Writing on his National Interest blog, former CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar offers an informed counter-argument to the Ikhwanophobia sweeping the US right.
Category Archives: Right wing
Tory MP launches cowardly attack on ENGAGE
The following exchange took place in the House of Commons earlier today:
Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con): Will the Leader of the House find time for an urgent statement on iEngage, the secretariat of the newly formed all-party parliamentary group on Islamophobia? iEngage has a track record of being aggressively anti-Semitic and homophobic, and has extensive links with terrorism in Tunisia and the middle east. In its capacity as the secretariat, it now has access to the parliamentary estate. Will the Leader of the House raise the issue with the Serjeant at Arms as soon as possible?
Sir George Young: The Serjeant at Arms will have heard what my hon. Friend has said. As he knows, I announced a few moments ago that there would be debate on all-party parliamentary groups on Monday evening, and it will provide an appropriate forum for him to develop his case.
ENGAGE “has a track record of being aggressively anti-Semitic and homophobic, and has extensive links with terrorism in Tunisia and the middle east”? Has Halfon been taking hallucinogenic drugs? Even Andrew Gilligan would balk at making ludicrous accusations like that. (He prefers weaselly insinuations instead.)
ENGAGE’s admirably restrained response to Halfon can be read here.
ENGAGE respond to Gilligan’s Sunday Telegraph smears
ENGAGE have written to the Sunday Telegraph in response to the contemptible article by Andrew Gilligan in last week’s edition of the paper. Read their letter here.
Meanwhile Gilligan has announced that he is going away for three weeks – “to hot foreign parts, on a most secret mission”.
Gosh. I wonder where that might be. Perhaps Gilligan is off to Egypt to help Mubarak to hang on to power by smearing the Muslim Brotherhood?
More likely, I think, to Bangladesh, to dig up some material on Jamaat-e-Islami to fuel his campaign against the East London Mosque. (Last week Gilligan did an interview with Bangladeshi prime minister and Awami League leader Hasina Wazed during her visit to London, which for some reason hasn’t yet appeared in the Telegraph.)
Critics raise concerns about House hearings on Muslims
A coalition of more than 50 Muslim, human rights, and faith organizations is urging House leaders to raise concerns about planned hearings this month on the “radicalization” of American Muslims.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, plans to focus his hearing on homegrown terrorism, including the Fort Hood shooting and attempted Times Square bombing, both plots hatched by American-born Muslims.
King has accused U.S. Muslim leaders of failing to cooperate with law enforcement officials and said that 80 percent of American mosques are run by extremists, a figure that Muslim leaders and scholars sharply dispute.
“Singling out a group of Americans for government scrutiny based on their faith is divisive and wrong,” the coalition wrote in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
The 51-member coalition includes Amnesty International USA, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, and the Interfaith Alliance, as well as dozens of local and national Muslim groups.
“I don’t believe it warrants an answer,” King said of the letters. “I am too busy preparing for the hearings.”
A few members of Congress, including the House’s two Muslims and former Homeland Security Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., have already denounced King’s plans.
Mad Mel’s ‘truth-teller’ who said Muslims are rapists is acquitted on racism charge
“Girls in Muslim families are raped by their uncles, their cousins, or their fathers.”
While one can certainly question the validity of such a statement, or the wisdom of making it, a Frederiksberg court ruled it does not constitute racism or hate speech, at least not in the case of Lars Hedegaard [pictured, with Geert Wilders].
The court on Monday acquitted Hedegaard, president of the Danish Free Press Society, of charges of racism stemming from statements the historian and journalist made to a blogger in December 2009.
Although the court stated that it found Hedegaard’s comments to be insulting, the acquittal was handed down due to the fact that Hedegaard did not know that his controversial comments would be published.
Hedegaard released a statement following his acquittal. “My detractors – the foes of free speech and the enablers of an Islamic ascendancy in the West – will claim that I was acquitted on a technicality,” the statement read. “That is absolutely true. However, the public prosecutor has been privy to the circumstances surrounding my case for a year – and yet he chose to prosecute me. Obviously in the hope that he could secure a conviction given the Islamophile sentiment among our ruling classes. My acquittal is therefore a major victory for free speech.”
Hedegaard’s Free Press Society believes that free speech is “being threatened, primarily by religious and ideological interests and international pressure groups” and that Islam is the “most dangerous threat at the moment” against free expression.
During the trial, Hedegaard received support both domestically – most famously from the Danish People’s Party’s Jesper Langballe, whose statements in support of Hedegaard earned the MP a 5,000 kroner fine for what another court said constituted racism – and from what Hedegaard called “freedom fighters around the world”.
According to Hedegaard’s statement, his acquittal “will encourage people all over the West and beyond to speak up”.
Copenhagen Post, 1 February 2011
Melanie Phillips will be pleased to hear the news. She denounced the prosecutions of Hedegaard and Langballe as “the Danish witch-hunt against the truth-tellers”.
Andrew Gilligan closes his eyes to rising Islamophobia
Inayat Bunglawala responds to Andrew Gilligan’s claim that “the available evidence simply does not support” the view that Islamophobia is on the increase in the UK.
Are you eating food sacrificed to idols?
And you thought this was an hysterical overreaction to the prospect of eating meat from an animal that had received an Islamic blessing before it was slaughtered?
