Obama and ‘the Jihadist vote’

Posted on October 28, 2008 by Bob Pitt

“… the threat Obama poses is being taken very seriously. The right here is all of a tizz, in part because of the writings in the US of figures such as Frank Gaffney – a former senior official under US President Reagan – who says that Obama ‘hopes to win the White House by relying, in part, on the Jihadist vote’ funded by ‘between $30m and $100m from the Mideast, Africa and other places Islamists are active’. Obama has promised change but writing in the Washington Times, Gaffney tells us that his election will in fact lead to ‘global theocratic rule under shariah, and the end of our constitutional, democratic government’. Unless James Bond intervenes. And Doctor Who. And Austin Powers.”

Hugh Muir in the Guardian, 28 October 2008

New Mexico Republican says ‘Muslims are our enemies’

Posted on October 27, 2008 by Bob Pitt

ALAMOGORDO, N.M. — County and state GOP officials criticized the head of a New Mexico Republican women’s group for calling Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama a “Muslim socialist” and stating that “Muslims are our enemies.”

Marcia Stirman, the head of the Republican Women of Otero County, will be asked to step down, Sassy Tinling, the chairwoman of the Otero County Republican Party, said Wednesday.

In a letter published Tuesday in the Alamogordo Daily News, Stirman wrote that she believes “Muslims are our enemies.” Stirman told The Associated Press in an interview: “I don’t trust them at all. They’ve sworn across the world that they are our enemies. Why we’re trying to elect one is beside me.”

Tinling told KOAT-TV that Stirman’s opinions do not reflect those of the county GOP or the Republican Women of Otero County. The executive director of the Republican Party of New Mexico, Matthew Kennicott, has said Stirman does not speak for the GOP and that her comments do not reflect its values and beliefs.

Associated Press, 24 October 2008

‘Another milestone in our slide towards national suicide’ – more hysteria over Sharia

Posted on October 27, 2008 by Bob Pitt

Leo-McKinstry “The Government’s craven appeasement of militant Islam is plumbing new depths. Under the guise of promoting tolerance, Ministers are tearing apart the legal fabric that was once part of the bedrock of our civilised society.

“In a shameful move, Jack Straw’s Ministry of Justice has announced that the Muslim sharia code, notorious for its oppression of women, is to be endorsed by the British judicial system for the first time….

“This new act of surrender to the ideology of Islamic separatism runs counter to all the assurances that Labour politicians have given in recent months.

“When the Daily Express revealed last year that sharia courts were informally operating in Muslim areas of London and northern England, we were accused of ‘scaremongering’….

“It is inevitable that there will now be a vast expansion of the role of sharia courts within Muslim areas. This creation of a parallel system of justice makes a mockery of the essential principle, stretching back to the signing of Magna Carta in 1215, that everyone is equal before the law….

“This is not the road to tolerance but the very opposite – in place of integration we will see distrust, suspicion and antagonism as Muslim hardliners ruthlessly expand sharia’s role, creating enclaves of bigotry and oppression….

“The Government has adopted this stance entirely for reasons of cynicism and fear. On the one hand, Labour is desperate to win the votes of the two-million strong Muslim community. It is no coincidence that more than a quarter of the voters in Jack Straw’s Blackburn constituency are Muslim. On the other, like all too many Western governments, Labour is fearful of standing up to the zealots as every Muslim demand is accompanied by the clenched fist of violence or the finger hovering over the bomb control device.

“That is why the creeping Islamification of Britain will continue – not because Muslims have overwhelming numbers but because our leaders are unwilling to defend our values. The adoption of sharia is another milestone in our slide towards national suicide.”

Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express, 27 October 2008

Nick Clegg attacks Policy Exchange for ‘offensive’ and ‘underhand’ briefing

Posted on October 25, 2008 by Bob Pitt

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has attacked thinktank Policy Exchange over its call to boycott the upcoming Global Peace and Unity event in London. The thinktank had circulated a dossier questioning apparent extremist background of several of the events speakers. However Mr Clegg, who is due to speak at the event accused the thinktank’s director of “bizarre and underhand behaviour”, and questioned the validity of the evidence.

Liberal Democrat Voice, 24 October 2008

Read the Policy Exchange dossier here.

Update: See also The Green Ribbon, 26 October 2008

Veiling and security

Posted on October 22, 2008 by Bob Pitt

Metro niqab picture The Metro carries a story on the comments made by Admiral Lord West, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Security and Counter Terrorism, to the Commons Defence Committee meeting yesterday on “UK national security and resilience” where he said that ending radicalization among young British Muslims could take up to 30 years.

The newspaper complements the news item with a picture of Muslim women in niqab. Is it any surprise that some Muslim women have had their veils forcibly torn from their faces when newspapers allude to connections between forms of Muslim dress and stories on terrorism and security?

You can write to the newspaper via email: mail@ukmetro.co.uk or post: Metro, Associated Newspapers Limited, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT.

Engage, 22 October 2008

Can we take the opportunity to give a big plug to this excellent new website.

Senior Anglican boosts hysterical campaign against Newham ‘mega-mosque’

Posted on October 19, 2008 by Bob Pitt

Building a mosque next to the Olympic site could create a breeding ground for extremists, a senior Church of England official has warned. Dr Philip Lewis, an interfaith adviser to the Bishop of Bradford, said that the plans threaten to establish a ghetto of Muslims taught to embrace jihad.

