Category Archives: Analysis & comment

Pamela Geller joins NSS and Richard Dawkins in promoting Pat Condell’s Islamophobic rants

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pat Condell and Pamela Geller

Pamela Geller is evidently to be counted among the admirers of British “comedian” Pat Condell. She has posted his latest rant against the “Ground Zero mosque” on her website Atlas Shrugs to help promote the Stop Islamization of America demonstration in New York next week at which Geert Wilders will be a featured speaker. So has Jihad Watch, the website of her fellow right-wing Islam-basher and co-leader of SIOA Robert Spencer (“Condell’s commentary is passionate, articulate, wide-ranging, and hard-hitting”). And today David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine follows suit (“Don’t miss Pat Condell’s new hard-hitting video on the stunt Islam is trying to pull off in America”).

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Geller defends EDL’s actions in Bradford

Posted on by Bob Pitt

EDL Bradford3

Newsweek‘s Declassified blog reports an email exchange with Pamela Geller, who sees no reason to withdraw her backing for the far-right EDL despite its supporters’ widely reported racism and hooliganism at the demonstration in Bradford on Saturday,

Geller told Declassified: “The media has been defamatory and libelous towards any and all counter jihad activists, including the EDL, which far from being neo-Nazi and racist, is pro-Israel and has Sikh and other non-white members and spokesmen. The EDL’s own explanation of what happened in Bradford is here. As you can see from that statement, a group of Islamic supremacists and Communists actually began the violence by throwing rocks at EDL members.”

In response Declassified points out that reports by the police and even the right-wing press contradict the EDL’s fantasy account of a peaceful, patriotic event that came under attack from the Left and was otherwise only slightly marred by the unrepresentative actions of a handful of “Combat 18 boneheads”:

“The Telegraph said that as EDL protesters got off buses that had taken them to the site, they shouted slogans at locals, including ‘Allah-Pedophile’, ‘We want our country back’, and ‘We love the floods’ – a reference, the paper said, to flooding that’s now devastating much of Pakistan.

“The Daily Mail, a newspaper perhaps even more conservative than The Telegraph, also reported on the violence. The paper’s website carries photos of what it says are EDL protesters, with one caption reading, ‘Crossing the line: EDL supporters in hats, hoods and balaclavas hurl missiles at police in Bradford today’.”

But Geller will have none of it. In reply she acknowledges that some of the slogans the Telegraph attributed to EDL protesters were “in bad taste, although in saying that I am not accepting the accuracy of The Telegraph account, and also understand that words said in anger are not always words the speakers would endorse in moments of reflection”.

Indeed, according to Geller, if racist chants and violence occur at EDL rallies this is very probably part of a conspiracy to undermine the “counter jihad” movement:

“The Left and real neo-Nazis frequently attempt to infiltrate EDL rallies in order to discredit the EDL. This is amply documented. Both have an interest in seeing the EDL fail: the Left so that there will be no serious resistance to its agenda, and the neo-Nazis so that there exists no respectable alternative to them in opposing the British elite, and also because the neo-Nazis have generally aligned with the Islamic jihad that the EDL resists.”

But then, Geller also believes that the attack on New York taxi driver Ahmed Sharif was a leftist plot to discredit her campaign against the “Ground Zero mosque”.

The truly bizarre thing is that this woman is regularly featured in the US media as if she has some rational ideas to contribute to a discussion of Islam. As for the UK, faced with the example of Pamela Geller you do feel that in all fairness Melanie Phillips should perhaps now be renamed “relatively sane Mel”.

Postscript:  For more on the common ground Geller finds with the far Right, see the recent article by Heidi Beirich at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog.

More raving from Nick Cohen

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Anyone who fails to denounce Tariq Ramadan is an apologist for Islamist totalitarianism. Well, so Nick Cohen claims in Standpoint magazine. Along with his hero Paul Berman, whose writings provide the inspiration for his paranoid ravings against Islamism, Cohen shows how certain self-styled defenders of Enlightenment rationalism have in fact taken leave of reason.

More scaremongering over ‘radicalised’ Muslim prisoners

Posted on by Bob Pitt

PrintBritain faces a potential “new wave” of home-grown terrorist attacks as a result of an escalating rate of radicalisation of Muslims inside the prison system, according to a report published today by a leading defence and security thinktank.

The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) says that up to 800 “potentially violent radicals” who have not been convicted of terrorist offences could be released from prisons in England and Wales over the next five to 10 years and will pose a significant challenge to the security services to identify them.

The estimate rests upon “prison probation sources” saying that one in 10 of the 8,000 Muslim prisoners in high security jails in England and Wales could be successfully targeted.

However, the Ministry of Justice disputed the figures in the report. It said last night: “The prison and probation service does not recognise the figure of 800 ‘violent radicals’ referred to in the report, nor do we agree that jihadist radicalisation is taking place at a rapid rate.

“There are only 6,000 prisoners in the high security estate, most of whom are not Muslim. The figure of ‘one in 10 of the 8,000 Muslims’ in the high security estate is therefore unrecognisable.”

