Yesterday we had the Sun running an anti-halal story on its front page under the screaming headline “Halal secrets of Pizza Express”. Not to be outdone in the field of right-wing anti-Muslim scaremongering, the Daily Mail decided to run this story on its front page today.
Of course, this is not the first time the Mail has tried to work its readers up into an anti-Muslim frenzy over the issue of halal slaughter by appealing to their ignorance and bigotry.
It would appear that the UK Independence Party may be about to suspend Harry Perry, the party’s candidate for Stockport Council whose offensive tweets and support for the English Defence League were exposed last week.
The Independent reports that UKIP leader Nigel Farage was asked about Perry and replied: “I’ve never heard of the bloke until last night. I’ve no idea who he is. I think he comes from the north west of England. Clearly his attitude and views are entirely inconsistent with being a member of UKIP. Simple.”
But what about Magnus Nielsen, the UKIP candidate for Camden Council whose offensive Facebook comments have received widespread coverage in the media? Farage can’t claim he’s never heard of Nielsen, who has a long history as a party activist. He stood for UKIP in the Barnet & Camden constituency in the London Assembly elections of 2000, 2004 and 2008. He was also the party’s parliamentary candidate for Hampstead & Highgate in the 2005 general election and for Hampstead & Kilburn in 2010.
Following the publication of his 2005 book The Losing Battle With Islam, David Selbourne wrote a briefing paper for John Kerry. In the current issue of the New Statesman he rehashes its arguments.
Summarising the advice he gave to Kerry, Selbourne sets out a list of the West’s failures in responding to Islamic aggression:
“Among them are the failure to recognise the ambition of radical Islam; the failure to condemn the silence of most Muslims at the crimes committed in their names; the failure to respond adequately to the persecution of Christians in many Muslim lands; the failure to grasp the nature of the non-military skills that are being deployed against the non-Muslim world – skills of manoeuvre, skills in deceiving the gullible, skills in making temporary truces in order to gain time (as in Iran); and, perhaps above all, the failure to realise the scale and speed of Islam’s advance.”
A UK Independence Party (Ukip) candidate who made national headlines for describing Islam as “organised crime” says he does not regret making the comment and insists it is backed up by “quotations from the Quran”.
Camden Ukip chairman Magnus Nielsen, 64, who is bidding to become a councillor in West Hampstead, has made numerous posts on his Facebook page about the religion, including one in which he says “Islam is organised crime under religious camouflage”.
The hysteria whipped up by the Sunday Telegraph over the Law Society’s guidelines for solicitors drawing up wills for Muslim clients (see here and here) has predictably been endorsed by the One Law for All Campaign, who organised a protest outside the Law Society headquarters.
OLFA, needless to say, denied that the protest was anti-Muslim. They issued a statement saying: “The fight against Sharia is clearly a defence of individual rights and freedoms, not an attack on Muslims. After all, Sharia Law is fundamentally the demand of Islamic states and the political movement to limit citizens’ rights.”
Robert Bilcliff is standing as a candidate for the UK Independence Party in the local elections in Tamworth. The Mail on Sunday reported that Bilcliff’s response to the legalisation of same-sex marriage last month was to post a comment on Twitter reading: “Sad day for all us straight people.”
The Mail also reported that in a Facebook post in July 2012 Bilcliff “made a joke against Muslims”. Bilcliff told the paper: “I am not racist and never have been. I have many friends of different nationalities but I enjoy a joke every now and again.”
The Mail didn’t quote the “joke”, so here it is:
For the last few weeks the Sunday Telegraph has been running a series of witch-hunting articles on the so-called “Trojan Horse plot” in Birmingham. The author of the reports, not entirely unexpectedly, is the discredited stitch-up artist Andrew Gilligan.
In the absence of any real evidence of the existence of such a “plot”, Gilligan has followed his usual method of hyping up the material he has managed to gather and loudly proclaiming that his charges have been proved. His repeated uncritical references to the transparently forged letter that provoked the furore in the first place – the most he is prepared to concede is that it contains “a number of inaccuracies” – give us an indication of Gilligan’s commitment to journalistic honesty.
The latest report by Gilligan is headlined “Guide to school Islamisation, by ‘ringleader’ of Trojan Horse plot”. He assures Telegraph readers that a “document” produced by the Muslim Council of Britain in 2007, and co-authored by Tahir Alam, offered “a detailed blueprint for the radical ‘Islamisation’ of secular state schools which closely resembles what appears to be happening in Birmingham”.
A European election candidate has been arrested on suspicion of “religious or racial harassment” in a Hampshire city.
Liberty GB candidate Paul Weston had been reading a Winston Churchill quote describing Islam as “militant” and “retrograde” through a megaphone outside Winchester’s Guildhall on Saturday afternoon.
Standing on the steps of the Guildhall, he addressed passers-by with an excerpt from former Prime Minister Churchill’s book The River War, written in 1899 while he was a British army officer in the Sudan. Police were called after complaints from members of the public, and the 50-year-old, from Dorset, was told to disperse but failed to do so.
A spokesman for Hampshire Constabulary said: “He was further arrested on suspicion of religious or racial harassment. He has been bailed pending further enquiries to report back to police on May 24.”
Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary, will warn on Saturday that “the pursuit of a divisive religious extremism” – as shown in an alleged conspiracy to take over schools in Birmingham – threatens to undermine Britain’s modern multicultural society.
Hunt’s remarks to the annual conference of the NASUWT teaching union in Birmingham follow the uncovering of a dossier named Operation Trojan Horse, claiming to reveal a plot to overthrow teachers and governors insecular state schools in the city and run them on strict Islamic principles.
A university has reversed a decision to grant an honorary degree to an advocate for Muslim women who has made comments critical of Islam. Brandeis University said in a statement that Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali would no longer receive the honorary degree, which it had planned to award her at the May 18 commencement.
Ali, a member of the Dutch parliament from 2003 to 2006, has been quoted as making comments critical of Islam. That includes a 2007 interview with Reason magazine in which she said of the religion: “Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace. I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars.”
Brandeis, outside Boston in Waltham, Massachusetts, said it was not aware of Ali’s statements earlier.