Please click on the link below and sign the petition to demand the government stops the extradition of British citizen Babar Ahmad to the US and puts him on trial in the UK.
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/BabarAhmad/sign
See also Socialist Worker, 23 June 2007
Over at the neocon blog Harry’s Place, Brett Lock of gay rights group OutRage! finally gets round to addressing the disgraceful campaign in Israel to ban the Jerusalem Pride march, which takes place tomorrow.
Brett omits any condemnation of, or indeed reference to, the threats of violence from Orthodox Jews or the appeal by the Mayor of Jerusalem to Israel’s High Court to stop the march, and it is now fully two weeks since the anti-Pride bills successfully passed their first reading in the Knesset.
This tardy and rather half-hearted response by Brett – and the failure of OutRage! or the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association to make any statement at all on the issue – stands in sharp contrast to the energy with which they all laid into Russia’s grand mufti last year over Moscow Pride. Somehow, OutRage! and GALHA seem to find homophobia so much more worthy of denunciation when it’s Muslims who are responsible for it.
In fact one might suspect that Brett’s belated post at Harry’s Place is little more than an attempt to cover OutRage! against criticisms by the Lesbian and Gay Coalition Against Racism, who issued a statement last weekend accusing Brett and his chums of hypocrisy. We can only endorse those criticisms.
Prime Minister Tony Blair was accused Tuesday of rekindling the 18-year old controversy over Salman Rushdie by his government’s decision to give the notorious author a knighthood.
“Many will interpret the knighthood as a final contemptuous parting gift from Tony Blair to the Muslim world,” said secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, Abdul Bari.
Bari said that the Indian-born author earned “notoriety among Muslims for the highly insulting and blasphemous manner in which he portrayed early Islamic figures much-loved and honoured by them.” “The insensitive decision to grant Rushdie a knighthood can therefore only do harm to the image of our country in the eyes of hundreds of millions of Muslims across the world,” he warned.
Labour peer Lord Ahmed described Blair’s decision to approve the honor just before his steps down from power next week as double standards. “It’s hypocrisy by Tony Blair who two weeks ago was talking about building bridges to mainstream Muslims, and then he’s honouring a man who has insulted the British public and been divisive in community relations,” Ahmed said.
Bradford Council for Mosques in northern England also criticized the knighthood as an insult to Muslim religious sensibilities and as an endorsement of the author’s views. “The British government has acted extremely irresponsibly in knighting Rushdie at a time when it should be seeking to restore and strengthen the confidence of its Muslim subjects that it has their best interests at heart,” said council spokesman Ishtiaq Ahmed.
See also Inayat Bunglawala at Comment is Free, 19 June 2007
“The interesting thing about this story is the use of a picture of some Muslims to illustrate a negative immigration story. Again. Sod Godwin’s Law – this sort of thing works on the same level as ‘Der Ewige Jude’, the Nazi propaganda film that intercut a documentary about the migration of Jews with shots of teaming rats to create a connection between the two. Here we have negative stories about immigration and ethnicity mostly illustrated with pictures of Muslims to create hamfisted links between the two. How many of the girls in the picture are actually British? How many speak English? Doesn’t matter for the Express.”
Five Chinese Crackers on another scaremongering piece in the Daily Express.
“Driven underground and into despair by zealotry, Rushdie finally emerged blinking into New York sunshine shortly before the towers came tumbling down. Those formidable literary powers would now be deployed not against, but in the service of, an American regime that had declared its own fundamentalist monopoly on the meanings of ‘freedom’ and ‘liberation’.
“The Sir Salman recognised for his services to literature is certainly no neocon but is iconic of a more pernicous trend: liberal literati who have assented to the notion that humane values, tolerance and freedom are fundamentally western ideas that have to be defended as such.
“Vociferously supporting the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq on ‘humane’ grounds, condemning criticism of the war on terror as ‘petulant anti-Americanism’ and above all, aligning tyranny and violence solely with Islam, Rushdie has abdicated his own understanding of the novelist’s task as ‘giving the lie to official facts’.”
Priyamvada Gopal in the Guardian, 18 June 2007
In the post-9/11 hysteria, John Walker Lindh – the “American Taliban” – never stood much chance of a fair trial, argues Fareena Alam of Q-News.
The much-publicised repentance of two former Muslim extremists tells us little about the roots of militancy in Britain, argues Inayat Bunglawala.
A report released today by a prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group indicates a 25 percent increase in the total number of complaints of anti-Muslim bias from 2005 to 2006, with citizenship delays being the major issue.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) report – the only annual study of its kind – outlines 2,467 incidents and experiences of anti-Muslim violence, discrimination and harassment in 2006, the highest number of civil rights cases ever recorded in the Washington-based group’s report. (Hundreds of anti-Muslim incidents reported immediately following the 9/11 attacks were detailed in a separate report.)
According to the study, called “Presumption of Guilt,” that total is a 25.1 percent increase over the preceding year’s total of 1,972 cases. One of the most significant increases is in the category dealing with government agencies, which rose sharply from 19.22 percent of total reports in 2005 to 36.32 percent in 2006. This increase was due primarily to the number of cases related to immigration issues such as citizenship and naturalization delays. CAIR also received 167 reports of anti-Muslim hate crime complaints, a 9.2 percent increase from the 153 complaints received in 2005.
“You have nuns totally covered … and no one questions it. But when a Muslim does it, we’re from outer space.” The Detroit Free Press interviews Muslim women who wear the hijab.
One reader is not impressed: “There is no comparison between a covered nun and Islamic hijab. No one living in a Christian community has to worry about armed gangs breaking into a family home to threaten, beat or kill them because their daughters haven’t become nuns. Islamic women have to worry about that daily in the Islamic world, and even in European countries Islamic women are subject to ‘honor killings’.”
“On Thursday the Commission on Integration and Cohesion is finally expected to publish its findings, but the project is based on some big misunderstandings. There is a widespread anxiety that we are ‘sleepwalking into segregation’, as Trevor Phillips put it in 2005 when he was chair of the Commission for Racial Equality….
“The whole debate about race in this country has shifted from multiculturalism, tolerance and anti-racism to integration and this sticky notion of cohesion. The onus of responsibility has shifted from tackling the white community’s racism to assessing the ethnic minority community’s state of integration. The latter is supposed to indicate the likelihood of extremism – the most dubious connection of all in this debate riddled with misconceptions – after all, Mohammed Siddique Khan, one of the 7/7 bombers appeared to be ‘integrated’ with a job in a primary school, a wife and child.
“This anxious, nervy debate has little connection to the evidence being turned up by UK demographers. Academics like Ludi Simpson, Danny Dorling and Ceri Peach say that the UK is going through a process of desegregation as established ethnic minorities move out of inner-city neighbourhoods into surrounding suburbs.”
Madeleine Bunting at Comment is Free, 13 June 2007
Read Commission on Integration and Cohesion report Our Shared Future here.
For the controversy surrounding one member of Ruth Kelly’s commission, Ramesh Kallidai, see Andrew Gilligan’s article in the Evening Standard (reprinted here). The issue is not so much Kallidai’s alleged association with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh but rather that he has deployed Hindutva myths about Muslims forcing young Hindu women to convert to Islam in the UK. It seems that while Kelly excludes representatives of the Muslim community on the basis of links with Jamaat-e-Islami or the Muslim Brotherhood, even though these links have no adverse impact on community relations in this country, she has no problems working with a Hindu admirer of the fascist RSS.