Guardian, 27 August 2010

So the RUSI report’s figures, which are evidently based on nothing more substantial than the subjective opinion of unnamed individuals in the probation service, don’t add up. Or at any rate the report’s authors know so little about the subject that they are unable to distinguish between the general Muslim prison population and those in high security jails. Unsurprisingly, the right-wing press doesn’t see the need to highlight this point.

The Mail performs its usual trick of running a shock-horror headline (“Muslim inmates ‘turning to terror’ as think tank says convicted terrorists are radicalising fellow inmates”) while burying the Ministry of Justice’s rejection of the RUSI’s claim at the bottom of the article. The Sun (“800 fanatical Muslim lags ‘waiting to hit UK'”) and the Star (“Muslim radicals bred behind bars says think-tank”) do the same. And, just to show that the liberal press isn’t immune to this sort of thing either, so does the Independent (“Muslims ‘being turned into terrorists in jail'”).

Neither the Telegraph (“Britain faces new terror wave”) nor the Express (“Jailed Muslims ‘converted to terrorist cause'”) bother to quote the Ministry of Justice at all.

Predictably, it is the Telegraph version of the story that is reproduced by Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch.

Dawkins compares the veil to a bin-liner, says he feels ‘visceral revulsion’ when he sees women wearing it

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Richard DawkinsThe outspoken atheist Professor Richard Dawkins has re-ignited the furore over the burka, describing it as a “full bin-liner thing”. The 69-year-old author and scientist told of his “visceral revulsion” when he sees women wearing the controversial Islamic clothing.

Professor Dawkins made the comments in an interview with Radio Times discussing his forthcoming documentary about the dangers of faith schools. Last night he stood by his remarks and told the Daily Mail: “I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.”

Seyyed Ferjani, of the Muslim Association of Britain, said of Professor Dawkins’ comments: “I think it is ignorant and Islamaphobic. This kind of thing has been on the rise for some time. Britain is a diverse and free society. It is a woman’s choice if she wishes to wear a burka, a niqab or not. Why does it matter to this man what a woman is wearing? We should be encouraging respect and understanding for each other.”

It is not the first time Professor Dawkins, who is the author of books including The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, has attracted criticism for his views on Islam. In 2008, he said: “It’s almost impossible to say anything against Islam in this country, because you are accused of being racist or Islamophobic.”

Daily Mail, 10 August 2010

Unfortunately, accusations of racism and Islamophobia haven’t had the slightest restraining effect on Dawkins. His website recently featured a vile video rant against the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” in New York by UKIP-supporting “comedian” Pat Condell, of whom Dawkins (along with many BNP members) is a great admirer. Rejecting complaints about the video by visitors to his site, Dawkins wrote: “I think it is well arguable that Islam is the greatest man-made force for evil in the world today. Pat Condell is one of the few with the courage to say so.”

Jonathan Githens-Mazer vs. Maajid Nawaz

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Sky News Sunday Live programme this weekend featured a revealing encounter between Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation and Jonathan Githens-Mazer of the European Muslim Research Centre, on the subject of Quilliam’s recently-leaked witch-hunting “briefing” against mainstream British Muslim organisations. Jonathan Githens-Mazer accurately nails Quilliam’s contempt for evidence and logic, and rightly argues that the organisation’s primary concern is with guaranteeing its continued receipt of large sums of taxpayers’ money. But there are some other aspects of Maajid Nawaz’s characteristically weaselly performance that need to be challenged.

Particularly disgraceful is Nawaz’s statement that the North London Central Mosque in Finsbury Park “has recently been accused in parliament by one of its former trustees Khalid Mahmood MP as having hosted Abdulmutallab the Christmas day bomber and Anwar al-Awlaki the Al Qaeda theoretician”. What Nawaz omits to mention is that Khalid Mahmood’s charge against the NLCM was based on a ridiculous US radio report which informed its listeners that Whitechapel Road is in “the Finsbury Park district of London”, confused the NLCM with the East London Mosque and claimed that Abdulmutallab had met al-Awlaki at the NLCM at a time when al-Awlaki was in fact in prison in Yemen.

Here two explanations suggest themselves. Either Nawaz was aware of this, and sought to suggest to Sky viewers that the NLCM was associated with Abdulmutallab and al-Awlaki even though he knew the charge was nonsense. If so, this only reinforces the argument repeatedly put forward on this website that the government should immediately withdraw all state financial support from the Quilliam Foundation. Or, alternatively, Nawaz was genuinely ignorant of the fact that Khalid Mahmood’s accusation against the NLCM was without foundation. In which case, perhaps Nawaz and his Quilliam co-director Ed Husain might consider diverting some of the lavish public funding they currently spend on plush offices, sharp suits and hiring expensive libel lawyers in an attempt to silence their critics, and use the money instead to employ some competent researchers.

