Dutch Parliamentarian Geert screened his controversial film Fitna in Jerusalem on Sunday, calling on Europe to restrict immigration “from backward Islamic countries” and describing Islam as a totalitarian ideology “full of hate, violence and submission.”
“Europe is in the process of ‘Islamization.’ We need to fight it,” Wilders said. “We have to win the war against Islam. If we don’t … we will lose our cultural identity, our rule of law, our liberties and our freedom.”
Violence against Muslims in the Netherlands rose considerably last year, according to the latest monitor on racism and extremism published by Leiden University and the Anne Frank Foundation on Wednesday.
The number of violent incidents against Muslims rose to 82 in 2007, from 62 in the preceding year. However the total number of racist attacks last year was down to 187, according to the 306-page report.
The Anne Frank Foundation says anti-Muslim sentiment has grown “significantly” in the last year and public opinion about Muslims has become more negative.
The researchers also point to the stream of anti-Muslim comments by the populist PVV party, led by the controversial member of parliament Geert Wilders. This, and the massive attention they are given in the media, has contributed to Islam phobia in the Netherlands, the foundation says.
The fact that the justice department decided not to prosecute those who made these anti-Muslim statements also played a role, say researchers Jaap van Donselaar and Peter Rodrigues.
The researchers also conclude that the PVV can be labelled as an extreme-right group because of, for example, its dislike of “strangers” and the political establishment and its tendency towards authoritarianism. The party also attracts more radical right-wing extremists.
Wilders is furious with the report. “They have gone completely mad. It is an insult to the PVV and our voters,” he told ANP news agency.
The arrival of the PVV has played a major part in changing the extreme-right climate in the country, according to the report. And the willingness of extreme right groups to take action has grown significantly. The number of demonstrations organised by extreme right-wing group is expected to rise to 20 this year from 12 in 2007.
See also “Islamophobia on the rise” on the website of the Anne Frank Museum.
It’s also worth noting that Wilders’ ally Ehsan Jami, who has made his own contribution to the rise of Islamophobia in the Netherlands, has just released his film Interview with Mohammed.
The graves of as many as 500 Muslim war veterans have been vandalised in northern France, in an attack President Nicolas Sarkozy said was “repugnant”.
Gravestones were daubed with swastikas and letters spelling out anti-Islamic slogans at France’s biggest military graveyard near Arras in the north-east.
The attack took place on the eve of Islam’s Eid al-Adha festival, when Muslims visit the graves of loved ones. Dozens of police searched the graveyard on Monday as an investigation began. It is the third time the Muslim sector of the Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery has been attacked.
President Sarkozy called the latest incident “abject and revolting” and said it was “the expression of a repugnant racism directed against the Muslim community of France”.
The cemetery holds the graves of tens of thousands of soldiers killed in World War I, including those of 576 Muslims.
The authorities estimated that about 500 graves were damaged. Vandals had sprayed letters on the tombstones which, when linked together, formed anti-Islamic insults, the French news agency AFP said.
The local prosecutor says the damage resembles another act of vandalism in April, for which two young men with neo-Nazi sympathies were later jailed. One of them had already been jailed for a previous attack on Muslim graves at the cemetery.
Police say security has been reinforced but the site remains difficult to guard.
Greenwood Junior School sent out a letter to parents saying the three-day festival of Eid al-Adha, which takes place between December 8 and 11, meant that Muslim children would be off school.
That meant planning for the traditional nativity play were shelved because the school felt it would be too difficult to run both celebrations side by side.
The move has left parents furious. Janette Lynch, whose seven-year-old son Keanu attends the school, in Sneinton, Nottingham, said: “The head has a whole year to plan for Eid and so she should be able to plan for both religious festivals. I have never heard of this at a school. It is the first year my son has been there and a lot of the mums like me were really looking forward to seeing the children in the nativity.”
Daily Telegraph, 3 December 2008
See also the Daily Mail, 4 December 2008
Yes, it’s another of those seasonal “Christmas banned because of Muslims” stories. However, according to a Press Association report, the performance has not in fact been cancelled but only postponed till January – and it’s not a nativity play but a pantomine (Cinderella, since you ask). A spokeswoman for Nottingham City Council is quoted as saying that in December the school will be staging “a range of events, including a Christmas carol concert and Eid celebrations”.
Predictably, the story has been seized on by the BNP. Under the headline “Nottingham school cancels Christmas to make way for Islam“, the fascists declare that “such outrages will inevitably progress from the exception to the norm, if Britain fails to embrace the BNP and continues its present headlong plunge into the abyss”.
