Fascists propose to ‘protect Britain from Islamic terror’

“Protecting Britain from Islamic terror isn’t rocket science”, the BNP announces, “but it will take the courage to throw political correctness where it belongs – in the litter-bin of history. And the day when that happens is getting closer. In the days since the start of the terror campaign, BNP activists all over Britain have been working harder than ever to spread the message that the Muslim terror threat has its roots in bad political decisions made by successive Labour and Tory governments. Now is the time to make people understand that the only chance they have of a return to safety and security is to get rid of the politicians who have brought us ‘diversity’ and death.”

Proposals include ethnic profiling of suspects, an instant halt to immigration from Muslim countries, banning the veil (“What is the point of having CCTV cameras if terrorists can disguise themselves as the wives of Muslim fundamentalists and prowl our streets undetected behind veils and hoods?”), deporting illegal migrants, and sacking all Muslims “studying chemistry, biology and computer communications in our universities, or working in jobs giving them access to installations such as water treatment plants”.

BNP news article, 26 July 2005

Lords to rule on Muslim clothes

The case of a girl excluded from school for wearing Muslim dress is set to be heard in the House of Lords. Shabina Begum, 16, won a landmark ruling in March when the appeal court upheld her right to wear the jilbab, which leaves only the hands and eyes exposed. The court ruled that the ban breached human rights. The school, Denbigh High in Luton, Bedfordshire, has now won leave to take the case to the Lords and the governors are due to decide within the next few days whether to go ahead. The case could set a precedent for schools and Muslim children across Britain.

Sunday Times, 24 July 2005

‘The real suicide bomb is multiculturalism’ says Mark Steyn

“It was the Prime Minister’s wife, you’ll recall, who last year won a famous court victory for Shabina Begum, as a result of which schools across the land must now permit students to wear the full ‘jilbab’ – ie, Muslim garb that covers the entire body except the eyes and hands. Ms Booth hailed this as ‘a victory for all Muslims who wish to preserve their identity and values despite prejudice and bigotry’. It seems almost too banal to observe that such an extreme preservation of Miss Begum’s Muslim identity must perforce be at the expense of any British identity…. Is it ‘bigoted’ to argue that the jilbab is a barrier to acquiring the common culture necessary to any functioning society?”

Mark Steyn takes up the apparently endless right-wing refrain that the London bombings were due to multiculturalism and the failure to impose a uniform “British” (read: white majority) culture on all citizens.

Daily Telegraph, 19 July 2005

Drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay speaks out

HitchensChristopher Hitchens joins in the attack on Galloway: “By George Galloway’s logic, British squaddies in Iraq are the root cause of dead bodies at home. How can anyone bear to be so wicked and stupid? How can anyone bear to act as a megaphone for psychotic killers?”

So, if the atrocities weren’t motivated by the British government’s participation in Bush’s wars of imperialist aggression, what grievances did lie behind them? Christopher explains:

“The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won’t abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art…. All of these have been proclaimed as a licence to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way.”

Daily Mirror, 8 July 2005

Muslim leaders join condemnation

Muslim leaders have condemned the terror attacks on London and called for full co-operation with police.
Muslim Council of Britain spokesman Inayat Bunglawala called on worshippers to pray for victims at Friday prayers.

And Ahmed Sheikh, president of the Muslim Association of Britain, said he feared a backlash and added that the Muslim community would feel less safe. He warned that Muslims, especially women in headscarves, might fall prey to vigilante attacks..

BBC News, 7 July 2005

See also Islam Online, 7 July 2005

Muslim woman sues real estate company, alleges discrimination

scarfsuit9.jpgAn Orlando Muslim woman is suing a Florida real estate company for religious discrimination after being told she could not wear a head scarf and long sleeves at work.

Danine Hammond, 27, said the office manager of Chapel Trace Apartments in east Orange County told her she couldn’t wear her hijab, a head scarf donned by some Muslim women.

Hammond is suing the Miami-based Housing Trust Management Co., which owns the complex, under Florida’s Civil Rights Act and requesting that the company compensate her for lost pay and benefits, punitive and compensatory damages, and legal fees, according to the lawsuit.

“I feel I have the right to work here in the U.S., and I shouldn’t have to compromise my religion,” Hammond said during a news conference Wednesday at the entrance to the complex, where she lives.

