Muslim family banned from bus

Posted on July 19, 2008 by Bob Pitt

A bus company has apologised after a Muslim family of nine was stopped from boarding a bus to Leeds. The Alhajeri family were refused entry onto the Transdev Harrogate and District No 36 bus from Harewood to Leeds on Monday evening, because the mother and eldest daughters were wearing burkhas.

They had been on a family day out visiting the house on holiday from their home country of Kuwait. They had travelled by bus from Leeds in the morning, and had a valid return ticket to get back that evening. The driver told the family they were not allowed to board as the CCTV cameras would not be able to see the faces of the women, who were wearing a full veil.

Harrogate Transdev and District said this week that it seemed the driver had misinterpreted guidance about photo card bus passes, and apologised for any embarrassment to the family.

Managing director Dave Alexander said: “It seems that he has misinterpreted some guidance using bus passes and photo cards. For those that have paid a cash fare, that is clearly not an issue. This certainly wasn’t in any way malicious or intended to offend anybody. I think the driver’s explanation was a genuine one.”

He said that the bus company would be willing to issue a formal apology to the family, and that the company would be re-issuing guidance to all drivers in the next few days.

The family did manage to return to Leeds as the next 36 bus allowed them to board without any trouble.

Wetherby News, 18 July 2008

Agency pays damages to Yusuf Islam over sexism slur

Posted on July 18, 2008 by Bob Pitt

Former hit writer and chart topper Cat Stevens, now known as Yusuf Islam, today accepted “substantial” but undisclosed libel damages and a public apology at London’s High Court over an entertainment news agency slur.

Adam Tudor, the singer’s solicitor told top libel judge, Mr Justice David Eady, the piece at the centre of the complaint was published by World Entertainment News Network’s and was later used on Contactmusic.com, a website published by Contactmusic.com Ltd which is said to have 2.2 million page views a month. Contactmusic also apologised today and will pay part of the damages.

Tudor said the item appeared on 26 March last year under the headline: “Yusuf Islam Ignors Bare-Headed Women” and was reproduced on a number of websites including that of Contactmusic.

“The article suggested that Mr Islam, who is a Muslim, was so sexist and bigoted that he refused at an awards ceremony to speak to or even acknowledge any women who were not wearing a veil,” said Tudor. “It went on to suggest that Mr Islam’s manager had stated ‘Mr Islam doesn’t speak with women except his wife. Least of all if they don’t wear a headscarf. Things like that only happen via an intermediary’.”

Tudor continued: “As the defendants now accept, these allegations were entirely false. Mr Islam has never had any difficulties working with women, whether for religious or any other reasons. In his normal life, women feature among some of the most influential people in Mr Islam’s team. Furthermore, the statement attributed in the article to Mr Islam’s manager was simply never made.”

He said that the article had caused the pop star considerable embarrassment and distress particularly given that it had the effect not only of creating an utterly false impression of his attitude to women, but because it also cast serious aspersions, quite wrongly, on his religious faith.

The compensation he is to be paid be donated to charity, Small Kindness. He is also to receive his legal costs. For World Entertainment News and Contactmusic solicitor Marvin Simons said they apologised for the distress and embarrassment that had been caused as a result of the “false allegations.”

Press Gazette, 18 July 2008

Mosques increasingly not welcome

Posted on July 17, 2008 by Bob Pitt

Cologne mosque protest Europeans are increasingly lashing out at the construction of mosques in their cities as terrorism fears and continued immigration feed anti-Muslim sentiment across the continent.

The latest dispute is in Switzerland, which is planning a nationwide referendum to ban minarets on mosques. This month, Italy’s interior minister vowed to close a controversial mosque in Milan.

Some analysts call the mosque conflicts the manifestation of a growing fear that Muslims aren’t assimilating, don’t accept Western values and pose a threat to security. “It’s a visible symbol of anti-Muslim feelings in Europe,” says Danièle Joly, director of the Center for Research in Ethnic Relations at the University of Warwick in England. “It’s part of an Islamophobia. Europeans feel threatened.”

The disputes reflect unease with the estimated 18 million Muslims who constitute the continent’s second-biggest religion, living amid Western Europe’s predominantly Christian population of 400 million, Joly says. The clashes also represent a turnaround from the 1980s and ’90s, when construction of large mosques was accepted and even celebrated in many cities. “I think the tide has turned,” Joly says.

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French minister denounces burqa

Posted on July 16, 2008 by Bob Pitt

Amara and Sarkozy A Muslim member of the French government has backed a court’s decision to deny citizenship to a Moroccan woman who wears the burqa. Urban Affairs Minister Fadela Amara said she hoped last month’s ruling would “dissuade certain fanatics from imposing the burqa on their wives”.

