Media Matters exposes US radio host “Gunny” Bob Newman, who has demanded that “every Muslim immigrant to America … be required by law to wear a GPS tracking bracelet at all times” and suggested that the federal government “bug [Muslims’] places of work and their residences” and monitor “all mosques and community centers.” Newman also called for a moratorium on Muslim immigration to the United States, adding, “If they don’t like the idea, or if they refuse, throw their asses out of this country.”
Category Archives: Right wing
Australia’s neo-conservatives target books on Islam
“The Howard government recently outdid its Western masters in the war on terror, announcing that it would begin banning and restricting materials that it deemed to be promoting ‘terrorism’….
“The threat to reinstate the old practice of confiscating reading materials has come true. In one recent case, Australian customs seized several titles that had been sent by a Malaysian publisher to a Muslim bookseller in downtown Sydney.
“Among them is one titled A Young Muslim’s Guide to the Modern World by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a US-based Iranian-born academic who is not even remotely political in most of his works, as well as another book on everyday Muslim do’s and dont’s which has become almost a household name among Muslims: Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam.
“Although the books have since been returned, probably after the Australian authorities realised how silly they had been to confiscate them at the first place, it shows just how strongly panic alarms can be set off by anything that sounds Islamic….”
‘Time to confront the Muslim conspiracists’
“Something is seriously wrong. A quarter of British Muslims believe the government and security services were involved in the July 7 suicide bombings in London, according to a poll for Channel 4 News…. Conspiracy theories abound in the Muslim community, many of them piggy-backing on an underlying notion of an American-Israeli bogeyman. In themselves, these ideas might be regarded as mere folly, but they are terrifyingly dangerous because they fertilise the ground in which more hostile projects can take root. Government and establishment rhetoric that continually presents our current difficulties as emanating from a ‘small extremist fringe’ does not help. It only provides cover for pernicious ideas which have very much wider currency, as the polls show.”
Zia Haider Rahman in Daily Telegraph, 6 June 2007
But what can you expect from a writer who describes himself as an opponent of “multiculturalism, the race relations industry and the peculiar culture of celebrating diversity”?
British Muslims and 7/7
Today’s papers are filled with articles reporting the Channel 4 poll of British Muslims. Typical headlines read “Muslims: MI5 behind 7/7” (Daily Mirror), “25% of Brit Muslims think 7/7 bombers innocent” (The Sun), “7/7 bombs staged by agents say one in four Muslims” (Daily Telegraph) and “24% of Muslims think 7/7 raids were MI5 plot” (Daily Express), while the Daily Mail goes with “59pc of UK Muslims believe there was a cover-up over 7/7”.
The background to the poll – not least the fact that the fraudulent propaganda used to justify the Iraq war has destroyed the government’s credibility among Muslim communities – is of course omitted from most of these reports. The Mail does at least quote Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain, who puts the findings into context:
“Most people who would examine the facts with a level head would realise that this (7/7) is not some conspiracy. But as with the assassination of JFK, regrettably these kind of incidents become a cause celebre for conspiracy theorists. I think that this particular government has also engendered a lot of distrust. Some people will always be determined to believe that Muslims could not have been behind such an act of mass murder and to this end they are vulnerable to conspiracy theorists. The Muslim Council has always asked for a public inquiry into the July 7 bombings and that inquiry would have put this scepticism to bed for good.”
Cameron accuses Muslims of ‘cultural separatism’
The Tory Party website has posted David Cameron’s speech to the “Islam and Muslims in the World Today” conference.
Cameron attributes the Channel 4 poll results, which indicate widespread suspicion among Muslims about the official account of 7/7, not to the understandable mistrust of a government that lied about the Iraq war but to the prevalence of “cultural separatism” within Muslim communities. He goes on to blame “the influence of a number of Muslim preachers that actively encourage cultural separatism. One such preacher is Yusuf al’Qaradawi….”
Cameron also complains that the “process of rising Muslim consciousness [which he apparently thinks is by definition a bad thing] has been accelerated by the creed of multiculturalism, which despite intending to allow diversity flourish under a common banner of unity, has instead fostered difference by treating faith communities as monolithic blocks rather than individual citizens”.
