Category Archives: Resisting Islamophobia

Inquiry is vital to retain Muslim confidence – MP

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Labour MP Sadiq Khan welcomed a government inquiry yesterday into alleg-ations that Scotland Yard had bugged conversations between him and a constituent acccused of terrorist offences. Khan said: “Constituents should have the confidence to speak to their MP in confidence, with candour so they can be helped with their case. My phone has rung off the hook with constituents who are concerned and annoyed.”

The Muslim Council of Britain said it wanted urgent meetings with the government over the “appalling” allegations which could damage confidence in the police: “Today’s revelations are simply appalling and raise a whole range of vital issues to do with confidentiality and how to hold to account the improper behaviour of senior police officers. This kind of behaviour cannot but do immense damage to the level of trust between Muslim communities and the police.”

Guardian, 4 February 2008

See also MCB press release, 3 February 2008

Islamophobes against Ken

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“It is not at all surprising that in the campaign now being waged against me are some former leftwingers, such as Bright and Nick Cohen, whose fear of multiculturalism and Islamism has tipped dangerously towards a paranoid Islamophobia that threatens harmonious community relations in this city. This group wants the mayoral election not to be waged on central issues for Londoners – affordable homes, public transport, investment in policing, radical policies to tackle climate change – but on their own obsessions.”

Ken Livingstone in the Guardian, 1 February 2008

Muslims ‘let down by race law’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Anti-Muslim prejudice is dealt with less seriously than other forms of discrimination, a university study found. The research conducted at Bristol University examined 30 years of Government legislation and legal rulings to distinguish the difference between prejudice towards race, ethnicity and religion.

In the study, Dr Nasar Meer, research associate in the Department of Sociology at Bristol, found that Muslims are let down by race legislation because being a Muslim is recognised as a lifestyle choice or a “voluntary identity”. Dr Meer says other religious identities – such as Sikh and Jew – have had race law applied in their favour in a way not extended to Muslim communities. He said many Muslims view their faith as an “involuntary identity” as they are born into the religion.

He said: “We explored what legislation exists to help protect people with what we call an involuntary identity. People with an involuntary identity shouldn’t be disadvantaged by others’ views. The legislation should offer them support and make sure they’re not discriminated against. Muslims have been totally missed out of the protection offered by race-relations legislation because it treats Islam as a religion and not a race.”

Dr Meer said he has come across various examples of when hatred towards Muslims was dismissed but hatred towards other religions had not been tolerated.

Press Association, 31 January 2008

Download Dr Meer’s article here.

See also University of Bristol press release, 31 January 2008

Muslims ‘lay siege to Australian hospital’?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Damian Thompson 2At his Holy Smoke blog, Telegraph leader writer and Catholic Herald editor Damian Thompson recycles a story from Robert Spencer’s Dhimmi Watch site:

“After the death of a young Muslim man in a car crash in Sydney last month,” Thompson writes, “an Islamic crowd invaded a hospital in order to stop medical tests being carried out on the body in contravention of Sharia law, according to the Dhimmi Watch website. If the report is true, then this is another example of a global campaign by fundamentalist Muslims to replace civil law by Sharia – a process that has already taken root in British cities.”

Thompson goes on to quote the report from Spencer’s site: “The antecedent to the Muslim incursion on the Hospital came about on Monday the 17 December last, when a young Muslim male was airlifted to the Liverpool Hospital’s emergency ward by helicopter. The 19-year-old had been in a serious car accident, his car left the road and crashed into a tree … he died of his injuries, and it seems he and his hijab-wearing girl friend had been celebrating the end of Ramadan.”

The Australian blog Austrolabe comments: “If the victim and his ‘hijab-wearing girl friend’ were, as the anonymous author claims, celebrating the end of Ramadan when they had a serious car accident, why did this obviously critically injured young man wait two months before he was admitted into a hospital? In 2007, Eid ul-Fitr (the celebration marking the end of Ramadan) was on the 11th of October. This man was supposedly admitted into Liverpool Hospital on 17th December, 2007. We know that waiting lists at Liverpool Hospital are long, but that long?”

Update:  Thompson has recanted. See Austrolabe, 31 January 2008

Muslims in London: challenge Boris Johnson tonight!

