Category Archives: Right wing

BBC appoints Muslim to top religious post, Mail and Torygraph not happy

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Aaqil AhmedThe BBC yesterday appointed a Muslim as its head of religious programming in a radical departure from broadcasting tradition. The post – considered one of the most influential religious roles in the country – has gone to Aaqil Ahmed, who has been working as an executive at Channel 4.

The appointment will cause dismay among the Christian churches. It comes at a time of deepening worries among Christian leaders that their faith is being sidelined and downgraded by authorities. Last year the BBC gave the job of producing its most popular and longrunning religious programme, Songs of Praise, to a Sikh, Tommy Nagra.

Mr Ahmed is a trustee of the Runnymede Trust, a body that has championed the ideology of multiculturalism. He has also taken part in campaigns for a greater Muslim presence in the media. In the past the post of head of religion at the BBC has been considered a job for a senior and respected cleric or lay churchgoer.

Daily Mail, 12 May 2009

Tabloid Watch has an analysis of the comments on the Mail‘s website.

See also the Telegraph which takes a similar line: “Leading church figures suspect that the BBC is giving preferential treatment to minority faiths, with a Muslim now in charge of its programming on television and a Sikh producing Songs of Praise, its flagship Christian show…. Channel 4 was accused of being biased towards Islam and failing to show enough respect to Christianity under Mr Ahmed, who was head of religious broadcasting.”

For an alternative view see Asians in Media and Sunny Hundal at Comment is Free.

Update:  See “BBC slammed over Muslim ‘gimmick’” in the Newsletter. Oh, and we mustn’t forget the BNP, who greet the news with the predictable headline “The Islamification of Britain continues: BBC appoints Muslim as head of religious programming“. According to the fascists:

“The British National Party is the only political party to voice its objection to this bloodless genocide and ethnic cleansing of the British people in their own country. A vote for the BNP on June 4th will send a clear message to the ruling elite that the British people do not want to subjected to foreign rule and Islamified.”

And over at Jihad Watch, the appointment is denounced as “a typical dhimmi move”.

Free speech and the hypocrisy of the anti-Muslim Right

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“… the anti-Muslim Right’s parading around under the free speech banner (just like their pretense of safeguarding the rights of gay people from oppressive Muslim societies) is so blatantly insincere, nothing more than a means of opportunistically elevating and justifying their anti-Islamic animus. That fact is conclusively demonstrated by how selectively self-interested is the application of their free speech ‘principles’.”

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, 12 May 2009

Patriotic, respectful and homophobic: a portrait of British Muslims’ state of mind

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Well, that how the headline currently reads to a quite balanced report of the Gallup poll findings in today’s Independent. However, as you can see from the URL, the original headline was “Patriotic, paranoid and homophobic”. Quite where they got that from, I don’t know. Perhaps the sub-editor was so used to producing headlines for articles portraying the Muslim community in a negative light that they had difficulty adjusting.

And over at the Daily Mail, their report is headed “Just one in 10 British Muslims feel integrated into society, study claims“.

The Muslim conquest of Europe (part 655)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“There’s a truly awful piece in Telegraph blogs by, no not Damian Thompson, but Ed West, entitled ‘Here’s an inconvenient truth: the Islamisation of Europe‘. West tries to rationalize what is nothing more than a racist diatribe against Muslim immigration and Muslim citizenship in Europe. While he tries to couch his article in language that conveys anxiety over mass immigration and the costs to social cohesion, he betrays his barely concealed Islamophobia by singling out Islam and Muslims as the scourge of Europe.”

ENGAGE, 7 May 2009

Update:  See also Indigo Jo Blogs, 9 May 2009

Arson attack on Islamic centre in Luton

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Luton Islamic CentreAn Islamic centre in Bedfordshire has been gutted by fire in what police believe was an arson attack. No-one was injured in the blaze, which started just after midnight at the centre in Bury Park Road, Luton.

A police spokesman said there was “considerable damage” and the road was likely to remain closed while forensic teams investigated the cause. Insp Martin Peters said: “It appears an accelerant was used and our immediate priorities include who started this fire and why, and making motorists aware.”

BBC News, 5 May 2009

Update:  Never a paper to pass up an opportunity to exacerbate tensions between communities, the Daily Star reports:

“Fears of a race war grew yesterday after right-wing extremists were accused of firebombing a mosque…. The attack will inflame the town gripped by race tension since riot cops broke up a ‘Reclaim The Streets’ rally aimed at police and council inaction over the taunting of the troops.”

The Star goes on to quote rent-a-mouth idiot Anjem Choudary – “there’s no telling how young extremist Muslims will react” – and a supporter of the Facebook group “Ban the Terrorists” who stated: “I think this centre was firebombed because these Muslim extremists tend to hang out nearby.”

The anti-jihadist theatre of the absurd

Posted on by Bob Pitt

At Comment is Free Sunny Hundal takes pleasure in the outbreak of in-fighting among the “anti-jihadist neocons”, exemplified by Little Green Footballs’ falling-out with Jihad Watch and Pamela Geller. He notes “the role mainstream media and thinktanks play in supporting this lunatic fringe and their paranoid fantasies”.

See also “Civil war raging in right-wing blogosphere”, Washington Independent, 23 April 2009

The Muslim conquest of Europe (part 654)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Reflections on the Revolution in EuropeMark Mazower reviews Christopher Caldwell’s new book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:

“His argument, baldly put, is that Enoch Powell was more right than wrong. Europe is in decline from an ‘adversary culture’, and Muslim immigration, in particular, poses a mortal threat….

“Throwing off the shackles of political correctness, he plays fast and loose with the data and switches between talk of immigrants, Muslims and ‘non-natives’ as it serves his argument. Europeans, he alleges, are fleeing abroad out of fear of Islam.

“But the best case of ‘white flight’ he can find is of emigrating Jews and even this is unpersuasive since the number of those leaving for this reason is small and almost certainly exceeded by the reverse flow from Israel and elsewhere. Oddly, Caldwell unselfconsciously invokes the Jews as indigenous Europeans when just two generations ago they were regarded much as he regards Muslims….

“Caldwell’s fast-breeding, over-sexualised immigrants have already established what he calls ‘beachheads’ – the idea that the immigrants are the vanguard of a larger invading force – and engineered a reverse ‘colonisation’ of historic cities abandoned by their native inhabitants. Muslim immigration, apparently nothing less than a ‘project to seize territory’, is well on the way to bringing Europe within the House of Islam.”

Financial Times, 4 May 2009