Category Archives: Right wing

US grocery chain pulls calendar that listed Islamic new year

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Joyce KaufmanBowing to complaints from angry customers, Publix has agreed to remove a free 2010 calendar from its stores that mentions the beginning of the Islamic new year but not the anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

The flap started when South Florida radio talk show host Joyce Kaufman complained on her WFTL 850-AM program earlier in the week that the calendar identifies Dec. 7 as the start of the Islamic new year. She told her listeners to let Publix know if they were offended. “Not Pearl Harbor Day. Instead Happy new year, Islam, or some such?” she said on air Thursday.

“We have great diversity in our customers and wanted to include as many of them as we could, which is why we included the Islamic new year along with Passover, Palm Sunday and a number of the national holidays of our customers,” said Publix spokesman Shannon Patten. “Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day wasn’t included because it’s not a holiday.” Memorial Day and Veterans Day are included. But because of the complaints, said Patten, the free calendar is no longer available in stores.

“Getting the calendar pulled is more about a cottage industry of Muslim bashers who seek every opportunity to demonize Islam than it is about Pearl Harbor Day,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, D.C. “Certainly, no one has an issue with including Pearl Harbor Day,” said Hooper, “But that’s not what this is about.”

Kaufman objected because she didn’t want World War II veterans “to be disappointed” and because she views Muslims as “an enemy who declared war on us,” Kaufman told the St. Petersburg Times. Furthermore, she said, she thought it was inappropriate to have holidays for people from the Caribbean and Central and South America on the calendar. “Why pander to Islamics and people from Peru, Belize, Cuba and Haiti?” she said on the phone. “It’s irrelevant in America.”

St Petersburg Times, 8 January 2010

Migration ‘threatens the DNA of our nation’, claims Lord Carey

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Writing in the Times, Lord Carey explains why he has signed up to a call for restrictions on immigration:

“The sheer numbers of migrants … threaten the very ethos or DNA of our nation…. Democratic institutions such as the monarchy, Parliament, the judiciary, the Church of England, our free press and the BBC … support the liberal democratic values of the nation. Some groups of migrants, however, are ambivalent about or even hostile to such institutions. The proposed antiwar Islamist march in Wootton Bassett is a clear example of the difficulties extremists pose to British society.

“Furthermore, the idea that Britain can continue to welcome with open arms immigrants who immediately establish their own tribunals to apply Sharia, rather than make use of British civil law, is deeply socially divisive.”

See also the Daily Mail. And the Daily Express, which headlines its story “Let Christian migrants in first, demands Carey”.

Update:  See “The church fights back against Islamification” by Damian Thompson, editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald, who writes:

“We have had to wait decades for this moment, but it has finally happened. A leading British clergyman has said something sensible about immigration…. Politicised Islam is at the forefront of his mind: he knows that Britain’s evangelical Christians are fed up with being told to develop ever closer ties with their Muslim neighbours…. In the long term, the future of Western civilisation can be secured only by an alliance between Christians and secularists against the totalitarian ideology of Islamism. That is a strange prospect; and even more uncomfortable is the realisation that Christianity’s survival as a mass movement may depend on something as prosaic as immigration control. But that is surely what Lord Carey is hinting at, and it is brave of him to do so.”

Further update:  See also “Damian Thompson on the ‘Islamification’ of Britain”, ENGAGE, 8 January 2010

Massachusetts college bans veil – Daniel Pipes welcomes ‘preventative step’ against terrorism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

MCPHS logoA Massachusetts pharmacy college instituted a ban on clothing that obscures the face, including face veils and burqas, weeks after a Muslim alumnus who is also the son of a professor was charged with plotting terror strikes.

The policy change at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Services, announced in a campus-wide e-mail last month, went into effect Friday.

Michael Ratty, a college spokesman, said the policy was developed in the fall during the school’s annual review of its public safety procedures and was unrelated to the arrest of 2008 graduate Tarek Mehanna.

Mehanna, of Sudbury, was arrested Oct. 21. He is accused of conspiring with two men to randomly shoot mall shoppers and kill U.S. public officials and soldiers in Iraq. Mehanna’s family has denied the charges and Mehanna has drawn strong, public support from friends and students he taught at a Muslim school in Worcester. Mehanna’s father, Ahmed Mehanna, teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy’s campus in Boston.

The school’s revised ”identification policy” reads that for ”reasons of safety and security, all students must be readily identifiable while they are on campus and/or engaged in required off-campus activities. … Therefore, any head covering that obscures a student’s face may not be worn, either on campus or at clinical sites, except when required for medical reasons.”

