Category Archives: Resisting Islamophobia

Police prepare for EDL protest in Swindon

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The chief of Wiltshire Police says the force is prepared to deal with a protest march planned by the far right English Defence League next month. Chief Constable Brian Moore says he had to respect the right of people to protest peacefully and hoped the event would not give rise to violence.

The English Defence League, an anti-Muslim group formed in 2009, says on its website that it is planning a day of protests in Swindon, Preston and the West Midlands on November 20. It is feared the EDL might be planning to hold the march in Manchester Road, one of the most multi-cultural areas of town and very close to the site of a proposed new mosque.

South West Trades Union Council regional secretary Nigel Costley said the TUC was joining with community and campaign groups to call for a ban of the EDL if rumours of the protest march in the town proved to be true.

He said: “The EDL is a toxic mix of right-wing racists and football hooligans. They pick areas with Asian communities to stir violent reactions. Plans for a new mosque on Manchester Road in Swindon will be exploited by the EDL to push their anti-Islamic views.”

Swindon Advertiser, 24 October 2010

Geller, the Tea Party and Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A report has been released by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People entitled Tea Party Nationalism, exposing the links between the Tea Party movement and white supremacists, anti-immigration groups, “birthers” and other extremists. It contains a section headed “Pamela Geller and Islamophobia” which examines the role of the Atlas Shrugs blogger in promoting anti-Muslim bigotry in assocation with the Tea Party. We reproduce it here.

Pamela Geller and Islamophobia

From the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights report Tea Party Nationalism

The term “Islamophobia” was defined in a 1997 Runnymede Trust Report as “unfounded hostility towards Muslims, and therefore fear or dislike of all or most Muslims.” Among the characteristic elements of Islamophobia highlighted in the report:

Islam is monolithic and cannot adapt to new realities; Islam does not share common values with other major faiths; Islam as a religion is inferior to the West; It is archaic, barbaric, and irrational; Islam is a religion of violence and supports terrorism; and Islam is a violent political ideology.

In fact, alongside racism, anti-Semitism, and nativism, the elements of Islamophobia have found their way into the Tea Party Movement. Tea Party leaders and members have employed anti-Muslim language. With strong Tea Party ties, Pamela Geller stands out in this regard.

As noted earlier, Geller was a featured speaker at a Tea Party Patriots-sponsored convention in Gatlinburg, Tennessee in May. Despite weeks of pressure from community groups who raised concerns about Geller’s history of Islamophobia, the convention organizers refused to reconsider their invitation to Geller.

Geller also spoke at the anti-immigrant rally in Arizona sponsored by Tea Party Nation in August 2010. She is expected to be speaking at the Tea Party Nation Unity Convention in Las Vegas in October.

Geller maintains a tight-knit trio of organizational fronts: Atlas Shrugs, SIOA (Stop Islamization of America), and the Freedom Defense Initiative. All are listed as official “partner” organizations of the ResistNet Tea Party faction. She has appeared on the ResistNet radio program that was heavily promoted by ResistNet leader Darla Dawald.

With leaders like Geller, it is not surprising to find language on a ResistNet Tea Party website that denigrates an entire grouping of people because of their faith. “We are at a point of having to take a stand against all Muslims. There is no good or bad Muslim. There is [sic] only Muslims and they are embedded in our government, military and other offices… What more must we wait for to take back this country of ours…”

Geller, like many Tea Partiers is also a birther. In addition to claiming that Obama’s birth certificate is a “forgery,” she has called President Obama a “third worlder and a coward” who’s “appeas[ing] his Islamic overlords.” She has perpetuated the lie that President Obama is Muslim.

Geller has referred to Obama as “The Muslim president.” Media Matters for America documented that Geller’s blog contains 267 posts tagged, “Muslim in the White House?” She’s gone as far as to seriously make the argument that Barack Obama is the illegitimate childof Malcolm X.

Among the many inflammatory statements Geller has posted on her blog, Atlas Shrugs, she has written that: “It is increasingly clear that the most divisive President in history is itching for a civil war. And at the rate he is going, he is going to get one – if he continues to ignore the will of the American people.”

Annual anti-GPU witch-hunt continues

Posted on by Bob Pitt

GPU 2010Once again we’re faced with the annual right-wing campaign against the Global Peace and Unity event, which takes place this weekend at the ExCeL centre in London.

