Category Archives: Analysis & comment

Multicultural society a success in Leicester, reports finds

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslims in LeicesterMost Muslims who live in Leicester feel at home in the city, a new study has found. Muslims in Leicester is the most detailed report on Muslim life in the city to date, and comes after researchers spent months questioning 300 people in Evington, Spinney Hills and Stoneygate.

The report found the majority of Muslims possessed a strong British identity and a sense of belonging to the city. The report by the Open Society Institute praised Leicester’s vibrant faith communities and strong political participation by ethnic minorities – 17 of the city’s 54 councillors are from an ethnic minority background.

Leicester Mercury, 23 April 2010

The OSI study is rather more nuanced than this article suggests. It notes the existence of “differing levels of socio-economic deprivation in areas within the city; simmering tension between particular minority groups; underachievment and unemployment among Muslims; and the increasing economic divide between the affluent and not so affluent”.

Neverthless, the study reinforces the view that Leicester, contrary to right-wing cliches, is a multicultural sucess story.

Berlin – Geert Wilders solidarity demo flops

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Wilders Berlin demo

Over the weekend a “Solidarity with Geert Wilders” demonstration was held in Berlin. Organised by Pax Europa and Politically Incorrect, the demo was reportedly inspired by the London march in support of Wilders by the English Defence League, whose representatives attended the Berlin demo.

The event has received little coverage from its far-right supporters, no doubt because according to one report it attracted fewer than 80 people. However, photographs of the demo (carefully framed to disguise the fact that there was hardly anyone there) have now been posted, providing a helpful illustration of the sort of international links the EDL are building.

Postscript:  And while we’re on the subject of the EDL, we note that they now have a website, “English Defence League … Extra”, which claims to offer a more theoretical take on the organisation’s anti-Muslim bigotry. The latest post is a rant against the Aylesbury Carnival Against Racism that will be held in opposition to the EDL’s planned provocation in that town on May Day. The author is evidently incapable of distinguishing between Steve Bell, secretary of the Bucks health branch of UNISON who took the initiative in organising the alliance responsible for calling the anti-EDL carnival, and Steve Bell of the Communication Workers Union who is treasurer of the Stop the War Coalition. But then, UNISON or the CWU – what’s the difference? They’re all communist organisations after all.

What’s Islam got to do with it?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“An Islamic convert and a fellow gang member were today (Monday) found guilty of imprisoning, stripping and torturing two men with an iron.”

Thus the opening paragraph to a report in the Kingston Guardian. Read it through and you’ll find that the individual’s conversion to Islam has no relevance whatosever to the story. So why include a prominent reference to it?

Warsaw mosque protest: Buddhists join hands with skinheads against Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Warsaw mosque protestOn 27 March a previously previously unknown group, Europe of the Future, held a protest against the proposal to build a new mosque in Warsaw (see here and here).

A reader from Poland has drawn our attention to the rather bizarre fact that a Buddhist organisation played a leading role in the protest. The organisation is called Diamond Way and is headed by a Dane named Ole Nydahl. Our correspondent tells us that “members of the Diamond Way organisation were prominent in TV coverage of the demonstration against the mosque”.

Indeed, the Polish journalist Robert Stefanicki reports that Europe of the Future is headed by the former president of of Nydahl’s organisation in Poland. Stefanicki adds: “Other supporters of Europe of the Future are Mlodziez Wszechpolska (All-Polish Youths) – ultra right group with hardly hidden fascist attraction, as well as other islamophobic right wingers. Weird coalition, isn’t it?”

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Islamophobes – they can dish it out but they can’t take it

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Over at his Gauche blog, City University lecturer and former Tribune editor Paul Anderson recounts how he shouted and swore at journalists from the university’s student paper the Inquirer when they approached him over a story about his fellow lecturer Rosie Waterhouse, who had called for a ban on the niqab at the university.

What provoked Anderson’s fit of apoplexy was that “the key quote the Inquirer team had for their story, from the president of the student Islamic Society at City, Saleh Patel, was blatantly abusive a rsity.

