Eight weeks after the London bombings racial violence is still on the rise, the Institute of Race Relations reports..
Category Archives: Resisting Islamophobia
Mad Mel and Tariq Ramadan
“The government’s desperation to engage with ‘moderate’ Islam appears to mean that it is keen to embrace even those who believe in Islamicising the west, as long as they make ritual noises denouncing the terror that flows from such an agenda. At the root of this is its determination to avoid at all costs being thought to have a problem with the current state of Islam itself as opposed to a few ‘unrepresentative’ terrorists, whose motivation will therefore be ascribed to everything but. Such myopia spells cultural suicide.”
Mad Mel condemns the government’s decision to appoint Tariq Ramadan to a Home Office task force.
Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 31 August 2005
As you might anticipate, she parrots accusations from Daniel Pipes’ attack on Professor Ramadan (the same one that provided the basis for the Sun’s recent witch-hunt). For Ramadan’s demolition of Pipes’ slanders, see here
Muslim students lay the blame on No.10
Muslim anger over British foreign policy, particularly the war against Iraq, resurfaced yesterday in a survey of Muslim students.
Almost all of the students who took part in the research said that they were unhappy with Tony Blair’s policy in the Middle East and two thirds said that they felt it had contributed to the London bombings. Half of the respondents in the poll, which was organised by the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, said they had experienced Islamophobia and nine out of 10 objected to the way they were portrayed in the media.
The preliminary results of the survey were revealed at a conference in London’s City Hall addressed by a panel including Ken Livingstone, the London Mayor, Government ministers and commentators.
Wakkas Khan, the president of the federation, which represents 90,000 Muslim students, said: “The Prime Minister’s continuing refusal to accept that his decisions could have led to such extreme consequences does nothing to appease the Muslim community, and on the contrary, seems to be causing more resentment amongst young Muslims. It is important now for Mr Blair to accept that foreign policy is a serious concern and to start to do something about it rather than being seen to brush it aside.”
Mr Livingstone said: “Anti-terrorist measures must be directed against those carrying out, planning or supporting such terrorist attacks and not against those who are our allies in dealing with the terrorists. Attempts to criminalise legitimate political views, for example on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, would destroy the trust, which is essential to isolate and deal with real terrorists.” He told Muslim students that it was their duty to challenge a “rising tide of Islamaphobia” in the media.
Muslim students ‘speak on terror’
A conference in London is hoping to forge bonds between Muslim students, police and other public authorities, organisers say. The event has been organised in response to last month’s terror attacks.
Student Wakkas Khan said it was a chance for the UK’s 90,000 Muslim students to be heard. “We want to hear what they believe needs changing and where the solutions lie,” he said.
“Following the attacks in London we have seen Muslim youth thrust into the spotlight. Through this conference we ask them directly about their concerns and give them an opportunity to state openly and frankly their views,” added Mr Khan, president of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (Fosis).
Muslim media image ‘must change’
A “rising tide of Islamophobia” in the media must be challenged by Muslim students, the Mayor of London has said.
Some newspapers depicted refugees as bringing crime and disease into the UK, Ken Livingstone told a Federation of Student Islamic Societies conference.
Fosis said about 90% of the 250 UK Muslim students it asked thought the media image of Muslims needs to change. Its survey also found 95% were unhappy with British foreign policy, with Iraq being the main reason mentioned.
Mr Livingstone compared the reporting of Muslims in contemporary Britain to the way the flight of Jews from Russia had been covered 100 years ago. He said both had been attacked, despite coming from “areas of conflict or places of oppression”.
Some newspapers, he said, have decided that in order to sell copies “it doesn’t matter what the origin of your victim is, so long as you can stir up fear in the host country”.
Woman defies law banning the burqa
A Moroccan woman living in a small town in Belgium has single-handedly triggered a national debate on multiculturalism after refusing to obey a municipal injunction to stop wearing a burqa.
The woman has now prompted politicians in the Dutch-speaking north of Belgium to talk about changing federal law, after she became the first person in Belgium to be fined for wearing the all-enveloping veil and robe. She has so far refused to pay the £80 fine, or even to co-operate with police and municipal authorities in the Flemish town of Maaseik.