“The burqa is a prison, it’s a straightjacket,” she told Le Parisien. “It is not a religious insignia but the insignia of a totalitarian political project that advocates inequality between the sexes and which is totally devoid of democracy.”

Ms Amara, who is also a prominent women’s rights campaigner, said she made no distinction between the veil and the burqa, describing both as symbols of oppression for women.

BBC News, 16 July 2008

Pensioner rips veil from Muslim woman’s face

Posted on July 15, 2008 by Bob Pitt

A pensioner ripped a veil from a Muslim woman in a South Tyneside supermarket. The 79-year-old approached the woman as she shopped in Asda, in Ocean Road, at around 11.45am yesterday.

She asked her to remove her veil and started to question her religion. When the 45-year-old refused to take off her veil, the pensioner ripped it from her face.

The pensioner, from South Shields, was detained in the store and police were called. She received a police caution for racial aggravated assault.

Shields Gazette, 15 July 2008

Is the burqa compatible with French nationality? Apparently not

Posted on July 11, 2008 by Bob Pitt

La burqa est-elle incompatible avec la nationalité française? Une Marocaine de 32 ans, mariée à un Français et mère de trois enfants nés en France, vient de se voir refuser la nationalité au motif qu’elle “a adopté, au nom d’une pratique radicale de sa religion, un comportement en société incompatible avec les valeurs essentielles de la communauté française, et notamment le principe d’égalité des sexes”.

Pour la première fois en France, le Conseil d’Etat, dans un arrêt du 27 juin, a pris en compte le niveau de pratique religieuse pour se prononcer sur la capacité d’assimilation d’une personne étrangère.

“Cette affaire montre que le droit est de plus en plus amené à se prononcer sur les conflits de valeurs que pose l’islam à la société”, constate Didier Leschi, ancien chef du bureau des cultes au ministère de l’intérieur, spécialiste de la laïcité.

Le Monde, 11 July 2008

Via Islam in Europe

Update: See also the Guardian, 12 July 2008 and the Independent, 12 July 2008

And the report has been taken up at the”left-wing” neocon blog Harry’s Place, where it has attracted the usual selection of thoughtful, humane comments. For example:

“It is the perogative of any Government to deny citizenship to immigrants if they feel they will not contribute to society.”

“Bravo France! Now you should put the icing on the cake and deport the entire family.”

“Why be a citizen of a country that you have no interest or knowledge of, but in fact live in complete alienation to?”

“… if I were a Muslim and didn’t want to work, I’d move to London, claim persecution and get benefits. It’s free money rammed down my throat. Not only that, but the native Britons won’t care a whit if I start saying that their country should be more like the country I ‘escaped’ from. In fact, even if I get a bunch of my friends to blow up a train and kill 50+ people, they will defend me, and maybe even give me a bigger house.”

“… the problem is not whether the woman wears the Burqa of her free will, but rather that her desire to be a devout Muslimah may eventually spill over as a desire to impose her norms on the host nation.”

“Judaism is not a proselytizing or supremacist religion while Islam is.”

“The burqa is the 21st century’s swastika armband.”

“The sad thing is the West has become so remiss – if not complacent – in defending its values. It’s a shame this sort of thing does not happen much more often.”

“Yes, the French are right; the UK should have done the same thing years ago.”

“Excellent news. The French judiciary has much more sence [sic] than ours! … citizenship is more than just a recognition of residency, it is membership of a community with a particular history and values. We have lost sight of this in Britain, as the Islamists are well aware.”

“There should be no Burqas in this continent or in this century. I shouldn’t even have heard of the word. Vive la France.”

“Truly devout and reclusive Muslim Women may be good breeding machines, but their contribution to society is at best doubtful. There is a good reason for keeping them out. A woman may breed an indefinite number of jihadis, whereas a man is hopefully only blowing himself up.”

“… the burqua is a reliable flag for strong mainstream Islamic views, which it is not hyperbole to describe as fascist; it’s really that simple.”

“Why on earth would this woman wish to be a French citizen? Surely it stands for so much that she opposes, especially women who think for themselves and live independent lives and flaunt their faces in public. Wouldn’t she be much happier in say, Saudi Arabia?”

“There is no reason to be, on an institutional level, tolerant of the very most intolerant people on Earth.”

Further update: For Yusuf Smith’s comments, see Indigo Jo Blogs, 13 July 2008

Racism row in Switzerland over minaret ban referendum

Posted on July 10, 2008 by Bob Pitt

SVP sheep poster Another racism row flared up in Switzerland after the country’s far-right party managed to trigger a referendum on banning minarets in the country.

The demand for a popular vote was driven by the nationalist Swiss People’s Party (SVP), which used an image of a white sheep kicking a black sheep off the Swiss flag to illustrate its anti-immigration policies in last year’s election campaign.

