Category Archives: Far right racists

Bid to turn former pub into mosque – fascists not happy

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Le Grand pubA group of Muslims is seeking permission to continue to worship in a former pub.

The Jamiat Ahle Hadith group was given permission to use the old Le Grand pub as a temporary mosque in November 2007. The permission, which allowed the group to worship there and use it as a learning centre, was originally granted for just 12 months. Now the group is applying to permanently use the pub at the corner of Alfreton Road and Gregory Boulevard, between Hyson Green and Radford, as a place of worship.

A decision is expected to be made when the city council’s development control committee meets at the Council House on Wednesday at 2.30pm. Council planners have recommended the request to change the use of the pub to a centre of worship be approved.

This is Nottingham, 16 January 2009

The BNP reports this as “The colonisation of Britain by Islam: Another pub to be converted into mosque“. According to the fascists:

“This is how the colonisation process works: first, large numbers of immigrants settle in an area, and then apply for ‘temporary’ permission to create an ‘Islamic Information Centre’ or even a ‘temporary Mosque’. The large number of immigrants drawn to such centres then ensures that indigenous British people flee the area. This then opens the way for a justification of the ‘temporary’ permission to be made permanent because it ‘fulfils the needs of the local community’.”

Italian minister blasts Muslim protesters’ prayers

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Italy’s defense minister warned the country’s Muslims to stop further “provocations” after thousands held prayers in public squares in Milan during pro-Palestinian demonstrations over the past week.

Ignazio La Russa, from the right-wing National Alliance, said he did not oppose protests or want to deny anyone the right to pray, but called the public prayers a challenge to peace. “I say enough of the provocations of Islamists in Milan,” he told Il Giornale newspaper on Sunday. “In Milan, a legitimate demonstration ended in a deliberately provocative mosque under the open sky.”

Thousands of Muslims knelt with their heads bowed to the ground in prayer before Milan’s central train station in one of several pro-Palestinian protests on Saturday. A week ago, Muslims held prayers in front of Milan’s central cathedral, angering right-wing politicians in the overwhelming Catholic country who called it an affront to Christianity.

“What would have happened if a group of Christians gathered together to pray with a rosary before Mecca? They probably would have been stoned,” said La Russa, who described himself as a practicising Catholic who attends Mass almost every Sunday.

Milan’s deputy mayor issued a similar warning to Muslims, saying four protests in seven days was too much. “Enough with pro-Hamas marches now,” said Riccardo De Corato. “Milan is not a province of Gaza and has no intention of reluctantly instituting this type of ‘Gaza Saturdays.'”

Protests against the Israeli offensive continued in Italy on Sunday, with 3,000 people marching through the center of Naples. Another 1,000 held hands to form a human chain and march through Rome’s historic center to demand an end to violence in Gaza.

Reuters, 11 January 2009

British National Party supports Israeli attack on Gaza

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Thurrock Patriots

“No don’t adjust your eyesight. You don’t have double vision. That’s right. Yup, that’s right. The fascist British National Party, whose leader believes that the Nazi holocaust is a hoax, is overjoyed at the genocide in Gaza. And why not? They’re killing Muslims so it can’t be bad.”

Tony Greenstein examines how the BNP’s anti-Muslim racism leads it to side with the state of Israel in its oppression of the Palestinian people.

Tony Greenstein’s Blog, 6 January 2008

See also “The real situation in Gaza and Israel” by the BNP’s “legal expert” Lee Barnes:

“This sort of ‘disinfecting’ process whereby Israel is required to sterilise areas of radical Islamist support … is what all nations have to do in order to eradicate Islamist cells who have managed to take over territory either within or on the edges of their borders…. For those that think what Israel is doing is excessive – that is ridiculous in relation to what Israel militarily can do. Excessive would be the eradication of Gaza with a nuclear weapon. What Israel is doing is what nations do when they secure their national security. Nationalists must fight for the survival of their nations.”

