Category Archives: Right wing

Islamophobes are front-runners in UKIP leadership contest

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Lord Pearson and WildersThe UK Independence Party is set to head in a fresh direction, fighting radical Islam, with the election today of a replacement for Nigel Farage as its national leader. The two favourites to take over from Mr Farage are committed to adding the battle against Islamic fundamentalism to the party’s main goal of withdrawing Britain from the European Union.

Mr Farage resisted strong grassroots pressure during his three-year leadership to broaden UKIP’s focus to include actively campaigning against Islamism and immigration. But both Lord Pearson of Rannoch and the London MEP Gerard Batten – the two front-runners in a field of five candidates – say that they are determined to target Islamic fundamentalism.

Lord Pearson invited the anti-Islam Dutch politician Geert Wilders to the House of Lords in February only for Jacqui Smith, then the Home Secretary, to issue a banning order so that Mr Wilders was turned away at Heathrow. The Dutchman travelled to Britain in October after overturning the ban.

Lord Pearson’s own outspoken views about Islam were recorded in Washington DC last month. Asked how much time Britain had before losing control of its cultural identity he said: “What is going to decide the answer to that is the birthrate. The fact that Muslims are breeding ten times faster than us. I do not know at what point they reach such a number that we are no longer able to resist the rest of their demands … but if we do not do something now within the next year or two we have in effect lost.”

Mr Batten, 55, has also invited Mr Wilders to speaking engagements and has called the Dutch politician “a brave man trying to defend western civilisation”. This year, writing in the magazine Freedom Today, Mr Batten addressed the notion of the confrontation of Islamism and the West. “It is a clash between civilisation and barbarism. It is a clash between everything that has made the modern world what it is and an ideology that wants to enslave us to a belief system that belongs in seventh-century Arabia and which was primitive and backward even then.”

Times, 27 November 2009

Media double standards over Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tabloid Watch examines two recent examples:

Yesterday, a man admitted 22 charges, including six under the Terrorism Act, after 54 homemade ball-bearing and nail bombs were found in his West Yorkshire home, along with guns, ammunition and weapons manuals. The charges included:

  • four counts of making explosives
  • four counts of possessing explosives
  • three counts of manufacturing prohibited weapons
  • four counts of possession of prohibited weapons
  • one count of possession of ammunition without a certificate.

Now it doesn’t take a genius to work out that if this man was Muslim, this would be all over the media. But he isn’t and so, apart from three Yorkshire papers, it hasn’t been mentioned at all. By contrast, this Muslim woman only had a memory stick with explosives manuals on and the Mail reported that. But they ignored this.

And the reports from Hope Not Hate and Searchlight that this bombmaker (Terence Gavan) was also a member of the BNP should only heighten the news interest. Or so you would have thought…

At the start of October, this blog noted the desecration of Muslim graves in Southern Cemetery in Manchester. Although covered by the BBC, it was ignored by everyone else in the mainstream media.

Now, the BBC are reporting the graveyard has been targeted for a third time, as 20 headstones were pushed over. The BBC says: “Det Ch Insp Steve Eckersley called it ‘mindless racist behaviour’ that was being treated as a hate crime. On 29 September, 26 Muslim headstones were vandalised and three days later 27 were targeted.”

So at what point does this become news to the newspapers? Or is it because the targets are Muslims that it never does?

More anti-Muslim hysteria in the Express

Posted on by Bob Pitt

113000 Aid to Fanatics“After yet another stupid health scare story yesterday (too much salt is bad for you, shock), the Express was back to one of its other favourite topics today: Islam. Or should that be anti-Islam hysteria?

“There is so much wrong with the Express‘ article that it’s hard to know where to start. But let’s try this: the headline ‘£113,000 aid to fanatics who want to kill us’ no longer exists on the Express website. They have changed it to a much less inflammatory David Cameron: Brown soft on Muslim fanatics, which strongly suggests they have backed away from their own ridiculous front page.”

