Category Archives: Right wing

Fareena Alam – agent of theocratic dictatorship

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yes, really. According to the increasingly crazed Spittoon blog, the former editor of Q-News should be removed from her position in the PVE-funded Radical Middle Way, because she works as a journalist and presenter for Press TV.

The Spittoon declares that “it is manifestly insane that an Iranian government employee, especially one who works for Tehran’s main English language propaganda outlet and who compares British soldiers to fascist storm-troopers, should be involved in running the UK’s most lavishly-funded counter-extremism programme”.

CAIR: Islamophobia machine targets American Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today distributed an editorial, entitled “Islamophobia Machine Targets American Muslims,” outlining what the Washington-based Muslim civil rights group says is a campaign by “extremists of all stripes who coordinate and cooperate in a relentless effort to demonize Islam and deprive American Muslims of their civil rights.”

CAIR press release, 28 October 2009

Mayor’s office defends Mohamed Ali Harrath

Posted on by Bob Pitt

ConservativeHome carries a piece by Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens (“Boris fails to tackle Islamic extremism“) revealing that it was the Centre for Social Cohesion who were behind the recent Sunday Express article (“Boris’s terror link“), which attacked the mayor of London for organising Eid in the Square in co-operation with the Islam Channel and allowing its CEO, Mohamed Ali Harrath, to address the event.

Meleagrou-Hitchens tells us that the CSC wrote to Boris Johnson complaining about his association with Mohamed Ali Harrath. They received the following response from the mayor’s office:

“The Islam Channel Chief Executive Mohamed Ali Harrath is not regarded as a threat by the British Government. He accompanied Robert Lambert, the former Head of the Met Police Muslim Contact [Unit] to a meeting last year with the Statutory Deputy Mayor. The Mayor’s office is proud to support Eid in the Square and this year’s celebrations were enjoyed by thousands of Londoners. The Islam Channel played a major factor in this success by broadcasting to millions of viewers in 132 countries.”

Boris Johnson promotes Islamist extremism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

If you thought the Sunday Times‘ recent attacks on Jack Straw for consorting with Islamist extremists were bizarre, the Sunday Express has gone one better by levelling the same accusation against Boris Johnson, under the jaw-dropping headine “Boris’s terror link”! In Johnson’s case, the charge is that Mohamed Ali Harrath, CEO of the Islam Channel, spoke at Eid in the Square last month, where the Islam Channel was one of the GLA’s media partners along with the BBC Radio Asian Network.

Step forward Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens of the Centre for Social Cohesion, who tells the Express: “The invitation shows a worrying inconsistency in what the Tories have said about Islamic extremism recently.” It was notable that Meleagrou-Hitchens was one of the few people to treat the Sunday Times attack on Jack Straw seriously (“the noose is tightening around both the MCB’s extremist connections and government ministers who have been championing them. It’s about time…”). Even Harry’s Place baulked at reproducing that particular rant, though their co-thinkers at the Spittoon evidently had no problems with it.

The parallels between the present wave of Islamophobia in the UK and the 1950s Red Scare in the US are increasingly striking. In both cases the campaign began as an attack on the Left but then broadened out into a general assault on anyone who failed to join in the hysterical witch-hunt against Communism/Islamism. This was what eventually discredited and destroyed McCarthy. Surely it can only be a matter of time before Meleagrou-Hitchens announces that the British Army has been infiltrated at the highest level by Islamist fellow travellers who pose a threat to national security.

Update:  See also Meleagrou-Hitchens’ piece, “Boris fails to tackle Islamic extremism”, ConservativeHome, 27 October 2009

Islam is biggest threat to Sweden since World War II says far-right leader

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jimmie Akesson2With their party conference just barely over, the ultra right wing Sweden Democrats are creating headlines in Sweden again. In an article in Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet Jimmie Åkesson, party leader, writes that Islam is the greatest threat against Sweden since WWII.

According to Åkesson “today’s multicultural Swedish power elite is completely blind to the dangers of Islam”. He goes on to say that there are 10 Muslim terror organisations established in Sweden today, that Sweden has the highest number of rapes in Europe and that Muslim men are highly represented among the offenders. He concluded his article by saying that if the party is elected into parliament in 2010, he will do everything in his powers to “change the trend”.

Per Hultengård, lawyer for the Swedish Newspaper Publishers’ Association, told Aftonbladet that the article can be read as a warning to Swedish Muslims, not in the least due to Åkesson’s promise at the end. “I would take that as a threat,” said Per Hultengård to Aftonbladet. According to Jan Hjärpe, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Lund, the rhetoric used by Åkesson has clear racist undertones. “This is the same kind of propaganda that was used by Nazi anti-Semites,” Hjärpe told Aftonbladet.