And see the article “Gaza – A window into the future” by Carlos Cortiglia on the BNP London website:

“The events in Gaza are a cruel reminder of what could one day happen in a country called United Kingdom if a creed of intolerance is allowed to prosper. After many years of occupation and as a gesture of goodwill, one day Israel decided to withdraw from the Gaza Strip only to find itself bombarded with rockets and human bombs.

“Hamas, Hezbollah, AlQaeda, whatever the name this creed of terror can adopt, are one and the same. When they are not strong enough, they present themselves as peace movements and freedom fighters, even as moderate thinkers in search of religious illumination and goodwill, but when they are strong enough they challenge, destroy and corrode true civilization.”

It’s also worth looking at the comments following Nick Griffin’s article “Israel’s Gaza affair”. Some examples:

“The Israelis will NEVER get unbiased reporting on the Brussels Broadcasting Corporation, despite being the only civilised country in the region & fighting for their very existance. It is NOT our place to get involved but you aren’t the only one to be 100% behind them, they are an example to us all because the only thing the Islamic Terrorists understand is FORCE.”

“The bottom line is that Israel acts as a vital buffer against Islam in the Middle East, and any enemy of Islam is a friend of mine.”

“While the Labour British Government continue to treat British people as second class citizens in our own country and continue to treat the immigrant and asylum invaders as VIP’s its nice to see a state like Israel protecting ‘its own’. A leaf that this Labour Government should take out of the Israeli book.”

“… if Israel falls or is weakened badly it could embolden the Muslims here. We need to stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel’s right to protect itself and make clear we do so. Islam must NOT be allowed any victories!”

And so on, and so on.

‘Do Cameron’s Tories secretly admire Islam?’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The question is posed by Damian Thompson, who claims that, when it comes to countering “the spread of Islamic ghettos” in the UK, “there’s so little to choose between the two main parties that I can’t see a case for voting Tory”. He continues:

“Conservative political correctness is normally more funny than alarming, especially when practised by deeply snobbish Old Etonians. But when it extends to taking advice from Muslim radicals about the correct posture to take towards the ‘religion of peace’, then it is positively dangerous. Leading Tories think that they can demonstrate their intolerance of Islamic extremism by fulminating against one or two loopy Jihadist pressure groups. It’s as if Margaret Thatcher, confronted by the threat of socialism in 1979, had simply called for the banning of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. Expel Vanessa Redgrave from the country and the unions will come to their senses.”

Daily Telegraph, 27 December 2008

That would be the same Tory Party whose leader pledges to break up “Muslim ghettos” and regards “rising Muslim consciousness” as a threat to social stability, whose security spokesperson Pauline Neville-Jones produces reports labelling the Muslim Council of Britain as extremist and accuses the entirely peaceful and apolitical Tablighi Jamaat of association with terrorism, a party whose MPs include the likes of Philip Davies, Michael Gove and Patrick Mercer, and whose supposedly “pro-Muslim” wing enthusiastically adds its voice to the assault on multiculturalism.

If this is amounts to politically correct admiration of Islam, as Damian Thompson believes, then you wonder which political party is conducting an anti-Muslim campaign aggressive enough to meet with his approval. The obvious answer is the BNP, who only the other day approvingly reproduced another anti-Muslim piece by Thompson on their website. Perhaps they should consider sending him a membership form?

Update: Well, no actual invitation to join the party as yet, but the BNP have again reproduced Thompson’s piece on their website. See “Tories accused of ‘secretly admiring Islam’ by leading Daily Telegraph writer“.

Italian priest puts mosque in nativity scene, Lega Nord reacts with fury

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mario BorghezioItaly’s Right-wing Northern League have reacted with fury after it emerged that a Roman Catholic priest added a model mosque to his church’s nativity scene. The League, which has campaigned against the building of new mosques, bitterly attacked Father Prospero Bonzani as an “imbecile”.

The miniature mosque, complete with a minaret, was included in the skyline of Bethlehem in the nativity scene at Father Bonzani’s Our Lady of Providence church in the northern port of Genova.