Tabloid Watch, 26 November 2009

Tabloid Watch quotes the Express editorial, which is not available online. This states: “What these exchanges demonstrate is just how deeply in hock the Labour party is at every level to Muslim vested interests.” Under the heading “No funding for Christians”, the editorial quotes actor David Suchet as saying: “A charity I work for got turned down for Government funding recently because it was a Christian charity, even though it had been funded by the Government for several years.”

The Express comments: “It does not take a brilliant detective to work out what is going on here, just an ordinarily observant person: Britain’s cultural identity is being systematically dismantled by a government of traitors.” As Tabloid Watch notes, this directly echoes the language of the BNP.

The Express article reporting Suchet’s comments also quotes Alan Craig of the Christian Peoples Alliance as claiming: “Christianity is being marginalised by those who rule our society. Christianity can stand up for itself, but my concern is that it is not a level playing field. It seems everything is being done to accommodate the Islamic faith at the expense of society.”

Tariq Ramadan ‘a greater threat to Western civilization’ than Osama bin Laden

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pipes 9-11“To borrow a computer term, if Ayatollah Khomeini, Osama bin Laden, and Nidal Hasan represent Islamism 1.0, Recep Tayyip Erdogan (the prime minister of Turkey), Tariq Ramadan (a Swiss intellectual), and Keith Ellison (a US congressman) represent Islamism 2.0. The former kill more people but the latter pose a greater threat to Western civilization.”

Daniel Pipes in the Jerusalem Post, 24 November 2009

See also LoonWatch, who comment: “Ellison and Ramadan stand as a strong counter example against Bin Laden and his cohorts for Muslims, especially young Muslims. They see two Muslims, strongly grounded in their faith, belonging to their society and giving back on various levels from the social to the political; instead of deriding them Pipes should be encouraging them.

“As more examples such as theirs increase in the West it will enable Muslims to better fight those minority elements within their faith that seek to cause chaos and violence and that is what really threatens Daniel Pipes who seems to be motivated by the paranoid fear that the ‘enfranchisement of American Muslims…will present true dangers to American Jews’.”

Mosque vote threatens to isolate Swiss

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Islamisierung stoppenIn Switzerland, home of the referendum, voters decide on everything from reducing fighter jet noise in tourist areas to boosting funding for complementary medicine. Although generally of narrow interest, even at home, once in a while, a plebiscite comes up that stirs passions well beyond national borders. That will be the case on Sunday, when voters decide on a call to ban construction of minarets at mosques.

On the face of it, the referendum is of negligible relevance, even by Swiss standards. The country has few mosques and fewer minarets. Only a tiny fraction of Switzerland’s 300,000-400,000 Muslims, drawn largely from the Balkans, are practising; most mosques are inconspicuous and there is scant demand for minarets. Any building schemes are subject to the same planning procedures that limit skyscrapers.

But, as with immigration and citizenship rights, the vote has touched a sensitive nerve – one with resonance elsewhere in Europe. Immigration, integration and the dilution of national identity have become big themes in the UK, France, Belgium and beyond. Recently, they have grown even more prominent because of recession and spiralling unemployment. Far-right groups have exploited popular unease to boost representation and influence agendas. Austria’s two far-right groups took more than 28 per cent of the vote in elections last year.

Sunday’s vote is typical of the Swiss People’s party (SVP) – the ultraconservative group that regularly and expertly exploits national emotions to mobilise support. Reinforced by simple, yet striking images and terse, but effective language, the SVP has become Switzerland’s biggest party.

SVP leaders maintain they are simply performing their duty to protect Swiss national values. They say minarets have no religious significance, but symbolise Islamic intolerance. Warning against a creeping “Islamisation” of society, Ulrich Schlüer, an SVP MP, notes: “The anti-minaret initiative is particularly important for the younger generation. The young will be the ones particularly affected if Islamisation comes off.”

