Category Archives: Right wing

Protestor calls for Miami mosque to be ‘razed to the ground’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mosque should be razed to the groundThe South Florida Imams accused of terrorism were arrested right in front of their mosques, disrupting the neighborhoods around them. Monday night, one of those neighborhoods saw more commotion.

Mosque protester Mark Dubynsky says standing outside the Flagler Mosque in West Miami-Dade with a sign demanding the mosque be razed to the ground was about self-expression. “This is not about hate, this is about not keeping a shrine that promotes hate in the neighborhood,” he told CBS4’s Natalia Zea.

Mosque worshipper Samad Nassirya feels differently. “That’s a threat, he’s threatening us,” he told Zea.

Dubynsky drove from Palm Beach to the mosque to make a statement, after the mosque’s imam Hafiz Khan was arrested and charged with funneling money to terrorists. “I think if your leader, your church, your mosque is supporting terrorism then I think that building, that mosque needs to be torn down,” said Dubynsky.

Nassirya called police Monday evening, saying Dybynsky and his sign were scaring fellow Muslims away from their evening prayer service. “People come here five times to pray and now all the women and children are scared to come here and we’re gonna lose all our people,” he said.

Nassirya is especially upset, because he doesn’t believe the allegations against his imam. “It’s ridiculous. He’s a saintly man, he’s a saintly man.”

CBS Miami, 16 May 2011

Via Islamophobia Today

Cf. “Does the arrest of an imam and his sons reinforce stereotypes of Muslims?”, South Florida Sun Sentinel, 17 May 2011

The JC and the ‘jihadist’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

JC Pears headlineLast week’s Jewish Chronicle – the same issue that included Geoffrey Alderman’s column applauding the murder of Vittorio Arrigoni at the hands of al-Qaeda – also featured a front-page splash by its political editor Martin Bright, who reported that:

“An organisation which hosted an associate of 7/7 ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan in the House of Commons has been bankrolled by one of the UK’s most prominent Jewish philanthropists, the JC can reveal.”

The charity referred to was Forward Thinking, which aims to encourage greater understanding between Muslim communities and wider society, promote peace in the Middle East and facilitate dialogue between the religious and secular worlds. And the Jewish philanthopical organisation was the Pears Foundation. The “jihadist” who spoke at the reception in parliament was Tafazal Mohammad, the head of an organisation called Muslim Youth Skills which advises clients such as the Metropolitan Police on how to engage with young Muslims.

The purpose of Bright’s report was clearly to warn off sections of the Jewish community who might be inclined to associate with organisations that take a more balanced view of the Palestinian resistance than the JC does. As Bright explained: “Forward Thinking was founded by William Sieghart, who has called for a reassessment of the West’s ‘distorted image of Hamas’.” (The reference is to an article published in the Times in December 2008.) Yet despite this the Pears Foundation had – shock, horror – given £23,000 to Forward Thinking between 2008 and 2010.

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‘Pope plot’ men not involved in terrorism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim plot to kill popeThe government’s terror laws watchdog says six men arrested during Pope Benedict’s UK visit last September were never involved in a plot.

David Anderson QC said police acted appropriately and the arrests were partly prompted by mistaken identity.

The six Westminster street cleaners were seized amid fears they wanted to attack the Pope mobile. The men were released without charge amid reports that a canteen joke had been misunderstood.

Scotland Yard counter-terrorism officers launched “Operation Grid” and arrested the six men on 17 September last year on suspicion of plotting to harm the Pope during a visit which began the day before. Questioned at high security Paddington Green police station, they were released without charge, having been held for between 33 and 42 hours.

The men, aged between 26 and 44, were all North African Muslims and worked for Veolia Environmental Services – which cleans streets in Westminster.

Mr Anderson, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said in this report he had met two of the men, spoken with lawyers and had also questioned detectives from Scotland Yard’s Counter-Terrorism Command.

“There is no reason to believe, with the benefit of hindsight, that any of the arrested men was involved in a plot to kill the Pope, or indeed that any such plot existed,” he said in his report.

“The powers of arrest, search, seizure under the Terrorism Act 2000 (TA 2000) were, however, in all the circumstances of Operation Grid, lawfully and appropriately used.

“There will be future temptations to use the TA 2000 powers in relation to individuals as to whom the necessary reasonable suspicions do not exist, particularly in the context of international high-profile events such as the London Olympics.

“Constant vigilance is required to ensure that the legal boundaries of those powers are respected, as they were in this case.”

BBC News, 15 May 2011

David Anderson supports the decision to arrest the men despite noting that it was “barely credible that persons who were within a couple of days of executing an attack on the life of the Pope would have spoken openly of their intentions within the possible hearing of others”.

He does however criticise the fact that some of the arrested men were denied the right to inform a named person of their detention – a right which serves “to differentiate the practices of a civilised society from the unexplained ‘disappearances’ characteristic of a police state”.

It has been reported that at least one of the men is considering legal action against the police for false imprisonment.

The men have been deprived of the opportunity to challenge the disgraceful coverage of their arrests in the Daily Express because Richard Desmond has withdrawn all his titles from the Press Complaints Commission.

