Category Archives: Resisting Islamophobia

Islamophobia began with end of Cold War, OSCE meeting hears

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islamophobia gathered pace in the West with the end of the Cold War, long before the September 11, 2001 attacks against the US, participants at a two-day OSCE conference that began in Spain Tuesday said.

“After the end of the Cold War, certain people took Muslims and Islam to be the new scapegoat and enemy,” Mustapha Cherif, an expert on Islam at the University of Algiers, told AFP on the sidelines of the gathering. “But after the senseless act of September 11, this has been amplified,” added Cherif, who is known for his commitment to battling religious hatred.

Delegations from the 56 nations that make up the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) are taking part in the conference in the southern Spanish city of Cordoba on the topic of intolerance toward Muslims. Spain currently holds the rotating presidency of the OSCE, which promotes human rights, democracy and conflict prevention in Europe, North America and Central Asia.

Arab League Secretary-General Amr Mussa told the gathering that after the end of the Cold War, “conservative extremists in certain Western circles” needed to find a new enemy. “We can’t live in stability and security if some are perceived as first class citizens and others second class citizens. This has to disappear,” he added.

Studies by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia have found anti-Muslim behaviour and attitudes have risen since 2001, said Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos. “Without a doubt, international terrorism has fueled this phenomena,” added Moratinos who is chairing the gathering.

Muslims in Europe face discrimination when it comes to employment, education and housing, said Ioannis Dimitrakopoulos, the head of research and data collection at the Vienna-based European Fundamental Rights Agency.

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Denmark: rightwing populists incite rise in xenophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Denmark: rightwing populists incite rise in xenophobia

From Anne Jessen for Demos and Antifa-Net in Copenhagen

Searchlight, October 2007

INTOLERANCE TOWARDS Muslims in Denmark is growing according to several recent reports that strongly criticise the government’s policies towards immigrants, refugees and ethnic minorities.

At the beginning of 2006 Denmark’s image took a battering as Muslim protests against the publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons of Muhammad dominated the international news. Since then the media spotlight has turned away and the Danish government’s hard line on ethnic minorities has resumed. Although the country is governed by a liberal-conservative coalition, the rightwing populist Danish People’s Party (DFP) wields decisive influence over immigration policy.

Amnesty International’s annual report published this summer emphasises that ethnic minority groups suffer discrimination, especially Muslims, and points out that since the cartoons controversy the number of politically motivated attacks on Muslims has increased but this has not been matched by charges brought for violating anti-racism laws.

Amnesty’s report confirmed the findings of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which commented in a report issued in March this year that the Danish jobs market discriminates against foreigners. It said that Denmark has the lowest proportion of employed immigrants out of all the OECD’s 30 member states and that the education system has failed the younger generation of immigrants.

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe also censured the Danish government over the situation of Muslims in Denmark in a report prepared in July 2006 but only reported in the Danish media in April. The report’s author, Ömür Orhun, pointed out that the situation of Muslims in Denmark has worsened over the past five years. He criticised the radical aliens legislation, which limits the access of Muslims to the social security system, and blamed the government for the absence of legal mosques and Muslim cemeteries, the requirement for newborn Muslim children to be registered with the Christian church and the fact that anti-racism legislation is rarely enforced.

In May last year the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) expressed its anxiety at increasing xenophobia and intolerance towards Muslims in Denmark. ECRI’s report pointed out that DFP members are able to make shockingly racist statements in public without political or legal consequences.

Both the Danish government and the DFP consistently reject criticism of their positions. Mogens Camre, a DFP Member of the European Parliament, unhesitatingly spells out his agenda: “We must quit the refugee convention of the UN, we must block the civil rights embodied by the European Union charter which are directed against Europeans and we must amend the legal and penal codes to make it possible to defend democracy and throw political-religious leaders, criminals and parasites out of the country.”

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Quebec – political courage needed on accommodation

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Quebecers strongly oppose almost any cultural or religious accommodation of immigrants and other minority Quebecers, according to survey findings published yesterday in La Presse. The findings are a sobering measure of the size of the problem Quebec faces and a clear indication that some political courage is going to be needed.

