“A year after the publication of a damning report into Islamic radicalisation among students, Britain’s universities have been accused of burying their heads in the sand.
“Professor Anthony Glees says many vice-chancellors are still failing to confront the issue. His claim comes 12 months after he named 24 universities where he said extremist groups had been detected.”
See also BBC News, 5 October 2006
This nonsense is given further coverage on BBC News at Ten. Watch here.
“Radical Muslims in France’s housing estates are waging an undeclared ‘intifada’ against the police, with violent clashes injuring an average of 14 officers each day. As the interior ministry said that nearly 2,500 officers had been wounded this year, a police union declared that its members were ‘in a state of civil war’ with Muslims in the most depressed ‘banlieue’ estates which are heavily populated by unemployed youths of north African origin.”
The media are trying to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment over the issue of Alexander Omar Basha, a Muslim police officer guarding the Israeli embassy in London who asked to be transferred to another post during Israel’s war on Lebanon, where he has relatives.
It’s not often this site has reason to endorse the views of a Tory member of the London Assembly, but we note that Richard Barnes blames senior officers rather than PC Basha. The Evening Standard quotes him as saying: “I think it was crass management in the first place. They should have recognised there could have been a problem and not suggested this officer be posted at this embassy.”
Another member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, Peter Herbert, has described the row as a “ridiculous fuss about nothing”. He added: “From a security point of view, the Met would be seriously criticised if this guy has relatives in Lebanon and his picture was used around the world to demonstrate the irony about having a Muslim defending the Israeli embassy in the UK.”
Glen Smyth, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers, said just one two-hour slot outside the embassy had been affected. The officer had not refused to do duties and had made a simple request which it was “fairly sensible” to grant, Mr Smyth said.
Postscript: It turns out that PC Basha was never posted to the Israeli embassy in the first place, according to a statement by Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson.
David Cameron today vowed to break up Muslim ghettos in Britain’s cities. In the most frank comments on the issue by a major party leader, he used his keynote party conference speech to say Britain had made an error by allowing ghettos to develop.
“It worries me that we have allowed communities to grow up which live ‘parallel lives’,” he said in an extract of today’s speech obtained in advance by the Evening Standard. “Communities where people from different backgrounds never meet, never talk, never go into each others’ homes,” said the Tory leader.
He said migrants should learn English because contact between people would overcome differences and “the most basic contact comes from talking to each other”. Mr Cameron said that children should be taught “the core components of British identity – our history, our language, our institutions”.
He went on: “We need to have contact. In many of our towns and cities, we have allowed ghettoes to develop. Whole neighbourhoods cut off from the rest of society. Immigrant families who only ever meet people with the same country of origin. We need to find ways to avoid this.”
Evening Standard, 4 October 2006
Significant that, of all the issues dealt with in Cameron’s speech, this is the one the Standard has seized on and advertised with a banner headline.
“I’ve been reading one of the great works of recent history, Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century. His chapter on ‘Soviet Myths and the Western Mind’ is particularly fascinating, and ripe with parallels to our own battles today against Islamic jihad. As Conquest documents, many Western intellectuals and academics were delusional about the reality of the communist threat. For a host of reasons… many professors, pundits, politicians, and religious leaders refused to believe that Soviet leaders meant what they said about revolution and subversion…. Thus throughout the Cold War the Western resolve to resist Soviet expansionism was undercut by ‘peace’ movements, nuclear disarmament movements, calls for détente and ‘dialogue’, and claims of moral equivalence between the U.S. and the Soviet Union….
“Alas the lesson has not been learned. As we fight what Norman Podhoretz calls World War IV, the same refusal to take seriously the motives of the enemy, and the same bad Western habit of indulging our own superstitions at the expense of a clear understanding of the enemy, are compromising our actions and policies….
“For centuries now the jihadists have been telling us that they hate the infidel West because it stands in the way of fulfilling Allah’s mandate ‘to fight all men until they say “There is no god but Allah”.’ … Despite this centuries-long, consistent expression of jihadist doctrine, many in the West continue to dismiss it as an aberration or a deformation of Islam, and to look for other economic or political causes.
