Category Archives: Right wing

Right wing Christians and secularists join in condemnation of Rowan Williams

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Anger Over Church BackingThe Archbishop of Canterbury prompted anger yesterday by putting Muslim veils on an equal footing with Christian crosses.

Britain’s most senior churchman, Dr Williams, said talk of banning the full-face niqab reminded him of China, where the state controls all religious life. He said: “The ideal of a society where no visible public signs of religion would be seen – no crosses around necks, no sidelocks, turbans or veils – is a politically dangerous one.”

But Stephen Green, the national director of fundamentalist group Christian Voice, said Dr Williams appeared to be ranking Islam alongside Christianity. He said: “We Christians should be more ready to stand up and be counted. We have to say that our faith is a world view and it’s not just something we do on a Sunday.”

Alison Ruoff, a member of the CofE General Synod, said: “The Archbishop should be standing up for the Christian faith in a much more visible way. He should be making a more public stand for Christianity and not for other religions.” Roy McCloughry, director of evangelical think-tank the Kingdom Trust, said: “The veil is not a religious issue – it is a cultural issue.”

Terry Sanderson, vice-president of the National Secular Society, which campaigns against all religious interference in non-believers’ lives, said: “Minority religions are now demanding a place at the table. Dr Williams is using phony arguments. Comparing ministers’ criticism of veils in Britain with what goes on in China is ridiculous. He’s running a hare that does not exist. There is no ban on veils in this country.”

Daily Express, 28 October 2006

St Andrews’ Students Association rejects witch-hunt against Khatami

Posted on by Bob Pitt

KhatamiA storm of protest is expected to greet a controversial Iranian former president in Scotland next week amid growing opposition to his visit.

The move to honour Mohammad Khatami by St Andrews University has attracted a furious response from exiled Iranians, the Israeli government, politicians and students across the UK, who claim he ran a tyrannical regime.

He will receive an honorary degree when he officially opens the university’s Institute for Iranian Studies during his visit on Tuesday.

A university spokesman said Mr Khatami’s visit reflected the international standing of the institution and added that the historic seat of learning had received messages of support from senior government officers and politicians.

But angry cries were led by Laila Jazayeri of the Association of Anglo-Iranian Academics in the UK who attacked his human-rights record while in office.

She said: “Khatami has always been a central pillar of the theocratic and brutal regime in Iran, which is responsible for the execution of more than 120,000 Iranians.

“It is ironic that Khatami should be invited to St Andrews University when, during his presidency, the Iranian regime responded to the just demand of students for democracy by ordering vicious dawn attacks on dormitories.

“Students were beaten using knives, chains, and batons, resulting in fatalities and hundreds wounded. Some were even thrown out of the second and third floor windows.”

The move has also infuriated Scottish Conservative MEP Struan Stevenson, who described the decision as a slur on Scotland. He said: “St Andrews University should be ashamed. Khatami’s presence in Scotland would be an insult to freedom, democracy, and human rights. I call upon Sir Menzies Campbell as chancellor of St Andrews University to withdraw the invitation to this odious man.”

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Did Italian right-winger take inspiration from Maryam Namazie?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Daniela SantancheBritain and Australia are not the only countries where debate is raging over the Islamic veil. In Italy, the issue burst into the news this week after the interior ministry ordered round-the-clock police protection for an MP, believing she had been threatened for expressing her views on the subject.

Daniela Santanche, an MP for the formerly neo-fascist National Alliance, clashed in a TV chat show with the imam of a mosque near Milan. After Ms Santanche insisted that the Qur’an did not call for women to wear a veil, the other guest, Ali Abu Shwaima, angrily replied: “I am an imam and I will not permit those who are ignorant to speak of Islam. You are ignorant of Islam and do not have the right to interpret the Qur’an.”

The ministry said it had been advised that the words used by the imam might amount to a coded death sentence – which the imam has vigorously denied.

