Over at the Spectator Douglas Murray complains that he’s been ostracised by the Tory leadership over his notorious speech at the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference in 2006 (“It is late in the day, but Europe still has time to turn around the demographic time-bomb which will soon see a number of our largest cities fall to Muslim majorities. It has to. All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop…. Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board”).
Category Archives: Analysis & comment
Abdulmutallab, al-Awlaki, the Finsbury Park mosque and Andrew Gilligan
The Caldicott inquiry has now cleared University College London and the students’ union Islamic Society of playing any part in converting the “Christmas Day bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to violent extremism. But UCL is not the only institution to have been falsely accused of involvement in Abdulmutallab’s “radicalisation”. The North London Central Mosque (NLCM) in Finsbury Park has also come under attack, on the grounds that it supposedly hosted a lecture by Anwar al-Awlaki that was attended by Abdulmutallab.
Imam Zijad Delic’s speech
Zijad Delic, national executive director of the Canadian Islamic Congress, was to deliver a speech earlier this week at a National Defence headquarters event marking Islamic History Month. But his invitation was withdrawn by Defence Minister Peter MacKay who accused the CIC of inciting hatred and said that Imam Delic had no place at an event honouring Muslim contributions to Canada.
The CIC has now posted the text of the speech that Delic would have made at the Islamic History Month event on their website, so the public can make up their own minds about the accuracy of MacKay’s charge that Delic and the CIC are guilty of promoting “extremist views”.
The campaign that resulted in the ban on Imam Delic appears to have been led by right-wing bloggers, but MacKay’s decision to cancel the speech was also warmly welcomed by an outfit calling itself the Muslim Canadian Congress.
Lies from Gilligan about Qaradawi
Continuing his witch-hunt of Lutfur Rahman, Andrew Gilligan has directed his fire against Ken Livingstone, who in an appeal for unity has attempted to repair some of the damage caused by the Labour Party NEC’s shameful decision to override a democratic decision by party members in Tower Hamlets and deselect Lutfur as Labour’s mayoral candidate.
According to Gilligan, Ken “has been an ally of Islamic fundamentalism for far longer than Lutfur Rahman”, and as evidence he offers Ken’s “embrace of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a man who has justified rape and suicide bombing”.
For Qaradawi’s position on suicide bombing Gilligan refers us to a BBC News report dating from Qaradawi’s visit to London in July 2004, which states: “Defending suicide bombings that target Israeli civilians Sheikh Al-Qaradawi told the BBC programme Newsnight that ‘an Israeli woman is not like women in our societies, because she is a soldier. I consider this type of martyrdom operation as an evidence of God’s justice. Allah Almighty is just; through his infinite wisdom he has given the weak a weapon the strong do not have and and that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs as Palestinians do’.”
But if you check out the Newsnight report you can see that Qaradawi was talking generally about the legitimacy of suicide bombing as a military tactic in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict. And while he addressed the issue of civilian casualties, there is no indication that he was responding to a specific question about Palestinian suicide bombers targeting Israeli non-combatants. In fact Qaradawi has avoided justifying such attacks.
In a Guardian interview with Madeleine Bunting in 2005, for example, Qaradawi made it clear that when he defended the legitimacy of suicide bombing he was talking about attacks on members of the Israeli armed forces: “Sometimes they kill a child or a woman. Provided they don’t mean to, that’s OK, but they shouldn’t aim to kill them. In every war, mistakes are made and non-combatants get killed…”.
In an interview in Asharq Al-Awsat in 2001, Qaradawi made the same point: “Some children, old people, and women may get hurt in such operations. This is not deliberate. However, we must all realize that the Israeli society is a military society, men and women. We cannot say that the casualties were innocent civilians…” (emphasis added).
So, while Qaradawi holds the view that there is no clear dividing line between civilians and non-civilians in Israel, he does not present this as an argument in favour of suicide bombers deliberately targeting non-combatants. The deaths of the latter, he says, are justifiable only if they are a side-effect of attacks on members of the Israeli military.
As for the ludicrous charge that Qaradawi has “justified rape”, Gilligan directs us to a Daily Telegraph article, published as part of the hysterical right-wing campaign against Qaradawi during his 2004 visit to London, which claimed that Qaradawi “believes that female rape victims should be punished if dressed ‘immodestly’ when assaulted”. (The article, which concludes with a quote from Peter Tatchell, was in fact inspired by an OutRage! press release.)