“The poll results are dramatic: A hijab on the soccer pitch? 70 per cent of respondents are against. Turbans for Sikh Mounties? Nearly 80 per cent against. The kirpan? Female-only swimming? Male-only driving testers for Hasidic Jews? No, no, and no, by large margins. People of common sense and goodwill can certainly disagree on many of these issues. But in Quebec’s current happy social context these strikingly one-sided results – if not the entire debate – seem to us somewhat irrational….

“So why all this opposition? One figure offers a hint: 58 per cent object to providing prayer spaces in public buildings. That’s far fewer naysayers than on most such issues.

“This leads us to suspect that the less visible a practice, the more acceptable it’s deemed. Praying to Allah or anyone else is bothersome to fewer old-stock Quebecers if done in private; but Heaven (so to speak) help the 13-year-old girl who wears a scarf to play soccer. Even the Quebec Council on the Status of Women, an organization dedicated to social equality, is campaigning to forbid public-sector employees from displaying any overt signs of culture or religion.

“It’s doing this in the name of a secular state, but the subtext is far different. If an SAAQ clerk or a teacher is barred by law from wearing a hijab, a turban or a kippa, what is the message? What is retained – by adults and kids – is that there’s something wrong with these symbols – and, by extension, their wearers.

“There is some good news in the survey. Younger Quebecers revealed themselves to be far more accommodating than their elders. That openness bodes well for the long term.”

Leader in the Montreal Gazette, 10 October 2007

No more torture in our name

Posted on by Bob Pitt

No More TortureNo more torture in our name

By Louise Nousratpour

Morning Star, 10 October 2007

AMNESTY International UK launched a hard-hitting campaign on Monday against human rights abuses in the name of the “war on terror.” The human rights organisation called on people to make a stand against terrorism and against civil liberties being eroded by governments claiming to fight al-Qaida. The billboard and internet campaign is called Unsubscribe, after the process that internet users use to reject unwanted emails.

Speaking at a launch event in Birmingham, Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen said: “Unsubscribe is about rejecting the false choice between terrorism on the one hand and abuse of human rights on the other.” She stressed people’s opposition to the government’s detention without charge or trial of terror suspects under the pretext of national security. “They believe people have a right to know why they are being detained and they believe in the right to have a fair trial if someone is suspected of a serious offence,” Ms Allen added.

As part of the campaign, Amnesty has launched a powerful new two-minute drama film depicting the suffering of a hooded prisoner undergoing “stress and duress” torture by an unnamed man in plain clothes. In the film, which is called Waiting for the Guard and can be seen online at www.unsubscribe-me.org, the prisoner is seen stripped to his underwear in an underground chamber and forced to sit with his head a knee level.

Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg said that the Unsubscribe film brought back unpleasant memories. “You cannot imagine that happening to anybody, let alone yourself,” said Mr Begg, who was held without charge for two years at the notorious US prison camp. “The way that I tried almost to tackle it was to say that it didn’t happen to me, it happened to someone else.”

Mr Begg said that worse abuses of human rights go on in “ghost” detention camps, referring to widely reported secret CIA “torture camps” that are scattered across the world. “These kinds of things continue to exist. Perhaps they don’t happen at Guantanamo any more, but there are other sites that people have to pass through,” he warned. “By the time I was sent to Guantanamo, I was looking forward to it.”

National Union of Students president Gemma Tumulty said that the campaign would give millions of students in Britain a voice to their “instinctive feeling that something has been going badly wrong in the ‘war on terror’.”

Amnesty will also display a series of hard-hitting billboard posters across the country. They will reproduce some of the most infamous images of human rights abuses from the “war on terror”. The images include an Abu Ghraib prisoner in Iraq being attacked by a dog and a Guantanamo Bay detainee being abused. The posters all bear the message Unsubscribe and will be displayed during October on the streets of Birmingham, London, Glasgow, Belfast, Cardiff, Leeds and Manchester.

Laughing at ‘Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“An ex-senator that opposes individual rights of women; a pundit that calls people ‘faggots’ and considers Islam a ‘cult’; a Christian scholar who is considered a ‘polemicist’ and an ‘Islamophobe’ by conservative Christians themselves; and an intellectual who has received millions from ‘far right’ organizations since 2001, are rising up for the rights of women, gays, and religious minorities in the Muslim world. This laughable spectacle is called the Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. It will be coming to a university near you on October 22-26.”

