Category Archives: Right wing

Anti-Islamic writer stirs hatred, Muslims warn

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A visit to Sydney by a controversial Somali writer who calls the prophet Mohammed a pedophile and says Islam is inferior to Western culture has outraged Muslims, who accuse her of inciting hatred. Ayaan Hirsi Ali will arrive in Sydney today amid tight security normally reserved for foreign dignitaries or royalty. Her writings and talks focus on what she calls the backwardness of Islamic culture and the persecution of Muslim women.

University of Technology Sydney Islamic law lecturer Jamila Hussain said Hirsi Ali’s ideas were extreme and stigmatised Muslims. “I think she’d be better staying where she came from,” Ms Hussain said. “I’ve read enough of her thoughts. It’s a narrow and radical opinion, and I don’t agree with it. She’s obviously had some dreadful experiences, but they’re not typical.”

News.com.au, 29 May 2007

‘America must not ignore a dangerous percentage’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Diana West“According to Pew’s data, one-quarter of younger American Muslims approve of the presence of skin-ripping, skull-crushing, organ-piercing violence in civilian life as a religious imperative – ‘in defense of Islam’…. According to Pew, the total Muslim population in America is 2.35 million, 30 percent of whom are between 18 and 29. By my figuring, the suicide-bomb-approving cohort works out to 183,000 people….

“Multiculturalism preaches that all civilizations are the same, all religions are the same, all peoples are the same. The Pew results, meanwhile, tell them something else again: Some people – some young American Muslim people – approve of suicide bombing in defense of Islam. Does this finding perhaps introduce a qualitative difference among civilizations, religions and peoples? That is, is there something more desirable about societies that don’t inspire and glorify suicide bombings – something worth preserving? Conversely, is there something about Islam our own society requires protection against?”

Diana West assesses the Pew Research Center poll of American Muslims.

Townhall.com, 25 May 2007

‘New study shows US Muslims are extremists’ (unlike Debbie Schlussel)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Debbie Schlussel“The message of the just-released Pew Research Center study on ‘Muslim Americans’ is clear … America hasn’t moderated Islam or its adherents. Islam has made America[‘s] Muslim residents more extreme, just as with its European counterparts. Wealth and education and opportunity and freedom have done nothing to moderate them….

“The study shows that even from 2000-2007, 18% of Muslims are still immigrants – significantly up from the 1980s. Why – after 9/11 – are we letting one in five Muslims in America in from countries and a religion that hate us? It isn’t news to me. But it should be disturbing, nonetheless, that we have a policy of affirmative-action immigration for the religion of 19 hijackers and assorted worldwide beheaders, homicide bombers, and rioters.”

US pundit Debbie Schlussel (herself well known as a beacon of moderation who renounces all forms of extremism) writes at debbieschlussel.com, 23 May 2007

Read the Pew Center report here.

See also BBC News, muslimmatters.org and Abu Aardvark.

The poll result that has been flagged up by right-wing US pundits is that, in response to the question “Can suicide bombings of civilian targets to defend Islam be justified?”, 15% of those aged 18-29 said that such attacks were sometimes or often justified, 11% that they were rarely justified, and 69% that they were never justified (overall the figures were 8%, 5% and 78% respectively). This is the source of all those headlines claiming that 26% of young US Muslims are potential terrorists.

However, when members of the general American public were asked in a November-December 2006 poll (pdf here) whether “bombing and other types of attacks intentionally aimed at civilians” were justified, 24% replied that such attacks were sometimes or often justified, while 27% said they were rarely justified, and only 46% said they were never justified.

Which, applying the same calculation, means that 51% of all Americans are potential terrorists.

Denmark’s Little Mermaid statue draped in Muslim dress and veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Little MermaidThe Little Mermaid statue in Denmark’s capital was found draped in Muslim dress and a head scarf Sunday morning, police said. After receiving a telephone call, officers drove to the site and removed the garments, said Copenhagen police spokesman Jorgen Thomsen.

The Little Mermaid was created by Danish sculptor Edvard Eriksen in tribute to Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen. Sitting on a rock at the entrance of Copenhagen harbor since 1913, she draws an estimated 1 million visitors a year, and is occasionally targeted by vandals.

She has been beheaded and doused in paint several times. Four years ago, the statue was blown off its perch by vandals who used explosives. In 2004, someone put a burqa, the head-to-toe Islamic robe, on the statue along with a sign saying “Turkey in the EU?” in reference to Turkey’s bid to join the European Union.

