Category Archives: Right wing

Poll: American views on Islam closely follow party affiliation

Posted on by Bob Pitt

PRRI

A comprehensive new report by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Brookings Institution reveals a deeply divided American public when it comes to Islam and the place of Muslims in the United States. The survey – “What it means to be American: Attitudes in an increasingly diverse America ten years after 9/11” – shows that “Americans are struggling to reconcile principles of religious liberty and the inclusion of new groups in America with specific discomfort and fears, particularly around American Muslims and Islam,” says Robert P. Jones, CEO of PRRI.

Some 47 percent of all Americans, according to the poll, believe that the values of Islam are at odds with American values and way of life. And the splits along ideological lines reveal a deeply divided public. Large majorities of Republicans (63 percent) and people who identify with the Tea Party (66 percent) say that Islamic values are in contrast with American values. At the same time, however, a majority of Democrats (55 percent) and independents (53 percent) disagree with that view.

Examiner.com, 8 September 2011

See also PRRI website

Download the report here

UKIP welcomes European anti-immigration parties to its conference

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ukip has been accused of pandering to xenophobia by inviting two prominent figures from European anti-immigration parties to address its annual conference today.

The star speaker will be Timo Soini, the leader of the True Finns, a previously fringe nationalist party which scored a surprise success by coming third in the Finnish general election. Ukip has been attracted by the fiercely Eurosceptic outlook of the party, which tapped into opposition to offering financial support for Mediterranean nations hit by the Eurozone crisis.

But the True Finns have also described immigrants as “parasites on taxpayers’ money” and suggested ethnically Finnish women should study less and spend more time having babies.

Mr Soini will be joined by the MEP Barry Madlener, of the Dutch Freedom Party. Its leader, Geert Wilders, has attacked Islam as a violent religion and compared the Koran to Mein Kampf.

Independent, 9 September 2011

Update:  UKIP reports that Madlener “gave a strong speech on the importance of retaining national identity and received a standing ovation for his inspirational words”.

Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islamophobia Thought Crime of the Totalitarian FutureFrontPage Magazine reports that David Horowitz and Robert Spencer have a new book out:

In their new pamphlet, Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future, Horowitz and Spencer have created what amounts to a biography of this malign concept.

Their work shows how the term “Islamophobia” originated with the Muslim Brotherhood, is connected to violent protests over cartoons about Mohammed, the growing number of blasphemy laws in Europe, resolutions against this “form of racism” in the UN, and prosecutions of notable opponents of Islamic terror such as Oriana Fallaci and Geert Wilders.

They show, too, how what began as a political strategy by the Muslim Brotherhood has now spread to American higher education and has, like political correctness and other such mad experiments cultured in the campus laboratory, the potential to break out into the larger political culture.

We can only hope.

Terry Jones returns to Michigan to denounce Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Terry Jones, the controversial Florida pastor, returned to Michigan on a rainy Wednesday night for a 30-minute speech on the steps of the Capitol where he railed about radical Islam. The pastor’s speech was greeted by more police, media and protesters than supporters or curious onlookers.

About a dozen protesters started chanting “Say No to Hate” during Jones’ speech before police quieted them down. “Terry Jones is not welcome here,” said protester David Mitchell, 30, of Lansing, who held a banner with others saying: “They shall not pass.”

Jones, wearing jeans and a Harley Davidson black bomber jacket, decried Islam as a not a peaceful religion and oppressive to women. The Islamic law, Sharia, should not be tolerated, he said. “Islam is a religion that hates freedom of speech,” Jones said.

He was in Lansing to support a new organization, Operation Freedom’s Tree, founded by James Terpening. The political group denounces Islam as evil.

Jones supporter Eugene Connors, 40, of Lansing agrees. One sign he held said: “Stop Burning Christians.” “People don’t realize the threat Islam poses to everyone,” he said.

Detroit News, 7 September 2011

Tarek Fatah claims Dalai Lama is Islamist dupe … for sharing platform with Tariq Ramadan

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Dalai Lama will join controversial Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan in Montreal on Wednesday for a conference on world religions and peace in the aftermath of 9/11.

But rather than promising inspiration in a world plagued by religious tumult, the conference has already stirred up controversy and dissension as critics charge that the Dalai Lama is being duped into promoting Islamc fundamentalism.

