Category Archives: Analysis & comment

Anti-Muslim protest by Master Race flops

Posted on by Bob Pitt

NF Islam Out of BritainThe Al Muhajiroun demonstration against “British Oppression” in Downing Street on Friday apparently passed off without incident. Reports indicate an attendance about 150, while the counter-protest initiated by Terry Blackham of the National Front attracted about 30 protestors according to the fascist website Stormfront – though photographs suggest it may have been even fewer.

Evidently expecting a huge response to his call for an anti-Islamist demonstration, Blackham had originally intended to march the vanguard of the White Race over to City Hall at the end of the demo to stage a mass protest against Ken Livingstone, so given the pathetic turnout he was well advised to abandon that idea. And over at YouTube you can watch an excerpt from Blackham’s inspirational address to his troops in which he predicts “world media attention on this event today”. Another slight misjudgement there, eh Terry?

On a more serious note, in a further speech to the demonstrators Blackham objected to the fascists being separated from the Al Muhajiroun protestors and declared that in future, instead of co-operating with the police, the NF will take direct action against Muslim communities: “This fucking barrier is a joke…. Let’s not have it…. You lot organise with me and we’ll turn up and we’ll oppose these [Muslims] at their mosques. I can’t wait until we can take their mosques down brick by brick.”

Surely there are grounds for Blackham being charged under the Public Order Act? Or are far-right racists – unlike Islamist extremists – immune to prosecution for inciting violence?

7/7 had nothing to do with foreign policy (it says here)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Prospect June 2007In an “Open letter to Tariq Ramadan” in the current issue of Prospect Magazine David Goodhardt rejects Professor Ramadan’s recent Guardian article as a “grievance-seeking, responsibility-avoiding diatribe”. According to Goodhardt, Muslims in Britain have never had it so good:

“Is there some discrimination, racism even? Yes, but there is far less than in the past and less than most other countries in the world…. The ideology of Islamophobia is a mixture of exaggeration (see Kenan Malik’s work on this subject) and a sort of perverted utopianism that interprets the initial suspicion (and sometimes even hostility) towards strangers found in all cultures as proof of deep hatred of a particular religion.”

Goodhardt refers Professor Ramadan to the cover story in the current issue of Prospect Magazine, a study of 7/7 bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan by Shiv Malik which draws the following conclusion: “Khan may have felt indignant about western foreign policy, as many anti-war campaigners do, but that wasn’t the reason he led a cell of young men to kill themselves and 52 London commuters.” But his lengthy article provides no evidence to back up Malik’s claim.

As is well known, Khan “martyrdom video” contains a clear statement of the reasoning behind the 7/7 bombings:

“Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we feel security, you will be our targets. And until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people we will not stop this fight. We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.”

Malik dismisses this on the grounds that Khan’s video also contains an attack on established religious leaders:

“Our so-called scholars today are content with their Toyotas and semi-detached houses. They seem to think that their responsibilities lie in pleasing the kufr instead of Allah. So they tell us ludicrous things, like you must obey the law of the land. Praise be God! How did we ever conquer lands in the past if we were to obey this law?… By Allah these scholars will be brought to account, and if they fear the British government more than they fear Allah then they must desist in giving talks, lectures and passing fatwas, and they need to sit at home and leave the job to the real men, the true inheritors of the prophets.”

How does this contradict the view that Khan’s murderous violence was motivated by anger against western foreign policy? It does nothing of the sort.

‘They threatened my life. But I will still speak out’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Talk of execution will not cow me; I will carry on.” The courageous Ed Husain, author of The Islamist and one of Melanie Phillips’s favourite Muslims, confirms his intention to speak out. Except that … nobody directly threatened his life at all. The whole thing is based on a friend of Husain’s warning him that his safety would be endangered if he attended a certain mosque (unnamed, but clearly the East London Mosque). And that’s it. That’s the sole basis for Husain’s hysterical talk about facing execution. What a plonker.

Observer, 10 June 2007

See also Indigo Jo Blogs, 10 June 2007

Livingstone ‘plays the Islamophobia card’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

nss2Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society is not impressed by the coalition to defend religious freedom launched at City Hall in London earlier this week. Sanderson opines that “there is very little in the way of aggression towards Muslims beyond the racism that all minority communities suffer”. Well, Sanderson and the NSS – who in the past have called for the publication of racist anti-Muslim cartoons and happily repeated denunciations of “Muslim foreigners who have forced themselves on us” – would know all about that.

NSS news report, 8 June 2007

The NSS has the backing of Robert Spencer over at Jihad Watch.

Cameron accuses Muslims of ‘cultural separatism’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

David CameronThe Tory Party website has posted David Cameron’s speech to the “Islam and Muslims in the World Today” conference.

Cameron attributes the Channel 4 poll results, which indicate widespread suspicion among Muslims about the official account of 7/7, not to the understandable mistrust of a government that lied about the Iraq war but to the prevalence of “cultural separatism” within Muslim communities. He goes on to blame “the influence of a number of Muslim preachers that actively encourage cultural separatism. One such preacher is Yusuf al’Qaradawi….”

Cameron also complains that the “process of rising Muslim consciousness [which he apparently thinks is by definition a bad thing] has been accelerated by the creed of multiculturalism, which despite intending to allow diversity flourish under a common banner of unity, has instead fostered difference by treating faith communities as monolithic blocks rather than individual citizens”.

