Category Archives: Right wing

Australian news show promotes rabid Islamophobes

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Today TonightThe Australian news and current affairs show Today Tonight has already established a reputation for irresponsible anti-Muslim scaremongering.

So it is no surprise that a recent news report claims that Darebin Council in Melbourne is “spending ratepayers’ money” on Muslims to “help them spread their faith”.

In fact the council’s project aims to “dispel myths and misconceptions about Muslims and Islam”, which is rather different from Today Tonight‘s characterisation of the initiative as “funding council workers to spread the word of Islam”. And the money doesn’t come from local ratepayers but from the government’s national counter-extremism fund.

The news report centres on an organisation that it says has “launched a public crusade” against the Darebin Council project. This turns out to be the rabidly Islamophobic Q Society, which campaigns against the “Islamisation of Australia”. Two of the group’s members feature heavily in the report, including its deputy president Vickie Janson, who has written a book entitled Ideological Jihad and promotes the view that “Islam is a totalitarian ideology”. The Q Society website, which is shown complete with a photo of Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer, is also given a plug.

Today Tonight demands to know why public money should be spent on persuading non-Muslims that Islam does not represent a threat to them. The answer, of course, is because it is necessary to counter the effect on potentially violent bigots of the Islamophobic propaganda spewed out by the likes of the Q Society and Today Tonight itself.

Lilburn, Georgia: bigots threaten to oust local politicians who approved mosque expansion

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a report on the Georgia town of Lilburn, where the city council was the target of a lawsuit by the US Justice Department over claims that it discriminated against an application by the Dar-e Abbas Islamic centre for planning permission to expand its premises.

The city council, which spent nearly $63,000 in legal expenses on the case before finally settling with the Justice Department in August, received emails from concerned residents, such as: “Remember the World Trade Center and what these people stand for. By letting these people having [sic] a Mosque built is only a stepping stone to possible future disasters.”

Opponents of the mosque development have threatened that council members who approved the application will pay a political price in Lilburn’s municipal elections in November.

Pam Geller linked anti-Muslim activist calls for mass murder of Congressmen, Muslims, liberals and journalists

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Further evidence has emerged of violent threats (“send all of the muslim immigrants back to their native countries, in boxes”, “burn all the mosques”) by John Joseph Jay, a founding members of the board of Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s American Freedom Defense Initiative, the umbrella organisation for Stop Islamization of America. Think Progress has the details.

Update:  See “Spencer and Geller disavow anti-Muslim activist’s call for violence, say he was never a board member”, also at Think Progress.

‘Political correctness continues to stifle debate on multiculturalism’ claims Mail writer

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Abhijit PandyaThe Daily Mail provides a platform for UKIP Islamophobe Abhijit Pandya to defend his support for Geert Wilders and his view that Islam is “morally flawed and degenerate”. The article also features an ignorant attack on the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia. Pandya is evidently unaware that this initiative has been sabotaged by supporters of Policy Exchange, who packed the APPG’s last meeting and ousted its secretariat.

The Mail is obviously very enthusiastic about Pandya, this being the third article by him it has published in the past week (in its “Right Minds” section, edited by Simon Heffer). The first was entitled “Uncontrolled immigration is destroying Britain’s literacy” and the second “Labour’s two-faced immigration apology still makes too many excuses”. As the EDL and BNP have already discovered, it’s very useful to have a right-wing bigot with brown skin making the kind of arguments usually associated with white racists.

Charges of Islamophobia are inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood with the aim of silencing critics of Islam (it says here)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

David Horowitz and Robert Spencer have a piece at FrontPage Magazine defending themselves against CAIR, the Southern Poverty Law Centre and the Center for American Progress, who have supposedly waged an “ugly campaign” to depict the authors as Islamophobes.

Horowitz and Spencer inform us that “the term ‘Islamophobia’ itself was invented by the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the political fountainhead of Islamic terror”. It is “designed to create a modern-day thought crime” in an attempt to “abolish the First Amendment where Islam is concerned”.

The article has already been published at National Review Online, where it was given the misleading title “A rational fear of Islamism”. However, as Horowitz and Spencer make clear, their target is not Islamism but Islam itself:

Should those of us who are infidels – and therefore targets – not be concerned by a religion whose followers regard this Koranic incitement as the word of God: “Slay the pagans wherever you find them.” (9:5)?

