Category Archives: Analysis & comment

15 lonely fascists protest in central London

Posted on by Bob Pitt

SIOE London demoThat’s how Indymedia reported the Stop the Islamisation of Europe (SIOE) “Stop Kuffarphobia” demonstration in London yesterday. So few people turned up for the protest march from Whitehall Place to Temple tube station that the police refused to allow them to march along the road and insisted that they walk on the pavement.

Strictly speaking, SIOE England is more accurately described as a hard-right anti-Muslim racist – rather than fascist – organisation. And our information is that fully 30 SIOE supporters attended the closing rally at Temple Place to hear SIOE head Stephen Gash (of the tiny English Democrats party) warn against the Islamist plot to impose sharia law on Europe.

Admittedly, the attendance was slightly down on the thousand demonstrators Gash had told the police he was expecting.

It would be easy to mock Gash as a sad little man afflicted by organisational incompetence and delusions of grandeur – and we have no hesitation in doing so. But the humiliating failure of the “Stop Kuffarphobia” demo should not blind us to the fact that, as Soumaya Ghannoushi recently pointed out at Comment is Free, SIOE’s message of anti-Muslim hatred and paranoia has a much wider resonance.

Let people wear cross or veil, says Archbishop

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Archbishop of Canterbury today warns politicians not to interfere with a Muslim woman’s right to wear the veil in public and cautions against a march towards secularism in British society.

In a dramatic intervention Dr Rowan Williams, who is backed by other senior church leaders, said that the Government must not become a “licensing authority” that decides which religious symbols are acceptable.

Writing in The Times he adds that any ban on the veil would be “politically dangerous”. His comments reflect concern within the Church that some members of the Government want to see Britain follow the same route as France, where secularism is close to being a national religion.

“The ideal of a society where no visible public signs of religion would be seen – no crosses round necks, no sidelocks, turbans or veils – is a politically dangerous one,” he writes. “It assumes that what comes first in society is the central political ‘licensing authority’, which has all the resource it needs to create a workable public morality.”

But secularists said that the Archbishop was misguided. Terry Sanderson, of the National Secular Society, said: “The way we are going in this country with the rise of Islam, the churches should look at secularism as their best friend.”

Times, 27 October 2006

Sanderson’s comment is of course entirely in line with the Islamophobic approach of the NSS, who happily formed an alliance with the evangelical Christian right in a campaign against the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, the primary purpose of which was to defend Muslims against incitement to hatred.

In January 2004, in the NSS Newsline, Sanderson wrote: “Secularism is under sustained threat from a resurgent Islam – and not just in France. In this country, too, it is becoming difficult to even discuss minority religions in critical terms without landing in trouble. We need to resist.”

Johann Hari and his friends

Posted on by Bob Pitt

johann hari 2Johann Hari has found a new hero: “Ehsan Jami is an intelligent, softly-spoken 22-year-old council member for the Dutch Labour Party. He believes there should be no compromise, ever, on the rights of women and gay people and novelists and cartoonists. He became sick of hearing self-appointed Islamist organisations claiming to speak for him when they called for the banning of books and the ‘right’ to abuse women. So he set up the Dutch Council of Ex-Muslims. Their manifesto called for secularism – and an end to the polite toleration of Islamist intolerance. As he put it: ‘We want people to be free to choose who they want to be and what they want to believe in’.”

Independent, 25 October 2007

That would be this Ehsan Jami, would it – the ally of Dutch far-right racist Geert Wilders?

In the same article Hari happily refers to “my friend Maryam Namazie” – the Iranian sectarian nutter who discredited this year’s International Day Against Homophobia in London by launching into a paranoid rant accusing the Muslim Council of Britain of wanting to execute gay men in Trafalgar Square.

But the main subject of Hari’s piece is Namazie’s fellow member of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran, Mina Ahadi, who has just been awarded the title of Secularist of the Year by the National Secular Society. Ahadi received widespread publicity when she launched her so-called Council of Ex-Muslims in Germany, including an interview in Der Spiegel in which she stated “I know Islam and for me it means death and pain” and defended the display of racist anti-Muslim caricatures at a German carnival.

How long, you wonder, before Namazie and Ahadi join their chum Ehsan Jami in forming an open alliance with the extreme Right? If they do, they’ll evidently be able to count on the support of Johann Hari.

Update:  For Johann’s response, see here

‘Islamisation of Europe’ suffers setback in Netherlands

Posted on by Bob Pitt

There are significantly fewer Muslims in the Netherlands than previously believed, the country’s Central Bureau for Statistics said Wednesday, after a review of its census techniques. The CBS said it was cutting estimates to 850,000, or 5.2 percent of the country’s 16.3 million population, from 1 million, or 6.1 percent.

Associated Press, 24 October 2007

A bit of a problem, you’d have thought, for fantasists like Geert Wilders, Mark Steyn, Douglas Murray and David Icke who have been predicting an Islamic takeover of the Netherlands.