Faced with Anderson’s ire, and no doubt fearful of future retribution, the Inquirer didn’t use the quote from Saleh Patel. So much for freedom of expression, eh?

This is par for the course with Islamophobes. Anderson has no objection to his friend Waterhouse describing the wearing of the niqab by students as “offensive and threatening” (what confidence can such students have that they will be welcomed at City University’s Department of Journalism?). And he thinks he has the right to accuse the City University Islamic Society of having “relentlessly pushed a separatist and intolerant version of Islam, repeatedly promoting apologists for terrorist violence and the most reactionary social attitudes”.

But Anderson furiously rejects the right of his opponents to criticise him harshly in return.

Protester jailed for race attack in Luton

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Luton riotA 19-year-old man has been jailed for 16 months after he was found guilty of racially aggravated assault during a protest in Bedfordshire. Kier McElroy hit an Asian man with a banner in a shop doorway in Chapel Street, Luton, on 24 May last year.

Jurors at Luton Crown Court found McElroy guilty of racially aggravated assault occasioning actual bodily harm on student Venkateswara Muppalla. He had earlier admitted assault occasioning actual bodily harm. However, he denied he was racist.

He also pleaded guilty to a second charge of affray, which resulted from his actions that day when he said he was drunk.

The assaulted Asian man was cornered by a group of people marching in protest over an earlier demonstration by a group of Muslims at a parade by the Royal Anglian Regiment in Luton.

BBC News, 26 March 2010

The protest was organised by United People of Luton, the direct precursor of the English Defence League. Although the supposed subject of the demonstration was Muslim extremism, this didn’t prevent McElroy from randomly targeting a Hindu.

The JC and Osama Saeed

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Scotland UnitedIn this week’s edition of the Jewish Chronicle, under the headline “Hunting the SNP’s Islamist”, Martin Bright complains that Osama Saeed, SNP parliamentary candidate for Glasgow Central, is unenthusiastic about being interviewed by Bright for the JC. Now, why do you suppose that might be?

I was intending to report this under the heading “Muslim declines interview with Islamophobe shock”. However, Bright’s article can’t be found on the online edition of the JC, which instead carries … yes, an interview with Osama Saeed.

In what is clearly a swipe at the hypocrisy of attacks on himself as an Islamist, Osama points out that sitting Glasgow Central MP Mohammed Sarwar, father of his Labour opponent Anas Sarwar, is on the management committee of the Finsbury Park Mosque alongside a supporter of Hamas (presumably a reference to Mohammed Sawalha). And how does the JC report this? Under the headline “SNP candidate attacks opponent’s Hamas ‘support’“!

Given that the JC is edited by Stephen Pollard, and has Bright as its political editor, it would seem wise for any politically active Muslim to avoid talking to the JC in future, or at least until there is a change in editorial line, as at present there is clearly no possibility of being reported fairly or accurately by that paper.

‘Pawn of Islamists’ – now Gilligan witch-hunts a Tory parliamentary candidate

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Andrew Gilligan 2Witchfinder General Andrew Gilligan shifts his attention to Tim Archer, Tory PPC for Poplar and Limehouse, who is speaking at an IFE meeting “Confronting Anti-Muslim Hatred in Contemporary Britain” on 30 March at the London Muslim Centre.

According to Gilligan, this demonstrates that “Mr Archer is perfectly willing to allow himself to be used as a pawn by Islamists if he thinks there might be a few votes in it”.

In fact, if you read the leaflet advertising the IFE meeting, you’ll see that the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Respect candidates for Poplar and Limehouse have all agreed to speak there. The only candidate who has not accepted his invitation is Jim Fitzpatrick, the Labour candidate.

What this would seem to indicate is that, with the obvious exception of Fitzpatrick, none of the main candidates in that parliamentary constituency has bought into Gilligan’s campaign of smears against the East London Mosque.

This is not the first time that Tories have been condemned by right-wing Islamophobes over their links with the mosque. London mayor Boris Johnson has been attacked by Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens of the Centre for Social Cohesion on this issue, as has London Assembly member Andrew Boff.