The burqa, together with a smaller type of face mask, the niqab, has been banned by bylaw in the cities and towns of Ghent, Antwerp, Sint-Truden, Lebbeke and Maaseik. The mayor of Maaseik, Jan Cleemers, said he acted after six women started wearing burqas, alarming locals. Five of the women stopped wearing the garments.
A police inspector in Maaseik said the head-to-toe covering of Bouloudo’s wife, who has refused to speak to police or give her name, offended and alarmed locals. “You cannot identify or recognise someone when they’re wearing a burqa, especially at night. It’s not normal, we don’t have that in our culture,” he said.
No ‘faith solution’ to extremism claims Rushdie
Tony Blair’s reliance on faith-based groups in fighting extremism is a “very bad mistake”, Salman Rushdie has said.
The prime minister’s belief that “more religion is going to solve the problem” was “seriously out of step with the country”, the novelist told BBC News. He criticised support for faith-based schools and said UK Islamic groups were failing to represent most Muslims.
The Muslim Council of Britain said Mr Rushdie had “lost his faith” and was “enraged” that most UK Muslims had not. MCB spokesman Inayat Bunglawala told BBC News: “Salman Rushdie’s call amounts to an appeal to Muslims to apostasise from their faith. He has been doing so at regular intervals since The Satanic Verses was published and has miserably failed every time.”
The meaninglessness of ‘Islamo-fascism’
“What he overlooks, along with many others who use the term Islamo-fascism, is how little relevance these mass political movements and their capture of the state have to Islamist terrorism – let alone the enormous exaggeration required to liken the threat of a few hundred potential terrorists in the UK with a sustained world war in which hundreds of thousands of Britons died fighting a hugely powerful, highly organised nation state. The real beauty of the Nazi analogy is that it provides a valuable political opportunity to define yourself and ensure a damaging definition of your opponent. Positioning in an argument is key, and the Islamo-fascism analogy enables the appeasement slur to be used against any ‘who try to explain jihadist violence’, as Cameron put it.”
Madeline Bunting responds to would-be Tory leader David Cameron.
Newspaper article provokes attacks on Islamic bookshop
Staff at a respected Islamic bookshop in central London have been the victims of an intensive campaign of abusive phone calls and personal threats after it was pictured in an article accusing London bookshops of selling pamphlets urging Muslims to wage holy war.
The shop Dar Al Taqwa, near Baker Street, has been run as a family business for more than 20 years. It’s one of the oldest and biggest Islamic bookshops in London and sells books on the Qur’an, Arabic, travel and academic books on Islam. But it became the target of an intense hate campaign after the Evening Standard carried an article claiming a journalist had bought two pamphlets on jihad from the bookshop that sanctioned the killing of women, old men and children.
The same article showed pictures of three books and videos, which it alleged advocate terrorism, suggesting that they were also for sale from bookshops like Dar Al Taqwa. But Dar Al Taqwa has never sold any of this material.
Ammie El-Atar, whose father owns the bookshop, said: ‘We have never stocked [the books pictured]. These stories are a gross misrepresentation and simply not true. ‘We’ve had constant abuse and threats since the stories appeared with people threatening to kill us and firebomb the shop.’
The Londoner, September 2005
The Evening Standard: the paper that hates London
“On Thursday July 28th, the Evening Standard published an article entitled ‘Terror and hatred for sale in the heart of capital’. In the article, Standard writer Robert Mendick told of how an Islamic bookshop called Dar Al Taqwa sold books and DVDs ‘advocating terrorism’ and ‘urging Muslims to wage a holy war by arming themselves with bombs and guns’. They printed a picture of the shop, the address of the shop and even the shop’s phone number. You can probably guess what happened next. The bookshop employees were immediately subject to a rigorous campaign of abusive phone calls and personal threats.
“Lawyers for the El-Atar family, backed by the Mayor of London, are working to clear the family’s name and are insisting on a public apology and an article of equal length setting the record straight from the Evening Standard. Their legal advisor said: ‘Everyone who works at Dar Al Taqwa is completely disgusted by and opposed to acts of terrorism, and having alleged the contrary in its article, the paper should have the decency and integrity to publicly admit that it has gone too far’.”