Aftonbladet‘s Jan Helin decided to print the article against the advice of legal experts. “I have decided to take that risk. Åkesson’s text is important because it shows clearly on what values a party, on its way into Parliament, rests on. You may think that he is right or wrong in his views. But through reading this article you get a chance to consider what the Sweden Democrats actually believe,” Helin writes in Aftonbladet.

In the latest opinion polls the Sweden Democrats received 4.7% of votes. This means that if elections were held today the party would get in to Parliament.

Radio Sweden, 19 October 2009

See also the response by Anna Waara, chairperson of Swedish Muslims for Peace and Justice, “What do the Sweden Democrats want to do with us Muslims?”, The Local, 21 October 2009

You can watch Alan Lake, the businessman who bankrolls the English Defence League, speaking at a Sweden Democrats meeting here and here.

Mad Mel on the rise of the BNP

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Melanie Phillips Jihad in BritainIn this week’s Spectator Mad Melanie Phillips has another go at explaining the factors behind the rise of the BNP.

And, wouldn’t you know it, these include “uncontrolled immigration, multiculturalism, the loss to the EU of Britain’s ability to govern itself. Most toxic of all, however, is the threat from Islamic supremacism and the concern of the disenfranchised white voters that the political establishment is supinely going along with the progressive Islamisation of Britain.”

As we’ve pointed out in the past, Phillips’ analysis of the BNP’s political appeal always omits one major contributory factor, namely the legitimisation of their hysterical anti-Muslim propaganda by “mainstream” right-wing journalists like Phillips herself.

See also “Mel P rationalises the BNP’s anti-Muslim prejudice”, ENGAGE, 23 October 2009

Douglas Murray savages Ed Husain

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Last week the Guardian revealed that Ed Husain, co-director of the government-funded thinktank the Quilliam Foundation (QF), believes that spying on British Muslims who are ‘not committing terrorist offences’ is ‘good and right’. He has expressed some pretty extreme views in the past, but this is beyond anything that anyone who believes in liberal democracy could extol….

“QF subsequently issued a press release and its other director, Maajid Nawaz, wrote an article of strange double-speak proclaiming that QF does not in fact support ‘mass spying’ nor ‘a police state’. Well here is how his co-director described the Prevent strategy that funds QF. ‘A government initiative backed by millions of pounds. It’s got access to tens of thousands of people’s emails, phone numbers, etc etc. Isn’t the government going to use it? Of course it is. And it should use it.’

“These statements strike me as quite appallingly illiberal: wrong in principle because the police should not investigate innocent people and very obviously damaging in practice. However, Nawaz has clearly decided that the best way to deal with the authoritarian pronouncements of his co-director is to divert attention under the belief that contradiction is better than retraction….

“Husain said that ‘It would be morally wrong of a taxpayer-funded programme designed to prevent terrorism if it was not designed to gather intelligence in order to stop that terrorism from happening.’… Unless a crime has been committed or is about to be committed there is no reason why any innocent person should be reported to the police. Husain, in particular, ought to know the difference between a police state – especially since his co-director was until recently in such a state’s prisons – and a developed liberal democracy….

“QF is currently cosying up to the Conservative party to ensure its role under the next government. It would not be a bad thing if that party’s first cost-cutting exercise was to stop funding an organisation that has come to represent the toxic juncture at which intense personal ambition and government propaganda meet.”

Douglas Murray at Comment is Free, 23 October 2009

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Sunday Express defends ‘Britishness’ against the Muslim hordes

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Morris dancers“If global warming is happening fast, the transformation of Britain into a foreign land is occurring more alarmingly swiftly still. Last week the Office for National Statistics revealed that, since 2002, approximately 515 migrants have been arriving here every single day….

“Old cinemas that are not carpet warehouses are overflow mosques…. People bob past in national costume – the women trussed up in black parachutes, to show they are men’s possessions, and the men themselves more heavily bearded than the holy warriors of the Khyber Pass…. It’s like being abroad.

“Instead of multiculturalism leading to acceptance of diversity, the liberal illusion has fostered intolerance and self-righteousness, particularly among younger Muslims who have no sense of Britishness and cling to their religious identity instead.