‘Every street in Britain could look like this in 50 years time’, warns Mail

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Every street could look like thisIn an article headed “Britain will be scarcely recognisable in 50 years if the immigration deluge continues”, Stephen Glover writes:

“The only question that interests me is whether a country that is recognisably British will survive in 50 or 100 years. British culture, whatever it represents, is evidently not worth preserving in the view of some on the Left.

“It is a curious paradox that some of its adherents believe that foreign cultures are worth safeguarding, but … when our own indigenous culture is threatened, we are told that it is parochial and small-minded to think about trying to defend it….

“Preserving one’s own culture is at least as important as preserving one’s infrastructure. Actually, it is even more important, because new hospitals, houses and roads can, with a struggle, be built – but culture, once it has been undermined, cannot be recovered.”

Daily Mail, 25 October 2007

And note the photograph chosen to illustrate Glover’s piece (reproduced above). It prominently features a Muslim woman wearing the niqab and is captioned: “Every street in Britain could look like this in 50 years time.”

Mohammed Atif Siddique sentenced to 8 years in prison

Posted on by Eddie Truman

When we wrote about Mohammed Atif Siddique’s conviction for terrorist related offences in September we commented that without the amended Terrorism Act of 2000 it was unlikely that the Crown would have been able to make a breach of the peace charge stick.

Today Siddique was sentenced to 8 years in prison on 3 terrorism charges, all of which are related to documents available on the internet.

During the trial there was no evidence produced that Mohammed Siddique was involved in planning any violence; a spokesman for Central Scotland Police said there was “no evidence that Siddique was involved in an actual terrorist plot”

In the days after he was found guilty the Scottish press carried ever more sensational claims about what Siddique was going to do if he had not been arrested and repeatedly referred to him as an “al-Qaeda-linked terrorist”.

The Scotsman suggested he “may” have been planning an attack in Canada while the right wing tabloids were absolutely sure he was going to behead the Canadian Prime Minister.

BNP candidate Robert Cottage was recently found guilty of possessing bomb making chemicals and was sentenced to 2 and a half years.

Mohammed Atif Siddique has been sentenced to 8 years in jail for being in possession of documents that one of the expert witnesses, Evan Kohlmann, has available on his website.

The conviction of Mohammed Siddique under the amended Terrorism Act and his 8-year prison sentence should concern every individual in the UK who questions the foreign policy of the British government; this is a piece of legislation that can be used to send people to prison without any evidence that they have actually done anything wrong.

Conservative Muslims back Ahmadinejad shock

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Conservative Muslim ForumWell, that’s the line the Daily Telegraph is taking anyway, and Conservative Home is joining in. What’s got them so worked up is the document submitted by the Conservative Muslim Forum in response to An Unquiet World, the report of the Tories’ National and International Security Policy Group chaired by Dame Pauline Neville-Jones.

The CMF’s response hits some nails on the head. It has a good line on Israel and Iran, which particularly outrages the Telegraph and Conservative Home (though the Torygraph is no less appalled by the CMF’s proposal that the history curriculum in schools should give “full recognition to the massive contribution that Islam has made to the development of Western civilisation”).

Conservative Home for its part is dismayed by the CMF’s defence of the Muslim Council of Britain, who were grossly misrepresented by Neville-Jones’ policy group, providing the basis for an ignorant attack on the MCB by David Cameron. The CMF asks:

“What is the evidence for the statement ‘the MCB does not have as one of its aims, the integration of members of Muslim communities into the wider society of the UK’? … it should be noted that one of the formal aims of the MCB is ‘to foster better community relations and work for the good of society as a whole’, which is what integration is about. The Policy Group did not specify what MCB activities they consider to be incompatible with integration. The Conservative Party should recognise that the MCB is well-respected by many Muslims and non-Muslims.”

Also by implication the Conservative Muslim Forum opposes Cameron’s call for a ban on Hizb ut-Tahrir: “… it is the mark of a mature and liberal democracy that it accepts people’s freedom to disagree. If a political party wishes to campaign, constitutionally, for the abolition of democracy in the UK and its replacement by a totalitarian system, why should it not be free to do so?”

Neville-Jones’ An Unquiet World report contains a ludicrously inaccurate attack on Dr al-Qaradawi. To which the CMF replies: “While we may disagree with many of the views of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, it is inaccurate for the Policy Group to question his status as a leading Islamic scholar…. Yusuf al-Qaradawi is considered a leading scholar by many Muslims, including other Muslim scholars.”

Conservative Home complains: “It is deeply troubling to learn of a group within the Conservative Party giving comfort to this extremist.”

An Unquiet Word: A Response can be downloaded from the Conservative Muslim Forum website.

For earlier criticisms of Neville-Jones’ report by Conservative Muslims, see here.

Amis wasn’t advocating oppression of Muslims, he was merely adumbrating

Posted on by Bob Pitt

martin amisIn a letter in today’s Guardian Martin Amis expresses indignation that Terry Eagleton should take exception to his remarks about Muslims.