There has been a last-minute push by the usual bunch of Islamophobes to pressure government ministers into boycotting the event. An appeal to that effect by Paul Goodman at ConservativeHome has unsurprisingly been endorsed by Harry’s Place. Given the role of the latter blog in witch-hunting the likes ofNew Statesman political editor Mehdi Hasan as Muslim extremists, you might have thought their support would hardly help Goodman’s case.

In that connection, note the Harry’s Place discussion thread where Ajmal Masroor of all people is denounced as an extremist on the grounds that he is “a presenter on the Islam Channel: a Muslim Brotherhood dominated organisation, whose CEO, Mohammed Ali Harrath is a convicted terrorist” and is accused of placing himself outside “mainstream politics” because he refuses to join Harry’s Place in witch-hunting Muslim organisations.

Meanwhile, on the discussion thread at ConservativeHome, Tory London Assembly member Andrew Boff comments: “Hey Paul – You should recruit this guy – he doesn’t like the GPU either.” And Boff provides a link to this anti-GPU rant at IslamicTube.

If the two parties that make up the coalition government really want to damage their reputation among Muslim communities across the UK, they really couldn’t do much better than succumb to this sort of hardline right-wing campaign and withdraw speakers from the GPU.

Lutfur Rahman elected Mayor of Tower Hamlets

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Lutfur_RahmanA former leader of Tower Hamlets Council who was dumped by Labour then stood as an independent has been voted in as the borough’s new mayor. Lutfur Rahman secured 51.76% of the vote to become the east London borough’s first directly elected mayor.

Former council leader Mr Rahman was Labour’s initial candidate. But when he was rebuffed by the party he announced he would stand as an independent with several Labour councillors’ backing.

Thursday’s poll was the first ever ballot for a directly-elected mayor in Tower Hamlets, with a 25.6% turnout.

Labour’s London mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone has risked internal discipline by campaigning for Mr Rahman against the party’s new candidate, Helal Abbas. On Monday, he was seen on the streets of Tower Hamlets campaigning with Mr Rahman.

Mr Livingstone called the deselection of Mr Rahman an “utterly unacceptable” move by Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee (NEC) which “ignored the views of the local electorate”.

He insisted however that he backed the official candidate and was simply trying to encourage voters to put the independent down as their second choice in an effort to keep out the Conservatives.

Labour’s Mr Abbas launched a bitter attack on Mr Rahman, accusing him of being “in the gutter”. “This is a sad night for those of us who want to build a better future and a united Tower Hamlets. Lutfur Rahman has won tonight but not as he wanted, as the Labour candidate,” he said in a statement.

“Thankfully, Labour’s ruling National Executive had the backbone to stop him from being the Labour candidate. We may have lost tonight, but at least the Labour Party has clean hands.”

Votes were as follows:

  • Helal Uddin Abbas, Labour Party – 11,254
  • Alan Duffell, Green Party – 2,300
  • John David Macleod Griffiths, Liberal Democrats – 2,800
  • Neil Anthony King, Conservative Party – 5,348
  • Lutfur Rahman, Independent – 23,283

BBC News, 22 October 2010

See also Dave Hill’s London Blog, 22 October 2010

So Andrew Gilligan’s contemptible witch-hunting was all in vain. Needless to say, he is not happy.

Update:  And now Gilligan has posted a transcript of his Channel 4 documentary “Britain’s Islamic Republic” on his Torygraph blog. Give it a rest Andrew. You spent all that time and effort trying to stitch up the IFE and turn public opinion against Lutfur Rahman – and you lost.

NPR fires Juan Williams over Muslim remarks

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Juan WilliamsUS broadcaster National Public Radio has fired news analyst Juan Williams for saying on Fox News that he gets nervous if he sees Muslims on a plane.

Williams, who has written several books on the US civil rights movement, made the remarks last week on chat show The O’Reilly Factor.

NPR said in a statement that Williams’s contract had been ended on Wednesday.

Fox News later signed Williams up as a contributor on a multi-year contract, reportedly worth $2m (£1.3m).

In a discussion on Muslims and 9/11 on the O’Reilly Factor, outspoken conservative presenter Bill O’Reilly said: “The cold truth is that in the world today jihad, aided and abetted by some Muslim nations, is the biggest threat on the planet.”

Williams said he concurred with O’Reilly.