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Why Labour should reject Jack Straw’s comments on veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslims under siege

Owen Jones, Poplar & Limehouse Constituency Labour Party, surveys the responses to Jack Straw’s comments on the niqab.

Labour Left Briefing, November 2006

“Ministers caught telling the truth!” announced the BNP on their website on 15th October as they hailed “a series of statements which show that some of our rulers are capable of speaking the truth and acknowledging commonsense after all.” No wonder the BNP feels vindicated. Over the past month, the already besieged Muslim community has faced a barrage of denunciations from the British political establishment.

The increasingly thuggish John Reid fired the opening shots in east London on 20th September by haranguing Muslim parents to spy on their own children “before their hatred grows and you risk losing them forever.” This carefully choreographed political stunt was followed by a further tirade at Labour Party Conference in which he pledged that Islamist terrorism would have “no no-go areas”. David Cameron momentarily forgot his cuddly rhetoric and pledged “break up Muslim ghettos.”

However, it was Jack Straw who opened the floodgates of the current deluge of anti-Muslim hysteria. His description of the niqab – a full body veil worn by a tiny minority of Muslim women – as a “sign of separation and difference” was music to the ears of the right wing media. “Ban the veil!” screeched the Daily Express, revealing that 98% supported such a ban in order to “safeguard racial harmony”.

In The Times, Simon Jenkins suggested that if Muslim women were unable to understand why a “westerner” might be offended by the veil, “it is reasonable to ask why they want to live in Britain.” Jon Gaunt in The Sun offered the nuanced argument that “no group has been such a pain in the burka as some of the Muslims in recent years…” Others took the opportunity to declare open season on the Muslim population. “Muslim cabbie bans guide dog” was the almost farcical Evening Standard headline.

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The rape of Europe

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The German author Henryk M. Broder recently told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (12 October) that young Europeans who love freedom, better emigrate. Europe as we know it will no longer exist 20 years from now. Whilst sitting on a terrace in Berlin, Broder pointed to the other customers and the passers-by and said melancholically: ‘We are watching the world of yesterday.’

“Europe is turning Muslim. As Broder is sixty years old he is not going to emigrate himself. ‘I am too old,’ he said. However, he urged young people to get out and ‘move to Australia or New Zealand. That is the only option they have if they want to avoid the plagues that will turn the old continent uninhabitable’….

“Broder is convinced that the Europeans are not willing to oppose islamization…. West Europeans have to choose between submission (islam) or death. I fear, like Broder, that they have chosen submission – just like in former days when they preferred to be red rather than dead.”

Paul Belien in the Brussells Journal, 25 October 2006

Fascists applaud result of Danish cartoons court case

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Denmark continues to lead in the way in defending the long cherished European concept of free speech after a court ruled yesterday (26th) that a Danish newspaper did not libel Muslims by printing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that unleashed a storm of protests in the Islamic world. Seven Danish Muslim organisations brought the case against the Jyllands-Posten, saying the paper had libelled the world’s one billion Muslims with the images, which included one depicting the Prophet with a bomb in his turban, by implying Muslims were terrorists.”

BNP news article, 27 October 2006

The ‘long Eurabian night’ closes in on us

Posted on by Bob Pitt

SteynBill Murray summarises Mark Steyn’s paranoid ravings about the Islamisation of Europe in his new book America Alone:

“Birthrates in many European countries fall well below the replacement rate of 2.1 for every woman, compared to regions of the Muslim world where women typically bear seven children each. The result, Steyn posits, will be a dramatic shift in global power in the coming decades, with the chief beneficiary being radical Islam. ‘How bad is it going to get in Europe?” he asks. ‘As bad as it can get, as in societal collapse, fascist revivalism, and then the long Eurabian night, not over the entire Continent but over significant parts of it.’

