out to destroy Christianity, and our American way of life.”

The current edition of the Reader features a front page photomontage of the 9/11 attacks with the headline “We Will Never Forget”. Inside the paper a guest column by Pastor Darrel Whaley of the Kingdom Ministries Worship Center begins: “How can we forget 9/11 when the actions of Muslims, led by the teachings of Islam, continue to remind us. The United States alone has been under attack the past ten years on forty different occasions.” (Pastor Whaley’s further thoughts on Islam, Muslims and the Murfreesboro Islamic Center can be found here. For example: “There’s over twenty thousand Muslims in Middle Tennessee. But as the percentages of Muslims gets greater, a greater saturation, the possibility of them getting radical is going to increase. Because that’s the purpose of it – they want to take over America and the whole world.”)

Another columnist – one Tom Murrah of Toolsmartz, a blog that combines the promotion of evangelical Christianity with fascinating posts on the technicalities of woodworking machinery – writes: “In my opinion, those who attacked us on 9-11 were not ‘Islamic Radicals’ as everyone wants to paint them. They were true-blue followers of Islam. ‘Fundamentalists’? Yes you could call them that. They are following the message of the Quran, faithfully.” As for the claim that the Muslims involved in the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro are peaceful, “perhaps they are simply following the Quran and lying to us”.

The paper also includes two articles by Bill Warner of the Center for the Study of Political Islam, publishers of the handy 50-page guide Sharia Law for Non-Muslims (“If you want to lobby against Islam with any legislator, councilman, school board member, or politician, then Sharia Law for Non-Muslims is the perfect tool”). And another comment piece raises the scary prospect of a Muslim contesting the 2012 US presidential election (“President Abdul Hassan? It Could Happen!”)

In response to Anthony Mijares’s campaign the Rutherford Reader has run a series of full-page ads attacking him, and even published his home address – in circumstances where opponents of the Murfreesboro anti-mosque campaign have received death threats. But Mijares has refused to be intimidated. If there were an award for resisting Islamophobia in the US, then Anthony Mijares would surely be on the list of nominees.

Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood – they’re all part of the same Islamist movement, claims Blair

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Blair with BushTony Blair, interviewed by John Humphrys on this morning’s Radio 4 Today programme, explains that the “war on terror” is not just against al-Qaeda but against all forms of “radical Islamism”.

He poses the rhetorical question about 9/11: “was this a group of isolated people, terrorists, with an ideology, who committed a terrible atrocity or was this group at the furthest end of a spectrum of what I would call radical Islamism, and therefore this is something far bigger, far greater than even we assessed after September 11?”

Blair opts firmly for the latter: “It’s not just about a movement prepared to use terror. The ideology, the narrative that gives rise to this is far deeper and far broader. When I’m in the Middle East now and you see for example the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood, or Hamas, you look at the role that Iran is playing in the region, I think it’s a big mistake to say this was just about Bin Laden and a group of terrorists.”

Perhaps Harry’s Place should contact Blair and offer him a guest post.

Anders Breivik’s ‘spider web of hate’ includes Melanie Phillips

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Melanie Phillips Jihad in BritainOver at Comment is Free Andrew Brown introduces a Linkfluence map based on a list of the websites to which Anders Breivik’s manifesto provides links and the sites to which they link in turn. Maybe I’m just a technophobic old fart, but I’m not convinced that this adds much to our understanding of the ideological inspiration behind Breivik’s terrorist acts.

Brown’s own interpretation of the data is hardly flawless either. He states that it is particularly “unfair to blame Melanie Phillips” for Breivik’s crimes, adding: “Although she was cited by Breivik at length for an article claiming that the British elite had deliberately encouraged immigration in order to break down traditional society and she has written that ‘Bat Ye’or’s scholarship is awesome and her analysis is as persuasive as it is terrifying’, she has also argued, with nearly equal ferocity, against the ‘counter-jihad’ belief that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim.”

But Phillips’s definition of a “moderate Muslim” is highly restrictive to say the least. The one prominent Muslim she has a good word for is Irshad Manji, whom Phillips applauds for “her passionate defence of Israel and her attack on the lies told about it by the Arab world”. And that’s how you get to qualify as a “moderate Muslim” as far as Mad Mel is concerned. Show the slightest hostility towards Israel and you’re an extremist. She even accused Ed Husain, of all people, of having “adopted the very narrative and rhetoric that are driving Muslims to mass murder” after he criticised the British government for failing to condemn Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. This position may not be quite identical to “the ‘counter-jihad’ belief that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim”, but the difference is clearly marginal.

And while nobody is accusing Phillips of supporting Breivik’s terrorist attacks, the reality is that it was her inflammatory rhetoric, along with that of Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, which helped fill him with the hatred that led to those attacks. Just try reading through Phillips’s Daily Mail article that Breivik reproduced in full in his manifesto. According to Phillips, the then Labour government had “engaged upon a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage”, having “secretly plotted to flood the country with immigrants to change its very character and identity”, in “an act of unalloyed treachery to the entire nation”. This is the language of the far right, given legitimacy through its appearance in a mainstream newspaper under the by-line of a well-known journalist.

Paraphrasing Phillips’s own attack on Ed Husain, you can only conclude that her Daily Mail article adopted the very narrative and rhetoric that drove Breivik to mass murder.