Category Archives: Resisting Islamophobia

Most people back religious hatred law – and they’re right

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Most people back religious hatred law – and they’re right

By Ken Livingstone

Tribune, 1 July 2005

Anyone would think from the media coverage of the government’s proposed legislation to ban incitement to religious hatred that the combination of some comedians and celebrities, along with the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, represented the views of the great majority of the population.

In London, they definitely do not. The Government’s new Bill, which will significantly build on existing legislative measures aimed at combating hate crime, has overwhelming backing from Londoners. Seventy-two per cent of London residents support the new anti-incitement law, according to our opinion polls. Just 15 per cent are against. The media has ignored this impressive show of popular support for the Bill, preferring to give publicity to the unrepresentative views of a few high-profile celebrities, who have falsely portrayed it as a new blasphemy law.

Some faith groups such as Jews and Sikhs are currently protected from incitement to hatred on the basis that these religions are held to be mono-ethnic, and therefore come under the 1986 Public Order Act which bans incitement to racial hatred. Members of faiths which are defined as multi-ethnic, such as Hindus and Muslims, are not so protected. This is clearly unacceptable, and has left a loophole for the far Right.

Opponents of the Bill claim that existing laws are sufficient to deal with the racists. They cite the case of Mark Norwood, a BNP member in Shropshire who was successfully prosecuted in 2002 after he placed a poster in his window carrying the slogan “Islam Out of Britain”. They omit to mention the case of another BNP member, Dick Warrington, who was prosecuted for displaying a poster with the same slogan but was acquitted by magistrates in Leeds in 2002.

The BNP had this to say about Warrington’s prosecution: “The snag for the police, however, is that Islam is not covered by the anti-free speech race law… it’s legal to say anything you want about Islam, even far more extreme things…”

Nick Griffin’s secretly-filmed tirade against Muslims, clearly desgined to whip up the most unpleasant hatred against Asians, indicates what we are up against.

The comedian Rowan Atkinson has accused the government of “using a sledgehammer to crack a nut”, which could be taken to imply that the rise in anti-Muslim hatred is a matter of little significance.

The same argument was employed during the Commons debate on the Bill by Tory MP Boris Johnson, who stated that “the problem of Islamophobia is in danger of being exaggerated”. As the editor of a magazine – The Spectator – that has brazenly contributed some of the worst examples of Islamophobia in the media, this is hardly surprising.

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Will religious hatred laws deal with bigotry?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Socialist Worker asks the question, Ghayasuddin Siddiqui and Inayat Bunglawala offer opposing answers. Looks like the SWP is hedging its bets. The fact that these two writers are given equal billing is itself a bit of a cop-out. Inayat Bunglawala is media secretary for the Muslim Council of Britain, to which over 300 British Muslim organisations are affiliated, whereas the Muslim Parliament is, how shall we put this, somewhat less of a mass movement.

Socialist Worker, 2 July 2005

Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The transcript of the first sitting of the House of Commons standing committee on the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill is now online. Leyton & Wanstead MP Harry Cohen states:

“Islamophobia is deep and serious. It is of great concern to many of my Muslim constituents. I suspect that Members with Muslim constituents know that very well. Where it is overt, the law must stand up against it and declare it illegal and unacceptable.”

Report of proceedings, 28 June 2005

Why watered down religious hatred legislation won’t work

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Why watered down religious hatred legislation won’t work

By Ken Livingstone

Morning Star, 25 June 2005

The government’s new Bill proposing a ban on incitement to religious hatred, which last week passed its second reading in the Commons by 303 votes to 247, has been the subject of much controversy.

As mayor of the most diverse city in the world, I strongly support this Bill, and welcome the fact that the overwhelming majority of Londoners do so too.

Our polls show that 72 per cent of Londoners support a ban on inciting hatred against people on grounds of their religion, while only 15 per cent oppose it.

Unfortunately, this mass public support for the Bill has been ignored by the media, who have concentrated on publicising the vocal objections of the Tory party and a few well-known celebrities, who have tended to portray the Bill as a form of blasphemy law.

The position under existing race relations laws is discriminatory and clearly unacceptable.

Some faith groups such as Jews and Sikhs are currently protected from incitement to hatred, whereas members of other faiths such as Hindus and Muslims are not.

This has left a dangerous loophole in the law which is being exploited by the extreme right.

The British National Party has been energetically propagating its racist filth by whipping up Islamophobia, playing on post-9/11 stereotypes of Muslims as terrorists.

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FA rules Religious Observance to extend to all faiths

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The English Football Association (FA) congratulated itself this month for finally accepting that its rule on Religious Observance in amateur leagues should be extended to religions other than Christianity.

For the first time, the FA acknowledged that just as amateur Christian players are not obliged to play on Good Friday or Christmas day, their Muslim counterparts should be afforded the same rights without fear of reprimand. The success was effectively due to The Muslim News campaign to correct this blatant discrepancy.

