Category Archives: Resisting Islamophobia

New Mexico Republican says ‘Muslims are our enemies’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

ALAMOGORDO, N.M. — County and state GOP officials criticized the head of a New Mexico Republican women’s group for calling Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama a “Muslim socialist” and stating that “Muslims are our enemies.”

Marcia Stirman, the head of the Republican Women of Otero County, will be asked to step down, Sassy Tinling, the chairwoman of the Otero County Republican Party, said Wednesday.

In a letter published Tuesday in the Alamogordo Daily News, Stirman wrote that she believes “Muslims are our enemies.” Stirman told The Associated Press in an interview: “I don’t trust them at all. They’ve sworn across the world that they are our enemies. Why we’re trying to elect one is beside me.”

Tinling told KOAT-TV that Stirman’s opinions do not reflect those of the county GOP or the Republican Women of Otero County. The executive director of the Republican Party of New Mexico, Matthew Kennicott, has said Stirman does not speak for the GOP and that her comments do not reflect its values and beliefs.

Associated Press, 24 October 2008

See also Associated Press, 22 October 2008, and CAIR press release, 23 October 2008

Nick Clegg attacks Policy Exchange for ‘offensive’ and ‘underhand’ briefing

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has attacked thinktank Policy Exchange over its call to boycott the upcoming Global Peace and Unity event in London. The thinktank had circulated a dossier questioning apparent extremist background of several of the events speakers. However Mr Clegg, who is due to speak at the event accused the thinktank’s director of “bizarre and underhand behaviour”, and questioned the validity of the evidence.

Liberal Democrat Voice, 24 October 2008

Read the Policy Exchange dossier here.

Update:  See also The Green Ribbon, 26 October 2008

ENGAGE launches FREE Pocket Guide to Media and Politics

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Engage pocket guideENGAGE will launch its FREE full colour “Pocket Guide to Media & Politics” at the Global Peace and Unity exhibition this weekend. Don’t miss this opportunity to pick up your copy!

After too many years on the sidelines of political and public debate on Islam in Britain, ENGAGE will enable Muslims to find their voices and places in the public sphere; in the media and in politics, by promoting participation through training seminars and indispensable resources that every engaged Muslim can’t do without.

The ENGAGE Pocket Guide is the handiest, most useful resource in the wallet of any Muslim committed to engaging with British society. ENGAGE have produced a 100,000 copies of the laminated, full colour pocket guide for free distribution around the UK.

The guide will be available at the GPU and at the ENGAGE community presentations that will begin in November. See “ENGAGE in the Community” for more details on the presentations.

Visit the ENGAGE stall at the GPU (stall number M03) and pick up your pocket guide this weekend! See www.theglobalunity.com for details and tickets to the event at London’s ExCel Exhibition Centre, Saturday 25 – Sunday 26 October.

Engage, 24 October 2008

Teenage bomb plot accused cleared

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Two teenagers who were accused of discussing a plot to blow up British National Party members have been cleared of terror charges. Waris Ali, 18, from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, was found not guilty of three counts of possession of an article for a terrorist purpose. His school friend Dabeer Hussain, 18, was acquitted of one count of the same charge at Leeds Crown Court.

Friends and family of the two men hugged in the public gallery as the jury returned their verdicts after deliberating for two and a half hours.

During the trial, the court heard that the two men had discussed a plan to spy on and blow up members of the BNP. They were both accused of possessing a terrorist manual on their computers, called the Anarchists’ Cookbook, and researching bomb-making techniques from “recipes” on the internet.

Mr Hussain, of Clarkson Street, Dewsbury, said he had been sent a copy of the Anarchists’ Cookbook but had not read it and was not interested in politics. Speaking outside the court after the verdicts, Mr Ali said he was “extremely relieved” that he had been cleared of the charges but was angry about how he had been treated.

“I believe that if I was not from a Muslim background, I would not have been prosecuted,” he said. “I have had to live in fear of being branded a terrorist. I feel it was completely obvious once the police looked up the evidence that I had nothing to do with terrorism at all. Silly teenage chat and things I said at school were taken out of context and presented as if it was evidence that I was an extremist.”

BBC News, 23 October 2008

Veiling and security

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Metro niqab pictureThe Metro carries a story on the comments made by Admiral Lord West, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Security and Counter Terrorism, to the Commons Defence Committee meeting yesterday on “UK national security and resilience” where he said that ending radicalization among young British Muslims could take up to 30 years.

The newspaper complements the news item with a picture of Muslim women in niqab. Is it any surprise that some Muslim women have had their veils forcibly torn from their faces when newspapers allude to connections between forms of Muslim dress and stories on terrorism and security?

You can write to the newspaper via email: mail@ukmetro.co.uk or post: Metro, Associated Newspapers Limited, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT.

Engage, 22 October 2008

Can we take the opportunity to give a big plug to this excellent new website.