Does the BBC have a problem with Muslims?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Does Britain have a problem with Muslims

Yesterday’s The Big Questions on BBC TV was devoted to the issue “Does Britain have a problem with Muslims?” The very title illustrates how Islamophobic discourse has entered the mainstream. Can anyone imagine the BBC broadcasting a programme that addressed the question “Does Britain have a problem with Jews?” or “Does Britain have a problem with Blacks?”

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Sindy interviews Geller

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pamela Geller UndeadThe Independent on Sunday carries a lengthy interview by Robert Chalmers with Pamela Geller (“American patriot or extremist firebrand?”). You might think this is a bit excessive for a woman who, as Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs is quoted as saying, “has a very long record of absolute lunacy, mixed with bigotry and racism”.

Nor is the interview the hatchet job you might have hoped for. Chalmers does conclude the piece with a warning that Geller is acting “a magnifying glass capturing, focusing and intensifying the blinding prejudices of her compatriots … and directing them towards a pile of kindling”. But the main thrust of the interview is to present Geller as a personally charming right-wing eccentric.

Republicans welcome Wilders to Tennessee

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Anti-Wilders protest TennesseeDutch politician Geert Wilders sees a kindred spirit in Tennessee – a state where new mosques draw protests and the legislature is considering a bill that once targeted adherents of Islamic law.

On trial for hate speech in his home country, Wilders brought his headline-grabbing views on Islam to Middle Tennessee on Thursday. He came to town as the invited guest of the Tennessee Freedom Coalition, a 2-week-old political coalition founded by Republican former congressional candidate Lou Ann Zelenik.

“I come with a warning for America,” said Wilders, a filmmaker and member of the Dutch parliament, and something of a cult celebrity in some conservative circles. Close Islamic schools, he warned America. Halt construction of mosques – or “hate palaces”, as he calls them. Cut off immigration from “non-Western and especially Islamic countries”, and expel any immigrants who do not “assimilate”.

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The ‘Islamification’ of Tower Hamlets (part 427)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

On the principle that you can never have too many inaccurate scaremongering articles about Muslim extremists taking over the London borough of Tower Hamlets, the Daily Mail presents its readers with a re-run of the paranoid report it published less than a month ago. This one appears under the headline “Tower Hamlets Taliban: Death threats to women who don’t wear veils. Gays attacked in the streets. And all in a borough at the heart of Britain’s capital…”

But, to be fair, the Mail doesn’t suggest that the takeover by Muslim extremists is restricted to East London. It has another article, mainly about the Balsall Heath area of Birmingham, entitled “Censored! Bikini advert blacked out with spray paint by ‘Muslim extremists who object to women in swimsuits'”.

Needless to say, these irresponsible reports are seized on by the EDL:

EDL-Daily-Mail

Republicans welcome Wilders to Tennessee

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Anti-Wilders protest TennesseeDutch politician Geert Wilders sees a kindred spirit in Tennessee – a state where new mosques draw protests and the legislature is considering a bill that once targeted adherents of Islamic law.

On trial for hate speech in his home country, Wilders brought his headline-grabbing views on Islam to Middle Tennessee on Thursday. He came to town as the invited guest of the Tennessee Freedom Coalition, a 2-week-old political coalition founded by Republican former congressional candidate Lou Ann Zelenik.

“I come with a warning for America,” said Wilders, a filmmaker and member of the Dutch parliament, and something of a cult celebrity in some conservative circles. Close Islamic schools, he warned America. Halt construction of mosques – or “hate palaces”, as he calls them. Cut off immigration from “non-Western and especially Islamic countries”, and expel any immigrants who do not “assimilate”.

“I was happy to visit the state of Tennessee, where I know a lot of people – certainly a lot of Christians – feel the same threat as we do, and know when you talk about values, when you talk about who you are and who you are not, and that Christianity is for certain not the same as Islam,” said Wilders, who is not himself a Christian. “I compare Islam not with Christianity and Judaism. I compare Islam with fascism and communism.”

His first stop of the day was talk show host Steve Gill’s radio show, then a meet-and-greet and news conference at Williamson County Republican Party headquarters in Franklin. The evening ended with a closed-to-the-press speech at Cornerstone Church in Madison about what Wilders sees as the evils of the world’s second-largest religion.

In Franklin, about a dozen protesters stood in the punishing May sunshine across from Republican headquarters, waving signs that said “SHAME” and “Be nice or go away”.

“It’s very inappropriate for an official political party here in Tennessee to bring in someone so notorious,” said Williamson County Democratic Party Chairman Peter Burr. “This guy is sort of the epitome of the outside agitator. That’s not the way we do business here in Tennessee.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations issued a statement condemning Wilders’ visit to Tennessee and asking state and local Republican officials to repudiate the decision to “honor one of the world’s leading Islam-haters”.

The Tennessean, 13 May 2011

See also Peter Burr, “Outside agitators should not define America’s values”, The Tennessean, 12 May 2011

Update:  Wilders’ speech has been reproduced on a number of right-wing blogs, including Jihad Watch and Atlas Shrugs.