The Muslim News Tuesday expressed its exasperation at the latest call by Home Secretary John Reid for Muslim parents to spy on the behaviour of their sons as suspected terrorists.

“The Home Secretary is generating a new climate of fear against Muslims, by not only suggesting they are all potential terrorists, but appears to be also trying to divide Muslims families,” The Muslim News Editor Ahmed J Versi said.

“There are times when we must confront them to protect them from harm. So I appeal to you to look for changes in your teenage sons – odd hours, dropping out of school or college, strange new friends. And if you are worried, talk to them before their hatred grows,” he said.

Versi said that the Home Secretary suggested that it was becoming “worse than looking for reds under the bed” and that Reid could be next asking Muslims to empty the pockets of their children every night, check all their emails and log all webpages they visit.

“He is taking to extreme lengths the Government’s false premises about so-called extremism. What is he asking Muslim parents to spy on? To watch when they are ever late and then report suspicions to anti-terrorist police to intervene and have them interrogated for 28 days? It a pure farce,” he said.

“Even more dangerous is the impression the Home Secretary is giving to the rest of society that when parents can’t trust their children not to be terrorist, who can,” the editor warned.

Muslim News press release, 19 September 2006

“The Pope’s response to the anger his statements sparked in the Muslim world was more offensive than the statements themselves. He apologised not for what he said, but for Muslims’ failure to grasp the intended meaning.

“That the Pope should have quoted from a Byzantine text on Islam is hardly surprising. The line of continuity between Emanuel Paleologos’s conception of Islam – quoted in the papal speech – and Benedict’s has never been severed. The massive body of terms, images and narratives on Islam which the church inherited from the middle ages survives intact. There, Islam is depicted as a false creed propagated through violence and promiscuity, with Muhammad as scoundrel, magician, heresiarch, and precursor of the anti-Christ…. The Reformation further developed this literary corpus and ensured its transmission into modern Europe. In a 17th-century Christian text, Muslims are described in the most chilling of terms. They are ‘poison, scabies, venomous snakes … the dogs in the church’.

“Even if this metaphorical language has retreated in favour of the profane language of reason and subjectivity, its structural foundations remain. Islam is still perceived as the other, the embodiment of evil. Only in this context can we make full sense of the Pope’s statements, and indeed of much of what is said today on the subject of Islam. We must defend freedom of expression, but freedom of expression should not be used as a disguise for the incitement of hatred of other races and religions.”

Soumaya Ghannoushi in the Guardian, 19 September 2006

Pope Benedict’s admission that he was “deeply sorry” for offending the sensitivities of Muslims does not necessarily mean that the worst crisis of his papacy is over yet. Speaking in Rome yesterday, the Pope said that the views of the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus that he quoted last week – describing Islam as “evil and inhuman” – were not his own.

In Britain, some senior Muslims welcomed the Pope’s apologies but suggested that he would have to make a further apology to stop the row escalating.

Massoud Shadjareh, of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, said: “He needs to convince that this is a genuine apology because many people are aware of the sort of things he has been saying for a long time. Threats are not the way forward but some of the things he has said have been music to the ears of racists.”

Guardian, 18 September 2006

Britain ‘resurrects culture of racism’

Morning Star, 18 September 2006

Race relations campaigners warned at the weekend that the British and US governments have “resurrected a culture of primitive racism” after the terror attacks in both countries.

The way the terrorist threat has been dealt with has produced overarching racism in which ethnic minorities are perceived as terrorists or illegal immigrants, said Institute of Race Relations (IRR) director Dr A. Sivanandan. He told Saturday’s conference at Conway Hall in central London that the multicultural Britain created after the second world war had been “destroyed”.

“The war on asylum and the war on terror – one the unarmed invasion, the other the armed enemy within – has produced the idea of a nation under siege, and, on the ground, a racism that cannot tell a settler from an immigrant, an immigrant from an asylum-seeker, an asylum-seeker from a Muslim, a Muslim from a terrorist”, said Dr Sivanandan.

But he insisted that the damage done to the whole fabric of society and democracy was more insidious, with constraints on the freedom of speech, plus the undermining of laws and the independence of the judiciary.

He went on: “It is that adamantine resolve to deny the connection between cause and effect that has also prevented the government from seeing that in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the systematic dismemberment of Palestine, it is they and their American bosses who have declared jihad on Muslims the world over and given sustenance to terrorism.

“And having refused to acknowledge it, they have no choice but to stir up more and more fear in order to pass more and more draconian legislation that further erodes our liberties.”

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“Pope Benedict delivered his controversial speech in Germany the day after the fifth anniversary of September 11. It is difficult to believe that his reference to an inherently violent strain in Islam was entirely accidental. He has, most unfortunately, withdrawn from the interfaith initiatives inaugurated by his predecessor, John Paul II, at a time when they are more desperately needed than ever. Coming on the heels of the Danish cartoon crisis, his remarks were extremely dangerous. They will convince more Muslims that the west is incurably Islamophobic and engaged in a new crusade. We simply cannot afford this type of bigotry.”

Karen Armstrong in the Guardian, 18 September 2006

See also Giles Fraser’s piece in Saturday’s Guardian: “the Pope has form on all of this. Just a few months before he was elected, he spoke out against Muslim Turkey joining the EU. Christian Europe must be defended, he argued. It didn’t go down well at the time with Muslim leaders. But what makes his comments from Bavaria doubly insensitive is that Munich and its surrounding towns are home to thousands of Gastarbeiter, many from Turkey, who are often badly treated by local Germans and frequently subjected to racism. It won’t be lost on them that Manuel II ran his Christian empire from what is now the Turkish city of Istanbul. And reference to that time, in circumstances such as these, has the unmistakable whiff of Christian triumphalism.”

Guardian, 16 September 2006

It’s that time of year again. The Islamic Human Rights Commission announces the 2006 Islamophobia Awards:

“The Islamophobia Awards is an annual event to acknowledge – through satire, revue and comedy – the worst Islamophobes of that year. Centred around a gala dinner, the ‘awards’ themselves are both entertaining and raise awareness of a serious and growing prejudice. Real awards are given to those who have battled against Islamophobia – often against enormous odds.”

IHRC announcement, 17 September 2006

So it’s your chance to vote now for the Islamophobes of the year.