The policy would effectively ban face veils, as well as burqas and niqabs, which either cloak the entire body or cover everything but the eyes. Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said he has contacted school officials about providing a religious exemption, and said it’s required because the policy makes a medical exemption.

He said the revision was aimed at two female Muslim students who wear face veils due to their religious beliefs. Hooper said a minority of Muslims believe that covering the face is required, but that stopping them from practicing their faith is “un-American”.

Hooper said strong security can be maintained at a college without sacrificing religious freedom. “If you can get on an airplane wearing a face veil, you can go to class at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy wearing a face veil,” he said.

Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum and a frequent critic of militant Islam, applauded the college for the policy change, noting numerous terrorist attacks have been committed by people hiding themselves and their weapons under veils.

“I think the college was alerted to the dangers that could come from its student body by the arrest of Tarek Mehanna … and realized that it needs to take preventative steps to protect itself, its student body, its staff,” he said.

Associated Press, 5 January 2010

Update:  See “Massachusetts college alters policy banning face coverings”, CNN, 8 January 2010

Media attacks on Islamic societies at universities are whipping up Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Unsubstantiated media reports on Islamic societies at University campuses inciting extremism are whipping up Islamophobia

Press release from One Society Many Cultures

Following the failed terrorist attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on 25 December 2009, many media reports have used the fact that the perpetrator was a student in London who was active in a student Islamic Society to imply this appalling act was incited by the perfectly normal activities of Islamic Societies in London colleges.

Such views have been rejected by Malcolm Grant, provost of University College London (UCL), who said reports that Abdulmutallab developed extreme views whilst studying at UCL were “spectacular insinuation”, and has ordered a review of the 23-year-old’s time at the university.

Attacks on Islamic Societies are unjustified, and whip up an atmosphere of fear and even hatred towards all Muslims.

Islamic Societies – like Jewish, Christian and other faith groups – are a normal part of student life. Islamic Societies give their members social support, discuss issues of faith, and, among many other activities, are a means of inter-faith and inter-community dialogue.

Islamic Societies also respond to Islamaphobia – for example following a vicious assault on Muslim students leaving prayers at City University in November, the Islamic Societies supported the victims and gathered support for widespread condemnation of the perpetrators.

Responses to this terrorist attack that encourage hostility to all Muslims and their expressions of faith add to an atmosphere which is already leading to stepped up attacks and assaults on Muslims.

In addition to the incident at City University mentioned above, in recent months there has been a rise in physical attacks on Muslims, including two murders of a taxi driver in Birmingham and a man in Tooting, South London. In Rochdale in the North West a Muslim woman was violently attacked by a BNP supporter who attempted to rip off her Hijab. Fascist and far right groups have held numerous overtly anti-Muslim demonstrations, including two outside a Mosque.

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Passenger profiling risks damaging counter terrorism efforts

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Good grief. Here‘s a press release from the Quilliam Foundation we can mostly agree with. True, you have to put up with the predictable Quilliam assertion that “governments must engage in a ‘battle of ideas’ to combat the Islamist ideologies which justify terrorism” – which, translated, means the government giving Ed Husain and his mates lots of money to denounce Islamist tendencies who have nothing whatsoever to do with al-Qaeda and who repudiate its methods. However, Quillam does at least take the right line on the actual issue of profiling. Which is more than others do.

BBC biased in favour of Muslims, claims La Plante

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Lynda La PlanteCrime writer Lynda La Plante has attacked the BBC’s commissioning policy, claiming the corporation’s drama team would rather take a script by a “little Muslim boy” than one she had written.

La Plante, the creator of Prime Suspect, the award-winning detective series starring Helen Mirren, told the Daily Telegraph she found the BBC drama commissioning process “very depressing”. She said: “If my name were Usafi Iqbadal and I was 19, then they’d probably bring me in and talk.”

La Plante told the Daily Telegraph: “If you were to go to the BBC and say to them, ‘Listen, Lynda La Plante’s written a new drama, or I have this little Muslim boy who’s just written one’, they’d say: ‘Oh, we’d like to see his script’.”

Broadcast Now, 4 January 2010

See also “Muslim writers say La Plante attack on BBC is ‘insulting'” in the Independent. Sarfraz Manzoor is quoted as saying that La Plante should “get that chip off her shoulder and return to the real world rather than playing the misunderstood victim in the fantasy world in which she is currently residing”. He added: “I would love to meet the Muslim writers whose output is currently clogging up the television schedules: can she name any of these mythical individuals or are her comments simply a headline-grabbing way to yet again bash the BBC and blame Muslims?”

