Category Archives: Right wing

Sarkozy takes stand against far right anti-Muslim bigotry (not)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Brigitte Bardot is facing prison if convicted for a fifth time of inciting racial hatred. Brigitte loves animals and hates Muslims, which is why she sent a petition to the president about halal butchers: ‘I’ve had enough of being led by the nose by this whole population which is destroying us, destroying our country, imposing their ways.’ Sarkozy takes a tough line on this sort of abuse. ‘When you live in France’, he is fond of reminding voters, ‘you respect the rules. You don’t have lots of wives, you don’t circumcise your daughters, and you don’t use the bath of your apartment to slaughter sheep in.’ The peace prize is in the post, M President.”

Fiachra Gibbons in the Guardian Paris Diary, 6 May 2008

‘Boris Johnson defeated Islamic extremists as well as Ken Livingstone’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“This result isn’t just a wonderful victory for Boris and the termination of Livingstone. It’s also a defeat for the campaign – an exceptionally dirty one, at that – waged against Boris by a small band of separatists claiming to act in the name of all London’s Muslims.”

Tory MP Paul Goodman attacks the role of the British Muslim Initiative and Muslims4Ken in the London mayoral election. (Yes, that the same Paul Goodman who David Cameron appointed as shadow minister for Communities.)

Conservative Home, 3 May 2008

See Anas Altiktiti’s responses in the comments section. He writes: “Paul Goodman’s piece is symptomatic of all that’s wrong with politics and politicians today. Neither Mr. Goodman nor his party have ever asked to meet up with myself or with any of the organisations that he has so steadily listed, yet he hesitates not for a second to label me and those organisations as extremists. In fact his whole argument seems to suggest that all Muslims who voted for Ken Livingstone are on the extreme side, and that only those who voted for his party are ‘moderates’.”

And see also Anas’s piece at Comment is Free: “The constituency we were addressing was worried about Islamaphobia. And we managed to ensure the issue of Islam, Islamaphobia and discrimination against Muslims was on every candidate’s agenda and a hot topic in every hustings. If it did nothing else than persuade Johnson to clarify his views on Islam, assert his conviction that it is indeed a religion of peace, and get him to visit a few mosques in an attempt to win back votes he was convinced he had lost, then it was a great success.”

Alan Craig loses fight over election broadcast

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Christian party has lost a High Court bid to have its party election broadcast (PEB) repeated, after claims it was censored by the BBC and ITV. Christian Choice said the BBC forced changes to its description of a Muslim group in a PEB aired in London. Alan Craig, the party’s candidate for London mayor, had argued the action breached his rights under the European Convention on Human Rights – which guarantees the right to freedom of expression.

BBC News, 30 April 2008

Mad Melanie Phillips is not happy: “There is clearly no limit to British pusillanimity and sheer unadulterated funk when it comes to calling Islamic radicalism by even the most polite and restrained of proper names.” Melanie Phillips’s blog, 29 April 2008

Mad Mel warns against ‘the progressive Islamisation of London’s East End’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jamme Masjid mosque with minaret“From the East London Advertiser comes further news of the progressive Islamisation of London’s East End, and the lengths to which Ken Livingstone is going to court the Muslim vote for tomorrow’s mayoral election.”

Melanie Phillips responds to the report that – shock, horror – Ken Livingstone has pledged to help raise funds for a major revamp of the Jamme Masjid mosque in Brick Lane. And, what’s worse, the proposed development would feature a minaret.

“The height of this proposed minaret is no incidental matter”, Phillips informs us. “The fact that it would tower over Brick Lane is designed to make a powerful symbolic statement of the supremacy of Islam over that area and the subjugation of all non-Islamic creeds. Like the proposed vast Olympic village mosque, also in east London, it is thus in itself an act of jihad against British society. That is what Ken is endorsing.”

Melanie Phillips’s blog, 30 April 2008

Predictably, the fascists of the British National Party find common ground with Phillips on this issue.

See BNP news article, 27 April 2008

Europe’s debt to Islam given a skeptical look

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Aristote au Mont Saint-MichelWhen Sylvain Gouguenheim looks at today’s historical vision of the history of the West and Islam, he sees a notion, accepted as fact, that the Muslim world was at the source of the Christian Europe’s reawakening from the Middle Ages.

He sees a portrayal of an enlightened Islam, transmitting westward the knowledge of the ancient Greeks through Arab translators and opening the path in Europe to mathematics, medicine, astronomy and philosophy – a gift the West regards with insufficient esteem.

