Category Archives: Right wing

Alabama store owner posts sign saying ‘BBQ PORK RESTURANT IS SAFEST NO MUSLIMS INSIDE’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Alabama 'No Muslims' signThe fuss over a sign in Alabama at an electronics store reading “BBQ PORK RESTURANT (sic) IS SAFEST NO MUSLIMS INSIDE” shocked its longtime owner who said he doesn’t understand why it’s such a big deal.

Electronic Repair Company owner Chuck Biddinger, who put up the sign last week, said he meant the message as a joke. After all, he said, it wasn’t even the most offensive one he had ever posted.

That award goes to a sign he posted last May that read “A dog is wiser than a woman – it does not bark at its master,” earned heat from domestic violence groups in Alabama. “The women’s groups went ballistic,” he told the Daily News when he picked up the phone at his East Lake, Ala., shop.

But he said this sign, which has garnered national attention, has gotten more positive reaction than negative – and he has no plans to apologize to anyone offended. “I have gotten a few complaints about it, but for every one complaint about it I’ve had, 10 people tell me that they like it and support it,” he said.

He told local television station ABC 33/40 that while it was meant as a lighthearted joke, it was true. “Muslims do not eat pork,” he told the television station. “It’s a known fact that Muslims have tried to commit crimes in this country.”

New York Daily News, 10 December 2010

Church cuts bishops where Muslims outnumber Christians by seven to one

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Thus the headline in today’s Daily Telegraph. The recommendation by the Church of England’s Dioceses Commission that three dioceses in the Yorkshire area should be merged into one was flagged up well in advance. This issue has already been hammered to death by the Mail on Sunday back in October followed by the Daily Express and the Daily Star (see the response by ENGAGE).

Still, you can never have too many scaremongering articles about the Muslim threat to Christian civilisation, can you?

Elsewhere in the Torygraph, under the heading “A tipping point for religion in Britain?“, the Sunday Telegraph‘s Religious Affairs and Media Correspondent, Jonathan Wynne-Jones, tells us that it is

difficult not to see the merger – or axing depending on which way you’re looking at it – in the context of the rise of Islam in Britain. In Bradford, one of the dioceses that is being subsumed, Muslims make up as much as three-quarters of the population in some parishes.

A report published by the Church earlier this year discussed the issues facing clergy trying to minister in areas with high numbers of ethnic minorities. It revealed the percentage of Christians is as low as 10 per cent in some parishes.

When Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester, warned of “no-go areas” in Britain for non-Muslims, he was widely ridiculed and criticised, but the Church’s report suggests that his critics have their heads in the sand. Bleak and rather extreme it may have been, but statisticians have already predicted that by 2035 there will be more active Muslims in Britain than church-going Christians.

The claim that “Muslims make up as much as three-quarters of the population in some parishes” in Bradford is clearly an exaggeration. There is no parish in Bradford where the Muslim population reaches that figure, and there are just two parishes in which Muslims make up over 70% of the population (see below). With regard to the UK as a whole, to put Wynne-Jones’ claim that “the percentage of Christians is as low as 10 per cent in some parishes” in proportion, the CofE report that he cites, Sharing the Gospel of Salvation, found that there are only 1,000 parishes, out of a total of 13,000, in which more than 10% of people are of non-Christian faiths. Among these 1,000 parishes, the report identified one in Leicester where the Christian population was 10.8% and one in Bradford where the figure was 10.9%. As the tables below illustrate, the two parishes were hardly typical, even of these two cities with their untypically large populations of South Asian origin:

SGS table Bradford

Wynne-Jones writes that “statisticians have already predicted that by 2035 there will be more active Muslims in Britain than church-going Christians”, but the key phrases here are “active Muslims” and “church-going Christians”. Even if you accept the statistical analysis in the 2008 Christian Research Religious Trends report that Wynne-Jones cites (and the CofE dismissed its findings as “flawed and dangerously misleading”), the report stated that there were only 1.6 million Muslims living in Britain today compared with 41 million Christians. By 2035, Christian Reseach predicted, there would be 1.96 million active Muslims in Britain, compared with 1.63 million church-going Christians. So, if the number of active Muslims in the UK were to exceed the number of active Christians, then that would be primarily due to a decline in the number of Christians who practise their faith, rather than because there had been a dramatic increase in the number of Muslims.

As for Nazir-Ali’s disgraceful nonsense about “no-go areas”, he defined them as areas in which “a strict Muslim ideology” prevails and consequently “people of a different race or faith face physical attack”, although it was notable that he failed to specify where these areas were to be found. That was bad enough, but Wynne-Jones’ position is even worse. What he appears to be arguing is that non-Muslims face the threat of violent assault not just in areas supposedly dominated by “a strict Muslim ideology” but in areas where “active Muslims” outnumber church-going Christians. The CofE’s Sharing the Gospel of Salvation report of course suggested nothing of the sort, and its authors would undoubtedly be appalled to have their research misrepresented in this way.

See also the comments by ENGAGE.

All Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia divided over ENGAGE’s role

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Over at the Jewish Chronicle, Martin Bright reports that the recently launched APPG on Islamophobia has been “forced to end its partnership” with ENGAGE, who were providing administrative support to the Group. According to Bright, the APPG’s chair Kris Hopkins MP and one of the vice-chairs, Lord Janner, “agreed on Tuesday to drop Engage”. However, he also quotes a statement issued by another of the vice-chairs, Simon Hughes MP, which reads:

“Engage is an organisation which promotes the participation and engagement of young Muslims in the public sphere. Occasionally this may mean that the group represents views that others may disagree with. But as long as they stay within the law and enter into the sprit of a democratic dialogue, I have no problem with them providing support to the APPG on Islamophobia, a group which exists precisely to advance reasoned debate on faith issues in our country.”

Bright claims that it was an attack on ENGAGE by Paul Goodman at ConservativeHome that prompted Hopkins and Janner to change their minds. And, as Goodman makes clear, his own article was based on an earlier piece entitled “Islamists establish a bridgehead in Parliament”, which was written by Andrew Gilligan, the hero of the English Defence League.

No doubt ENGAGE will publish a clarification of the situation in due course. However, if the APPG has indeed severed its links with ENGAGE, we would be faced with the bizarre spectacle of an APPG whose purpose is to combat Islamophobia taking its first major decision on the basis of a witch-hunt led by two of the country’s leading Islamophobes! This hardly bodes well for the APPG’s future.

Update:  Bright’s JC report has of course been seized on byHarry’s Place who dismiss Simon Hughes’s support for ENGAGE in the following terms:

“Hughes has form as a supporter of Islamist politics. He is a regular speaker at the Islam Channel’s Global Peace and Unity Event, which showcases hate preachers. This is quite remarkable – Simon Hughes is a gay man and, supposedly, a liberal. Yet, he consistently allies himself with political groups which attack liberal Muslims, are virulently homophobic and would like to establish a state in which gay men would be executed. What is wrong with him?”

Are these the sort of forces Kris Hopkins and Lord Janner really want to align themselves with?

Further update:  See the “Joint statement from Kris Hopkins MP and Lord Janner” which announces their intention “to call a meeting of the group at the earliest opportunity, to recommend that we dispense with the services of Engage”.

A more appropriate response from the APPG would be to remove Hopkins and Janner and replace them with a chair and vice-chair who are prepared to stand up to Islamophobic witch-hunts from the likes of Andrew Gilligan, Paul Goodman and Harry’s Place.

Meanwhile, over at his Torygraph blog, Gilligan is hailing the news under the headline “Great news: Islamists lose their Parliamentary foothold”.

One more update:  Read ENGAGE’s detailed response to Paul Goodman’s criticisms here

More admirers for Andrew Gilligan

Posted on by Bob Pitt

EDL Close East London Mosque Now“Andrew Gilligan is one of the most lucid journalists out there and therefore he understands incredibly well the threat of Islamic supremacism to free societies.”

Now, who do you think wrote this? Could it be Melanie Phillips? Or perhaps Pamela Geller? No, it’s the English Defence League, whose Wiltshire Division have reproduced Gilligan’s recent attack on ENGAGE on their website.

But then, this is not the first time that Gilligan has proved an inspiration to the far-right boot-boys of the EDL. It was his TV documentary witch-hunting the Islamic Forum Europe, “Britain’s Islamic Republic”, that prompted the EDL to demand that the East London Mosque should be closed down and threaten to stage an intimidatory demonstration in Tower Hamlets.

Glenn Beck estimates there are close to 157 million Islamic terrorists

Posted on by Bob Pitt

On his radio program this morning, Fox News host Glenn beck warned, as he often does, that there is a dangerous group of violent radical Communists who want to overthrow the government, and lamented that the mainstream media, including Fox News, refuses to cover this allegedly imminent threat. As a point of comparison to the dreaded Communists, Beck mentioned Islamic terrorists, saying he suspects that close to 10 percent of Muslims are terrorists:

BECK: What is the number of Islamic terrorists? One percent? I think it’s closer to 10 percent, but the rest of the PC world will tell you “oh no, it’s minuscule.” Okay, well, let’s take you at your one percent. Look at the havoc of one percent of Muslims causing on the rest of the world!

According to a Pew report from last year, there are 1.57 billion Muslims in the world. Thus, by Beck’s calculations, there would be 157 million Islamic terrorists – more than half the population of the U.S. Even at 1 percent, which Beck – noted headmaster of Beck University – claims the “PC world” believes, there would be 1.57 million Muslim terrorists.

Think Progress, 6 December 2010

Daily Mail exposes the Islamification of Narnia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Narnia fans’ fury after Liam Neeson claims Aslan – the symbol of Christ – could also be Mohammed”, reads a furious headline in the Daily Mail. Neeson, who provides the voice of Aslan the lion in the new film of C.S. Lewis’s book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, has scandalised middle England by claiming that the character is also based on other religious leaders.

“Aslan symbolises a Christ-like figure”, Neeson has stated, “but he also symbolises for me Mohammed, Buddha and all the great spiritual leaders and prophets over the centuries. That’s who Aslan stands for as well as a mentor figure for kids – that’s what he means for me.”

The Mail has tracked down Walter Hooper, Lewis’s former secretary and a trustee of his estate, who says that the author would have been outraged. “It is nothing whatever to do with Islam,” he is quoted as saying. Hooper attributes Neeson’s remarks to political correctness and a desire to be “very multicultural”.