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Boris“Boris Johnson will be answering questions on the BBC London (94.9FM) drive-time show at 5pm this evening. If it follows the same pattern as Ken Livingstone’s last week, the interview will happen at 6pm. The hosts are Eddie Nestor and Kath Melandri.

“Boris Johnson has been challenged many times about his remarks about Africans (piccaninnies etc) and on one occasion told the interviewer he was sick of talking about it. However, nobody has challenged him about his record as editor of the Spectator. In response to the July 2005 bombings and to the riots in Paris and elsewhere later that year, he printed articles only from non-Muslims hostile to Islam: himself, Mark Steyn and Patrick Sookhdeo….

“This man must be challenged! The number for the station is 020 7224 2000; email eddieandkath at bbc.co.uk or text 07786 200 949.”

Yusuf Smith at Indigo Jo Blogs, 30 January 2008

‘Anti-mosque initiatives tap into a fear of Islam’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Spiegel Online interviews Oliver Geden, an expert on right-wing populism at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. Regarding the tactics of far-right parties like the BZÖ and FPÖ in Austria, Geden states:

“These parties are very clever. They usually focus on the question of minarets, so they can say: ‘We’re not calling for a ban on Islam, but Muslims don’t need minarets to pray.’ If they claim that mosques or even small prayer halls should be banned, then many people would say that was going too far…. The man in the street has probably never thought about minarets before, but it taps into his fear of Islam and he can easily relate to the issue. The right-wing populist parties have an underlying narrative which is against Muslims, but in public they only say that they are against minarets, which they see as symbols of Islamic superiority. Then, if they are accused of being racist, they can counter by saying: ‘Well, we’re only against minarets – what’s your problem?'”

Muslim mums win discrimination appeal

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Two Muslim mothers have won a court appeal against a municipal pool in Gothenburg that required them to take off their veils and body-covering clothing. The Court of Appeal for western Sweden found the City of Gothenburg guilty of ethnic discrimination and ordered the authorities to pay the women 20,000 kronor ($3,000) each in damages.

The women, Houda Morabet and Hayal Eroglu, were at the pool separately on two different occasions in April 2004, accompanying their young children but not to swim themselves. Both were wearing veils, long pants and long-sleeved tee-shirts because their religion does not allow them to reveal parts of their body in public.

In its judgment, the court said that the actions of the swimming pool lifeguards, who insisted that the women should change into tee-shirts, could be deemed discriminatory even if this had not been their intention.

The nature of Sweden’s discrimination laws mean that it was up to the City of Gothenburg to prove that the request for the women to remove some of their clothing had nothing to do with their religion. “In the view of the Court of Appeal, the City of Gothenburg did not succeed in doing this,” the court said in a statement.

Continue reading →

Amis and the untermenschen

Posted on by Bob Pitt

William Dalrymple reviews The Second Plane, Martin Amis’s new collection of essays and short stories about the post-9/11 world:

“Only in one place in the book does Amis actually come across a living Muslim. Arriving at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem after it has closed for the night, he tries to talk his way into the enclosure, and is rebuffed by the guard. ‘I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper’s face’, he writes, ‘when I suggested … that he … let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant.’ This hysterical reaction, and the strong whiff of racial prejudice it gives off, is smelled again and again throughout this book.

“Islamists, in Amis’s view, are not people with a political complaint against the West and its foreign policy. Instead, they are all ‘irrationally abstract’ in their hatred of America, ‘haters of reason’ whose ‘armed doctrine is little better than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide’, ‘fanatics and nihilists’ who have created ‘a cult of death’ and wish to ‘eliminate all non-Muslims’.

“It is the lack of nuance that is most alarming. For Amis, all Islamists are the same, whether mass-murdering jihadis, or completely non-violent but religiously conservative democrats. Nor is it just the militant Islamists he dislikes: ordinary Muslims are regarded with equal contempt. He writes, with deep distaste, of ‘the writhing moustaches of Pakistan’ and ‘the shoving, jabbing, jeering brotherhood’ that Christopher Hitchens encounters in Peshawar. It seems, to Amis, that people’s religion and ethnicity can remove them from rational discourse, and relegate them to the position of untermenschen.”

Sunday Times, 27 January 2008