You should check out this report over at WorldNetDaily, which asks: “When you bite into a delicious pizza, succulent sandwich or luscious lamb chops, are you possibly eating food that has been sacrificed to idols?”
Pastor Mark Biltz of El Shaddai Ministries in Bonney Lake, Washington, has alerted his congregation to the threat of “backdoor Shariah”. In a recent sermon that he posted online, Biltz explained that “Muslims can only eat food that is halal, that has been sacrificed to their idol, Allah … and with Allah’s name prayed over it. You could be eating beef, chicken, etc., offered up to Allah and not even know it…. It could be on your pizza without you knowing it, or at your favorite restaurant. People don’t realize they could be eating meat sacrificed to idols!”
Still, not to worry, it will all be sorted in a few years anyway, as Biltz has predicted the second coming of Christ for 2015.
South Carolina jumps on sharia law bandwagon
The crusade against the “ever growing threat” of Sharia law has marched on into South Carolina. Following the lead of places like Oklahoma, Rep. Wendy Nanney and Sen. Mike Fair introduced a legislative initiative aimed at preventing “a court or other enforcement authority” from enforcing foreign law. The two conservative sponsors of the bill hope to “preempt violations of a person’s constitutional rights” that result from the application of foreign law. Foreign law of course is the new dog whistle for Sharia law.
Liddle replies to Warsi
Writing the current issue of the Spectator, Rod Liddle takes issue with Baroness Warsi’s criticism of his speech headlined “Islamophobia? Count me in!” Liddle objects that “she hadn’t heard, or read, the speech I made, or asked what I had meant. Condemning a speech solely because of its headline strikes me as being the very apogee of ‘shallow’.” Whereas Liddle’s bigoted ramblings are of course famous for their intellectual depth. So what did he say in his speech at the Evening Standard‘s “Is Islam good for London?” debate in November 2007? Liddle summarises:
My speech expressed a profound dislike of the ideology of Islam because it lends itself to a) homophobia, b) the subjugation of women, c) anti-semitism d) viciousness towards so-called apostates, e) authoritarianism and f) a somewhat medieval approach towards crime and punishment. And then there’s the barbarism of female circumcision, forced marriages and the notion that those who are not Muslims are not quite human, that their lives are worthless. These last three manifestations of Islamic thought are not universally present throughout the Islamic world, for sure. But the ideology facilitates them, offers them a weird sort of legitimacy.
The other manifestations of Islam I noted above, however, are universal within the Muslim world. OK, some Islamic states kill homosexuals while others merely imprison them. Some Islamic states merely loathe Jews, rather than loathing them and demanding their liquidation. Moderate Malaysia will put you in prison and take away your children for giving up your Islamic faith, while hardline Saudi Arabia will kill you. There are gradations of spite, violence, persecution and insecurity within Islam: but what there always is, beyond all doubt, is spite, violence, persecution and insecurity.
I was careful, in that speech to which she refers, to draw a distinction between Islam and Muslims….
You can imagine how it would go down with Britain’s Jewish community if Liddle delivered a speech headlined “Antisemitism? Count me in” in which he quoted bloodcurdling passages from the Torah, listed the atrocities committed by Israel as a self-proclaimed Jewish state and then concluded by observing that he drew a distinction between Judaism and Jews.
See Mehdi Hasan’s response to Liddle on his New Statesman blog.
Another Gilligan witch-hunt bites the dust
Andrew Gilligan has a piece in the Sunday Telegraph continuing his campaign against ENGAGE.
Alas for Gilligan, it seems that the campaign isn’t going well. Kris Hopkins and Greville Janner, who buckled in the face of a witch-hunt initiated by Gilligan (“Islamists establish a bridgehead in Parliament”) and taken up by Paul Goodman and Martin Bright, and announced that they would recommend that the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia should remove ENGAGE from its position as the group’s secretariat, finally got round to consulting other members of the APPG. They found that their proposal to remove ENGAGE has no support. Gilligan reports:
Kris Hopkins, Tory MP for Keighley, and the Labour peer Lord Janner, quit the new All-Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia after failing to persuade their colleagues to sack a body called iEngage as the group’s secretariat.
iEngage, also known as Engage, is an organisation of Islamist sympathisers which has repeatedly defended extremists. Last year, it called on the Government to revoke a ban on a hardline foreign preacher who has said that “every Muslim should be a terrorist”.
The pass allows Mrs Bunglawala to enter Parliament without having to go through security checks and mix freely with ministers and MPs. It gives her the right to invite guests and to use Commons facilities. There is no suggestion that Mrs Bunglawala has been involved in any act of terrorism.
No, there’s just the weasel-worded accusation from Gilligan that ENGAGE supports extremists who advocate terrorism and that Shenaz Bunglawala represents some sort of security threat.
Gilligan isn’t meeting with much success in his self-appointed role as witchfinder general of Islamists, is he? Last year, you may recall, he intervened in the Tower Hamlets mayoral election to launch an attack on Lutfur Rahman, portraying him as a pawn of “Islamic fundamentalists” at the East London Mosque. The result was that Lutfur was elected as an independent candidate with a huge majority.
The moral for Muslims seems to be that if you want to win broad support, your best bet is to have Gilligan launch a campaign of baseless slander against you.