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Category Archives: Resisting Islamophobia
Met chief orders inquiry into Muslim PC embassy row
The media are trying to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment over the issue of Alexander Omar Basha, a Muslim police officer guarding the Israeli embassy in London who asked to be transferred to another post during Israel’s war on Lebanon, where he has relatives.
It’s not often this site has reason to endorse the views of a Tory member of the London Assembly, but we note that Richard Barnes blames senior officers rather than PC Basha. The Evening Standard quotes him as saying: “I think it was crass management in the first place. They should have recognised there could have been a problem and not suggested this officer be posted at this embassy.”
Another member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, Peter Herbert, has described the row as a “ridiculous fuss about nothing”. He added: “From a security point of view, the Met would be seriously criticised if this guy has relatives in Lebanon and his picture was used around the world to demonstrate the irony about having a Muslim defending the Israeli embassy in the UK.”
Glen Smyth, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers, said just one two-hour slot outside the embassy had been affected. The officer had not refused to do duties and had made a simple request which it was “fairly sensible” to grant, Mr Smyth said.
Postscript: It turns out that PC Basha was never posted to the Israeli embassy in the first place, according to a statement by Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson.
Has the West been silenced by Islam?
Paul Vallely offers a reasoned assessment.
See also the leader in the same issue – “Beware loose talk about a clash of civilisations“.
Erdoğan: Islamophobia a ‘crime against humanity’
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in an interview on Monday with The Washington Post, scolded those who link Islam to the terrorism of al-Qaeda and other extremist groups that perpetrate violence in the name of Islam. “The coinage of such terms as ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘Islamo-fascism’, these have injured the Muslim people in the world, and it is best to avoid such characterizations,” Erdoğan said.
Asked whether he planned to communicate that to U.S. President George W. Bush, who frequently invokes such phrases in speeches, he said he has in the past. “In the same way as we consider anti-Semitism a crime against humanity”, he said, “Islamo-phobia is also a crime against humanity.”
Turkish Daily News, 4 October 2006
See also Washington Post, 3 October 2006
US radio station thanked for ‘Muslim Jeopardy’ skit apology
A prominent national Islamic civil rights and advocacy group today thanked a Minnesota radio station for reacting positively to concerns about an on-air skit that offended Muslim listeners.
A complaint received by the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) stated that KDWB-FM recently aired a segment called “Muslim Jeopardy” in which a person reportedly used a fake South Asian accent in announcing contest categories such as “infamous infidels,” “potent portables” and “smells like a Shia.” The complaint also stated that a female host was threatened with beheading when she got an answer wrong.
As a result of complaints about the skit, KDWB morning host Dave Ryan issued an apology and the station placed the following “Public Statement” on its web site: “KDWB does not condone making light of Islam and Muslims. We regret that listeners found the ‘Muslim Jeopardy’ comedy skit of one of our on-air hosts to be insensitive.”
CAIR news report, 2 October 2006
Are there no limits to the appeasement of Muslim “sensibilities” by would-be dhimmis? Are western cultural values to be inexorably eroded by the ideological onslaught of the Islamic hordes? Will no-one stand up for the basic democratic right of the white majority to promote offensive stereotypes of minority ethno-religious communities? Definitely another case for Robert Spencer.
New intolerance
“In public elementary schools across the nation, students are taught that America is a land of equality and tolerance. We are all created equal, and we should treat each other with dignity and respect, regardless of race, gender or religion. However, it appears that some of us have forgotten these grammar school lessons. We have turned our fear of living in a post-9/11 society into intolerance towards Arabs and Muslims.
“A poll done earlier this year by the Washington Post and ABC News found that 46 percent of Americans think poorly of Islam today, along with 33 percent that believe Islam helps to cause violence against non-Muslims. A more recent USA Today/Gallup poll found that nearly 40 percent of Americans admit to feeling at least some prejudice against Muslims and 22 percent wouldn’t want to have Muslims as their neighbors. Is this what tolerance passes for in a post-9/11 society?”