Ali Eteraz at the Huffington Post, 8 October 2007

Rebuking obnoxious views

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Terry EagletonTerry Eagleton explains his recent much-publicised polemic against Martin Amis and replies to critics:

“In an essay entitled The Age of Horrorism published last month, the novelist Martin Amis advocated a deliberate programme of harassing the Muslim community in Britain. ‘The Muslim community’, he wrote, ‘will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children…’

“Amis was not recommending these tactics for criminals or suspects only. He was proposing them as punitive measures against all Muslims, guilty or innocent. The idea was that by hounding and humiliating them as a whole, they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man’s law. There seems something mildly defective about this logic….

“Suicide bombers must be stopped forcibly in their tracks to protect the innocent. But there is something rather stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment.”

Guardian, 10 October 2007

Here at Islamophobia Watch we are of course rooting for Professor Eagleton. However, in the interests of accuracy, we should point out that Amis’s disgraceful comments in fact appeared in an interview with Ginny Dougary published in the Times Magazine in September 2006.

Experts sound alarm on rising Islamophobia in Europe

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islamophobia is on the rise in Europe and governments should do more to protect the continent’s 15 million Muslims from discrimination, experts meeting in Spain said Monday.

“The situation is very serious,” said Mustapha Cherif, an expert on Islam at the University of Algiers who is known for his commitment to battling religious hatred. “Islamophobia is a rising phenomena,” added Jasser Auda of Britain’s Forum Against Racism and Islamophobia, which is made up of representatives of the British Muslim community.

The two were speaking at a meeting in the southern Spanish city of Jaen of some 30 non-governmental organisations from across Europe. The gathering was held ahead of the start on Tuesday in the nearby city of Cordoba of a two-day conference on the issue organised by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Spain currently holds the rotating presidency of the OSCE, which promotes human rights, democracy and conflict prevention in Europe, North America and Central Asia.

Participants said there was no easy solution to fighting Islamophobia. Turkish State Minister Meymet Aydın underlined the need to help Western societies undestand Islam.

“It is good to attract the attention of governments on the issue, to increase their level of awareness,” said Aydin Suer, the spokesman for Femyso, a confederation of Muslim youth groups from 22 European nations.

“The problems are complex, the solutions themselves are complex,” said Suer. Muslims could not just blame media stereotypes for the problem, he added. “We Muslims need to question ourselves,” he said.

The non-governmental organisations will present a list of recommendations on how to tackle the problem to delegations from the 56 nations that make up the OSCE, and that are set to take part in the Cordoba conference.

“This will be the message from civil society” to the government representatives gathered in Cordoba, said Spain’s special ambassador for relations with Muslim communities, Jose Maria Ferre.

Cordoba was chosen as the host for the event because for centuries the city was a symbolic centre of coexistence between Christians, Jews and Muslims. The city hosted an OSCE conference on anti-Semitism in 2005.

AFP, 8 October 2007

‘Islam is Peace for Britain?’ Robert Spencer thinks not

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Islam is Peace campaign has failed to impress the proprietor of Jihad Watch. Robert Spencer complains:

“There is not one word about fighting against the jihadist ideology of Islamic supremacism within English mosques and Islamic schools. Instead, point one of the campaign is to fight against undefined Islamophobia, as if the only reason why anyone regarded Muslims with suspicion was because of bigotry and hatred by non-Muslims. Well, I’ve got news for you. If ‘Islamophobia’ actually exists at all, it is a result of the over nine thousand violent attacks committed by Muslims in the name of Islam since 9/11.”

Human Events, 8 October 2007

See Jihad Watch video here.

Note Spencer’s use of an interview with Anjem Choudary to illustrate the mainstream Muslim view concerning attacks on innocent people. Spencer does not of course mention that Choudary is the leader of a tiny group of extremist nutters who represent next to nothing within Islam in the UK. But, to take the charitable view, it may well be that he doesn’t even know that. After all, this is the same Robert Spencer who once assured his readers that Al-Muhajiroun was “Britain’s largest Muslim group“.