The Nottingham Evening Post reports that Greenwood Junior School has received phone calls from BNP members accusing the school of responsibility for the “erosion of Christian values”. In other words, we have here yet another example of the mainstream media’s biased and inaccurate reporting giving a boost to the far right.
Inspector Andy Townsend, the local area commander, is quoted as saying: “There have been a lot of angry people phoning the school, some of whom are claiming to be from the BNP. Other agencies including the national press have contacted the school, including one journalist pretending to be a social worker. There’s also been vans pulling up and people taking pictures. We are dealing with the potential for disorder. No actual criminal acts have been committed but we are increasing patrols in the area around the school to keep the peace.”
Update: Needless to say, this distorted report has spread across the right-wing blogosphere. Here is a characteristic comment, by Phyllis Chesler: “Muslim fanatics are also demographically populating beachheads deep in the West where they are also demanding that their holidays be recognized in a more paramount way than Christian holidays are. Just yesterday, in England, a Nativity play was cancelled at a primary school because it interfered with the Muslim celebration of Eid.”
“To his admirers, Mr. Wilders is a champion of Western values on a continent that has lost confidence in them. To his detractors, he is an anti-Islamic provocateur. Both sides have a point.”
The Wall Street Journal carries a “balanced” appraisal of the Dutch far-right anti-Muslim racist Geert Wilders. The most the WSJ is prepared to concede is that Wilders’ views on Islam are “problematic”.
“In Britain, Muslims currently make up 5% of the population and that total is increasing every year.
“The Islamic lobby here, as in India, is pushing, pushing all the time for more self-determination and our weak-kneed Government gives in every time. To avoid what is happening in India we need to stem the growth of Islam in our country NOW.
“We need to stop all immigration into Britain. Send all illegal immigrants back to their own countries. Send all migrant workers home. Oppose all planning applications for new mosques, conversions to mosques and expansion to existing mosques.
“But most importantly, we must encourage through financial incentives Muslims living in Britain legally, to move to an Islamic country where they will be able to celebrate their religion with other Muslims. Britain is a Christian country and if we wish to keep it that way and for our people to be able to live free from fear of attack from within, then we must take steps now to safeguard our future.”
“As one who exchanged blows rather than opinions with the National Front in the 1980s, it gives me no pleasure to say this. But we ought to uphold the right of the British National Party to express its views, however vile, after Merseyside Police arrested 13 of its members for distributing leaflets. I’m afraid that free speech means freedom for fools and scumbags, too.
“The BNP pamphlet doled out in Liverpool was called Racism Cuts Both Ways. You can see it on its website. It argues that everybody knows racial hatred is wrong, but that few realise that ‘the vast majority of the real racism that scars Britain involves white victims from the indigenous community’.
“It lays the blame for much of this on ‘relentless’ discrimination against British natives by ‘an institutionally hostile ruling class’ but also claims that ‘our people are the silent victims of an epidemic of racist violence, sexual exploitation and murder’ by Muslims and blacks.
“… racism is not a crime. And while police chiefs may judge ‘racist content’ to be offensive, that does not make it a criminal offence. It should not be the job of the police or the courts to outlaw any ‘ism’, idea or ideology.
“Incitement to racial or religious hatred is a crime, but difficult to prove (the BNP’s leader, Nick Griffin, was found not guilty in 2006). And rightly so. We should draw a clear line between words and violent deeds. The old playground saw about sticks and stones seems a more grown-up guide than current policy. That leaflet is arguably guilty of incitement to elect BNP councillors….
“For this old libertarian Marxist, state action against a political party, however odious, is nothing to cheer.”
Mick Hume in the Times, 25 November 2008
Twelve British National Party activists have been arrested in Liverpool on suspicion of handing out racist leaflets claiming that “our people” are experiencing an “epidemic of racist violence, sexual exploitation and murder” by Muslims.
The leaflet alleges the “average racist killer” is 40 times more likely to be from an ethnic minority than “a native Brit”; the Muslim community condones paedophilia; and the English are “relentlessly discriminated against by an institutionally hostile ruling class”. One passage reads: “Wherever there are large numbers of young Muslim men, groups team up to lure girls – often as young as 12 or 13 – into a nightmare world of sexual abuse, rape, beatings, drug addiction and prostitution.”