And while we’re on the subject of Quilliam’s source of finance, it’s also worth dealing with Nawaz’s claim that “funding that we got from a certain Kuwaiti foundation was cut when we criticised suicide bombings inside Israel”. In reality, Quilliam’s Kuwaiti backers appear to have withdrawn financial support after Ed Husain publicly backed a shameful decision by the then Labour government to ban Yusuf al-Qaradawi from entering the UK. And you can understand why the Kuwaiti foundation took that decision. To anyone in the Middle East it must have appeared incomprehensible that a self-styled “counter-extremism think-tank” should have lined up against a leading voice of moderation in the Muslim world.

Finally, Nawaz asserts that “we’ve opposed banning Hizb ut-Tahrir” and to back up that claim says that he was “quoted by the former Prime Minister in parliament as opposing banning non-violent Islamists”. The reference is to a House of Commons debate in November 2007 in which Gordon Brown did indeed cite Nawaz’s opposition to the illegalisation of HT.

However, while Nawaz has always said he is against a ban on HT, Ed Husain has repeatedly argued in favour of one. He did so in his book The Islamist and has since repeated the call in even more unequivocal terms. Writing in the Daily Telegraph in February 2007, for example, Husain complained:

“Today, in our midst, Hizb ut-Tahrir calls for an expansionist, violent, totalitarian Islamist state – and we continue to ignore it. There is no quick fix to the problem of home-grown terrorism, but banning Hizb ut-Tahrir would be an excellent first step, sending a strong signal to aspiring terrorists that Britain has not changed the rules of game. We no longer play that game.”

But then, as Jonathan Githens-Mazer points out, evidence and logic are of little concern to the directors of the Quilliam Foundation.

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More ignorant nonsense from Paul Goodman

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Paul Goodman 2It’s still only July, but already Islamophobes are gearing up for their annual witch-hunt of the Global Peace and Unity Event in October, whose partners include the Islam Channel and the Muslim lifestyle magazine Emel.

Former Tory MP Paul Goodman is scaremongering over the supposed “extremists” who will be speaking at the event. One such extremist is “Dr Abu [sic] Rahman Al-Sudais”. The reference is to the imam at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, who has of course visited the UK on a number of occasions and in his speeches has always urged moderation and integration on his Muslim audiences (see for example here, here and here). But Goodman evidently knows so little about Dr Al-Sudais that he can’t even get his name right.

This is par for the course with Goodman. Last week he declared his support for Khalid Mahmood’s disgraceful attack on the North London Central Mosque in Finsbury Park, which was itself based upon a jaw-droppingly ignorant report by the US radio station NPR claiming that the “Christmas Day bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had attended a lecture by Anwar al-Awlaki at the mosque “in the fall of 2006 or 2007”. Al-Alawi was in fact arrested in Yemen in August 2006 and was held in prison there until December the following year – so, as the NLCM has pointed out, he could hardly have paid a visit to Finsbury Park during that period. But why should Goodman bother himself with minor details like this? His method is to mindlessly repeat slanders against representative Muslim individuals and institutions without making the slightest effort to check his sources.

Immigration minister opposes ban on veil – Toby Young not happy

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Toby_YoungIn an interview with the Sunday Telegraph immigration minister Damian Green is quoted as saying:

“I stand personally on the feeling that telling people what they can and can’t wear, if they’re just walking down the street, is a rather un-British thing to do. We’re a tolerant and mutually respectful society.

“There are times, clearly, when you’ve got to be able to identify yourself, and people have got to be able to see your face, but I think it’s very unlikely and it would be undesirable for the British Parliament to try and pass a law dictating what people wore.

“I think very few women in France actually wear the burka. They [the French parliament] are doing it for demonstration effects.”

Elsewhere in the Telegraph, under the headline “By refusing to ban the burka, Damian Green is supporting the humiliation of millions of British women”, Toby Young informs his readers that “the burka is both a symbol and a source of the oppression of Muslim women”.

According to Young: “Few people can be in any doubt that Islam is a deeply misogynistic religion.” As for wearing the veil, according to Young “for most Muslim women it is not a free choice but something they’re forced to do by their fathers or brothers or husbands – and the consequences of disobeying can be a beating or worse”.

To which we can only respond: Few people can be in any doubt that Toby Young is a deeply ignorant bigot.

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Jerusalem Post interviews sinister right-wing bigot

Posted on by Bob Pitt

douglas_murrayToday’s Jerusalem Post carries a long, rambling interview with Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion.

Among the aperçus Murray offers is the bizarre claim that multiculturalism led the British police to refuse to investigate murders if they were classed as honour killings (“This is a community matter, they’d say”), the assertion that “you are more likely to become a major terrorist if you’ve gone to university” (as demonstrated by the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who got “in touch with the top jihadis via his Islamic studies society”), and the revelation that Inayat Bunglawala, of all people, is a “very unpleasant sinister figure”!

Whereas there is of course nothing unpleasant or sinister about a right-wing bigot like Murray, who holds that “there’s a very rational fear in being scared of Islam today and wanting to act against it” and who advocates that “conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board“.