Met’s most senior Muslim woman ‘ostracised even from coffee run’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Muslim woman responsible for upholding racial and religious diversity within the Metropolitan police claims she was so marginalised that she was not even allowed to make the coffee. Yasmin Rehman, 42, the force’s director of partnerships and diversity, is taking her bosses to an employment tribunal claiming she was bullied because of her colour and sex. She says one female detective told her not even to touch her coffee cup because she was Muslim, according to legal documents.

Sunday Times, 19 October 2008

Senior Anglican boosts hysterical campaign against Newham ‘mega-mosque’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Building a mosque next to the Olympic site could create a breeding ground for extremists, a senior Church of England official has warned. Dr Philip Lewis, an interfaith adviser to the Bishop of Bradford, said that the plans threaten to establish a ghetto of Muslims taught to embrace jihad.

In the first intervention by a Church figure over the controversial project, Dr Lewis raised fears that a 12,000-capacity mosque in London would lead to a segregated Muslim community. The mosque would be four times the size of Britain’s largest cathedral. “Tablighi Jamaat does not try to engage with wider society so there must be clear worries that such a mosque would lead to a ghetto,” he said. “The danger is that this becomes a self-contained world, which would be vulnerable to extremists.”

His comments follow a private meeting of Anglican and Roman Catholic clergy earlier this month who fear that the mosque could have a negative effect on east London, the proposed site for the building. Councillor Alan Craig, who leads the Christian People’s Alliance and organised the meeting, said that Dr Lewis’s contribution to the debate was a great boost to the campaign to block the mosque.

He said: “For someone of Philip Lewis’s stature and experience, who has good relations with Muslims, to make these comments is a great help to our campaign. It shows that this is a reasoned campaign against the mega-mosque and is not built on Islamaphobia, but on facts and evidence.”

Sunday Telegraph, 19 October 2008

Frankly, you’d have thought Philip Lewis would know better. It’s a matter of days since he was himself denounced for his connections to another Deobandi organisation, the Association of Muslim Scholars of Britain (JUB), which has been attacked in similar terms to Tablighi Jamaat.

Update:  For Yusuf Smith’s comments, see Indigo Jo Blogs, 20 October 2008

Colin Powell condemns Islamophobia in the Republican Party

Posted on by Bob Pitt

I’m anything but a fan of Colin Powell, and have no idea what impact (if any) his Meet the Press endorsement of Obama will have, but I was really glad to see him make the following point in explaining why he has rejected McCain’s candidacy:

I’m also troubled by, not what Sen. McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said such things as: “Well, you know that Mr.Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is: he is not a Muslim. He’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian.

But the really right answer is: What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is: No, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she can be President?

Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion: he’s a Muslim, and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

There has been much condemnation over the ‘Obama-is-a-Muslim’ line of GOP attack, but almost all of it has been on the ground that the attack is factually false as applied to the Christian Obama, not on the ground that it is a reprehensible and dangerous line of attack even if it were factually true. Powell bears much of the responsibility, and always will, for the horrific U.S. attack on Iraq (one which, just by the way, resulted in the deaths of at least hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims), but he deserves credit for using the platform he had this morning to go out of his way to make this vital point when doing so was not necessary (and perhaps not even helpful) in advancing the cause of his endorsement of Obama.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, 19 October 2008

Death for apostasy?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Reading AC Grayling’s latest article and listening to the protestations of the Council of Ex-Muslims, you would think that the death penalty is being gratuitously and frequently applied to those who renounce Islam or harbour thoughts of apostasy. As a Muslim who has lived most of my life in Muslim countries, this picture is hard to recognise.”

Nesrine Malik at Comment is Free, 17 October 2008

BNP member fined over racist mail

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Lockhart KneenAn internet trader who put racist stickers on packages has been fined after they were spotted by Muslim postal workers. The stickers, which had the statement “no more mosques” and a cartoon figure of a Muslim with a bomb exploding from his head, were found at the Royal Mail Centre, on Green Lane, Stockport.

Lockhart Kneen, of Braemore Drive, Hyde, was fined £150 and ordered to pay £115 costs for racially/religiously aggravated harassment. Kneen, 39, who sells political magazines for the BNP, claimed he put the stickers on the packages in protest against a “Tameside Super Mosque”.

The court was told Kneen became extremely aggressive when arrested and shouted racist abuse. He claimed was advised by a BNP leader that the stickers were not racist, but were illegal if put on public property.

“These parcels are my property and I live in a free country, so I decided to stick them on my property,” he said. “They’re going to move the war graves in Ashton and build a super mosque. There are people in Tameside bricking windows of mosques. I was protesting peacefully and I’m the one in court. I would have been better off throwing bricks.”

Mr Lake, defending, said: “It was an expression of freedom of speech. Freedom to express your views should not only include the inoffensive, but also the contentious, providing it does not provoke violence. And a freedom of speech that does not include the contentious is not worth having.”

Sentencing, District Judge Tim Devas, said: “I believe the defendant was aware of the distress his comments could have caused.”

Manchester Evening News, 15 October 2008