Embarrassingly, it took the case of Abram Moss Warriors and the highlighting of the rationale by The Muslim News for the FA to concede that its diversity policy was alarmingly outdated, having failed to take into account England’s growing Muslim population.

In 2003, the Manchester-based team, made up of mostly 12-year-old Muslims, were penalised with a £250 fine and excluded from their local cup for merely requesting the rescheduling of the kick-off time for a game during Ramadan that year. The Warriors’ appeal to Lancashire FA was rejected and met with patronising advice on the appropriate age for fasting.

Muslim News, 24 June 2005

UN officials seek Guantánamo Bay visit

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Manfred NowakGENEVA — U.N. human rights investigators, citing “persistent and credible” reports of torture at the U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay, urged the United States on Thursday to allow them to check conditions there.

The failure of the United States to respond to requests since early 2002 is leading the experts to conclude Washington has something to hide at the Cuban base, said Manfred Nowak, a specialist on torture and a professor of human rights law in Vienna, Austria. “At a certain point, you have to take well-founded allegations as proven in the absence of a clear explanation by the government,” Nowak said.

Associated Press, 23 June 2005

The lynching of a Lodi family

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In less than a week of recklessness reporting, the Bay Area media has destroyed a humble Pakistani family and three other men. The carnage was unbelievable. In a frenzy race for the ratings, the media descended to Lodi, a small town south of Sacramento, in search of the “terrorist cell” they learned about in a federal criminal complaint. Everybody took at face value the veracity of an FBI affidavit and the most imaginative headlines started to come out of the editor’s brains. The San Francisco Chronicle, northern California biggest paper, went along with the FBI version with astonishing words, quotes and statements: terror cell, training with al-Qaida, how to kill Americans, terrorism inquiry to spread, number of people committed to al-Qaida have been operating in and around Lodi, to carry out his jihadi mission, targets include hospitals and food stores, and could have poisoned the ice cream.

San Francisco Bay Indymedia, 23 June 2005

See also “FBI ‘witch-hunt’ in Lodi, California”, Not In Our Name, 23 June 2005

Opposition to anti-incitement bill defeated

Posted on by Bob Pitt

So the predicted backbench rebellion failed to materialise, and yesterday the new bill outlawing incitement to religious hatred passed its second reading in the Commons by 303 votes to 247. Interesting that the Lib Dems found themselves in a bloc with the Tories in opposing the bill.

It’s not every day that this member of the Islamophobia Watch collective applauds the politics of Gerald Kaufman MP, but I can’t help approving of the attack he launched on the Tories in the course of the debate:

“The problem with interventions by Conservative Members is they are totally unrepresentative of the population as a whole in that hardly any of them are open to the kind of humiliation that many members of our communities are open to. If they were, they would not be criticising this legislation.”

He went on to refer to “the case of Mrs Shahzada, a constituent of mine who went to a shop in central Manchester soon after 9/11. She wears a veil over her face, and the shopkeeper refused to serve her because she was, to his perception, a Muslim. That was hatred against an individual, not a criticism of Islam. It is about time that we had an Opposition who understood the kind of country that we live in today.”

Hansard, 21 June 2005

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We need this law to fight hatred

Posted on by Bob Pitt

We need this law to fight hatred

By Sadiq Khan, MP for Tooting

Evening Standard, 21 June 2005

It is, if its critics are to believed, a grievous threat both to our freedom of speech and to the nation’s cherished sense of humour. As such, the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, which has its second reading in Parliament today, has been derided as dangerous, politically cynical, and most of all, as unnecessary. So why do so few of my fellow Muslims see it that way?

Debating the Bill, Muslims tend to think not of vicar jokes but of incidents like one in a charity shop in Shepherd’s Bush recently, where a white, British Muslim woman was told by another customer: “You may be English, but you married a f***ing Muslim.”

We think not about alleged political calculations, but about the dangers faced, for example, by one woman recently attacked in the street in north-west London while wearing Muslim dress. She was warned sympathetically by the nurse who treated her injuries: “You have to take off this scarf. Every month we get several cases like you who come for treatment.”

Indeed Muslims might tend to question the extent of freedom of speech when simply going out dressed recognisably as a Muslim can invite assault. Many reported cases involve Muslim women having their headscarves forcibly pulled off and or having alcohol thrown at them. In one incident, a schoolgirl had her headscarf pulled off by a parent of another child at the school gates, to the sound of laughter from those watching.

All these incidents happened because these Londoners were Muslims. It was not about the colour of their skin but the religion they follow.

The Racial and Religious Hatred Bill is not about gagging comedians or curbing criticism of any religion. It is about giving Muslims and other followers of religions the same protection from hate crimes as, for example, black people.

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