The SVP’s message has been conveyed with arresting and provocative images. Building on previous emotive – and widely criticised – posters, the latest campaign has been galvanised by a poster of a woman in a burka, standing on a Swiss flag, flanked by minarets looking like missiles.

Opinion polls suggest the initiative will be rejected comfortably, even if the margin appears to be narrowing. But even if Sunday’s vote goes against the SVP, observers say the damage for Switzerland may already have been done.

Financial Times, 24 November 2009

Writing on his Telegraph blog, Damian Thompson has mixed feeling about the introduction of a similar referendum in the UK: “A legal ban on the construction of a certain sort of building strikes me as a very un-British, top-down solution. Giving local people the right to decide whether they want a minaret in their midst, on the other hand, is very British. But what if the locality is a Muslim ghetto? I wish I could say that last question is hypothetical, but increasingly it isn’t.”

Update:  See Amnesty International press release, 25 November 2009

Obscene anti-Muslim emails put Nile on the defensive

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Abusive emails written by the son of the campaign manager of the Christian Democratic Party containing anti-Muslim and homophobic comments have embarrassed the party’s president, the Reverend Fred Nile, only two weeks before the December 5 Bradfield byelection, in which the party will field nine candidates.

Mr Nile has been forced to apologise to dozens of recipients of the emails, which also attack the Reverend Gordon Moyes, the CDP-turned-Family-First MP in the NSW upper house. Their author, Douglas Darby, the son of the former Liberal identity Michael Darby, who is the CDP’s campaign manager, has been expelled from the party.

In one email Douglas Darby attacks a Muslim activist, Mal Mac Rae, as a ”stupid moslem c—” and says ”muslim scum are too busy stacking ALP branches and raping Aussie chicks”.

In another, Douglas Darby suggests Muslims ”who habitually engage in child molestation, incest, pack rape … obey the laws of this country or f— off to Afghanistan where Australians are allowed to shoot you people”.

Yet another urges Mr Mac Rae to become a suicide bomber. ”Please do it inside either a Sunni or Shiite mosque.”

Continue reading →

Billboard in Colorado features picture of Obama and asks ‘President or Jihad?’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

President or JihadToday, a new birther billboard went up above Wolf Automotive off I-70 in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. The sign has a picture of President Obama wearing a turban, asking, “President or Jihad?” and exhorting, “Wake up America! Remember Fort Hood”.

ThinkProgress spoke with Phil Wolf, the owner of the car dealership. He said that the billboard is his personal project because he believes the American people have a right to know the facts about the president:

“I’m probably like a lot of other people that have asked the question, I want to know who our president is. And to date, I don’t think I know, I don’t think a lot of people know, I don’t think it’s ever been asked – answered…. When this Fort Hood massacre occurred, and I saw the response of our Commander in Chief to this unbelievable, politically correct, nonsense – to me it was just enough.”

Think Progress, 20 November 2009

Witch-hunt against UK Muslim organisations over Fort Hood

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Writing at Islam Online, Inayat Bunglawala examines how Anwar Al-Awlaki’s support for the Fort Hood killings has been used to promote “a modern version of a McCarthyite witch-hunt against leading UK Islamic organizations and Muslim individuals”.

Update:  Predictably, Inayat has come in for some stick over the following statement:

It is very unfortunate that Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi has been barred from visiting the UK since early 2007 by the British government, following pressure from pro-Israeli lobbies. Sheikh Al-Qaradawi is an Islamic scholar who commands huge respect among millions of Muslims worldwide. As a regular past visitor to the UK, he would consistently urge British Muslims to shun all forms of extremism and to focus their energies on ensuring that their children excelled in education.

“His long experience of dealing with youths influenced by extremist and takfiri ideas (ideas involving accusations of backsliding from Islam) would surely have been a valuable asset in the struggle against Al-Qaeda-inspired propaganda.”

Equally predictably, Inayat’s critics include mad Melanie Phillips, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, the Spittoon and Edmund Standing.