(Just to remind you what these were: “There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”)

As Mart explains: “I was not ‘advocating’ anything. I was conversationally describing an urge….” And in a letter to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Independent he offers a similar defence against Eagleton’s criticisms: “The anti-Muslim measures he says I ‘advocated’ I merely adumbrated….”

So that’s all right then.

For Osama Saeed’s comments, see Rolled Up Trousers, 12 October 2007

‘Fear of giving offence is killing our culture’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Minette Marrin (2)Minette Marrin complains that the struggle against the civilisation-sapping ideology of multiculturalism is not over yet:

“For at least 20 years there was a debilitating fog of moral relativism in the air, a miasma of guilty self-loathing…. Even the phrase ‘host culture’ was considered unacceptable. We have moved on since then, supposedly, and surprisingly suddenly. Many prominent multiculturalists, including the Commission for Racial Equality itself, have recently performed swift U-turns and the bien-pensant orthodoxy now is that multiculturalism has been a divisive failure….

“It might seem, superficially, that the Victoria Climbié report and the massacre of 7/7 in London, among other shocks, have brought us back at last to our cultural senses and our cultural self-respect. Not entirely so, unfortunately…. A week ago The Sunday Times reported that some Muslim workers in Sainsbury’s are refusing to check out purchases of alcohol on the debatable ground that it’s against their religion.”

Well, actually, it was just the one Muslim worker in a single branch of Sainsbury’s. But why quibble over figures when the very future of “our” culture is at stake? Marrin continues:

“This is preposterous and a depressing sign of the times. But the painful truth is it would be just as preposterous to blame the Sainsbury’s Muslims. For years now ethnic minorities have been encouraged to insist on their cultural differences and on their human right to have these differences respected and actively promoted….

“Surely the fault lies with Sainsbury’s, for cultural funk. And it lies with all those others who out of some strange abandonment of common sense – such as the government’s laissez-faire guidelines on wearing Muslim veils in schools last week – bottle out.”

Sunday Times, 7 October 2007

Elsewhere in the same issue, the paper follows up last week’s exposé of cultural surrender at Sainsbury’s with another article, “Muslim medical students get picky“, which claims:

“Some Muslim medical students are refusing to attend lectures or answer exam questions on alcohol-related or sexually transmitted diseases because they claim it offends their religious beliefs. Some trainee doctors say learning to treat the diseases conflicts with their faith, which states that Muslims should not drink alcohol and rejects sexual promiscuity. A small number of Muslim medical students have even refused to treat patients of the opposite sex.”

“Some … some … a small number” – and how many Muslim medical students, roughly, might that be? Of course, we’re not told. Although, to be fair to the Sunday Times, its intrepid reporters have come up with a further shocking revelation: “At a Sainsbury’s store in Nottingham, a pharmacist named Ahmed declined to provide the pill to a female reporter posing as a customer”. So that makes one Sainsbury’s employee who opts out of selling alcohol, two who’ve been given exemption from stacking the drinks shelves, and one who avoids selling the pill. Clearly, the foundations of Western civilisation are under mass assault from the Muslim hordes.

Meanwhile, over at the Infidel Blogger’s Alliance, one Mark Alexander (who’s apparently the author of a book entitled The Dawning of a New Dark Age: A Collection of Essays on Islam) offers his take on the Sunday Times report:

“This latest story about the obstreperousness of trainee Muslim medical students should alarm us all. It is a harbinger of the nightmare that awaits us all in the West as a result of allowing far, far too many Muslims into the Judeo-Christian West…. If something isn’t done about the Muslim problem, then it is only a matter of time before blood will be shed. Not in the operating theatres, but in the streets.”

And the fascists of the British National Party (who are becoming great fans of the Sunday Times) present the report as evidence that “the country moves unceasingly and unchallenged to becoming part ofDar-ul-Islam (the world of Islam)”.

BNP news article, 7 October 2007

Cf. The letter of appreciation to Sainsbury’s from Ibrahim Mogra of the Muslim Council of Britain.

See also Yusuf Smith’s comments at Indigo Jo Blogs, 8 October 2007

Christian Voice holds prayer meeting against Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Christian_Voice

The right-wing evangelical organisation Christian Voice – the same group that threatened to prosecute Islamic bookshops under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act for selling the Qur’an – has announced that it is holding a prayer meeting this morning at the site of the proposed Islamic centre at Newham in East London. They explain:

“With the threat of a planning application for the megamosque any day now, the need for prayer at the site, which is less than a mile from the 2012 Olympic village, is urgent. Certainly, one can pray in church or at home, but the act of going to the site has a spiritual dimension. It focuses our prayer and the effort of going shows God our prayer is serious, an important matter when we are praying for miracles.

“And 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.”

But don’t get the idea that Christian Voice is moved by hostility towards adherents of another religion. Not at all: “Love for God and for our neighbour is what motivates us, so while we shall pray against Islam, we shall also pray for salvation for Muslims and for them to be brought into the kingdom of God by faith in the incarnate Son of God, the crucified, risen, ascended Lord Jesus Christ.”