The SVP has a record of using the country’s system of direct democracy to provoke debate about immigration. This year it lost a referendum on moves to make it harder to obtain a Swiss passport.

The party said it had chosen minarets because they were “symbols of political-religious imperialism” rather than simply traditional architecture. Dominique Baettig, an SVP MP, said: “It is like the veil, it is a symbol of non-integration. We hope that this initiative sends a clear signal that we are calling a halt to the Islamisation of Switzerland. Our hard-won individual liberties are being eroded and that is not acceptable.”

Jasmin Hutter, vice-president of the party, added: “Many women, even socialists, signed this petition because not one Swiss woman can tolerate the way that Muslim men treat their wives.”

Times, 9 July 2008

The Islamisation of Brooklyn

Posted on July 9, 2008 by Bob Pitt

“I was Brooklyn bound – or so I thought. I took the subway to see a fellow alumna of New York’s High School of Music and Art (as today’s LaGuardia High School for the Arts was then called). I looked forward to the nostalgic reunion. I hadn’t been in NYC for ages, and catching up with an old classmate seemed an indispensable component of walking down memory lane.

“What’s more, Kathy still lives at the same address in the cozy middle-class neighborhood where I sometimes visited her way back then. It was common for the house-proud Irish to keep property in the family, and hence I’d soon reenter the two-story red-brick home in whose wood-paneled rec-room we occasionally whiled away hours.

“But when I climbed up the grimy station stairs and surveyed the street, I suspected that some supernatural time-and-space warp had transported me to Islamabad. This couldn’t be Brooklyn.

“Women strode attired in hijabs and male passersby sported all manner of Muslim headgear and long flowing tunics. Kathy met me at the train and astounded me by pointing out long kurta shirts as distinguished from a salwar kameez. She couldn’t help becoming an expert. She’s now a member of a fast-dwindling minority because ‘people are running away. We’re among the last holdouts of our generation. My kids have fled’.

“Pakistani and Bangladeshi groceries lined the main shopping drag, and everywhere stickers boldly beckoned: ‘Discover Jesus in the Koran’. An unremarkable low-slung building on the corner of Kathy’s block was now dominated by an oversized green sign identifying it as Masjid Nur al-Islam (the Light of Islam Mosque) and announcing that ‘only Allah is worthy of worship and Muhammad is his LAST prophet’. Here too Christians were urged to ‘turn to the Koran’ if they were ‘genuinely faithful to Jesus’.

“It wasn’t hard to identify the remaining non-Muslim residences. Kathy’s was typical. A huge American flag fluttered demonstratively in the manicured front yard, accompanied by a large cross on the door and an assortment of patriotic/jingoistic banners.‘We’re besieged,” she explained. ‘Making a statement is about all we can do. They aren’t delighted to see our flag wave. This is enemy territory’.”

Sarah Honig in the Jerusalem Post, 7 July 2008

Study suggests ‘turban effect’ as a source of Islamophobia

Posted on June 29, 2008 by Bob Pitt

A Muslim-style turban is perceived as a threat, according to a new study, even by people who don’t realize they hold the prejudice, dubbed “the turban effect” by researchers. Research volunteers played a computer game that showed apartment balconies on which different figures appeared, some wearing Muslim-style turbans or hijabs and others bare-headed. They were told to shoot at the targets carrying guns and spare those who were unarmed, with points awarded accordingly.

People were much more likely to shoot Muslim-looking characters – men or women – even if they were carrying an innocent item instead of a weapon, the researchers found. “Whether they’re holding a steel coffee mug or a gun, people are just more likely to shoot at someone who is wearing a turban,” says author Christian Unkelbach, a visiting scholar at Australia’s University of New South Wales. “Just putting on this piece of clothing changes people’s behaviour.”

Unkelbach largely blames one-sided media portrayals for the bias.

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Spanish minister under fire for criticizing Islamic headscarf

Posted on June 26, 2008 by Bob Pitt

Bibiano Aido Spain’s Equality Minister Bibiana Aido has angered Muslims by criticizing the Islamic headscarf, alleging that it undermines the rights of women, media reported Thursday. Muslim men could dress in Western clothes, Aido said, asking why women wearing loose clothes and headscarves could not do the same.

“Not all cultural practices must be protected and respected,” she said, expressing her opposition to practices “violating human rights and promoting inequality” between the sexes.

Muslim women “wear the veil because they feel like it,” representatives of Spain’s Muslim community responded, advising the minister “not to talk about what she does not know about.”

The Koran advised both men and women to dress modestly, said Mansur Escudero, president of the Islamic Board.

Earth Times, 26 June 2008

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