Category Archives: Resisting Islamophobia

MP calls on YouTube to remove racist videos

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Shahid MalikA Muslim MP has demanded YouTube removes a series of racist items from its website after a video alleging he was a “pervert” remained available for three weeks.

The video featured footage of Shahid Malik, before a written message stating: “This scum thinks he can mess with the big boys.” Then, before an image of the Labour MP’s face covered with blood, a new message appeared: “He better not or he will end up like this.”

Earlier in the posting, which has now been removed from the site by administrators, another subtitle stated: “A pervert just like his f***ing prophet.”

Malik suggested that a member of the British National Party could be behind the video, which also featured pictures of BNP leader Nick Griffin.

Scotland on Sunday, 10 June 2007

Faisal Alam interview

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The rhetoric of Islamophobia from the ‘gay’ press after 9/11 was incredible. We were hearing things from conservative columnists that one could not imagine before. After I spoke publicly about not supporting the US war in Afghanistan, soon after 9/11, there were Op-Eds in the gay press that denounced me as a ‘unpatriotic’. One writer went as far as to say that I should be stripped of my American passport and be shipped off to Guantanamo. I was writing responses almost on a daily basis confronting the Islamophobia being perpetuated by these columnists.”

Lavender magazine interviews AlFatiha Founder Faisal Alam.

Livingstone ‘plays the Islamophobia card’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

nss2Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society is not impressed by the coalition to defend religious freedom launched at City Hall in London earlier this week. Sanderson opines that “there is very little in the way of aggression towards Muslims beyond the racism that all minority communities suffer”. Well, Sanderson and the NSS – who in the past have called for the publication of racist anti-Muslim cartoons and happily repeated denunciations of “Muslim foreigners who have forced themselves on us” – would know all about that.

NSS news report, 8 June 2007

The NSS has the backing of Robert Spencer over at Jihad Watch.

Anti-Muslim comments of US talk show host

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Media Matters exposes US radio host “Gunny” Bob Newman, who has demanded that “every Muslim immigrant to America … be required by law to wear a GPS tracking bracelet at all times” and suggested that the federal government “bug [Muslims’] places of work and their residences” and monitor “all mosques and community centers.” Newman also called for a moratorium on Muslim immigration to the United States, adding, “If they don’t like the idea, or if they refuse, throw their asses out of this country.”

Australia’s neo-conservatives target books on Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Howard and Bush“The Howard government recently outdid its Western masters in the war on terror, announcing that it would begin banning and restricting materials that it deemed to be promoting ‘terrorism’….

“The threat to reinstate the old practice of confiscating reading materials has come true. In one recent case, Australian customs seized several titles that had been sent by a Malaysian publisher to a Muslim bookseller in downtown Sydney.

“Among them is one titled A Young Muslim’s Guide to the Modern World by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a US-based Iranian-born academic who is not even remotely political in most of his works, as well as another book on everyday Muslim do’s and dont’s which has become almost a household name among Muslims: Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam.

“Although the books have since been returned, probably after the Australian authorities realised how silly they had been to confiscate them at the first place, it shows just how strongly panic alarms can be set off by anything that sounds Islamic….”

Muslimedia, June 2007

An injury to one is an injury to all – Bruce Kent defends religious freedom

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Virtually everybody in Britain today accepts that the right to freedom of religion and expression is a fundamental pillar of any democratic society. Yet in practice that freedom is under threat, at least for some of our communities – notably British Muslims. And we all need to understand that, because human freedoms are indivisible, if we allow such rights to be undermined for any one group, they will be undermined for all of us.”

Bruce Kent, chair of the Coalition to Defend Freedom of Religious and Cultural Expression, writes at Comment is Free, 7 June 2007

Coalition to defend freedom of religious and cultural expression launched

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Coalition launchPolitical figures, religious leaders, trade unionists and human rights campaigners are amongst the individuals that have signed up to a new coalition aimed at defending freedom of religious and cultural expression.

Speakers at the launch included the Mayor of London; peace campaigner and activist Bruce Kent; writer Ismail Patel from the British Muslim Initiative; Dr Daud Abdullah, Deputy General Secretary, Muslim Council of Britain; Edie Friedman, Director, Jewish Council for Racial Equality; Andrew Stunell MP; and Steve Sinnott, National Union of Teachers.

The coalition is being set up in the light of continuing media and other claims that different communities and faith groups openly expressing their culture or faith threaten community relations in Britain. Such claims have been most recently and strongly directed at the Muslim community, particularly focusing on the right of Muslim women to wear the veil.

A Greater London Authority commissioned report into Islamophobia in the media showed that 90 per cent of reports on Islam were negative. However, the majority of Londoners – 94 per cent – support freedom of thought, conscience, speech and religion.

The coalition will put the case that that multiculturalism, especially in London, enriches society and that division will flow from repression of these rights, not their expression. And that it is necessary for individuals and different communities to come to gether to defend freedom of religious and cultural though that have been established over hundreds of years.

The Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said: “I am proud of London’s reputation as the most diverse city in the world where the contribution all communities is celebrated and people’s freedom of religious expression is respected as it is one of the most essential of our civil liberties. Attacks on the rights of Muslim people to express their faith as they choose are ultimately a threat to everybody’s rights to freedom of religious and cultural expression.”

GLA press release, 6 June 2007

See also British Muslim Initiative website.

British Muslims and 7/7

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Today’s papers are filled with articles reporting the Channel 4 poll of British Muslims. Typical headlines read “Muslims: MI5 behind 7/7” (Daily Mirror), “25% of Brit Muslims think 7/7 bombers innocent” (The Sun), “7/7 bombs staged by agents say one in four Muslims” (Daily Telegraph) and “24% of Muslims think 7/7 raids were MI5 plot” (Daily Express), while the Daily Mail goes with “59pc of UK Muslims believe there was a cover-up over 7/7”.

The background to the poll – not least the fact that the fraudulent propaganda used to justify the Iraq war has destroyed the government’s credibility among Muslim communities – is of course omitted from most of these reports. The Mail does at least quote Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain, who puts the findings into context:

“Most people who would examine the facts with a level head would realise that this (7/7) is not some conspiracy. But as with the assassination of JFK, regrettably these kind of incidents become a cause celebre for conspiracy theorists. I think that this particular government has also engendered a lot of distrust. Some people will always be determined to believe that Muslims could not have been behind such an act of mass murder and to this end they are vulnerable to conspiracy theorists. The Muslim Council has always asked for a public inquiry into the July 7 bombings and that inquiry would have put this scepticism to bed for good.”