“So devout have the checkout staff at branches of Sainsbury’s become that they are refusing to handle customers’ beer and wine, as drink is offensive to Allah. Trainee doctors, too, are declining to attend lectures on liver diseases as they are ‘so opposed to the consumption of alcohol they don’t want to learn anything about it’, according to a spokesman at the British Medical Association. They also boycott courses on sexually transmitted ailments and won’t examine ‘patients of a particular gender’ – that is, women. Boots allow Muslim pharmacists not to dispense the Pill ‘for ethical reasons’….

“While not in the same league as blowing up Tube trains, there is still the same philosophy behind flinching from condoms and Special Brew – such goods are the mark of the Infidel….

“Why do we always cave in? The managers at Sainsbury’s and Boots and the nervous medical authorities? Why have our civilised standards and sense of moderation vanished? … We resisted the Nazis in 1940, after Dunkirk. We wouldn’t now. Today’s politicians with their egalitarian humbug would let everybody in, regardless of the fact that we have far too large a population for a tiny island – with the consequent pollution, crime and the destruction of the landscape for cheap housing estates…..

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Philadelphia university allows Wilders to preach hate

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Temple UniversityAmid tight security and a large turnout of protesters, Dutch right-wing lawmaker Geert Wilders told an assembly of Temple University students that Europe and America must fight an ongoing “stealth jihad” that threatens democracy and free speech.

“Where Islam sets roots, freedom dies,” Geert Wilders told the students during his 30-minute address organized by a new student group called Temple University Purpose and funded by the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

If the spread of Islam continues unabated in the Western world, “you might at the end of the day lose your Constitution,” he told the assembly. “Wake up, defend your freedom.” He also touched on common themes in his speeches, including calling for an end to Muslim immigration and referring to the Muslim holy book, the Quran, as “an evil book” that promotes violence and intolerance.

A question-and-answer session was cut short after the tone of the event began to turn nasty, when some in the crowd of several hundred students began shouting jeers. Wilders’ security detail quickly ushered him from the room.

Before his remarks at Temple, a public university serving about 34,000 students, Wilders showed his 15-minute anti-Islam film, “Fitna,” which juxtaposes passages from the suras, or chapters, of the Quran with images of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, beheadings, shootings and speeches from clerics advocating violence against non-Muslims.

Temple officials issued a statement saying the university “is a community of scholars in which freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression are valued. We respect the right of our student organizations to invite people who express a wide variety of views and ideas.”

Fox News, 21 October 2009

See also the Philadelphia Daily News which reports:

Before the speech, held in Anderson Hall, more than 50 protesters had denounced the appearance of Wilders at the school. Members of All Sides, an organization that seeks to promote peace between Israel and Palestinians, held pink pom-poms and shouted, “Hey Hey, HO, HO, this racist bull—-‘s got to go.” Standing next to them with signs decrying Wilders’ views were members of the Student Senate, Democratic Socialists and the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance.

“Wilders speaks out about free speech while at the same time banning the Quran,” said Megan Chialastri, vice president of All Sides. “Banned books are not free speech and there is no way around that,” Chialastri said. “This is hate speech at its core,” said Monira Gamal-Eldin, president of the Muslim Students Association.

And over at Jihad Watch Robert Spencer reports the protest under the headline “Heavily indoctrinated student thugs shout down Wilders at Temple University”.

Temple Uni protest against Wilders

Progress apologises to Sir Iqbal

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sir Iqbal Sacranie: Correction and Apology

On the 21st August 2009 Progress published an article titled “It’s time to end the cultural appeasement“. This article suggested that Sir Iqbal Sacranie had never been elected to “anything, not even a parish council”. Sir Iqbal has contacted us through his lawyers, Carter-Ruck, and asked us to point out that in fact he:

“was elected as the founding Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), when it was established in 1997. He was re-elected to the role twice in 2002 and 2003 by the 60 or so elected members making up the Central Working Committee. Under the MCB’s constitution, only elected members of the Central Working Committee can assume the role of Secretary General, so our client had first to be elected to this committee by the General Assembly (consisting of delegates from all the affiliates of the MCB, which is in the region of 500 national, regional and local bodies).

“Sir Iqbal has also been elected to various other positions. By way of example only, he was elected to his position as Chairman of Muslim Aid in 2008, he was elected to the position of Chair of the Executive Committee of Memon Association UK, he was elected to the position of Deputy President of World Memon Organisation, and he was elected to his position as Chair of the Management Committee of Balham Mosque and Tooting Islamic Centre.”

We have amended the article, and would like to apologise to Sir Iqbal Sacranie for the offence caused.

Progress Online, 21 October 2009