“We’ve all been too deferential about the veil, the hijab, the niqab. I find such garb, in the context of a London street, first ridiculous and then directly offensive.” David Sexton writes in the Evening Standard.
Category Archives: Right wing
Torygraph columnist applauds Kelly’s commission
“The message from the Commission on Integration and Cohesion is loud and clear. Multiculturalism has not worked…. For too long, local authorities have had a free hand to promote a multiculturalist agenda, wreaking untold harm on race relations…. The commission also recommends the withdrawal of funding for groups that represent only one particular ethnic group, religion or race, unless there are compelling reasons to do so…. The Government must now catch up with what many of us have been arguing for years; that many of Britain’s ethnic minorities are adrift in ghettoes and that some are proving to be incubators of radicalist tendencies and havens for criminals.”
Zia Haider Rahman in the Daily Telegraph, 15 June 2007
Cf. Lee Jasper’s comment on the CIC report: “This report fails to identify gross racist stereotypes and whipped up fear now targeted at Muslims and asylum seekers as a source of social conflict. Instead, without any basis in fact, it dangerously turns the blame onto the victims.”
Blink news report, 14 June 2007
And on the Matthew Bannister programme on Radio 5 yesterday morning, the featured speaker on the issue of integration arising from the CIC report was the BNP’s Nick Griffin. Listen here.
Wearing a headscarf in Detroit
“You have nuns totally covered … and no one questions it. But when a Muslim does it, we’re from outer space.” The Detroit Free Press interviews Muslim women who wear the hijab.
One reader is not impressed: “There is no comparison between a covered nun and Islamic hijab. No one living in a Christian community has to worry about armed gangs breaking into a family home to threaten, beat or kill them because their daughters haven’t become nuns. Islamic women have to worry about that daily in the Islamic world, and even in European countries Islamic women are subject to ‘honor killings’.”
Catholic bigots denounce composer
“John Tavener is a gentle sort of chap … but his latest choral work, to be premiered at Westminster Cathedral on Tuesday, seems to have stirred up a hornets’ nest of angry Catholics.
“The work, The Beautiful Names, is a reflection on the 99 names for Allah and its production at the cathedral – a venue suggested by Prince Charles, who commissioned the work – has caused outrage among those of the faithful who think the building is being taken over by Islamists. One letter writer, Daphne McLeod, has spluttered about the cathedral being desecrated and honouring a false god.”
Indeed, in her letter to the Catholic Herald Ms McLeod demands: “Can we be told what arrangements have been made to reconsecrate our Cathedral to the Precious Blood of Our Blessed Lord after this defilement?”
See also Daily Telegraph, 15 June 2007 and Sunday Telegraph, 9 June 2007
Pat Robertson: Islam is not a religion
On the June 12 edition of the Christian Broadcasting Network’s The 700 Club, following a report on Muslims in Minneapolis seeking religious accommodations at school and work, host Pat Robertson stated, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have to recognize that Islam is not a religion. It is a worldwide political movement meant [sic] on domination of the world. And it is meant to subjugate all people under Islamic law.”
He characterized the American Muslim community as “Islam light” and went on to say Muslims “want to take over and we want to impose Sharia on you. And before long, ladies are going to be dressed in burqas and whatever garments they would put on them, and next thing you know, men are going to be allowed to have wife-beating and you’ll be beheading adulterers and so on and so forth.”
Mad Mel on ‘honour killings’
The loathsome Melanie Phillips takes advantage of the tragic death of Banaz Mahmod to engage in yet more baiting of Muslims:
“The elephant in the room here – as so often – is that ‘honour killings’ are largely a Muslim phenomenon…. honour killings, the need to avenge the shame caused by a loss of honour, are rooted in values intrinsic to the way of life of many Muslims…. Much hot air is expended on how to integrate British Muslims into British society. But look what happens when the women try to do just that. Some of them end up murdered…. It’s quite simple. Integration can lead to murder because of the concepts of honour and shame embedded in Muslim culture…. Britain’s multicultural orthodoxy does not protect women like Banaz Mahmod. It signs their death warrant.”
Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 12 June 2007
Cf. the Times, 13 June 2007
US Baptists warned about Islam, atheism
SAN ANTONIO – Watergate figure Chuck Colson warned a gathering of Southern Baptist pastors Sunday night against what he described as two dire threats: the deadly marriage of Islam and fascism and a new, militant atheism growing in popularity in the West.
Colson, a former Nixon “hatchet man” who became a born-again Christian and founded an evangelical ministry to prisoners, called on Christians to do a better job of explaining their religion’s worldview.
Colson, 75, spoke at a conference that precedes the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, which begins here Tuesday. At one point, Colson said “Islam is a vicious, evil …” and then before finishing the sentence, said, “Islamo-fascism is evil incarnate.” “Islamists,” Colson said, “are very different. We will die for what we believe. They will kill for what they believe.”
Comments about Islam have generated controversy at past Southern Baptist meetings. In 2002, a former Southern Baptist Convention president, the Rev. Jerry Vines, called Muhammad, the Muslim prophet, a “demon-possessed pedophile.”
Faisal Alam interview
“The rhetoric of Islamophobia from the ‘gay’ press after 9/11 was incredible. We were hearing things from conservative columnists that one could not imagine before. After I spoke publicly about not supporting the US war in Afghanistan, soon after 9/11, there were Op-Eds in the gay press that denounced me as a ‘unpatriotic’. One writer went as far as to say that I should be stripped of my American passport and be shipped off to Guantanamo. I was writing responses almost on a daily basis confronting the Islamophobia being perpetuated by these columnists.”
Lavender magazine interviews AlFatiha Founder Faisal Alam.
Livingstone ‘plays the Islamophobia card’
Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society is not impressed by the coalition to defend religious freedom launched at City Hall in London earlier this week. Sanderson opines that “there is very little in the way of aggression towards Muslims beyond the racism that all minority communities suffer”. Well, Sanderson and the NSS – who in the past have called for the publication of racist anti-Muslim cartoons and happily repeated denunciations of “Muslim foreigners who have forced themselves on us” – would know all about that.
The NSS has the backing of Robert Spencer over at Jihad Watch.
Muslim immigration and the destruction of Europe
Stanley Kurz reviews Walter Laqueur’s The Last Days of Europe at National Review Online:
“In combination with Europe’s demographic decline and guilt-laden multiculturalism, says Laqueur, unchecked immigration has created a massive and growing population of unassimilated Muslims, hostile to their own countries and determined to transform Europe beyond all recognition, through a combination of violent and non-violent means…. Laqueur’s extended critique of ‘Islamophobia’ as an explanation for failed Muslim assimilation in Europe is devastating. Laqueur doesn’t hesitate to say that the fundamental problem of Muslim assimilation is cultural – rooted in traditional Islam, and in the strange blend of Muslim mores and ghetto street-culture that nowadays shapes Europe’s angry young Muslim men.”