Orlando Sentinel, 23 June 2005


Robert Spencer offers this as an example of the “clash of civilizations”.

Dhimmi Watch, 1 July 2005

Over at Militant Islam Monitor, they’re convinced that it’s another CAIR-inspired plot to destroy western society.

Militant Islam Monitor, 24 June 2005

Labour left fails to stand up for right to incite anti-Muslim hatred, AWL complains

“Outlawing incitement to hatred on the basis of religious belief, as opposed to ethnicity, is a major attack on freedom of speech. It means extending the blasphemy laws which still, at least in theory, protect Anglican Christianity from rational public debate, to shield all religions with authoritarian impartiality.

“The bill is partly a cynical pitch to win back Muslim voters outraged by Blair’s warmongering and erosion of civil liberties (like the expansion of state funding for faith schools, and defence of the hijab) and partly the brainchild of a Prime Minister with a lot of respect for religious superstition and very little for human rights.

“So why did the left of the Parliamentary Labour Party, whose leaders have boasted that they will be ‘setting the agenda’ for this Parliament, fail to rebel?

“Unfortunately, on this issue as on many others, these MPs are highly representative of a left which is increasingly losing its political bearings. The ‘religious hatred’ law has elicited not a squeak of protest from the trade union movement; meanwhile the National Union of Students, on the initiative of the SWP and their Stalinist friends Socialist Action, has positively endorsed new Labour’s assault on respect for rational thinking and free speech.”

Sacha Ismael of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and Houzan Mahmoud of the Worker Communist Party of Iraq provide us with a good illustration of which section of the left has really lost its bearings. The section of the left that supports the right to incite hatred against Muslims and sneers at the defence of the right to wear the hijab.

Solidarity, 23 June 2005

We need this law to fight hatred

We need this law to fight hatred

By Sadiq Khan, MP for Tooting

Evening Standard, 21 June 2005

It is, if its critics are to believed, a grievous threat both to our freedom of speech and to the nation’s cherished sense of humour. As such, the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, which has its second reading in Parliament today, has been derided as dangerous, politically cynical, and most of all, as unnecessary. So why do so few of my fellow Muslims see it that way?

Debating the Bill, Muslims tend to think not of vicar jokes but of incidents like one in a charity shop in Shepherd’s Bush recently, where a white, British Muslim woman was told by another customer: “You may be English, but you married a f***ing Muslim.”

We think not about alleged political calculations, but about the dangers faced, for example, by one woman recently attacked in the street in north-west London while wearing Muslim dress. She was warned sympathetically by the nurse who treated her injuries: “You have to take off this scarf. Every month we get several cases like you who come for treatment.”

Indeed Muslims might tend to question the extent of freedom of speech when simply going out dressed recognisably as a Muslim can invite assault. Many reported cases involve Muslim women having their headscarves forcibly pulled off and or having alcohol thrown at them. In one incident, a schoolgirl had her headscarf pulled off by a parent of another child at the school gates, to the sound of laughter from those watching.

All these incidents happened because these Londoners were Muslims. It was not about the colour of their skin but the religion they follow.

The Racial and Religious Hatred Bill is not about gagging comedians or curbing criticism of any religion. It is about giving Muslims and other followers of religions the same protection from hate crimes as, for example, black people.

Continue reading

‘We’ oppose an anti-incitement law, says Will Hutton

willhutton“Being a Muslim, especially a Muslim woman, in Britain is for many a dispiriting and occasionally terrifying experience. The society that prides itself on tolerance has lost its bearings over Islam. On the streets, the prejudice that Islam is irrationally and murderously violent and menacingly foreign has spawned a subculture of hatred and abuse. If you are a woman in a hijab, being jeered at, even spat at, is routine. Many never venture from their houses.

“This is fertile ground for widespread racism and where the law is currently uncertain. Harassment and abuse are certainly illegal, but the threshold that incurs legal action is very high; equally illegal is the expression of hatred, or views that might incite hatred, towards a group or individual for their race.

“But the woman in a hijab could be African, Asian or Middle Eastern. It is not her race that makes her the object of hatred; it is her religious belief and culture that require her to dress in such a conspicuously different way and make her part of the hated group. The law, as currently framed, offers her no systematic protection, and no explicit penalty for a political party, say the BNP, that chooses to make such hatred a central plank of its electoral pitch.”

Thus Will Hutton in the Observer, 19 June 2005

Continue reading