The Second Global Conference on World’s Religions After Sept. 11 is being organized by McGill University and the Université de Montréal and organizer Arvind Sharma, a professor of comparative religion at McGill, says the goal is to debate how religions can contribute to peace in the world.

He is also hoping to have the participants adopt three resolutions, including one that says violating the sanctity of the scripture of any religion amounts to violating the sanctity of all religions.

To Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, this is just a way of saying religions are above reproach and tacitly endorsing Sharia, or Islamic law, and he is furious the Dalai Lama would be asked to support that.

“This is a sugar-coated attempt by Islamists to co-opt other religious leaders being asked to come here in good faith,” said Fatah, a critic of Ramadan who, he charges, masks his true views of Muslim fundamentalism behind a fake facade of moderation.

Montreal Gazette, 6 September 2011

Yes, that’s the same Muslim Canadian Congress that recently joined the EDL-supporting Jewish Defence League in a protest against Muslims being allowed to pray in Toronto schools.

Update:  See “Stop painting religions in image of their destructive followers: Dalai Lama”, CTV, 7 September 2011

 

Anders Breivik’s ‘spider web of hate’ includes Melanie Phillips

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Melanie Phillips Jihad in BritainOver at Comment is Free Andrew Brown introduces a Linkfluence map based on a list of the websites to which Anders Breivik’s manifesto provides links and the sites to which they link in turn. Maybe I’m just a technophobic old fart, but I’m not convinced that this adds much to our understanding of the ideological inspiration behind Breivik’s terrorist acts.

Brown’s own interpretation of the data is hardly flawless either. He states that it is particularly “unfair to blame Melanie Phillips” for Breivik’s crimes, adding: “Although she was cited by Breivik at length for an article claiming that the British elite had deliberately encouraged immigration in order to break down traditional society and she has written that ‘Bat Ye’or’s scholarship is awesome and her analysis is as persuasive as it is terrifying’, she has also argued, with nearly equal ferocity, against the ‘counter-jihad’ belief that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim.”

But Phillips’s definition of a “moderate Muslim” is highly restrictive to say the least. The one prominent Muslim she has a good word for is Irshad Manji, whom Phillips applauds for “her passionate defence of Israel and her attack on the lies told about it by the Arab world”. And that’s how you get to qualify as a “moderate Muslim” as far as Mad Mel is concerned. Show the slightest hostility towards Israel and you’re an extremist. She even accused Ed Husain, of all people, of having “adopted the very narrative and rhetoric that are driving Muslims to mass murder” after he criticised the British government for failing to condemn Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. This position may not be quite identical to “the ‘counter-jihad’ belief that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim”, but the difference is clearly marginal.

And while nobody is accusing Phillips of supporting Breivik’s terrorist attacks, the reality is that it was her inflammatory rhetoric, along with that of Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, which helped fill him with the hatred that led to those attacks. Just try reading through Phillips’s Daily Mail article that Breivik reproduced in full in his manifesto. According to Phillips, the then Labour government had “engaged upon a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage”, having “secretly plotted to flood the country with immigrants to change its very character and identity”, in “an act of unalloyed treachery to the entire nation”. This is the language of the far right, given legitimacy through its appearance in a mainstream newspaper under the by-line of a well-known journalist.

Paraphrasing Phillips’s own attack on Ed Husain, you can only conclude that her Daily Mail article adopted the very narrative and rhetoric that drove Breivik to mass murder.

Bomb threat against Murfreesboro Islamic Center

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Not WelcomeAuthorities say an anonymous caller threatened to detonate a bomb inside a mosque in Tennessee on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

According to a police report, an unidentified person made the threat Monday in a voicemail left at the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. The report says the message included extreme profanities and derogatory remarks toward Muslims.

Murfreesboro Police spokesman Kyle Evans told The Associated Press on Wednesday that security at the mosque has been increased and that marked and unmarked vehicles are patrolling the area. Evans says federal authorities are helping in the investigation.

The mosque has been the target of vandals who defaced signs at the site where it plans to build a bigger site of worship. Last year, arsonists also torched construction equipment there.

Associated Press, 7 September 2011

See also Daily News Journal and News Channel 5.

And see “Tenn. 9/11 event features anti-Islamic speakers”, Associated Press, 7 September 2011

Allen West promotes anti-mosque film

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sacrificed SurvivorsWASHINGTON — Florida Congressman Allen West, no stranger to controversy for his remarks about Muslim-Americans, on Wednesday renewed the debate over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York, just days before the country marks the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.