We hesitate to give advice to our opponents, but if Gilligan or Meleagrou-Hitchens possessed a grain of tactical sense they’d see how counterproductive this is from their own witch-hunting standpoint.

Denunciations of Ken Livingstone or George Galloway as pawns of Islamism might find traction in some quarters. But Boris Johnson, Andrew Boff, Tim Archer? In attacking these individuals Gilligan and Meleagrou-Hitchens destroy any shred of credibility they might have left.

Ken Livingstone replies to Andrew Gilligan

Posted on by Bob Pitt

EDL Close East London Mosque

In last week’s Spectator Andrew Gilligan has a typically hysterical piece entitled “Why does the BBC air Islamist propaganda?” in which he denounces the decision to hold the 5 March edition of Radio 4’s Any Questions at the London Muslim Centre, which is attached to the East London Mosque. What particularly outrages Gilligan is that a questioner was allowed to raise the issue of Islamophobia in the media, which led to criticism of Gilligan’s recent television “documentary” witch-hunting the East London Mosque. Gilligan writes:

“Listeners to Any Questions would have heard a man named Musleh Faradhi accuse the media of ‘developing hatred against Muslims’, with particular reference to a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation – also broadcast last week – into an organisation called the Islamic Forum of Europe, the IFE. One of the panellists, the former London mayor Ken Livingstone, compared the Dispatches programme to Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech, accused it of being an attack on all Islam and said it incited racist violence against Muslims. With the activist audience baying and hollering their approval, the civilised Radio 4 debate turned into just another East London Mosque hate rally.”

The full programme is available online here, but will soon be deleted. So, for the record, here is Ken Livingstone’s contribution to the discussion:

“There was a hour-long programme depicting this mosque, the East London Mosque, as a centre for fundamentalism trying to gain total control of the area and impose Islam on people who don’t want it.

“If you walk through these doors you’ll see that this mosque chose to be built next to a synagogue so they all work together. In eight years as mayor I came here again and again. This is an outward-looking East London community who happen to be Muslims.

“That programme was a disgrace. And by amazing coincidence the man who made it, Andrew Gilligan, phoned me just before I came to this programme saying ‘Did you give any grants?’ I suspect we did, I honestly can’t remember. And I said, ‘Did you see what happened today in Parliament Square? Three hundred fascists and racists marched through there with banners saying “Ban the hijab” and “Close the East London Mosque”.’ He said, ‘Oh, that’s nothing to do with me.’ And I said, ‘It is. Because your paper and you pander to racism and Islamophobia.’

“And there’s nothing new about this. A hundred and four years ago the Daily Mail had a headline saying ‘Jews bring crime and disease to Britain’. And they meant down here, in Brick Lane. And then it was the blacks, and the Irish. For some reactionary elements there’s got to be a threat, there’s got to be a victim.

“When I’m in a mosque in this city, like when I’m in a Hindu temple, I close my eyes and I hear London accents and I hear Londoners facing the same problems everybody else does.

“This is something we’ve got to defeat, because it will divide us. Just like when Enoch Powell did his ‘rivers of blood’, black bus conductors were beaten up in this city. And because of Andrew Gilligan’s programme Muslims will be harassed and spat at, and perhaps some will be beaten, and Andrew Gilligan should be ashamed of himself.”

Andrew Gilligan – not a harmless democrat

Posted on by Bob Pitt

What is going on at the Guardian? Following on from the paper’s full-page splash on the “hijab gates” myth, it now gives space to Andrew Gilligan at Comment is Free to continue his witch-hunt of the Islamic Forum Europe.

And speaking of the “hijab gates”, over on his Telegraph blog Gilligan reports that Tower Hamlets Council has temporarily suspended plans for the Brick Lane arches, described by Gilligan as “a £1.85 million exercise in ‘religious triumphalism'”, pending further consultation. Gilligan interprets this as a sign that “cracks have started to appear” among the “Islamic fundamentalists” who have supposedly seized control of the council.