Leaving aside the fact that the main thrust of the IslamOnline article was to counter the view, widespread in some backward rural societies, that women who are the victims of rape are guilty of damaging the “honour” of the family or community, the article wasn’t by Qaradawi anyway. Nor was it written by “a panel, headed by Mr al-Qaradawi” (an invention lifted by the Telegraph from the OutRage! press release). The author of the IslamOnline was an individual named Kamal Badr.
Even the Israeli-American academic Martin Kramer, a hardline Zionist who is associated with Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum and is a vehement opponent of Qaradawi, balked at this particular stitch-up.
“I abhor the views of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi”, Kramer wrote, “… but I’m not happy with what the London Telegraph did to him this morning. It attributed to Qaradawi an accusatory view of rape victims: ‘To be absolved from guilt, the raped woman must have shown some sort of good conduct.’ These words actually belong to someone else, a consultant to the website Islamonline. Even if Qaradawi is ostensible head of the committee that oversees this website, a Muslim jurist can only be deemed responsible for his ownfatwas… Today’s Telegraph article establishes nothing.” (“Qaradawi non-quote”, Sandbox, 11 July 2004)
If Gilligan can find a quotation from Qaradawi himself implying that women deserve to be raped if they dress immodestly, we would be happy to reproduce it here at Islamophobia Watch. We can guarantee that he won’t be able to come up with a single one.
Torygraph discovers three – yes, three – schools in which pupils wear the niqab
“Hundreds of girls are bring forced by British schools to wear the Islamic veil in a move which has been heavily criticised by mainstream Muslims”, the Sunday Telegraph reports.
And who are these “mainstream Muslims”? Yes, as you might expect, the two men asked for their opinions on the subject are Ed Husain and Taj Hargey.
Husain is quoted as saying: “It is absurd that schools are enforcing this outdated ritual – one that which sends out a damaging message that Muslims do not want to fully partake in British society. Although it is not the government’s job to dictate how its citizens dress, it should nonetheless ensure that such schools are not bankrolled or subsidised by the British taxpayer.”
Hargey says: “This is very disturbing and sets a dangerous precedent. It means that Muslim children are being brainwashed into thinking they must segregate and separate themselves from mainstream society. The use of taxpayers’ money for such institutions should be absolutely opposed.”
But the three schools the Telegraph identifies are all fee-paying private schools, none of which receives state funding. The accusation about the use of taxpayers’ money hinges exclusively on Tower Hamlets council having sold one of the named schools its premises in 2008 at below the property’s then market value. As the Telegraph admits, this was because the price had been agreed in 2004 when the market value was lower.
As for causing divisions between non-Muslims and Muslims, scaremongering articles like this – and irresponsible comments by malicious and unrepresentative attention-seekers like Ed Husain and Taj Hargey – have a far more damaging impact than the sight of veil-wearing pupils entering the gates of a few socially and religiously conservative Muslim schools.
Update: Predictably, the story has been picked up by the Daily Express (“British girls forced to wear burkhas as part of school uniform”) and the Daily Mail (“The British Muslim schools where EVERY pupil is forced to to wear the veil – and Ofsted inspectors have approved them”). The Mail chips in with an editorial that accuses the schools of being “committed to secrecy and complete isolation from the rest of society” and opines that the situation “should be deeply disturbing to anyone concerned about racial harmony and social cohesion”.
Halal hysteria continues in the Mail
Following on from the previous week’s scaremongering front-page story, the Mail returned this weekend to the subject of halal meat.
We were in fact treated to two stories, “How 70% of New Zealand lamb imports to Britain are halal… but this is NOT put on the label” in Saturday’s issue and “Top supermarkets secretly sell halal: Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose, and M&S don’t tell us meat is ritually slaughtered” in the Mail on Sunday.
Saturday’s report states at the end: “The trade body Beef & Lamb New Zealand said the form of halal slaughter used there does allow for the animals to be stunned. A spokesman said: ‘In New Zealand the process for halal slaughter is virtually the same as for non-halal slaughter’.”
In fact, earlier this year New Zealand imposed a legal requirement that all animals killed for commercial consumption must be stunned prior to slaughter.
Inayat Bunglawala tells us that he was contacted by the Mail for a comment and gave them the following quote:
“Supermarkets should not be afraid of labelling their products as Halal. Consumers – despite risible tabloid scare antics – are quite capable of appreciating that in a globalised world meat is sourced from many different quarters and that halal meat tastes just the same as non-halal meat. It is just that with halal meat the method of slaughter is with a sharp knife instead of a gun and that the name of God is recited over the animal in order to give thanks to God for providing us with food.”