He continues: “This rise in Muslim consciousness has been reinforced by a second, parallel, factor at work: the deliberate weakening of our collective identity in Britain. Again, multiculturalism has its part to play. By concentrating on defining the various cultures that have come to call Britain home, we have forgotten to define the most important one: our own.”
As for Muslim disaffection with British foreign policy, Cameron has found a solution: “We have to explain patiently and carefully that in Iraq and Afghanistan we are supporting democratically elected Muslim leaders.”
Boston Muslims forgive Israel advocates
Karin Friedemann on the controversy over the Boston mosque.
The Islamist – ‘a PR job for the Blair government’
“Young Muslims are no more likely to join Hizb ut-Tahrir than young Christians are to join the Moonies. You have to be of a certain bent to come under the influence of a cult and join as a fully paid-up member. Fortunately, in my experience, the vast majority of young British Muslims have more sense and critical acumen than Husain.
“The suggestion that the radicalisation of Muslim youth can be laid firmly on the door of Hizb is also hard to swallow. The anger of young Muslims against the West has a much broader context. There was a great deal going on during the 1990s that agitated young Muslims and brought anti-Western sentiment to the fore – from the first Gulf War to the genocide of Muslims in Chechnya. But Husain sees the world in reductive, one-dimensional terms.
“When he finally realises his folly, and bids farewell to Hizb, Husain continues to be a reductive extremist. Now, the entire blame for the radicalisation of Muslim youth is placed on multiculturalism – the very idea that gave Husain all the opportunities he had in life! Terrorists, he tells us, are a product of sexual frustration. So we ought to provide them with generous doses of sex to usher them towards peaceful directions.
“Hizb ut-Tahir should be banned so that they can take their nefarious activities underground and become even more difficult to tackle. Muslim organisations are secret terrorist sympathisers. Husain doesn’t tell us what we should do with them. But I suspect he wants everyone locked up, leaving the terrain open for his brand of neocons to run amok….
“The occasional insight of Husain’s memoir notwithstanding, The Islamist seems to have been drafted by a Whitehall mandarin as a PR job for the Blair government.”
Ziauddin Sardar reviews The Islamist in the Independent, 1 June 2007
Who’s afraid of Tariq Ramadan?
Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism, which has become the bible of ex-leftist supporters of the “War on Terror” like Nick Cohen, has a major article in The New Republic devoted to attacking Tariq Ramadan.
Mad Melanie Phillips hails Berman’s “magisterial piece of writing” which she claims “not only manages to disinter the extremism that Ramadan goes to such lengths to conceal but he also comprehensively shreds the various useful idiots who have sanitised Ramadan’s thinking for public consumption”.
Mel expresses her outrage that “despite the fact that Ramadan was excluded from the US because of his suspected links with extremism, Oxford university has given him an academic berth – and the British government appointed him as one of its advisers on how to deal with … Islamist extremism. Berman’s article shows just how deeply the west’s collective brain has been put to sleep.”
Fox News uses Al Qaeda tape to whip up fear and hatred of American Muslims
Rather than analyze the seriousness of the threat or the effectiveness of the US war on terror, FOX News used a recently-released video tape from an American Al Qaeda member to foment hatred toward Muslims, particularly American Muslims.
On last night’s (5/30/07) Hannity & Colmes, Sean Hannity, in his scripted introduction to the discussion about the tape made by Adam Yehiye Gadahn, read, “(Gadahn’s) involvement with Al Qaeda may no longer come as a surprise to many Americans. Remember, a poll released last week revealed that 25% of young Muslims in America say that they would condone suicide bombings in defense of religion.”
Yet more on the ‘mega-mosque’
The Times reports on the proposed Abbey Mills mosque, under the headline “Setback for Muslim sect’s ‘mega-mosque’ in London“. See also the government’s response to the BNP-inspired petition warning that the building of the mosque would “only cause terrible violence and suffering”.
See also Radical Muslim which urges support for a “Build the mega-mosque” petition.
For the background see Islam Online, 27 May 2007