Category Archives: Right wing

Hirsi Ali arrives in the US

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Ayaan Hirsi AliThe Washington Post on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, newly arrived in the United States:

“Her story is told in a riveting new book, Murder in Amsterdam, by Ian Buruma, who is not alone in finding her – this ‘Enlightenment fundamentalist’ – somewhat unnerving and off-putting…. He is dismissive of the idea that she is a Voltaire against Islam: Voltaire, he says, offended the powerful Catholic Church, whereas she offends ‘only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe’.

“She, however, replies that this is hardly a normal minority. It is connected to Islam’s worldwide adherents. Living sullenly in European ‘dish cities’ – enclaves connected by satellite television and the Internet to the tribal societies they have not really left behind – many members of this minority are uninterested in assimilation into open societies…. Europe, she thinks, is invertebrate. After two generations without war, Europeans ‘have no idea what an enemy is’…. Clearly she is where she belongs, at last.”

Catholic Archbishop questions Turkish entry to EU

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales today questioned whether Turkey should join the European Union. Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, echoed comments previously made by Pope Benedict XVI in saying that the predominantly Muslim state was not culturally part of Europe.

His comments came as the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey of Clifton, also questioned the admission of Turkey into the EU.

Cardinal Murphy O’Connor questioned the position of Tony Blair who has consistently argued for Turkish membership of the EU on the grounds that exclusion would be damaging, arguing:

“There may be another view that the mixture of cultures is not a good idea. I think the question is for Europe: will the admission of Turkey to the European Union be something that benefits a proper dialogue or integration of a very large, predominantly Islamic country in a continent that, fundamentally, is Christian?”

Times, 21 September 2006

Pope’s public scepticism of Islam’s role dates back to 1997

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Nine years before Pope Benedict XVI delivered implied criticism of Islam in a speech last week and ignited angry Muslim protests worldwide, he expressed skepticism of the religion’s commitment to tolerance. Benedict, the then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, told an interviewer in 1997 that Islam is organized in a way “that is opposed to our modern ideas about society.”

“One has to have a clear understanding that it is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of a pluralistic society,” Ratzinger said in an interview contained in Salt of the Earth, a book published by Ignatius Press in 1997.

In recent years, the pope reiterated doubts about Islam’s compatibility with Western-style modernity. According to an account of a seminar he held in September 2005, Benedict told theology students that Islam can adapt to democracy only if the Koran is radically reinterpreted.

Benedict’s suggestion that Western culture, based on Christian values, differs markedly from Islam underlay his controversial opposition to Turkey’s admission to the European Union. In August 2004, he told France’s Le Figaro magazine that Turkey should be excluded because “Europe is a cultural continent, not a geographical one.”

Bloomberg, 19 September 2006

Karen Armstrong – ‘the guardian of Islamic extremism’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch denounces the author of the influential Islam: A Short History as just another apologist for Islam, covering up its violent anti-western essence:

“The time for such disingenuousness is over, as is the time, if there ever was time, for the unseemly self-recrimination to which Armstrong is calling the West. The Muslim rage against the Pope’s call to eschew religious violence reveals an Islamic world in deep denial, as irrational as it is unable to take responsibility for its own actions. And in this it has Karen Armstrong and other Leftist haters of Western civilization and culture as willing accomplices.”

Front Page Magazine, 21 September 2006

Carey backs Pope and issues warning on ‘violent’ Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

CareyThe former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton has issued his own challenge to “violent” Islam in a lecture in which he defends the Pope’s “extraordinarily effective and lucid” speech.

Lord Carey said that Muslims must address “with great urgency” their religion’s association with violence. He made it clear that he believed the “clash of civilisations” endangering the world was not between Islamist extremists and the West, but with Islam as a whole.

“We are living in dangerous and potentially cataclysmic times,” he said. “There will be no significant material and economic progress [in Muslim communities] until the Muslim mind is allowed to challenge the status quo of Muslim conventions and even their most cherished shibboleths.”