In the first intervention by a Church figure over the controversial project, Dr Lewis raised fears that a 12,000-capacity mosque in London would lead to a segregated Muslim community. The mosque would be four times the size of Britain’s largest cathedral. “Tablighi Jamaat does not try to engage with wider society so there must be clear worries that such a mosque would lead to a ghetto,” he said. “The danger is that this becomes a self-contained world, which would be vulnerable to extremists.”

His comments follow a private meeting of Anglican and Roman Catholic clergy earlier this month who fear that the mosque could have a negative effect on east London, the proposed site for the building. Councillor Alan Craig, who leads the Christian People’s Alliance and organised the meeting, said that Dr Lewis’s contribution to the debate was a great boost to the campaign to block the mosque.

He said: “For someone of Philip Lewis’s stature and experience, who has good relations with Muslims, to make these comments is a great help to our campaign. It shows that this is a reasoned campaign against the mega-mosque and is not built on Islamaphobia, but on facts and evidence.”

Sunday Telegraph, 19 October 2008

Frankly, you’d have thought Philip Lewis would know better. It’s a matter of days since he was himself denounced for his connections to another Deobandi organisation, the Association of Muslim Scholars of Britain (JUB), which has been attacked in similar terms to Tablighi Jamaat.

Update: For Yusuf Smith’s comments, see Indigo Jo Blogs, 20 October 2008

Colin Powell condemns Islamophobia in the Republican Party

Posted on October 19, 2008 by Bob Pitt

I’m anything but a fan of Colin Powell, and have no idea what impact (if any) his Meet the Press endorsement of Obama will have, but I was really glad to see him make the following point in explaining why he has rejected McCain’s candidacy:

I’m also troubled by, not what Sen. McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said such things as: “Well, you know that Mr.Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is: he is not a Muslim. He’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian.

But the really right answer is: What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is: No, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she can be President?

Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion: he’s a Muslim, and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

There has been much condemnation over the ‘Obama-is-a-Muslim’ line of GOP attack, but almost all of it has been on the ground that the attack is factually false as applied to the Christian Obama, not on the ground that it is a reprehensible and dangerous line of attack even if it were factually true. Powell bears much of the responsibility, and always will, for the horrific U.S. attack on Iraq (one which, just by the way, resulted in the deaths of at least hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims), but he deserves credit for using the platform he had this morning to go out of his way to make this vital point when doing so was not necessary (and perhaps not even helpful) in advancing the cause of his endorsement of Obama.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, 19 October 2008

Horowitz lambastes Islam at Brown University in near-empty hall

Posted on October 17, 2008 by Bob Pitt

David Horowitz opened his lecture on terrorism – part of “Islamofascism Awareness Week,” a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center – with a joke. “I hope you checked your pies at the door,” he quipped, recalling the incident in which New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman was pied as he began his lecture in Salomon 101 last spring.

Three uniformed officers at the back and three at the front of the largely empty MacMillan 117 and Horowitz’s own private bodyguard made any pies-to-the-face unlikely.

Horowitz, a Jewish writer and activist who holds adamantly pro-Israel views, said the purpose of his lecture was to counter “liberal orthodoxy” on campus. “You have one of the worst faculties in the United States,” he said. “These people are communists – they are totalitarians.”

The lecture was titled “Helping the Enemy to Win: Support for the Jihad on American Campuses”. “Islam is a fundamentalist religion,” Horowitz said, adding that the Quran left very little room for interpretation when compared to the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.

Brown Daily Herald, 17 October 2008

Obama is ‘a Muslim and a terrorist’

Posted on October 16, 2008 by Bob Pitt

The “moment in Minnesota” appeared last Friday like the white, infected head of a pimple – impossible to miss, hard not to stare at, and embarrassing, at least to John McCain, who wants to present an unblemished face to the voting public.

Wearing her bright red McCain-Palin T-shirt, Gayle Quinnell rose from the crowd at a rally in Lakeville, Minn. to give her candidate a little of his signature straight talk. “I don’t trust Obama,” she announced, as McCain nodded enthusiastically. Then she continued: “I have read about him. He’s an Arab.”

And there it was. Centre stage, on camera, about as public as you can get. The political pus that’s been building for nearly two years under the surface of this presidential campaign, oozing forth in broad daylight.

By last week, the crowds at McCain rallies were turning ugly. Mention of Obama’s name invoked cries of “terrorist!” or “bomb him!” or “traitor!” or “off with his head!”

McCain has begun trying to tamp down the hostility, telling supporters at rallies that they have “no reason to be scared” of Obama. But Gayle Quennell, for one, remains resolute. Obama, she told reporters after her moment on stage last week with McCain, is “a Muslim and a terrorist … all the people agree with what I said.”

CBC, 16 October 2008

BBC put Muslims before you

Posted on October 16, 2008 by Bob Pitt

The BBC supremo caused a storm last night by saying he would not allow jokes about Muslims.

Director-general Mark Thompson announced the ban, saying they were “more sensitive” than Christians. He said the network should not make fun of Islam because Muslims were a minority group in Britain.

But his comments were slammed by Christian groups, and comics including Ben Elton. He accused the network of being “too scared” to joke about Islam.

Daily Star, 16 October 2008

This is one of those reports where it is instructive to replace Muslims and Islam with Jews and Judaism. You can imagine the outcry if a daily paper carried a piece attacking the BBC Director-general for arguing that making jokes about Jews was not the same as making jokes about Christians, under the headline “BBC put Jews before YOU!”

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