West, who sponsored the screening of a movie about the opposition to the Islamic center, said he hosted the event because he believes the center’s backers have a moral responsibility to honor the wishes of the families of the victims of the attacks who don’t want it near what will soon be a public memorial to those killed.

“If 10 years, or nine years after Pearl Harbor, if the country of Japan had come to the United States of America and said ‘we want to erect a memorial to Japanese naval seamanship at Pearl Harbor’, what would we have said?” West said. “Decades from now, centuries from now, we must remember what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.”

The film, “SACRIFICED SURVIVORS: The Untold Story of the Ground Zero Mega Mosque,” was produced by Martin Mayer of the Christian Action Network, and shown in a conference room in the Rayburn House Office Building across from the Capitol.

The film’s producers bill their movie as a depiction of how “survivors and family members are experiencing yet another type of Islamic jihad.” Survivors, the filmmakers said, “believe they must work to keep people vigilant and fighting against the march of radical Islam,” including efforts to build the center two blocks from Ground Zero.

At Wednesday’s press event, West was flanked by about a half-dozen relatives of people who died in the terrorist attacks. One man, Bruce DeCell, held up a photo of his son-in-law who was killed on 9/11, and said he wanted to tell people that “we are at war with the Islamic culture.”

West didn’t disagree with him publically, but said he believes there needs to be “a recognition of some concepts, such as Sharia, that are the antithesis of what we believe in here in the United States of America,” he said, referring to a system of Islamic law.

Although billed as a press conference before the film’s screening, most of the people asking West questions were those tied to the movie or participants in a panel the filmmakers and other groups were organizing later in the day.

West didn’t disagree with those asking questions at the event, including one man who suggested that “Islam has a history of building victory monuments on places it has triumphs.”

“Throughout the history of Islamic conquest, you do see the same type of parallels,” West said, citing his recent trip to Israel and Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, a spot sacred to Muslims, Jews and Christians alike.

Miami Herald, 7 September 2011

See also “Supporters praise Allen West comments on Islam”, Sun-Sentinel, 7 September 2011

And “Islamic leader blasts Congressman Allen West’s comments”,Sun-Sentinel, 7 September 2011

Update:  See “Allen West brings ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ controversy out of hibernation”, TPM, 8 September 2011

More evidence of Cory Bernardi’s anti-Islamic views

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Cory Bernardi (2)The Liberal senator accused of supporting a self-confessed Islamophobic Dutch politician has asked a Sydney Muslim to “publicly denounce” fundamentalist Islam before he corresponded with him.

Arch-conservative South Australian senator Cory Bernardi has been under fire from moderates in his own party for extending an invitation to visit Australia to Dutch politician Geert Wilders.

Yesterday, more evidence of Senator Bernardi’s anti-Islamic views were revealed when the online Muslim forum muslimvillage.com published a letter from the senator to a Sydney Muslim.

Senator Bernardi was responding to concerns expressed by the man about his comments regarding Islam. In the letter he declared Islam had been linked with hate speech, terrorism, gang rapes, racism, segregation and isolationism.

He wrote: “You have identified yourself as an Australian Muslim. I would be interested to know if you subscribe to fundamentalist Islamic practices. If not, I ask then for evidence that you have publicly denounced the above mentioned practices and the preachers who advocate for non-engagement of Muslims and ‘infidels’.”

The Sydney man replied and listed types of extremism associated with other religions.

On August 12, Senator Bernardi wrote another letter stating the man was ”incapable of critically analysing the actions of Islamic fundamentalists”. ”In the absence of your condemnation, one can only conclude you agree with their conduct.”

The Age, 8 September 2011

See also “Is Cory Bernardi Australia’s Geert Wilders?”, MuslimVillage.com, 7 September 2011

‘Outrageous: NY Times op-ed defends Sharia law … in America’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Bruce Bawer, a notorious Islamophobe much admired by Anders Breivik, throws a wobbler over Eliyahu Stern’s interesting and informed article in the 2 September edition of the New York Times, which drew some revealing parallels between the current anti-Sharia hysteria in the US and 19th-century denunciations of Jewish religious law in Europe.

Pajamas Media, 6 September 2011

See also “Pro-Sharia lunacy at the New York Times”, FrontPage Magazine, 6 September 2011