Laura Taylor in the Cornell Daily Sun, 3 October 2006
Why I’m banned in the USA – Tariq Ramadan
Tariq Ramadan answers the US government’s claim that he has been banned from the US because he gave money to two Palestinian charities:
“In its letter, the U.S. Embassy claims that I ‘reasonably should have known’ that the charities in question provided money to Hamas. But my donations were made between December 1998 and July 2002, and the United States did not blacklist the charities until 2003. How should I reasonably have known of their activities before the U.S. government itself knew? I donated to these organizations for the same reason that countless Europeans – and Americans, for that matter – donate to Palestinian causes: not to help fund terrorism, but because I wanted to provide humanitarian aid to people who desperately need it. Yet after two years of investigation, this was the only explanation offered for the denial of my visa. I still find it hard to believe.”
‘Let’s have an open and honest discussion about white people’
“Any candid discussion of race, immigration and asylum that was not racist would not just acknowledge fear and prejudice but challenge them both. Since ministers are not able to do that about ethnic minorities, maybe they should start off with a subject with which they are more familiar. Let’s have an open and honest discussion about white people.
“Let’s start by talking about how they don’t want to integrate. The stubborn rump of around 10% of whites who, according to a 2002 Mori poll, are hostile to racial equality and antagonistic to the very existence of non-white people in this country. Given a percentage point either way, that is the consistent figure who believe that to be truly British you must be white and who do not believe it is important to respect the rights of minority groups.
“Let’s discuss their inability to choose moderate leaders and the propensity of the leaders they do choose to murder innocent civilians abroad by their thousands. Let’s analyse their vulnerability to extremists such as the British National party, not to mention elsewhere in Europe, where fascism is once again a mainstream ideology.
“Let’s talk about the religious intolerance that rages in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and can be found in the highest levels of the state, where only Protestants can marry into royalty. And let’s not forget the terrorists white people have been rearing at home for years, whether they are bombing Brick Lane, parliament or shopping centres in Manchester, and the no-go areas in housing estates, football terraces and boardrooms.
“Only then perhaps will it become sufficiently apparent for those with insufficient imagination just how crude and crass the framing of the debate about Muslims has been. Any group of people will rightly bristle at the demand to answer collectively for the acts of individuals with whom they share an identity but over whom they have no control.
“The tolerant, secular, liberal society into which Muslims are being asked to integrate lies somewhere between mythology and a work in progress and, the responsibility for transforming it into a lived reality lies with all of us.”
Gary Younge in the Guardian, 2 October 2006
‘Crude stereotyping’ – Osama Saeed replies to Muriel Gray
Muriel Gray doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a good rant against Islam and Muslims (Comment, September 24). The 7/7 bombers were not all, in fact, from devout Muslim families. Jamal Lindsay, for one, was a convert, as indeed was Richard Reid, the previous shoebomber.
But the main point is yet again we see Gray adopt the most extreme formulation of Islam to advance her argument, and then paint the whole Muslim community with it. Bin Laden would be proud of her. I regard myself as a pretty devout Muslim, but don’t recognise the views she ascribes to me about women, homosexuals, freedom of speech, democracy and the West.
What she is guilty of is exactly what she accuses Muslims of when it comes to the West – caricaturing and stereotyping with the “kaleidoscopic richness and beauty of the country’s (in this case “religion’s”) culture erased”.
It would be easy to debunk her argument that practising Islam leads to bombing by making a similarly stupid argument that anyone that drinks alcohol, doesn’t pray, has sex outside marriage, and indeed writes foaming-at-the-mouth articles against Muslims in newspapers, is just a stone’s throw away from waging military war on the Muslim world.
Osama Saeed
Scottish spokesman
Muslim Association of Britain
German politician blames Islam for religious violence
A top German politician and close ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel said today Islam was one of the main factors in religiously motivated violence, and urged Germany’s Muslims to reject all forms of brutality. Ronald Pofalla, general-secretary of Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), also said many Muslims would find it painful that their religion was being abused for violent ends.
“Certainly it is painful for many Muslims that their religion is misused for violence,” Pofalla wrote in a guest column for tomorrow’s Bild am Sonntag newspaper. “But… the problem of religiously motivated violence is today almost exclusively a problem of Islam. In addition, many of the victims are Muslims themselves,” he said, according to extracts released today.
The Central Council of Muslims in Germany criticised Pofalla’s comments, saying such generalisations reinforced stereotypes and prejudices. “I get the impression that some CDU people want to take one step forward and two back,” its general-secretary said.