Category Archives: Right wing

Muslim advocates fasting during Ramadan shock

Posted on by Bob Pitt

ENGAGE replies to a particularly stupid piece of witch-hunting by Martin Bright in last week’s Jewish Chronicle attacking the appointment of Asim Hafeez as Community Advisor in the Home Office on the grounds that he is “a hardcore Islamist”. ENGAGE points out:

“An example Bright cites of Hafeez’s ‘hardcore’ credentials is this: ‘The new Home Office adviser is reported to have raised eyebrows at his new department during the Muslim festival of Ramadan, when he lectured guests at a reception about the benefits of fasting.‘ If a Muslim speaking of the benefits of fasting on the passing of Ramadan and celebration of Eid ul-Fitr is hardcore, then Hafeez shares the quality with all British Muslims.”

ENGAGE, 9 November 2009

Islamic schools may groom children for terrorism – at taxpayer’s expense

Posted on by Bob Pitt

OMN logoFears are emerging that vulnerable children might be groomed for religious extremism or even terrorism at taxpayers’ expense.

Muslim pupils are being taken out of classes and sent to study at Islamic schools, or madrassas. A pilot scheme, the Open Madrasah Network, has received a £550,000 government grant to pay for under-achievers to attend lessons in Arabic, Urdu and religion.

The classes, described as booster lessons for primary and GCSE age pupils, are already running at four madrassas in Bradford, West Yorkshire. If pupils show improvement, the scheme is likely to be rolled out nationally. But critics say it will lead to the risk of taxpayers’ money being spent on “suspect” organisations.

Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said: “These institutions are devoted almost entirely to pumping Islam into the heads of their pupils. We need to know who will keep tabs on these indoctrination centres to ensure taxpayers’ money is properly spent. Although there is no suggestion that the Yorkshire scheme is suspect, if this kind of idea rolls out, who knows what will happen?”

There are almost 1,600 madrassas in Britain, where 200,000 children attend evening classes to study the Koran. But anti-terror police fear that extremists could indoctrinate pupils with anti-Western sentiments.

Sunday Express, 8 November 2009

‘Jihad at Fort Hood’ – according to Robert Spencer

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Major Hasan’s motive was perfectly clear – but it was one that the forces of political correctness and the Islamic advocacy groups in the United States have been working for years to obscure. So it is that now that another major jihad terror attack has taken place on American soil, authorities and the mainstream media are at a loss to explain why it happened – and the abundant evidence that it was a jihad attack is ignored.”

Robert Spencer at Front Page Magazine, 6 November 2009

See Mehdi Hasan’s comments at the New Statesman, 6 November 2009

Update:  See also Sunny Hundal, “Double standards over Fort Hood attack”, at Pickled Politics, 6 November 2009

Inayat is ‘fake moderate Muslim’, claims Edmund Standing

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Edmund StandingYou might have thought that Inayat Bunglawala’s Muslims4UK campaign against yesterday’s (cancelled) al-Muhajiroun demonstration in central London would have gained almost unanimous support outside the ranks of Anjem Choudary’s tiny gang of idiots.

But no. Mad Melanie Phillips has been joined by Edmund (“the BNP don’t really hate Muslims“) Standing in condemning Inayat’s initiative as a cunning manoeuvre to cover up his extremist views and misrepresent himself as a moderate.

Standing writes: “Bunglawala’s ‘anti-extremist’ drive managed to drum up support largely from extremists: Bob Pitt, an extreme left-winger, and MPAC, an organisation which refuses to condemn Jihadists and whose spokesman actively promotes them. Moderate? Pull the other one!”

In fairness to MPACUK and myself, I think Standing should amend his post to include a denuciation of that well-known pro-Islamist extremist Ed Husain too.

Witch-hunt of Azad Ali resumes

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A civil servant who has condemned ministers for helping to fuel the “slaughter” of Arabs in the Middle East is advising Britain’s most senior prosecutor on Islamic extremism.

Azad Ali, a Treasury official who has used his internet blog to praise the spiritual leader of Al-Qaeda, sits on a Whitehall counterterrorism panel that provides advice to Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions (DPP).

Ali was investigated earlier this year over his controversial views on the Iraq war and was forced to deny that he sympathised with the killing of British troops. He got into trouble with his Treasury bosses after using his blog to deny that last November’s Mumbai attacks, which claimed 173 lives, were an act of terrorism.

Sunday Times, 1 November 2009

This is no more than a rerun of the witch-hunt of Azad Ali that took place earlier this year, and features the same blatant misrepresentations of Azad’s views. The Sunday Times also fails to make it clear that, although this lying campaign led to Azad’s suspension from his civil service job, an inquiry cleared and reinstated him.

