Barmy PC do-gooders have put up their town’s Christmas lights along with displays for Muslim and Hindu festivals – even though those celebrations have already finished. Councillors were so anxious not to offend other faiths that they decided to share the Christian display with lights to mark the other celebrations. But residents have slammed the move because although the lights were switched on last night, the Muslim festival of Eid ends today and Sikhs and Hindus celebrated Diwali two weeks ago.

One angry father told the Daily Star: “It’s like Christmas is being hijacked. It’s mad. Why do we have these lights up for Eid and Diwali when they’ve finished? We wouldn’t go around putting Santas up on any of these festivals.” But council bosses in Rochdale say they want to keep the lights to “represent the community”. Another resident said: “The lights look fantastic … but I don’t see why they have to have all these other festivals in them.”

Philip Davies, Tory MP for Shipley, West Yorks, said: “I’ve no idea why local authorities up and down the country are so ashamed of celebrating Christmas. All this kind of pussyfooting around is done in the name of not offending other people from other faiths. But it tends to be done by white middle-class people with some kind of bizarre guilt complex.”

Daily Star, 19 November 2010

You’ll see that the “Happy Eid” illuminations are less prominently displayed than the main “Happy Christmas” message, and that Stars of David have rightly been included too as a mark of respect to the Jewish community. Of course, even the Daily Star balks at running an article headlined “Christmas is hijacked by Jews”. But Muslims and Hindus are regarded as legitimate targets by racist tabloids.

Update:  See Rochdale Online, 20 November 2010

Egyptian police have rounded up about 600 Muslim Brotherhood members ahead of this month’s parliamentary election and some 250 are still detained, a senior Brotherhood official said on Tuesday.

Mohammed Mursi told AFP that the crackdown on members of the opposition Islamist group began when the Brotherhood announced on October 9 plans to field candidates for the November 28 legislative polls.

“Arrests are still being made. Someone goes out to campaign, he gets harassed and arrested and then released in a few days,” said Mursi, a member of the Brotherhood’s politburo who heads the group’s election campaign. “About 600 have been arrested since we announced that we would run in the election. About 250 remain in jail.”

AFP, 16 November 2010

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You might have thought that sites like Harry’s Place, who were so vocal in defending the political opposition in Iran against state repression, would take a clear stand in defence of the democratic rights of the opposition in Egypt. But so far not a peep.

Could it be that Harry’s Place believes that democratic rights don’t extend to members and supporters of Islamist political parties? Given HP’s obsessive campaign to drive Islamists out of public life in the UK, that would seem to be a reasonable conclusion to draw.

Over at his Telegraph blog, Andrew Gilligan responds to Bob Lambert’s recent Al-Jazeera article.

Gilligan sneers at the role of the Metropolitan Police’s Muslim Contact Unit in helping to oust Abu Hamza al-Masri from the North London Central Mosque in Finsbury Park, claiming that one gang of terrorist sympathisers was merely replaced by the present management which itself has “close links with another designated terrorist organisation, Hamas”.

NLCM can answer for themselves about the nature of their supposed “close links” with Hamas. But it is worth pointing out that Hamas is in fact a political party with mass support – it won a majority on the Palestinian Legislative Council through democratic elections in 2006, with 44% of the vote – and is not a proscribed terrorist group in the UK. It is the Izz al-Din al-Qassem Brigades that is proscribed. But when has Gilligan ever been interested in accurate reporting?

Gilligan also provides a link to his earlier piece attempting to associate NLCM with Anwar al-Awlaki and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Given that this allegation has been shown to be nonsense, you might have thought an apology to NLCM from Gilligan would be in order. But the day when Gilligan admits he was wrong, even after his misreporting has been thoroughly exposed, is yet to dawn.

Sentencing Roshonara Choudhry after her conviction for the attempted murder of Stephen Timms MP, Mr Justice Cooke told her: “You said you wanted to die because you wanted to be a martyr and that it was Islamic teaching that to fight and die for your religion is the highest honour. You said that you thought you had fulfilled your obligation and your Islamic duties to stand up for the people of Iraq and to punish someone who wanted to make war with them.”

Cooke observed of Timms: “I understand that he brings to bear his own faith, which upholds very different values to those which appear to have driven this defendant. Those values are those upon which the common law of this country was founded and include respect and love for one’s neighbour, for the foreigner in the land, and for those who consider themselves enemies, all as part of one’s love of God. These values were the basis of our system of law and justice and I trust that they will remain so as well as motivating those, like Mr Timms, who hold public office.”

If Cooke was saying that Timms’ interpretation of his faith led him to do good, whereas Choudhry’s interpretation of hers led her to an act of attempted murder, that would be fair enough (allowing for the fact that a judge is hardly likely to view a vote for the Iraq war as an act of evil). All faiths are open to conflicting interpretations. But Cooke’s words could also be taken as arguing that Christianity is a religion of love and peace whereas Islam is a religion that inspires violence. Trying to be charitable, I initially concluded that his statements were ambiguous.

However, Tom Leonard draws our attention to the fact that Mr Justice Cooke is a prominent figure in the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship, a right-wing evangelical organisation with a record of promoting anti-Muslim bigotry.

For example, the LCF joined with other fundamentalist Christian groups in whipping up hysteria over the plan to build a so-called “mega-mosque” in Newham. The LCF website published a letter to MPs and peers by Christian Concern For Our Nation headed “Terrorist links for Olympics mosque?”, and in the aftermath of the attempted 2007 car bombings in London and Glasgow the LCF reproduced a press release by Alan Craig of the Christian People’s Alliance accusing Tablighi Jamaat of inspiring the attacks.

In 2008 the LCF’s then public policy director Andrea Minichiello Williams hosted a conference called Understanding Islam, where the featured speaker was one Sam Solomon, who told his audience: “The Christian faith, it is all about love…. What is Islam based on? It’s based on this one word: Hate.” Solomon added: “The closer you get in Islam to the Koran and to the Islamic sources the more radical you become and the more hateful a personality you develop.” Solomon claimed that Muslims “are brainwashed, they are indoctrinated in accepting that we are the enemies and we must be liquidated and eradicated”. (See video here here from 2:30.)

This certainly sheds some light on the thinking behind Cooke’s comments, doesn’t it? That a man with close links to Christian fundamentalism should have been allowed to preside over such a sensitive case as Choudhry’s is unbelievable, and it is even more unacceptable that he should use the trial as a platform to promote his own religious views.