“With the exception of The Guardian, the National Union of Teachers’ report ‘In Good Faith’ has been largely represented in today’s news media as primarily a ‘Muslim’ story. Implicitly, Islam is the only religion deemed a threat to Britain and British society.”
Julaybib Ayoub at Critically Unstable Muslim, 25 March 2008
Fury over plan to teach Koran in schools
By Gabriel Milland Political Correspondent
Daily Express, 25 March 2008
STATE schools should be forced to open their doors to Islamic preachers teaching the Koran, the largest classroom union demanded yesterday.
The National Union of Teachers’ conference also said existing religious schools – almost all of them Christian – should have to admit pupils from other faiths.
The union’s general secretary Steve Sinnott said that allowing Muslim imams to preach in schools would be a way to reunite divided communities.
But the proposals prompted immediate outrage. Conservative Party backbencher Mark Pritchard said: “This is just further appeasement for Muslim militants. We should just follow the existing laws on religious education, which state that it should be of a predominantly Christian character. All this will do is further divide many communities that are already split on religious lines.”
Yusuf Smith responds to Charles Moore’s recent Centre for Policy Studies lecture (pdf) “How to beat the Scargills of Islam“.
Indigo Jo Blogs, 23 March 2008
It’s also worth noting the following excerpt from Moore’s ignorant lecture: “Phoney Muslim moderates, beloved of the media, are a great feature of our age. Look at Tariq Ramadan, for example, lionised at Oxford while considered so extreme in France that he found it easier to leave and work here.” As we’ve pointed out repeatedly, anyone who regards Professor Ramadan as an extremist has completely lost the plot. And who represents Moore’s idea of a “moderate”? Predictably, it’s Melanie Phillips’ favourite Muslim, Ed Husain.
The Olympics is meant to promote solidarity – but the 2012 Games has become a question of faith for some in East London as Christianity and Islam vie to become the most visible religion around the 500-acre park.
Muslim leaders have begun a charm offensive with residents in the borough of Newham over controversial plans to build a 12,000-capacity “super-mosque” on the edge of the Olympic Park. Trustees of the Abbey Mills Mosque conducted tours of the 18-acre site in West Ham last week to show they had “nothing to hide”, say their Westminster lobbyists.
The Kingsway International Christian Centre, which claims to be the fastest-growing church in western Europe, wanted to build a church capable of holding 8,000 people – or five times the size of Westminster Abbey – after it was evicted from its home on the Olympic site. The congregation is still homeless and “crammed” into a 1,000-seat cinema while it plans its appeal, according to Pastor Dipo Oluyomi.
Alan Craig, a local councillor and leader of the Christian Peoples Alliance Party, is fighting their cause. “The symbolism of the largest church in Europe coming down and the largest mosque going up is powerful,” he said. “The whole world will come to East London and they won’t see a church or a cathedral, they will see a mosque.”
He is accusing officials in Newham borough, where Christianity is the dominant religion, of bias towards the Islamic project after they invited 250 community groups to the mosque’s open weekend.
The East London Mosque replies to the Sun article “Mosque fiend: Muslim who raped girl claimed he was preaching“. Read pdf here.
“It is just a few days until Easter, the most important date in the Christian calendar. But for 700 Muslims who have gathered in a rural caravan park, this week has a different religious significance. And to some of their neighbours, the thrice-daily calls to prayer are proving a strain on a harmonious relationship. The Iranian Muslims have converged on the Trevelgue Holiday Park in Porth, Cornwall, to celebrate yesterday’s Persian New Year.”
The original headline was “700-strong party of Muslims provoke fury after broadcasting call to prayer”.
Following a complaint by the British Muslim Initiative to the Press Complaints Commission regarding media coverage of the disgraced Policy Exchange’s unfounded report on alleged extremist literature in mosques, the Sun newspaper has withdrawn its coverage of the report from its website and published a clarification letter by BMI.
A right-wing American weekly newspaper will distribute free copies of a book that insults Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and associates Islam with terrorism, Washington-based news agency America in Arabic reported.
The neo-conservative, Republican-oriented Human Events newspaper will distribute Robert Spencer’s The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion (2006), America in Arabic said. The book – regularly priced at 30 dollars – is released by Regnery, which has published a string of controversial neo-con books and is a division of Eagle Publishing, which owns Human Events.
Well-known British writer Karen Armstrong, author of Muhammad: A Prophet of Our Time, has said that the book is “written in hatred,” contains “basic and bad mistakes of fact” and that the author “deliberately manipulates the evidence”.
“A clergyman in East London has been kicked in the head by Asian youths, one of whom screamed the words ‘f——- priest’ at him. Police are treating the attack on Canon Michael Ainsworth, vicar of Hawksmoor’s magnificent St George-in-the-East, Wapping, as a ‘faith hate’ crime. But was it? A lot hangs on the answer. Does the use of a single word automatically turn a savage but common assault into a new (and essentially artificial) category of crime, or has the tide of Islamic anti-Christian persecution reached these shores?
“… Tower Hamlets houses Muslim ghettos whose fundamentalist leaders are offended by the mere presence of a Christian place of worship in their community. The Rt Rev Stephen Lowe, Bishop of Hulme and a friend of Canon Ainsworth, reacted to the attack by calling for ‘condemnation of this cowardly behaviour by senior Muslims in the community’.”
Damian Thompson in the Daily Telegraph, 16 March 2008
For the response of local Muslim leaders to the attack, see the East London Advertiser, 17 March 2008
Update: See also Inayat Bunglawala, “Jihad or alcohol?”, Comment is Free, 19 March 2008
“The majority of Muslims do not kill women for running away from brutal husbands and forced marriages, nor are they terrorists, yet moderate Muslims nevertheless appear to be creating divisive enclaves within this country as a result of routine Muslim religiosity and lifestyle…. The overall picture is of cumulative assertiveness, but there is evidence too of proselytising aggressiveness … the Muslim group Tablighi Jamaat is proposing to build the largest mosque in Europe, for 12,000 worshippers at a time, close to the London Olympic site. The organisers aim to convert Britain to Islam.”
John Cornwell in the Sunday Times, 16 March 2008