In a new book, he is basically canceling, or largely writing off, a debt to “the Arabo-Muslim world” dating from the year 750 – a concept built up by other historians over the past 50 years – that has Europe owing Islam for an essential part of its identity.

“Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel” (Editions du Seuil), while not contending there is an ongoing clash of civilizations, makes the case that Islam was impermeable to much of Greek thought, that the Arab world’s initial translations of it to Latin were not so much the work of “Islam” but of Aramaeans and Christian Arabs, and that a wave of translations of Aristotle began at the Mont Saint-Michel monastery in France 50 years before Arab versions of the same texts appeared in Moorish Spain.

Le Figaro and Le Monde, in considering the book in prominent reviews, drank its content in a single gulp. No suspended endorsements or anything that read like a caution.

“Congratulations,” Le Figaro wrote. “Mr. Gouguenheim wasn’t afraid to remind us that there was a medieval Christian crucible, a fruit of the heritage of Athens and Jerusalem,” while “Islam hardly proposed its knowledge to Westerners.”

Le Monde was even more receptive: “All in all, and contrary to what’s been repeated in a crescendo since the 1960s, European culture in its history and development shouldn’t be owing a whole lot to Islam. In any case, nothing essential. Precise and well-argued, this book, which sets history straight, is also a strongly courageous one.”

Published less than a month ago, the book is just beginning to encounter learned criticism. Sarcastically, Gabriel Martinez-Gros, a professor of medieval history, and Julien Loiseau, a lecturer, described Gouguenheim as “re-establishing the real hierarchy of civilizations.”

They said that he disregarded the mathematics and astronomy produced by the Islamic world between the 9th and 13th centuries and painted the period’s Islamic civilization exactly what it was not: obscurantist, legalistic, fatalistic and fanatic.

New York Times, 28 April 3008

Daily Star exposes ‘Muslim sickos’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim sickos“Is this the vilest front page headline we’ve ever seen?

“For those wondering – the article isn’t actually about Muslims kidnapping anyone, although you won’t find it on the Star’s website.

“It’s about some Muslims suggesting on the internet that the McCanns were responsible for their daughter’s kidnapping.

“You know, similar to what The Star and Express had to print front page apologies about and pay half a mil in fines for a couple of weeks ago.”

Five Chinese Crackers, 28 April 2008

See also Lee Burrows at How Liberty Dies.

Back Boris, bury Ken says Littlejohn

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Richard_Littlejohn“In London, Livingstone is relying on a huge turnout among innercity Muslims. If previous experience is anything to go by, ‘community leaders’ will simply collect the ballot papers from bewildered Muslims, especially women, and ‘help’ them cast their votes.

“Don’t be surprised to discover subsequently that a bloke in a burqa has voted a few dozen times using someone else’s polling cards. Officials would be too petrified to challenge him.

“There’s nothing new in vote-rigging. In 1960, the Mayor of Chicago turned out the dead to push John F. Kennedy over the line in the U.S. Presidential election. The Mayor of London wouldn’t complain if something similar happened in the Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets provided it kept him in office.”

Richard Littlejohn offers his thoughts on the London mayoral election.

Daily Mail, 29 April 2008

Alan Craig takes BBC and ITV to court over election broadcast

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Alan Craig in churchA London mayoral candidate is taking the BBC and ITV to the High Court for “censoring” his party Election Broadcasts in the run up to the May 1 elections. The Christian Choice candidate, Alan Craig, has instructed the Christian Legal Centre to file papers this morning at the Royal Courts of Justice after BBC and ITV officials instructed him to remove parts of his Party Election Broadcast which was aired on Wednesday evening.

Cllr Craig, a long-standing campaigner against the “mega-mosque”, due to be built in Newham close to the site of the Olympic Games, originally described the organisation behind it, Tablighi Jamaat, as “separatist”. However, BBC and ITV officials responsible for supervising the Broadcasts instructed him to moderate his views and change this description of the Islamic organisation if he wanted it aired.

Cllr Craig claims not only “political interference” by the broadcasters, but says such action breeches his rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects freedom of speech.

According to the Christian Legal Centre, Cllr Craig changed the word to “controversial” under duress. Late in the day ITV insisted that the agreed word “controversial” should be applied to the mosque plans not to the Islamic group. Cllr Craig’s objections to the mega-mosque, however, have consistently been related to the nature of the Islamic group behind the project – the plans have not yet been published.

Christian Today, 25 April 2008

And good for BBC and ITV, we say. Mind you, “separatist” and “controversial” represent quite restrained language as far as Alan Craig is concerned. This is the man whose press releases feature headlines such as “Olympics mega-mosque linked to London and Glasgow car bomb plots“.