“The anniversary of Sydney’s December 11, 2005 Cronulla race riot witnessed no serious incidents, but not for want of trying on the part of the media and political establishment.”
Category Archives: Resisting Islamophobia
Not all Muslim Somalis are violent thugs
Islamophobia Watch has not always seen eye to eye with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, but this article, from yesterday’s Evening Standard, is right on the button.
Not all Muslim Somalis are violent thugs
By Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Evening Standard, 21 December 2006
Yusuf Abdillh Jama and his brother Mustaf will, I hope, burn slowly in hell for slaughtering PC Sharon Beshenivsky, mother of two, who was called to duty during an armed robbery.
With other hard gangsters, the two were violent career criminals. Yusuf was convicted of murder and faces years of incarceration. The more villainous Mustaf escaped to Somalia. Speculation is spreading that he slipped away under a full veil using his sister’s passport. What evil lurks under some of these shrouds: you can see why criminals and terrorists would take up a garment that gives them absolute facial anonymity.
Yusuf and Mustaf are evil. They are also Muslim Somali refugees. A simple reminder: that doesn’t mean all Muslim Somali asylum seekers are violent thugs who should be banished. Yet I bet, as people read reports of this heinous crime and the court case, many will have thought exactly that.
With the many crises this year over asylum arrivals, ineligible or fake claimants, Immigration Service paralysis and Home Office ineptitude, public attitudes have hardened against migrants in general and asylum seekers in particular – including the deserving. Asylum seekers have never had it so bad. Many are destitute, others wrenched from the places they have settled in to be detained and processed. Their children are traumatised.
Osama Saeed replies to Sunday Times
Osama Saeed replies to the Sunday Times article claiming that he had “compared the treatment of Asians in Britain with that of Jews in Nazi Germany”.
A people under siege
Five years after the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, “Islamophobia” – intensified by the war in Iraq and government actions – has left millions of Muslims here and in other Western countries fearful of harassment, discrimination and questionable prosecutions, and confused about their place in society.
Recent polls indicate that almost half of U.S. citizens have a negative perception of Islam and that one in four of those surveyed have “extreme” anti-Muslim views. A survey by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) found that a quarter of people here consistently believe stereotypes such as: “Muslims value life less than other people” and “The Muslim religion teaches violence and hatred.”
In 2005, CAIR received 1,972 civil rights complaints, compared to 1,522 in 2004. This constitutes a 29.6 percent increase in the total number of complaints of anti-Muslim harassment, violence and discriminatory treatment from 2004. It is the highest number of Muslim civil rights complaints ever reported to CAIR.
US congressman asked to apologize for anti-Muslim remarks
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) tonight called on Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) to apologize for anti-Muslim remarks he made in a recent letter to a constituent.
Goode’s letter to the head of the local Sierra Club chapter slammed the planned use of a Quran for the ceremonial swearing-in of Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress. (No religious texts of any kind are used for the official swearing-in ceremony.)
“I do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way,” wrote Goode. “The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”
Goode also decried the growth of the American Muslim community. He wrote, “I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America.” (Keith Ellison has traced his family’s roots in America to the year 1742.)
“Representative Goode’s Islamophobic remarks send a message of intolerance that is unworthy of anyone elected to public office,” said CAIR National Legislative Director Corey Saylor. “There can be no reasonable defense for such bigotry.”
‘Muslim dinners for church kids’
“Pupils at a Church of England school are only able to eat Muslim meals because of a council ruling. The only meat on the menu at the primary school is halal – where animals are controversially bled to death. Children have been eating the meat for up to SEVENTEEN years at FOUR schools in Reading, Berkshire, without parents’ knowledge, the council admitted yesterday. The fact emerged after pupils were given letters from canteen managers to take home. Islamic law insists on halal meat, produced by slashing an animal’s neck with a single cut. Animals are not stunned beforehand. Parents are furious at the revelation.”
Update: See also Christian Today, 19 December 2006
Stand by for the BNP to pick up on this story as an example of the so-called “Islamicisation of Britain”.