“Just as Sovietophiles during the Cold War dismissed Soviet expansionism as an understandable response to Western aggression or a traditional Russian anxiety over its long western border, so too today jihadist aggression is waved away as a natural reaction to neo-colonialist sins or autocrats at home or lack of economic development or even sexual frustration – indeed, anything and everything except what the jihadists plainly tell us is motivating them, and what millions of Muslims around the world who support the jihadists clearly understand to be the spiritual imperatives for jihadist violence.”
Bruce S. Thornton at the Victor Davis Hanson website, 4 October 2006
A French philosophy teacher yesterday entered his third week in hiding after writing a newspaper comment piece calling the prophet Muhammad a merciless warlord and mass-murderer.
Robert Redeker, 52, who teaches at a suburban Toulouse high school, this week won the support of famous French intellectuals including the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who warned that death threats against him were an attack on freedom of speech akin to the persecution of Salman Rushdie.
The teacher, whose latest book, Depression and Philosophy, is about to be published, does not shy away from controversy. A member of the board of Les Temps Modernes, a review founded by Jean-Paul Sartre, he criticised French pacifists at the start of the Iraq war.
In a comment piece in Le Figaro on September 19, he said Muhammad was “a merciless warlord, a looter, a mass-murderer of Jews and a polygamist”. He called the Qur’an “a book of incredible violence” and contrasted what he said were Christianity’s peaceful roots and Islam’s violent ones, adding: “Jesus is a master of love, Muhammad a master of hate.”
The case has become a political issue. Philippe de Villiers, head of the far-right Movement for France party, suggested that President Jacques Chirac should shelter Mr Redeker at the Elysée Palace.
Spanish villages are toning down traditional fiestas in which revelers blow up dummies representing the Prophet Mohammed for fear of offending Muslims, the newspaper El Pais reported on Monday.
One eastern Spanish village, Bocairent, decided to abandon the custom of packing the head of a dummy representing Mohammed with fireworks after seeing the angry response by Muslims to a Danish newspaper’s publication last year of cartoons of him.
El Pais found that several other villages in the Valencia region had also modified similar fiestas this year. It carried out the investigation after a Berlin opera house decided last week to cancel performances of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” because the production included a scene depicting Mohammed’s severed head.
Bocairent’s mayor, Antonio Valdes, said blowing up the Mohammed dummy was offensive. “It just wasn’t necessary, and, as it could hurt some people’s feelings, we decided not to do it,” he said.
The village may not have blown up the wood-and-cardboard Mohammed dummy this year – but it still threw it off a castle wall at the fiesta’s climax in February.
Villages all over Spain hold annual festivals to commemorate the “Reconquista,” the reconquest of Spain by Christians from the Moors, which was completed in 1492 after more than 700 years of Muslim rule in much of the country.
Spain is now once again home to a growing number of Muslims, mainly Moroccan immigrants, who villagers feel might be offended by some of their traditional celebrations.
For Robert Spencer this is yet another “dhimmi” capitulation to the threat of Muslim violence: “After all, we don’t want any ‘hurt feelings’: if they don’t tone down the exploding of Muhammad, they might get … exploding Muhammads.”
“Pope Benedict XVI dropped one of his Prada shoes recently. Quoting the Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus on the ‘evil and inhuman’ decree of Muhammad to spread Islam by the sword, he suggested that there’s not much talking ground between Christianity, a faith that has reconciled itself with reason, and Islam, a medieval system that has not. The common sense of Benedict’s observation was self-evident. Modern Christianity has a mild creed, a diminished view of its exclusivity, and is tolerant of disbelievers. Islam does not share these characteristics.”
Barbara Amiel at Macleans.ca, 2 October 2006
A majority of Danes still support the decision to print the controversial Prophet Muhammad cartoons that enraged much of the Islamic world, according to a poll published Saturday on the one-year anniversary of the printing.
The survey by pollster Ramboell Management – published by the Jyllands-Posten daily, the newspaper that first printed the drawings – showed 53 percent of Danes still think it was correct to publish the cartoons as a demonstration of free speech.
According to the poll, 38 percent of Danes now think the drawings should never have been published, while 9 percent said they were not sure. Ramboell interviewed 1,041 people between September 4-7. No margin of error was given for the poll.
“Soon after 9/11, the Bush administration labeled the conflict into which it plunged this country the ‘war on terror’…. The more pressing question is: Are we, or are we not, engaged in a larger clash of civilizations? If the answer is ‘We are’, the clash long predates 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and George W. Bush. It predates America itself. It is a clash between Western civilization and the Islamic world.”