And how does the quote appear in the Mail on Sunday? Like this: “Supermarkets should not be afraid of labelling their products as halal. Halal meat tastes just the same as non-halal meat.”
Predictably, the Mail reports are seized on by mad Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs: “In a little-known strike against freedom, yet again, we are being forced into consuming meat slaughtered in a barbaric, torturous and inhuman method, Islamic slaughter. Ugh.”
PCC upholds complaint against Daily Star over ‘Muslim-only public loos’ story
The ever-excellent Tabloid Watch draws our attention to yesterdays’s Daily Star, which reports that the Press Complaints Commission has upheld a complaint against the paper over its front page story, about a shopping centre in Rochdale installing “squat” toilets, which was headlined “MUSLIM-ONLY PUBLIC LOOS” with the sub-heading “Council wastes YOUR money on hole-in-ground toilets”.
As ENGAGE pointed out at the time, this non-issue, involving just two toilets in one shopping centre in Greater Manchester, was blown up into a major controversy by the Daily Express and other papers – and even by the BBC, who as ENGAGE observed “once again picked up on a non-story, utilised by the right-wing press to foment fear about the ‘Islamification’ of Britain”.
(The Daily Star followed up the story with another front-page article, based on information from an anonymous source that the toilets were being reconsidered, which was headlined “DAILY STAR BLOCKS MUSLIM-ONLY LOOS!” with the sub-heading “We get hole-in-the-ground toilets banned”.)
A reply to George Readings on Qaradawi
Crossposted from Socialist Unity
The Quilliam Foundation claims to be a think-tank combating extremism, particularly within the Muslim community. However, as the recently leaked briefing document “Preventing terrorism: where next for Britain?” has demonstrated, Quilliam’s real objective is to misrepresent and smear those mainstream Muslim organisations and individuals who are the leading forces in countering extremist interpretations of their faith.
An article at Left Foot Forward (“Livingstone: Al-Qaradawi is a ‘leading progressive voice’ in Muslim world”) by George Readings, who holds the post of Communications Officer and Research Fellow at the Quilliam Foundation, is exactly the sort of dishonest hatchet-job against a leading Muslim figure we have come to expect from the organisation that employs Readings. Predictably, he completely ignores the actual role played by Yusuf al-Qaradawi across the Muslim world and in the Arabic-speaking Middle East in particular.
Daniel Pipes accuses Obama of enforcing Sharia law
Over at the Washington Times Daniel Pipes opines that he found Pastor Terry Jones’ plan to ban the Qur’an “distasteful”. But the actual object of his attack is the Obama administration, who Pipes claims capitulated to the threat of “Muslim violence” when they persuaded Jones to call off his book-burning stunt.
Pipes explains: “That violence stems from Islamic law, Shariah, which insists that Islam, and the Koran in particular, enjoy a privileged status. Islam ferociously punishes anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, who trespasses against Islam’s sanctity.”
Pipes concludes with the following charge against the Obama administration: “Its pressure on Mr. Jones further eroded freedom of speech about Islam and implicitly established Islam’s privileged status in the United States, whereby Muslims may insult others but not be insulted. This moves the country toward dhimmitude, a condition whereby non-Muslims acknowledge the superiority of Islam. Finally, Mr. Obama, in effect, enforced Islamic law, a precedent that could lead to other forms of compulsory Shariah compliance.”
Pipes has found himself rather sidelined recently by more newsworthy Islamophobes like Pamela Geller or Newt Gingrich. Maybe this is Pipes’ attempt to show he is still a major player when it comes to whipping up hysteria against the US Muslim community.
Yay! Ed Husain is leaving the country
Yes, Ed Husain is indeed leaving the UK. Having spent the past few years trying to poison public opinion against mainstream Muslim organisations here, Husain is evidently off to the US to do the same there. According to the Jewish Chronicle he’s resigning from the Quilliam Foundation to become a senior fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations.
And good riddance, I say. At least the Muslim community in the UK will be spared the further attentions of this contemptible little man. Of course, you might say I’m biased. My past experience of Husain has involved him sending a threatening email to a London Assembly member in whose office I worked demanding that he stop me criticising the Quilliam Foundation and, when that failed, hiring libel lawyers in an attempt to silence me. And all this while Husain’s employment at Quilliam was being subsidised by public money.
CAIR and other organisations in the US Muslim community should prepare themselves for a Husain-inspired campaign of misrepresentation and slander against them.