Mario Borghezio [pictured], a Northern League MEP, called the priest an “imbecile” and said: “What on earth possessed him to put a mosque in a traditional Christmas nativity scene? I hope that the Church authorities in Genova will investigate this as a matter of urgency.” He added: “What will this priest do when he says Mass during Ramadan? Ask us to turn towards Mecca? He may as well have included a suicide bomber wearing dynamite.”

But Father Bonzani said that his nativity scene was designed to send a message of inter-faith harmony. “I included the mosque as a sign that we should have more dialogue with the Muslim faith. I do not have any regrets. At the end of the day the most important thing to focus on here is the Holy Family. I have only one had one complaint from within the parish and that’s it.”

Daily Telegraph, 25 December 2008

Indulgence of Islam is harming society, says Damian Thompson

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Damian_Thompson“Islam is the fastest-growing religion in Britain: the number of Muslims has grown from 1.6 million to two million since 2000. Moreover, every major public institution has changed its policies to accommodate the demands of Islamic ‘community leaders’. The Government, the Opposition, the police, schools, the Church of England, the BBC and now Channel 4 are all helping Muslims construct a parallel Islamic state…. For the first time in decades, religion is moulding public life in this country; but that religion is not Christianity.”

Catholic Herald editor Damian Thompson continues what appears to be a campaign aimed at making Melanie Phillips look relatively sane.

Daily Telegraph, 26 December 2008

The fascists of the BNP find that Thompson’s piece so perfectly reflects their own views that they reproduce it in its entirety, adding the following conclusion:

“When will the people of Britain wake up to the threat that lies within our country? When you will have to step on to the road for Muslims to walk safely by? When someone you know is stoned to death for being raped? When family pets are slaughtered for being ‘unclean’? When animals are halal butchered in the street? When homosexuals are murdered? Or when the sword is at your throat and you have to decide – be a Muslim or die?”

9,000 Muslims in UK prisons for terror offences, claims BNP

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“There are almost 10,000 Muslims in Britain’s jails – with 90 percent of them serving time for terror offences”, claims the BNP.

This is evidently taken from a News of the World report which states: “There are almost 10,000 Muslims in Britain’s jails – with 90 of them serving time for terror offences.” Even allowing that this figure is accurate (which we doubt – the total number of convictions under the Terrorism Act 2000 is far less than that) the BNP has contrived to increase it by 8,910!

However, it would perhaps be unduly harsh to accuse the fascists of manipulating statistics for political ends. A more charitable explanation would be that they’re just plain thick.

Fascists accuse anti-fascists of … supporting fascism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tyndall and fellow NazisThe fascist British National Party has produced a “briefing” on Unite Against Fascism. The document employs the now familiar tactic, adopted by the BNP in imitation of Le Pen’s Front National in France, of turning the accusations made by its political opponents against the accusers themselves.

Thus the BNP condemns UAF as “a racist organisation” whose members are “prepared to to embrace movements (or representatives of those movements) whose ideological roots are fundamentally based on fascistic ideology, and which have close and extensive historical links to Nazism”.

This sets a new standard in brazen hypocrisy, coming from a party whose constitution requires that all its members must be from the “Indigenous Caucasian” racial group and commits it to “stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration” and to restoring “the overwhelmingly white makeup of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948” – a party, moreover, whose founder and long-time leader was the notorious Nazi admirer John Tyndall (standing on the left of the photograph).

Who are the “fascist groups” that UAF has supposedly embraced? Predictably, they are grouped by the BNP under the heading of “Islamo-Nazism” – a category which, according to the BNP, prominently features the Muslim Council of Britain, the largest and most representative Islamic organisation in the UK. The BNP informs us that “the historical link between extremist Islam and Nazism is well known”, the “evidence” for this assertion being the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem’s attempts to build an alliance with Nazi Germany.

