Muslim students’ right to organise must not be compromised by this barbaric attack on London, says NUS president Kat Fletcher.
Category Archives: Resisting Islamophobia
The anti-Muslim backlash continues
The Institute of Race Relations provides a further compilation of press reports about the post-7/7 backlash against British Muslims.
IRR news summary, 21 July 2005
Increases in hate crimes against Muslims are also reported in the South West and Wales.
For BBC reports see here, here and here.
The statement by one of the interviewees that the London atrocities were “nothing to do with Islam” reduces Robert Spencer to apoplexy:
“How long will Muslims and multiculturalists keep saying this? How long will a gullible public keep buying it? When will the denial end about exactly why these bombers are killing themselves and others, and how such bombers are recruited? Is Britain and the West going to play the dhimmi intellectually and morally all the way up to the time that it becomes necessary to assume the dhimmi role not just in metaphor but in reality?”
Enormous upsurge in anti-Muslim backlash
The Islamic Human Rights Commission is sad to announce that there has been a huge upsurge in the number of Islamophobic incidents reported to it in the two weeks following the London bombings.
The source of this hysteria
Portraying Muslim scholars such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi and even Tariq Ramadan as extremists is absurd – and dangerous, Naima Bouteldja argues.
An excellent article. However, the author is wrong in assuming that Professor Ramadan’s opponents in France are the main source of misinformation for right-wing journalists compiling attacks on him in Britain. Rather, it is US Islamophobes like Daniel Pipes and Steve Emerson who provide the Sun et al with their lies and distortions. The recent article in the Sun “exposing” Ramadan was a crude cut-and-paste job from articles by those two writers.
Explainers not popes
“The British right-wing press’s campaign of vilification against Islam continues today, with no less than three hostile articles by three of the usual suspects: Anne McElroy, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Amir Taheri. The last gets a two-page spread in which he is allowed to defame a large proportion, if not the entirety, of the scholarly body of Islam.”
Media blamed for Islam’s image
The misperception of Islam that led to the attacks on six Auckland mosques two weeks ago was fuelled by negative media portrayal of the faith, Auckland’s Muslim community says.
Last night at Ponsonby Mosque, Government and police officials re-iterated their support for New Zealand’s Muslim community in the wake of the mosque attacks on on July 10. The acts were an apparent backlash for the bombings in London three days earlier.
Ethnic Affairs Minister Chris Carter, Labour MP Ashraf Choudhary and Police Commissioner Rob Robinson joined other officials to hear the concerns of about 50 leaders and members of Auckland’s Muslim community.
The Muslim community was united in thanking the Government for its support and the police for their swift arrest following the attacks. But the loudest applause followed their own comments condemning the mainstream media’s portrayal of Islam.
Norman Geras – apologist for imperialist war
Norman Geras, the neocons’ favourite “Marxist”, holds forth in the Guardian today, condemning those who have sought to relate the London bombings to the anger aroused in the Muslim world by Western imperialism and the Iraq war in particular.
Beneath the cloud of pseudo-moral indignation, it is not difficult to fathom the motives for Geras’s article. As one of the leading “left” cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq, he himself obviously bears a small part of the responsibility for the London atrocities.
Geras writes: “It needs to be seen and said clearly: there are, among us, apologists for what the killers do…. There are apologists among us, and they have to be fought intellectually and politically. They do not help to strengthen the democratic culture and institutions whose benefits we all share.”
There could hardly be a better description of Geras himself, an apologist for imperialist warmongering who enthusiastically backed an invasion that caused the death of some 100,000 Iraqis, and who now lashes out in fury at anyone who tries to open a democratic debate about the wider political context of the London bombings.
Still, Norm does have his admirers. Mad Mel joins the US Right in paying tribute to the good professor.
Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 21 July 2005
For a reply to Geras by Yusuf Smith, see here.
Omar Bakri shoots off his mouth again
Yusuf Smith on the way Omar Bakri’s provocative statements play into the hands of the anti-Muslim press.
Livingstone defends ‘progressive’ Qaradawi
Defying calls by pro-Israeli lobby in Britain to ban Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi from visiting the country, London Mayor Ken Livingstone has defended the prominent Muslim scholar as a “leading progressive Muslim” and blamed decades of western hegemony over the Arab world for recruiting “terrorists and extremists”.
Speaking at his first mayoral press conference Tuesday, July 19, since the terrorist July 7 attacks, Livingstone said he invited Qaradawi to a conference in Manchester next month on means of fighting extremism, the Financial Times reported.
“I believe it (is) important that Britain’s Islamic community hears, through every means possible, condemnation of this [London blasts] from leading Islamic figures and urge them to speak out with all the means they possess on this issue.”
“All information I have received is that [Qaradawi has] condemned the London bombings unequivocally as wholly incompatible with Islam,” he said.
Qaradawi, head of the Dublin-based International Association of Muslim Scholars (IAMS), was quick to condemn the grisly attacks on London, which were carried out by four bombers, including three British-born Muslims, and killed at least 56 people and injured up to 700.
“We were dumbfounded by the grave news of the London bombings which killed tens and wounded hundreds of innocent people who committed no crime,” Qaradawi had said.
His office told IslamOnline.net Tuesday, July 19, that the respected scholar was not expected to show up in the August conference because of his illness.
What motivates the terrorists?
“Again and again we are told that terrorism is associated with poverty and the basic, Qur’anic education provided by madrasas. We are told that the men who carry out this work are evil madmen with whom no debate is possible and who, according to Frank Field on last week’s Question Time, ‘aim to wipe us out’. All links with Iraq and Afghanistan are vehemently denied.
“In actual fact, al-Qaida operatives tend to be highly educated and their aims clearly and explicitly political. Bin Laden, in his numerous communiques, has always been completely clear about this. In his first public statement, ‘A declaration of war against the Americans’, issued in 1996, he announced he was fighting US foreign policy in the Middle East and, in particular, American support for the House of Saud and the state of Israel. His aim, he stated, is to unleash a clash of civilisations between Islam and the ‘Zionist crusaders’ of the west, and so provoke an American backlash strong enough to radicalise the Muslim world and topple pro-western governments.
“Bush has fulfilled Bin Laden’s every hope. Through the invasion of secular Ba’athist Iraq, the abuses in Abu Ghraib, the mass murders in Falluja, America – with Britain’s obedient assistance – has turned Iraq into a jihadist playground while alienating all moderate Muslim opinion in the Islamic heartlands and, crucially, in the west. Of course, we must condemn the horrific atrocities these men cause; but condemnation is not enough. Unless we attempt to understand the jihadis, read their statements and honestly analyse what has led these men to blow themselves up, we can never defeat them or even begin to drain the swamp of the grievances in which they continue to flourish.”
William Dalrymple in the Guardian, 20 July 2005