You could, of course, base your opinion of Qaradawi on the word of ignorant bigots like that. Alternatively, you could consult the analysis of people who actually know something about the subject.

Continue reading →

Islamophobes rally for Rifqa outside courthouse

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Geller rallyFathima Rifqa Bary was present only in smiling photographs at a Downtown rally of her supporters yesterday.

The 17-year-old Columbus runaway is in foster care until a Franklin County Juvenile Court judge decides where she should live. The former New Albany High School student says her father threatened to kill her for leaving Islam for Christianity. She ran away from their Northeast Side home in July, fleeing to the Florida home of married pastors whom she met on Facebook.

Mohamed Bary denies his daughter’s accusations, and authorities in Ohio and Florida have found no credible threat to her safety.

But her supporters say the authorities are being ignorant at best and malicious at worst. They say the girl, who goes by Rifqa, will be killed if she is returned to her family because Islamic law mandates it and Muslim ideology is violent and dangerous.

About 120 people gathered in a small park across from the S. High Street courthouse for the rally. A hearing had been scheduled for yesterday but was postponed until Dec. 22.

Speakers included Simon Deng, a Sudanese man who spoke of his enslavement by Muslims as a child, and Nonie Darwish, director of Former Muslims United, based in Granada Hills, Calif. Behind the speaker’s lectern was a banner showing Muslim girls and women who have been maimed or killed for various offenses against faith or family, said conservative blogger Pamela Geller, a rally organizer. “We don’t need another martyr,” she said. “We have to win.”

A general theme at the rally was that Islam is threatening the U.S. Constitution and American freedoms. “My concern is for the way that Islam is creeping into our society and trying to change it,” said Don Berger of the East Side. “So I’m here in support of Rifqa and that she keeps her freedom.” Several at the rally wore T-shirts that read: “Islam is of the devil.”

Columbus Dispatch, 17 November 2009

See also LoonWatch, 16 November 2009

The Muslim plan to conquer the West (part 678)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“During an inter-faith meeting in Turkey some years ago, a Catholic bishop recounted how an Islamic cleric told the crowd: ‘Thanks to your democratic laws, we will invade you. Thanks to our Islamic laws, we will conquer you.’ … It’s not politically correct to admit – or even discuss – the fact that the West is facing one of the greatest challenges to its traditions of plurality, democracy, freedom of speech and expression.

“Instead we call it ‘multiculturalism’ or ‘cultural relativism’ and applaud it, as if tolerating unfair, inequitable and in some cases downright barbaric ‘traditions’ is somehow a noble, righteous cause. It’s not. It’s a deliberate and cowardly attempt to ignore what is going on right under our noses in case we may be branded racist, sectarian or worse…. in Europe ‘multiculturalism’ seems to have developed into a blind tolerance toward any culture and faith – depriving many people, specifically women, of their human rights.

“In 2004, Italian author Oriana Fallaci wrote The Rage and the Pride, in which she criticised both Muslims (bent, according to her, on conquering the West and annihilating its culture) and Europeans (described as spoiled, hypocritical and blind to the moral threat represented by Islamic expansion). A few years later she wrote a follow-up, The Force of Reason. It’s a wonder she had the courage to do this as, in the introduction, she recounts the intellectual lynching she was subjected to following the publication of her first book.

“According to Fallaci, the politically correct establishment, or ‘modern inquisition’, keeps individuals in fear of expressing what they believe. ‘If you are a Westerner and you say that your civilisation is superior, the most developed that this planet has ever seen, you go to the stake. But if you are a son of Allah, or one of their collaborationists, and you say that Islam has always been a superior civilisation, a ray of light … nobody touches you. Nobody sues you. Nobody condemns you.’ Here Fallaci hit the nail on the head, but she was vilified for saying what people refuse to listen to.”

Carol Hunt in the Sunday Independent, 15 November 2009