The English Defence League: not suited but booted

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Anindya Bhattacharyya provides a useful summary of the campaign by anti-racists against the English Defence League. He notes: “the fact that racist groups such as the EDL have taken to the streets with an explicitly anti-Muslim agenda has clarified what is at stake. Arguments about the nature of Islamophobia that had until now been primarily ideological are now being played out on the streets”.

Socialist Review, October 2009

‘Fear of giving offence is killing our culture’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Minette Marrin (2)Minette Marrin complains that the struggle against the civilisation-sapping ideology of multiculturalism is not over yet:

“For at least 20 years there was a debilitating fog of moral relativism in the air, a miasma of guilty self-loathing…. Even the phrase ‘host culture’ was considered unacceptable. We have moved on since then, supposedly, and surprisingly suddenly. Many prominent multiculturalists, including the Commission for Racial Equality itself, have recently performed swift U-turns and the bien-pensant orthodoxy now is that multiculturalism has been a divisive failure….

“It might seem, superficially, that the Victoria Climbié report and the massacre of 7/7 in London, among other shocks, have brought us back at last to our cultural senses and our cultural self-respect. Not entirely so, unfortunately…. A week ago The Sunday Times reported that some Muslim workers in Sainsbury’s are refusing to check out purchases of alcohol on the debatable ground that it’s against their religion.”

Well, actually, it was just the one Muslim worker in a single branch of Sainsbury’s. But why quibble over figures when the very future of “our” culture is at stake? Marrin continues:

“This is preposterous and a depressing sign of the times. But the painful truth is it would be just as preposterous to blame the Sainsbury’s Muslims. For years now ethnic minorities have been encouraged to insist on their cultural differences and on their human right to have these differences respected and actively promoted….

“Surely the fault lies with Sainsbury’s, for cultural funk. And it lies with all those others who out of some strange abandonment of common sense – such as the government’s laissez-faire guidelines on wearing Muslim veils in schools last week – bottle out.”

Sunday Times, 7 October 2007

Elsewhere in the same issue, the paper follows up last week’s exposé of cultural surrender at Sainsbury’s with another article, “Muslim medical students get picky“, which claims:

“Some Muslim medical students are refusing to attend lectures or answer exam questions on alcohol-related or sexually transmitted diseases because they claim it offends their religious beliefs. Some trainee doctors say learning to treat the diseases conflicts with their faith, which states that Muslims should not drink alcohol and rejects sexual promiscuity. A small number of Muslim medical students have even refused to treat patients of the opposite sex.”

“Some … some … a small number” – and how many Muslim medical students, roughly, might that be? Of course, we’re not told. Although, to be fair to the Sunday Times, its intrepid reporters have come up with a further shocking revelation: “At a Sainsbury’s store in Nottingham, a pharmacist named Ahmed declined to provide the pill to a female reporter posing as a customer”. So that makes one Sainsbury’s employee who opts out of selling alcohol, two who’ve been given exemption from stacking the drinks shelves, and one who avoids selling the pill. Clearly, the foundations of Western civilisation are under mass assault from the Muslim hordes.

Meanwhile, over at the Infidel Blogger’s Alliance, one Mark Alexander (who’s apparently the author of a book entitled The Dawning of a New Dark Age: A Collection of Essays on Islam) offers his take on the Sunday Times report:

“This latest story about the obstreperousness of trainee Muslim medical students should alarm us all. It is a harbinger of the nightmare that awaits us all in the West as a result of allowing far, far too many Muslims into the Judeo-Christian West…. If something isn’t done about the Muslim problem, then it is only a matter of time before blood will be shed. Not in the operating theatres, but in the streets.”

And the fascists of the British National Party (who are becoming great fans of the Sunday Times) present the report as evidence that “the country moves unceasingly and unchallenged to becoming part ofDar-ul-Islam (the world of Islam)”.

BNP news article, 7 October 2007

Cf. The letter of appreciation to Sainsbury’s from Ibrahim Mogra of the Muslim Council of Britain.

See also Yusuf Smith’s comments at Indigo Jo Blogs, 8 October 2007