Times, 20 September 2006

Pope protests – part of Islamic plot to dominate West

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“… the Muslim uproar has a goal: to prohibit criticism of Islam by Christians and thereby to impose Shariah norms on the West. Should Westerners accept this central tenet of Islamic law, others will surely follow. Retaining free speech about Islam, therefore, represents a critical defense against the imposition of an Islamic order.”

Daniel Pipes offers his insights into the Pope Benedict controversy.

New York Sun, 19 September 2006

US Muslims say anti-Islam bias on rise

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Fox TVAn American Muslim rights group says the number of civil rights complaints made by Muslims in the US has increased by 30 per cent.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) said in the report published on Monday that there were 1,972 cases of anti-Muslim violence, discrimination and harassment in 2005, the highest number of civil rights cases ever recorded in the Washington-based group’s annual report.

The Struggle for Equality study said that was a 29.6 per cent increase from 2004’s 1,522 cases. Nine states accounted for almost 79 per cent of all civil rights complaints made to the civil rights group. California and Illinois recorded the highest number of all complaints with 19 and 13 per cent respectively, and New Jersey had the lowest with 4 per cent.

Arsalan Iftikhar, CAIR’s legal director, blamed the media. “We believe the biggest factor contributing to anti-Muslim feeling and the resulting acts of bias is the growth in Islamophobic rhetoric that has flooded the internet and talk radio in the post-9/11 era,” he said. “By all accounts, racial profiling, harassment, and discrimination of Muslim and Arab Americans have increased since 9/11.”

Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas congresswomen, said in response to the study: “We cannot allow xenophobia, prejudice, and bigotry to prevail, and eviscerate the constitution we are bound to protect.”

Al-Jazeera, 19 September 2006

Another bigot backs the Pope

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Jon_GauntJon Gaunt throws his considerable intellectual weight behind the Pope in today’s Sun:

“We are constantly being told to be tolerant and understanding of the Muslim faith. Well, do you think it would be possible just for a minute for Muslims to be tolerant of our humour, culture and literature? Why, as the former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey said, can’t the Muslim community take criticism? … There’s no sound of laughter around this religion and if there were it would be drowned out by the sound of feet treading on eggshells. Why?

“It started with the West’s capitulation to the religious nutters and fanatics of Iran who declared a fatwa on Salman Rushdie over his novel The Satanic Verses nearly 20 years ago…. The row over the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad was an absolute joke, and again the West gave in to the mad mullahs and extremists of the Muslim world who stirred up trouble, protests and intimidation by circulating the pictures around the globe.

“Not content with intimidating artists, politicians and newspaper editors, these people are now even trying to deny the Pope free speech. The Pope wasn’t preaching hatred. He was basically saying there is no place for violence in any religion. Who can take offence at that?

“The truth is, of course, that the Pope was showing he had more moral backbone than most leading politicians. He has previously demanded that Muslim clerics condemn ‘any connection between your faith and terrorism’.”

BNP applauds Mad Mel

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Mad Mel Phillips, the Daily Mail’s ranter-in-chief, says in a typically temperate post on her blog that the positive response to young Dave Fotherington-Cameron’s recent anti-neocon foreign policy speech from the ‘profoundly anti-Jew, anti-Israel, simply vile’ Muslim Public Affairs Committee is proof positive of the ‘moral and intellectual decline’ of the present-day Conservative party.

“Now if we read this right (and one can never be entirely sure with Mel), she’s saying that if an ‘extremist’ group expresses agreement with a part of your work, you’re lost. Heartening, then, to hear from the eminently mainstream British National Party that in general, ‘the opinions of the Daily Mail … and columnist Melanie Phillips are those that most closely match our own’.”

Jon Henley in the Guardian, 19 September 2006

For the BNP’s quoted endorsement of Mad Mel, see here.