He continues: “This rise in Muslim consciousness has been reinforced by a second, parallel, factor at work: the deliberate weakening of our collective identity in Britain. Again, multiculturalism has its part to play. By concentrating on defining the various cultures that have come to call Britain home, we have forgotten to define the most important one: our own.”

As for Muslim disaffection with British foreign policy, Cameron has found a solution: “We have to explain patiently and carefully that in Iraq and Afghanistan we are supporting democratically elected Muslim leaders.”

Who’s afraid of Tariq Ramadan?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tariq Ramadan New RepublicPaul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism, which has become the bible of ex-leftist supporters of the “War on Terror” like Nick Cohen, has a major article in The New Republic devoted to attacking Tariq Ramadan.

Mad Melanie Phillips hails Berman’s “magisterial piece of writing” which she claims “not only manages to disinter the extremism that Ramadan goes to such lengths to conceal but he also comprehensively shreds the various useful idiots who have sanitised Ramadan’s thinking for public consumption”.

Mel expresses her outrage that “despite the fact that Ramadan was excluded from the US because of his suspected links with extremism, Oxford university has given him an academic berth – and the British government appointed him as one of its advisers on how to deal with … Islamist extremism. Berman’s article shows just how deeply the west’s collective brain has been put to sleep.”

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 30 May 2007

Blair: shackled in war on terror

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Blair and flagsWriting in the Sunday Times, Tony Blair calls for further attacks on the civil liberties of Muslims who are suspected of involvement in terrorism:

“Over the past five or six years, we have decided as a country that except in the most limited of ways, the threat to our public safety does not justify changing radically the legal basis on which we confront this extremism. Their right to traditional civil liberties comes first. I believe this is a dangerous misjudgment.”

As for the argument that his government has stoked up Muslim anger by invading Afghanistan and Iraq, Blair claims he can’t understand why there should be the slightest resentment at such actions:

“We remove two utterly brutal and dictatorial regimes; we replace them with a United Nations-supervised democratic process and the Muslims in both countries get the chance to vote, which incidentally they take in very large numbers. And the only reason it is difficult still is because other Muslims are using terrorism to try to destroy the fledgling democracy and, in doing so, are killing fellow Muslims.”

Meanwhile, over at the Independent on Sunday, shadow Home Secretary David Davis promotes the Tories’ Cameroonian tactic of criticising Blair’s attacks on civil liberties from an apparently libertarian standpoint while at the same time advocating some even harsher measures against Muslim communities. Thus Davis complains that “these powers are not properly used against the real threats. Extremist groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir are not banned”.

‘New study shows US Muslims are extremists’ (unlike Debbie Schlussel)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Debbie Schlussel“The message of the just-released Pew Research Center study on ‘Muslim Americans’ is clear … America hasn’t moderated Islam or its adherents. Islam has made America[‘s] Muslim residents more extreme, just as with its European counterparts. Wealth and education and opportunity and freedom have done nothing to moderate them….

“The study shows that even from 2000-2007, 18% of Muslims are still immigrants – significantly up from the 1980s. Why – after 9/11 – are we letting one in five Muslims in America in from countries and a religion that hate us? It isn’t news to me. But it should be disturbing, nonetheless, that we have a policy of affirmative-action immigration for the religion of 19 hijackers and assorted worldwide beheaders, homicide bombers, and rioters.”

US pundit Debbie Schlussel (herself well known as a beacon of moderation who renounces all forms of extremism) writes at debbieschlussel.com, 23 May 2007

Read the Pew Center report here.

See also BBC News, muslimmatters.org and Abu Aardvark.

The poll result that has been flagged up by right-wing US pundits is that, in response to the question “Can suicide bombings of civilian targets to defend Islam be justified?”, 15% of those aged 18-29 said that such attacks were sometimes or often justified, 11% that they were rarely justified, and 69% that they were never justified (overall the figures were 8%, 5% and 78% respectively). This is the source of all those headlines claiming that 26% of young US Muslims are potential terrorists.

However, when members of the general American public were asked in a November-December 2006 poll (pdf here) whether “bombing and other types of attacks intentionally aimed at civilians” were justified, 24% replied that such attacks were sometimes or often justified, while 27% said they were rarely justified, and only 46% said they were never justified.

Which, applying the same calculation, means that 51% of all Americans are potential terrorists.

What ‘Dave’ learnt about Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

David CameronTory party leader David Cameron does a rewrite of his blog about his stay with a Muslim family in Birmingham. This one is pitched at a liberal audience, so he omits the stuff about Muslims being in denial about 7/7. Yes, it’s yet another example of Cameron trying to be all things to all people.

Observer, 14 May 2007

Amazingly, Cameron does have his admirers in the Muslim communities, despite his track record of anti-Muslim rhetoric. See for example here, here, here, here, here and here. Or try putting “David Cameron” into the search engine on this site.

‘One in 10 Muslims are in 7/7 denial’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Evening Standard puts a predictable spin on David Cameron’s blog about his stay with a Muslim family in Balsall Heath.

It’s not hard to identify a considerable degree of political cynicism here on the part of the Tory leader. Cameron must have been well aware that the right-wing press would highlight this particular aspect of his article, reinforcing his appeal to hardcore Tory voters. But at the same he tries to cosy up to Muslim communities by making some progressive-sounding criticisms of the misuse of the phrase “Islamist terrorists” and of the general anti-Muslim bias in the media.

Anyone tempted to fall for Cameron’s BS should read this article by Soumaya Ghannoushi.