Should Jews not be concerned by the Jew-hatred that permeates the sacred texts of this religion, whose prophet has said: “The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them, until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him” (Sahih Muslim 6985)? …

Should women not fear the expansion of a creed whose God likens a woman to a field men can till: “Your women are a field for you (to cultivate) so go to your field as ye will.” (Qur’an 2:223)? This God has decreed that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man (2:282), that men can marry up to four wives, and have sex with slave girls (4:3), that a son’s inheritance shall be twice the size of daughter’s (4:11), and that husbands can and should beat their disobedient wives: “Good women are obedient…. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them.” (4:34). This God sanctions marriage to pre-pubescent girls, stipulating that Islamic divorce procedures “shall apply to those who have not yet menstruated” (65:4). Islamic law codifies all this and adds from Islamic tradition justification for honor killing, female genital mutilation, and even the prohibition of women leaving their homes without permission from a male guardian.

BBC head of religion hits back at BC/AD ban claims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Aaqil AhmedAaqil Ahmed, the BBC’s head of religion and ethics, has responded strongly to reports that the Corporation has banned the terms BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini). Last weekend it was claimed that BC and AD had been replaced across the BBC’s output by the modern, secular terms BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era).

“The story was quite simply wrong,” Ahmed wrote on the About the BBC blog. “We have issued no editorial guidelines or instructions to suggest that anyone in the BBC should change the terms they use.”

Radio Times, 2 October 2011

This hasn’t prevented the Daily Mail from reporting: “Government to save Year of our Lord from BBC’s ‘Common Era’.”

US Islamophobes launch campaign to paint ‘Islamist’ Turkey as part of ‘enemy camp’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

With deteriorating relations between Turkey and Israel, some of Israel’s staunchest backers in the U.S. have seized on the diplomatic crisis to push for the U.S. to abandon its partnership with Turkey – including kicking the strategically-located Eurasian country out of the NATO alliance. The campaign, spearheaded by neoconservatives, ramped up this week with attacks demonizing Turkey from several Islamophobic commentators. Over the past few weeks, these Islamophobes have been accusing Turkey of trying to create an Islamist empire, one that would put Turkey at odds with the West and make it an enemy of the U.S.

Think Progress, 30 September 2011

Judge backs schools in suit over ‘Islam is of the Devil’ shirts

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islam is of the Devil court rulingThe Alachua County School Board did not violate the free-speech rights of members of Dove World Outreach Center when students from the church were sent home from school for wearing T-shirts bearing the words “Islam is of the Devil,” a district court judge ruled Friday.

Senior District Judge Stephan Mickle wrote that the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently held that the First Amendment rights of students while they’re in school are not as broad as the rights of people in public forums.

Mickle wrote that school policies to prohibit clothing that can cause disruptions are not a violation of constitutional rights.

“‘Islam is of the Devil’ presents a highly confrontational message. It is akin to saying that the religion of Islam is evil and that all of its followers will go to hell,” Mickle wrote. “The message is not conducive to civil discourse on religious issues; nor is it appropriate for school generally.”

Gainesville Sun, 30 September 2011

Express website carries call for murder of Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sometimes the most obnoxious aspect of the coverage of Islamic issues by right-wing newspapers is the sickening online comments their articles provoke. Two days ago the Express published a short report on the Swiss parliamentary vote in favour of banning the veil. The one comment it has so far attracted openly calls for Muslims to be killed. Despite the comment being reported, the admins at the Express website evidently have no interest in removing it.

Express comment on Swiss veil ban

Publisher of ‘pro-Islam’ school textbook receives threats

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Police are looking into a series of online threats made against a Georgia textbook publisher after a parent complained that one of the books promoted Islam and polygamy.

The controversy began last week when Hal Medlin, the parent of a student at Campbell Middle School in Cobb County, Georgia, complained to the school about an assignment that he said “slanted positively” toward Islam.

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the part of the assignment in question was called the “letter from Ahlima”: “The assignment by a teacher at Campbell Middle School, which asked students to write on the issue of dress codes, included a fictional two-page letter ostensibly written by a 20-year-old Saudi Arabian woman. In it, the character writes approvingly of wearing the Islamic veil – and of her fiance’s multiple wives and the law of Sharia.”

The letter is part of a unit in the textbook devoted to the Middle East, and according to the AJC is paired with a letter from an Israeli woman discussing her own life.

The story was picked up by anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller, which she called “grotesque”. “Misogyny, homicide bombing, Jew hatred, packaged in multi-culti tolerance of Islam, is being spoon fed to our young,” Geller wrote.

And the publisher, InspirEd Educators, complained that a number of other bloggers made “terroristic threats” and that it has “received what the police have classified as hate email and phone calls, and the company and its staff have been threatened and discussed with threatening language on various websites and blogs.”

Local police say they are investigating the threats, which include one blogger’s comment that “there will be a blood bath,” according to WSB-TV.

An official for the publisher defended the lesson: “It’s important for kids to have some empathy for other people in the world. Some people think we’re trying to teach their children to be Muslims, and that could not be more ridiculous.”

TPM, 29 September 2011