“… Steyn’s choicest attacks are reserved for a Europe run by closeted elites. For the past 60 years, he insists, they have sustained an environment of weak social contracts where the relationship between rights and responsibilities for a European and his or her government ‘is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship’. A European welfare state that promotes dependency and extended adolescence is, in Steyn’s eyes, as grave a cultural sin as can be committed, leading to divided communities, large-scale violence and a wholesale replacement of Europe’s dominant culture.”

Bloomberg.com, 26 October 2006

‘Fury as BA says it would allow Muslim veil but not cross’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“British Airways has been accused of appalling double standards after admitting Muslim staff may be allowed to wear veils – just weeks after it sent a Christian home for wearing a cross. Check-in worker Nadia Eweida has been on unpaid leave for a month after the airline banned her from wearing her tiny cross on a necklace over her uniform…. She demanded to know why she had to hide her faith from the public when Muslims and Sikhs can openly display theirs by wearing hijabs, turbans, and possibly a full-face veil.”

Daily Mail, 26 October 2006

Of course, the answer is that Muslim women who wear the hijab or Sikh men who wear a turban do so because they believe it is a requirement of their faith. So far as I know, no Christian denomination requires its adherents to display a cross.

Nevertheless, BA’s stupidity in denying Nadia Eweida the right to do so has simply opened the door for racists in the right-wing press to take up the refrain about favours being granted to minority ethno-religious groups that are supposedly denied to the white Christian majority.

Media ‘bullied’ into not discussing Islam, according to Mad Mel

Posted on by Bob Pitt

madmel“The head of Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, was one of the first in the governing and quangocrat class to sound the alarm over multiculturalism some fourteen months ago when he warned that Britain was ‘sleepwalking to segregation’. He has also said that mass immigration is changing the face of Britain and that Muslims wanting to live under Sharia law should leave the UK….

“But now, Phillips’s position appears to have shifted. Last weekend, he said he was disconcerted that the debate about the veil seemed ‘to have turned into something really quite ugly’ and descended into ‘bullying’. He told BBC One’s ‘Sunday AM’ show: ‘I, this morning, really would not want to be a British Muslim because what should have been a proper conversation between all kinds of British people seems to have turned into a trial of one particular community, and that cannot be right.’

“Ugly? Bullying? ‘A trial of one particular community’? Surely, it’s those who draw attention to Islamic extremism who are mostly on the receiving end of ugly bullying. Any mention of ‘Islamic terrorism’ produces instantaneous denunciation as an ‘Islamophobe’, racist, bigot and all the rest of it – backed up by the implicit threat of violence, a state of affairs which started with the fatwa against the life of Salman Rushdie. As a result, the British media are now so cowed and intimidated they refuse to publish much vital discussion about Islam, to the terrible detriment of free and vital debate.”

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 24 October 2006

Regular readers of this site will of course be well aware of how “intimidated” the British media has been when it comes to attacking Islam and Muslims, particularly in recent weeks during the outburst of racist hysteria provoked and legitimised by Jack Straw’s comments on the veil.

Rowan Williams capitulates to Islamist reaction, Leo McKinstry claims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The Church of England used to be known as the Tory Party at prayer. Today it is the liberal establishment on its knees. Terrified of giving offence to any minority cause, obsessed with Marxist notions about race and wealth, its leadership has all but given up as a serious force for Christianity.

“Rather than standing up for the faith that built this country, Anglican leaders prattle on about Islamophobia and multiculturalism in a spirit of hand-wringing self-abasement, always demanding that our national traditions be subverted or abandoned in order to accommodate other religions, especially Islam…. Despite the threat of Muslim terrorism since 9/11, which is primarily directed against Judaeo-Christian civilisation, Dr Williams has consistently refused to attack Islamic fundamentalism….”

Leo McKinstry has a go at the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Daily Express, 25 October 2006

McKinstry adds: “The veil is a mark of oppression against women, a reflection of misogynistic determination to keep them isolated from the mainstream of society, as senior Labour figures like Jack Straw and Harriet Harman have pointed out, showing far more moral bravery than Dr Williams has ever done.”