But where does the BNP get all this nonsense about “Islamic fascism” from, and the fantasy about the MCB being an extremist organisation? Well, the main source they cite is none other than Martin Bright. They footnote both his Observer article from July 2006, “Right showing left the way on radical Islam”, and his pamphlet When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries, published in 2006 by the right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange. (As we commented at the time: “When it comes to treating with reactionaries, Bright can evidently speak from first-hand experience.”)

Bright, of course, has used the fascists’ own tactic of generating a smokescreen by accusing his opponents of the very political crimes for which he himself is responsible. A piece on his New Statesman blog, entitled “Where the hard left and extreme right meet”, drew a bizarre parallel between the Holocaust denier Michele Renouf and Islamophobia Watch. In response we pointed to the BNP’s support for Bright’s views and argued that it was more a case of “where liberal Islamophobes and the extreme right meet”. The fascists’ endorsement of Bright’s writings in their latest anti-Muslim rant reinforces that point.

Exclusive: over 60 per cent of Britain’s Muslim schools have extremist links

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Damian_Thompson“Britain’s Muslim schools have been sharply criticised in a controversial draft report commissioned by a leading think tank which suggests that over 60 per cent of them are linked to potentially dangerous Islamic fundamentalists.

“An early version of the report, entitled When Worlds Collide, alleges that of the 133 Muslim primary and secondary schools it surveyed, 82 (61.6 per cent) have connections or direct affiliations to fundamentalists. The 133 schools are in the private sector but supposedly subject to Ofsted inspection. The report also claims that some of these schools teach ‘repugnant’ beliefs about the wickedness of Western society and Jews.

“The claims in the report, written by Denis MacEoin in response to a commission from Civitas, will provoke ritual cries of ‘Islamophobia’ from the Muslim Council of Britain and fellow travellers such as Koran [sic] Armstrong.”

Yes, it’s yet another thoughtful contribution to interfaith dialogue from Catholic Herald editor Damian Thompson.

It tells you all you need to know about MacEoin’s political agenda that he has chosen a blog run by a reactionary bigot like Thompson as the vehicle for promoting his forthcoming report.

But why should MacEoin leak the draft report before it is published? Thompson provides the answer:

“Civitas, however, is not prepared to endorse MacEoin’s 61.6 per cent figure, which will not appear in the published version of When Worlds Collide. A spokesman for Civitas explains: ‘We want to concentrate on claims that are absolutely robust, rather than complicated material, some of it in Arabic, that might unjustly damage someone’s reputation’.”

In other words, even an Islamophobic right-wing think-tank like Civitas regards MacEoin’s central claim, which forms the basis for Thompson’s “exclusive”, as indefensible.

But then, you might have thought that any self-respecting think-tank would steer well clear of MacEoin, given the problems over The Hijacking of British Islam, the notorious and now discredited report he put together for Policy Exchange.

Update:  Predictably, the British National Party are eagerly publicising MacEoin’s report, which of course provides a “respectable” cover for their own hate-filled propaganda against Muslim communities in the UK.

EU parliament prevents screening of Wilders’ Fitna

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The EU parliament prevented the showing on Wednesday of an anti-Islamic film made by far-right Dutch MP Geert Wilders, bringing cries of censorship from the British eurodeputy who organised the screening.

“The banning of this film is a direct attack on free speech,” said British MEP Gerard Batten, who had organised the event, though officials pointed out that parliamentary leaders had banned the film from being shown in their Strasbourg building back in March.

“A parliament that constantly talks of freedom, democracy and tolerance has shown once again that these are empty words when it does not agree with what is being said,” added Batten, a member of the eurosceptic UK Independence Party (UKIP).

Wilders, who was in the parliament building hoping to see the film in a screening room, said he intended to present it during European parliamentary elections next June. “We are in discussion with other parties,” he said, without giving details.

AFP, 17 December 2008

Although, of course, we do know from Wilders’ interview with Haaretz that one of the parties he is in discussion with is Vlaams Belang.