‘The Muslims are breeding ten times faster than us’ claims Lord Pearson

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Lord Pearson and WildersA lord’s claim that Britain faces coming under Islamic rule has been blasted as “alarmist” and “inaccurate”.

In a sick rant, UK Independence Party peer Lord Pearson makes wild statements about the Muslim birth rate. He said the UK was under threat because “the Muslims are breeding ten times faster than us”. He added:

“I don’t know at what point they reach such a number we are no longer able to resist the rest of their demands. We must be looking at somewhere between 10 or 20 years. If we don’t do something in the next year or two we have in effect lost.”

Continue reading →

Andrew Boff – apologist for Islamism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Andrew BoffWell, according to Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens he is. At ConservativeHome, under the headline “Hate preachers should not be defended”, Meleagrou-Hitchens returns to the attack on City Hall’s supposed links with “Islamist extremism”. This time the object of his ire is Conservative Assembly Member Andrew Boff, who has defended Boris Johnson against Meleagrou-Hitchens’ earlier accusations.

It is not accidental that Meleagrou-Hitchens’ articles have been posted on ConservativeHome’s local government page, which is edited by Harry Phibbs. A one-time leading member of the notorious Federation of Conservative Students, Phibbs is one of those Tory right-wingers who expected Boris to implement a more thorough break with Ken Livingstone’s legacy after his election as mayor. Writing at ConservativeHome in July this year, Phibbs complained indignantly that “the Conservative administration in City Hall have been shamefully allowing Ken Livingstone’s ideology of quotas, interest groups, thought crime and racial separatism to remain largely intact”. For Phibbs, links with the Islam Channel and the East London Mosque show that Boris is extending this “Livingstone lite” approach to London’s Muslim communities.

But Boris has his eye on re-election in 2012 and is prepared to take a more pragmatic view than Phibbs. In the 2008 mayoral contest the publicising of Boris’s offensive journalistic remarks about Islam led to a significant mobilisation against him among Muslims in the capital, where they make up 8% of the population. This could well have cost Boris the election. So maintaining and publicising Eid in the Square is one of Boris’s ways of mending fences with Muslim Londoners, and if it means working with the Islam Channel and giving its CEO Mohamed Ali a platform then Boris is prepared to go along with that.

In the case of the East London Mosque a more specific issue is involved, namely that the Tories think they have a chance of victory in Bethnal Green & Bow or Poplar & Limehouse in next year’s general election, after Jim Fitzpatrick’s comments about a gender-segregated Muslim wedding severely damaged Labour’s prospects in the East End. So, from a party-political perspective, establishing a warm relationship between the Tories at City Hall and the East London Mosque makes good sense.

As we’ve pointed out previously, by extending their anti-Islamist witch-hunting to the likes of Jack Straw, Boris Johnson and now Andrew Boff, Meleagrou-Hitchens and the Centre for Social Cohesion have made a serious tactical blunder which risks undermining their whole operation. And that is certainly something we welcome here at Islamophobia Watch.

Inayat is mirror image of BNP says Mad Mel

Posted on by Bob Pitt

We recently reported on Inayat Bunglawala’s launch of Muslims4Uk and its planned counter-demonstration against al-Muhajiroun this Saturday. Mad Melanie Phillips is not impressed, though. According to Mel, Inayat is carrying out a cunning manoeuvre (on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood, apparently) designed to misrepresent himself as supporting “a multi-faith, multicultural democracy where people are free to practise their faith or not to if they so choose”. Mel is having none of it: “Bunglawala is surely the mirror image of Nick Griffin in hisattempt to reposition the BNP as a non-racist party – and about as plausible.”

Daily Express ignores Muslim counter-demonstrations

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Buckingham Mosque“As we approach Sat 31st October and British Muslim groups (Muslims4UK, ISB) prepare to counter the ridiculous ‘March for Shari’ah’ demonstration called by the Islam4UK fringe group, what groups do you suppose the Daily Express is busy promoting?

“No prizes for guessing of course, the DE’s obsession with Anjem Choudary and his al-Muhajiroun (or Islam4UK as they are now known) ilk is well known to bemused British Muslims.

“The paper today (image above) grants the fringe group yet another page spread, this in addition to the coverage given to Islam4UK on the 15th and 16th of this month. And yet you’ll be hard pressed to find any coverage of the counter-demonstrations in the newspaper’s pages, this despite the paper’s editorial plea for the ‘moderate Muslim majority’ to speak out.”

ENGAGE, 29 October 2009