Please don’t listen to Anjem Choudary

Posted on by Bob Pitt

First, he announced his plan to march through Wootton Bassett, in Wiltshire, carrying 500 coffins to symbolise the thousands of Muslims killed ‘by the oppressive US and UK regimes’ in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, he is sending letters to the grieving families of fallen British soldiers, telling them he has “no sympathy whatsoever” for their plight, urging them instead to become Muslims to “save” themselves “from the hellfire”.

Is there anything Anjem “Andy” Choudary won’t do for the sake of a cheap headline? As Inayat Bunglawala wrote on Cif almost a year ago, Choudary and his gang deploy “a simple formula – hold up some offensive placards designed to get people’s backs up and call a local reporter to come along and capture some footage – that has reliably generated acres of media coverage for them in recent years”.

Our sensationalist and irresponsible media has, in fact, been deeply complicit in the rise and rise of this fanatic, devoting quite disproportionate and counter-productive coverage to his various rantings. Is Choudary an Islamic scholar whose views merit attention or consideration? No. Has he studied under leading Islamic scholars? Nope. Does he have any Islamic qualifications or credentials? None whatsoever. So what gives him the right to pontificate on Islam, British Muslims or “the hellfire”? Or proclaim himself a “sharia judge”?

Will he even manage to round up enough misfits to carry the 500 coffins with him? I doubt it – Choudary and co couldn’t even persuade enough people to join a ‘march for sharia’ that they had proudly planned to hold in central London in late October, and, at the very last minute, had to humiliatingly withdraw from their own rally. Pathetic, eh?

Mehdi Hasan at Comment is Free, 4 January 2010

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How to spot a terrorist – an Islamic specialist explains

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ruth Dudley Edwards 2“Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was by all accounts a decent, virtuous teenager who wanted to do good but, lost and alone in London, he fell into a malign embrace.”

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Ruth Dudley Edwards (billed as an “Islamic specialist”) trots out the familiar right-wing clichés about Abdulmutallab being converted to extremism/terrorism during his three years as a student at University College London.

She accuses the UCL authorities of failing in their duty of care to Abdulmutallab: “Did it concern no one that this lonely boy had taken to wearing Islamic dress? Wasn’t anyone worried about the radicalism of the ‘War on Terror Week’ Abdulmutallab organised as [UCL Islamic society] president?”

Yes, really – according to this “Islamic specialist”, wearing traditional clothing and opposing Bush’s “War on Terror” are apparently signs of incipient terrorism.

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Universities are now hotbeds of Islamic extremism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Stephen_PollardSo Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard claims, in a comment piece in today’s Daily Express.

The article is a predictable mish-mash drawn from Anthony Glees, author of the discredited scaremongering “study” When Students Turn to Terror, from the Centre for Social Cohesion’s nonsense about a third of Muslim students believing that “killing in the name of religion was justified” and, last but not least, from the Quilliam Foundation’s recent witch-hunt against the Green Lane Masjid in Birmingham.

Pollard concludes: “So when we read about Mr Abdulmutallab we should place him in this context. His is the name we now know. But the extremists are working to ensure that while he may have failed, others will succeed. And the authorities still – despite 9/11, despite the 2005 Tube bombings, despite other terrorist plots – refuse to root out extremism…. The extremists may be the enemy of Western civilisation but in our failure to take the threat seriously, we are our own worst enemy.”

Given that, according to Pollard’s analysis, mainstream mosques like the Green Lane Masjid are promoting terrorism and a third of Muslim students are potential killers, what else can this be but a call for a general crack-down on the Muslim community?

See also “Detroit terror attack: British university ‘complicit’ in radicalisation” in the Telegraph. This report relies on quotations from Glees and from Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion, who accuses University College London of having “failed grotesquely to clamp down on extremism”.

Murray is of course inclined to see extremism everywhere in the Muslim community. In a TV discussion programme that was not broadcast because of his libellous comments, he notoriously accused Salma Yaqoob of supporting terrorism and rioting.

Update:  See “UCL President speaks out against false insinuations of radicalisation”, ENGAGE, 31 January 2009

Further update:  See Inayat Bunglawala’s piece at Comment is Free. Responding the Telegraph article, he writes:

“Glees does not share with us what actual evidence, if any, he has that enables him to conclude that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was recruited by al-Qaida in London, but we’ll pass over that for now. Of more immediate concern is his absurd demand that student Islamic societies give ‘assurances that no radicalisation will be allowed’ and that they should be disbanded unless they do. What on earth is ‘radicalisation’ supposed to mean in this context? TheTelegraph mentions that the Islamic society at University College London – of which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was president – organised a series of lectures in 2007 on the ‘War on Terror’. Can you imagine that? Students organising lectures that are critical of US and UK foreign policy. Goodness, who would have thought it?”