“I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country,” Williams replied. “But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations said before Mr Williams was sacked that such commentary from a journalist about other racial, ethnic or religious minority groups would not be tolerated.

In its statement, NPR said Mr Williams’s comments “were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR”.

Mr Williams has also served as a reporter and columnist for the Washington Post.

Later on Thursday, Fox News chief Roger Ailes offered Williams a deal to appear on Fox programmes and to write for FoxNews.com.

“Juan has been a staunch defender of liberal viewpoints since his tenure began at Fox News in 1997,” Mr Ailes said in a statement, according to the Los Angeles Times, with a reference to National Public Radio. “He’s an honest man whose freedom of speech is protected by Fox News on a daily basis.”

BBC News, 21 October 2010

Muslim woman fired for wearing headscarf is reinstated

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Muslim saleswoman from Philadelphia, who was fired from her job for refusing to remove her religious head scarf, was reinstated Tuesday and will be reimbursed for her lost wages.

Khadijah Campbell, 23, moved to Dover, Del., when her husband was accepted to graduate school. On Oct. 6, she filled out an application at the Dover store of Bare Feet Shoes, the Montgomery County-based retailer. She interviewed wearing her hijab and was hired on the spot, she said.

On Oct. 7, her first day of work, a district manager visited the Dover store and ordered her to remove the scarf or work in the store’s stockroom. She told the manager that she wore the scarf for religious reasons. He told her the chain did not allow anyone to display their religion and then dismissed her in front of the other workers, said Moein Khawaja, executive director for the Pennsylvania chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

On Monday, CAIR filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. On Tuesday, Campbell was reinstated and the district manager who fired her was suspended, Khawaja said. Though the store offered her the job back, Campbell said she would not be returning.

“I normally have tough skin, but I’m very sensitive when it comes to my religion. The whole thing was very embarrassing,” Campbell said. “This is America, not a third-world country.” She said she would continue looking for work. “It’s back to square 1,” she said.

Philadelphia Inquirer, 20 October 2010

Foreign occupation, not ‘Islamic fundamentalism’, causes suicide bombings

Posted on by Bob Pitt

For nearly a decade, Americans have been waging a long war against terrorism without much serious public debate about what is truly motivating terrorists to kill them….

A simple narrative was readily available, and a powerful conventional wisdom began to exert its grip. Because the 9/11 hijackers were all Muslims, it was easy to presume that Islamic fundamentalism was the central motivating force driving the 19 hijackers to kill themselves in order to kill Americans. Within weeks after the 9/11 attacks, surveys of American attitudes show that this presumption was fast congealing into a hard reality in the public mind. Americans immediately wondered, “Why do they hate us?” and almost as immediately came to the conclusion that it was because of “who we are, not what we do.” As President George W. Bush said in his first address to Congress after the 9/11 attacks: “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

Thus was unleashed the “war on terror.”

The narrative of Islamic fundamentalism did more than explain why America was attacked and encourage war against Iraq. It also pointed toward a simple, grand solution. If Islamic fundamentalism was driving the threat and if its roots grew from the culture of the Arab world, then America had a clear mission: To transform Arab societies – with Western political institutions and social norms as the ultimate antidote to the virus of Islamic extremism….

There’s just one problem: We now know that this narrative is not true.

New research provides strong evidence that suicide terrorism such as that of 9/11 is particularly sensitive to foreign military occupation, and not Islamic fundamentalism or any ideology independent of this crucial circumstance. Although this pattern began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, a wealth of new data presents a powerful picture.

More than 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation, according to extensive research that we conducted at the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Terrorism, where we examined every one of the over 2,200 suicide attacks across the world from 1980 to the present day. As the United States has occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, which have a combined population of about 60 million, total suicide attacks worldwide have risen dramatically – from about 300 from 1980 to 2003, to 1,800 from 2004 to 2009. Further, over 90 percent of suicide attacks worldwide are now anti-American. The vast majority of suicide terrorists hail from the local region threatened by foreign troops, which is why 90 percent of suicide attackers in Afghanistan are Afghans….

The United States has been great in large part because it respects understanding and discussion of important ideas and concepts, and because it is free to change course. Intelligent decisions require putting all the facts before us and considering new approaches. The first step is recognizing that occupations in the Muslim world don’t make Americans any safer — in fact, they are at the heart of the problem.

Robert Pape in Foreign Policy, 18 October 2010