Associated Press, 20 May 2007

So, pretty obviously another right-wing protest against Islam, you might think? Not according to one blogger, who reports the incident under the heading “Muslim THUGS Deface Famous Hans Christian Andersen Statue – Again“.

Islamophobia doesn’t exist, claims ex-leftist

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Furedi“In recent years the term Islamophobia has been frequently invoked to silence criticism of Islam. Criticisms of any aspect of Islam are looked upon as expressions of a new form of racism. In reality, critics of Islam are questioning the values associated with the religion rather than the racial status of Muslim people. Today, promoting the concept of Islamophobia is about setting up Islam as a criticism-free zone. Recent claims about an ‘epidemic of Islamophobia’ are based on very impressionistic and subjective methodology.”

Frank Furedi, formerly of the Revolutionary Communist Party, in Spiked, 21 May 2007

Perhaps Furedi should have a word with BNP führer Nick Griffin who last year recommended that the fascists should seize “a great political opportunity to surf our message into the public mind on the back of a media tsunami of ‘Islamophobia’.”

The differences between Islam and Christianity

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Great Divide“Alvin J. Schmidt, Ph.D., provides extensive documentation from history, the Koran, and the Bible that there are indeed chasm-wide differences between the two religions – and between the societies where they hold sway. ‘Islam is not just a different religion’, argues Professor Schmidt, ‘but interwoven with it is also a very different culture.’

“In comparison to the Christian West, he shows, Islamic nations throughout history have been culturally sterile, technologically backward, materially impoverished, prone to barbarism and cruelty, and almost perpetually at war not only with their non-Muslim neighbors but with each other.”

Human Events reviews The Great Divide: The Failure of Islam and the Triumph of the West by Alvin J. Schmidt.

Bishop suggests closer monitoring of Swiss mosques

Posted on by Bob Pitt

One of the Catholic Church’s leading experts on Islam says the Swiss authorities need to keep a closer eye on the country’s mosques. Pierre Bürcher, assistant bishop of Lausanne, Geneva and Fribourg, tells swissinfo it is what goes on inside mosques rather than the construction of minarets that poses a greater threat to peace. His comments come just weeks after a group of rightwing politicians launched a nationwide campaign to ban the construction of minarets.

Swissinfo, 20 May 2007

Mad Mel explains Islamism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Londonistan“Islamism is the politicised version of Islam which mandates jihad, or holy war against the infidel and conquest of the non-Islamic world for Islam. I’m well aware of the argument that there’s no difference between Islamism and Islam: that’s a theological argument for others to have….

“The Islamist goal is to destroy the virus of freedom and modernity before it infects the Islamic world, and to replace it with Islam. That is the core of the profound threat it poses to the west, a threat mounted through the pincer movement of both terrorism and cultural takeover. This cultural takeover, or the aim to Islamise the west, was explicitly laid out in a programme of subversion for Europe by the Wahabbi [sic] Muslim Brotherhood almost 30 years ago….

“And for Islamists there is no room in a liberal society. True liberals never thought they had a duty to accommodate fascism. True liberals always fought it. So must we do with religious fascism.”

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 18 May 2007

Bernard Lewis’ latest call to arms

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Bernard Lewis’ op-ed piece in the May 16, 2007 issue of the Wall Street Journal deserves swift rebuttal. This is the same man who advised President Bush prior to the Iraq war that the only language Arabs understood was the language of force. While Presidents may self-select advisors who tell them what they want to hear, these advisors bear as much responsibility, specially when they pose as ‘experts’…. Lewis’ op-ed article is a call to arms against Islam.”

Badruddin Khan writes in Counterpunch, 17 May 2007

In an article entitled “Islam’s War for World Mastery” Efraim Karsh takes up Lewis’s arguments. He writes:

“Mr. bin Laden and other Islamists’ war is not against America per se but is rather the most recent manifestation of the millenarian jihad for a universal Islamic empire, the umma. As the preeminent world power for quite some time, and the only remaining superpower after the collapse of the Soviet empire, America blocks the final realization of this goal and hence is a natural target for aggression. In this sense, the House of Islam’s war for world mastery is a traditional, indeed venerable, quest that is far from over.”

New York Sun, 18 May 2007