The 12 men, aged from 19 to 70 and from Liverpool, Wirral, Knowsley and St Helens, were arrested in the city centre at 12.50pm on Saturday.
The leaflet, “Racism Cuts Both Ways”, is also available on the BNP’s website [pdf here]. Anti-racism campaigners are preparing to submit a UK-wide complaint to the Metropolitan Police.
Assistant Chief Constable Colin Matthews of Merseyside Police said the arrests were made following the “distribution of leaflets … which officers believe to contain racist content”. He added: “Merseyside Police condemns racism and will take prompt action to support all our communities.”
The BNP intends to capitalise on the arrests. Simon Darby, a party spokesman, said it planned a “huge demonstration” in Liverpool. “It’s a mystery, you tell me what you think is criminal or inciting about it,” he said. “I don’t think Merseyside Police have any idea what they have done. It’s a knee-jerk reaction.” Asked if the party stood by the leaflet, Mr Darby said: “Obviously we do otherwise we wouldn’t have put it out.”
BNP response here.
See also the earlier arrest of BNP members in Manchester.
Writing in the Sunday Times, Douglas Murray plugs his recent pamphlet Victims of Intimidation published by the right-wing think-tank, the laughably misnamed Centre for Social Cohesion.
And who are the so-called “moderate Muslim voices” whom Murray says governments should do more to support as an alternative to “radicals and radical-affiliated groups”? Well, here’s an example:
“Ehsan Jami, 23, the Dutch Labour party politician and founder of the Central Committee for Ex-Muslims, was repeatedly assaulted before being guarded by the Dutch police. He now requires constant protection but his own political party, instead of assisting his right to speak out about what he saw in the religion he was born into, tried to make him tone down his public statements about the treatment of women, apostates and homosexuals within Islam. Those like Jami who have left Islam are often treated, by our governments and broadcasters as much as by the Muslim communities, as though they are out of the discussion.”
First of all, there is no evidence that Jami was ever a practising Muslim, so it is difficult to see how he could have “left Islam”. He didn’t even study the Qur’an until after 9/11, and having done so he concluded that Islam provides the ideological inspiration for terrorism and violence. This has been the theme of his statements ever since. As for Jami’s so-called “Committee for Ex-Muslims”, it fell apart even before its official launch meeting because the co-founder of the organisation, Loubna Berrada, broke with Jami over his denunciations of Islam, and the Committee is now defunct.
Nor is Jami a “Dutch Labour party politician”. He was expelled by the PvdA after he co-authored an Islamophobic article with the Dutch far-right racist Geert Wilders which warned: “If we do not act now against the far-reaching Islamisation of the Netherlands, then the 1930s will be revived. The only difference is that back then the danger came from Adolf Hitler, while today it comes from Mohammed.”
This is not to excuse acts of violence, even against provocateurs like Jami, but Murray’s suggestion that Ehsan Jami is an example of the “Muslim reformers” with whom governments should seek to engage perfectly illustrates the ignorance and dishonesty of his pamphlet.
And while we’re on the subject of Jami, he was in the UK last month to attend a conference organised by the fraudulent “Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain”, a front organisation for the Islamophobic far-left sect the Worker-Communist Party of Iran.
Recently David Toube of Harry’s Place posted an article calling for a ban on Yasir Qadhi entering the UK, on the basis that he had made hostile comments about Shias. But did Toube raise any objections to Jami being allowed into the country? Of course he didn’t. As in Murray’s case, Toube’s pious expressions of concern for the welfare of minorities within the Muslim community are just a smokescreen for his own efforts to incite hostility towards Muslims and their representative organisations.
“I have received, unsolicited, from the leader of the British National Party, a 12-page document supposedly setting out details of crimes against whites committed by other ethnic groups.
“One intended effect will be to increase racism in general and Islamophobia, in particular. When the document describes gang rape and teenage grooming, it says: ‘One community, however, is different. Wherever there are large numbers of young Muslim men, groups of them team up to lure girls – often as young as twelve or thirteen – into a nightmare world of sexual abuse, rape, beatings, drug addiction and prostitution … the Muslim sex gangs … never target girls from their own community.’ The pamphlet also claims that there is a refusal by ‘Muslim leaders to condemn what is going on’.
“To suggest that gang rape is a normal feature of Muslim male life and that Muslim leaders tolerate it, is not only untrue, but is designed to fan the flames of racial and religious hatred. It is certainly immoral and ought to merit criminal prosecution as well.”
Letter from Bruce Kent in the Times, 21 November 2008