For Osama Saeed’s comments, see Rolled Up Trousers, 18 December 2006
Islamophobia takes a grip across Europe
Muslims are suffering physical attacks, verbal taunts and widespread discrimination as a climate of Islamophobia takes a grip across Europe.
A new report lists a host of examples of crime and intimidation from arson and suspected racist murder in Germany and Spain to pork fat being smeared on a mosque in Italy.
Thugs in Ireland beat up one man after calling him “bin Laden” while a bogus email in Denmark outlined fake primary school reforms to help migrant children. A maths question read: “Jamal has an AK47 with a 30-shot magazine. If he misses 6 out of 10 shots and he wants to hit each cup 13 times, how many cups can he shoot before he needs to reload?”
The report from the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia called on leaders to strengthen policies on integration, and on Muslims to “engage more actively in public life.” It also highlights the lack of reliable data, pointing out that only one country – the United Kingdom – publishes criminal justice data which specifically identify Muslims as victims of hate crime incidents.
The Muslim population of the EU is estimated to run to around 13m, around 3.5 per cent of the total. Since September 11 many feel “they have been put under a general suspicion of terrorism,” according to Beate Winkler, director of the centre.
The report says that Muslims “experience various levels of discrimination and marginalisation in employment, education and housing” and are “vulnerable to manifestations of prejudice and hatred in the form of anything from verbal threats through to physical attacks on people and property.”
The BBC and ‘Muslim-only swimming sessions’
Yusuf Smith reproduces a letter he has sent to David Robey, the managing editor of BBC London, about the Vanessa Feltz show last Monday, in which she recycled a story from the Daily Star about a swimming pool in London having sessions for Muslims. He accuses the BBC of engaging in “irresponsible pseudo-journalism”.
Melbourne protesters march against racism
An estimated 1,500 anti-racism protesters marched through the Melbourne CBD on Friday night.
The rally attracted protesters from the Socialist Alliance, the Greens Party and the Civil Rights Defence group. It stopped traffic as it weaved its way through the city to the Liberal Party state offices in Exhibition Street.
Organiser Kim Bullimore says the riots in Sydney have shown that political leaders lack the will to combat racism. “What we need is some leadership … actually take a stand,” she said. “I’m here today because I think that Muslim and Arab people should be welcome in our country,” one protester said.
Another said: “These riots have happened in Sydney due to tension that’s been building up for a long time. We don’t believe in a divided Australia.”
Florida web host asked to drop ‘kill all Muslim kids’ site
The Tampa, Fla., office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Tampa) is calling on an Internet web hosting company in that state to drop a hate site that supports calls to “kill all Muslim kids”.
Under the headline, “Love Your Kids? Fear For Their Future? Kill All Muslim Kids!!!!”, the website’s owner, who lives in the Tampa area, wrote: “Makes sense to me. After all, if Muslims are raising their little crumb-snatching, curtain climbing, ankle biting rug rats to strap on bombs in order to kill us, it is logically correct to assume that in order to stop that from happening we need to kill all Muslim kids. Starting now.”
Other entries on the site contain obscene and hate-filled attacks on Islam and Muslims, as well as support for violent actions. One entry states: “It’s bad enough some [expletive deleted] in Minnesota elect a Muslim to Congress but the people in Michigan might have done them one better… Start sticking [sic] up on guns and ammo. The war will start soon.”
In a letter to Boca Raton-based Hostgator.com LLC, CAIR-Tampa Executive Director Ahmed Bedier wrote: “While we respect an individual’s right to freedom of speech, we oppose hate-filled speech that calls for violence against innocent people. . .It’s clear that [the website is] in violation of your company’s ‘Terms of Service’ agreement which states: ‘…Any material that, in our judgment, is obscene or threatening is prohibited and will be removed from our servers with or without notice.’ The agreement also clearly defines ‘hate sites’ under ‘Examples of unacceptable material.'”
Bedier asked Hostgator to stop hosting the site. He noted that CAIR had raised concerns about the anti-Muslim site at a local forum on hate crimes in November.