“London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), scene to a growing number of anti-Semitic incidents from an increasingly pro-Islamic campus, issued a threat to one of its Jewish students to cease his protests against anti-Semitism at the University. Gavin Gross, an American, had been leading a campaign against the deterioration of conditions for Jewish students at SOAS, which is part of the University of London. SOAS had witnessed an escalation of anti-Jewish activity, in both severity and frequency. At the beginning of the year, the Islamic Society screened a video which compared Judaism with Satanism.”
Category Archives: Right wing
MCB ‘not doing enough to stamp out extremism’
Britain’s leading Muslim organisation is not doing enough to root out anti-Western extremism, eight out of ten people believe. A new opinion poll day suggests an overwhelming majority think the Muslim Council of Britain should do more to tackle dangerous radicalism in young Muslims. The survey, carried out for PR Week magazine, found 78 per cent of people overall, rising to nearly 90 per cent of over-55s, strongly agreed the organisation was not doing enough.
Considering that most respondents have probably never even heard of the MCB, still less have any knowledge of its activities, it would be difficult to come up with a more stupid opinion poll. All the poll succeeds in registering is a high degree of ignorant anti-Muslim prejudice among the general population.
This hasn’t prevented mindless right-wing Islamophobes from seizing on the poll’s “findings” to attack the MCB. See, for example, Western Resistance, 31 August 2006
Don’t penalise all Britons – just Muslims
“Americans are at last waking up to the threat posed by British-born Islamists…. The fact that Americans are worried is gratifying. This column was among the first to warn about the radicalization of the British Muslim community. But there is a risk that, having ignored the danger hitherto, Americans may now overreact by penalizing all Britons, not just the minority who really do threaten security.
“It is true that opinion polls show that a significant proportion of British Muslims have at least some sympathy for jihadist extremism, and that even their leaders are unwise or unscrupulous enough to use the threat of terrorism to put pressure on Tony Blair to abandon his support for America and Israel. It is also true, however, that the overwhelming majority of non-Muslim Britons are just as hostile to Islamist terrorism as Americans.
“Even more significantly, the British – like the Americans – are now much more concerned about Islam than was the case five years ago. They no longer believe the assurances of ‘moderate’ Muslim leaders or their non-Muslim apologists that Islam is a religion of peace. People are much better informed and understand that there is a real problem about Islamic theology, which is constantly used to justify jihad against America, Britain and Israel, while suicide ‘martyrs’ are glorified.
“About half of all Britons now see Islam as such, not merely its most extreme versions, as a potential threat to their way of life – not before time. It is not only the war on terror that has to be won; there is a culture war, too. This involves resisting the encroachments of aggressive multiculturalism, which acts as a Trojan horse for Muslim demands to live under Shariah law or to censor legitimate criticism or comment.”
Daniel Johnson in the New York Sun, 31 August 2006
Faith schools – they’re OK so long as they’re not Muslim
In a letter to the Times, Lord Baker of Dorking has written: “The Government, in its first flush of multiculturalism, allowed new exclusive faith schools to be established and funded by the state…. There are 100 Muslim schools waiting to apply. Their entrance criteria are explicit: the purpose is to create a total Muslim personality, and the required familiarity with the Koran means that non-Muslims would not be acceptable.”
Oddly enough, when he was education secretary under Thatcher in the late 1980s, I can’t remember Baker proposing to withdraw support from the thousands of Church of England schools that receive state funding.
Fascism is new buzz word among Republicans
President Bush in recent days has recast the global war on terror into a “war against Islamic fascism”. Fascism, in fact, seems to be the new buzz word for Republicans in an election season dominated by an unpopular war in Iraq.
Bush used the term earlier this month in talking about the arrest of suspected terrorists in Britain, and spoke of “Islamic fascists” in a later speech in Green Bay, Wis. Spokesman Tony Snow has used variations on the phrase at White House press briefings. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., in a tough re-election fight, drew parallels on Monday between World War II and the current war against ‘‘Islamic fascism,” saying they both require fighting a common foe in multiple countries. It’s a phrase Santorum has been using for months. And Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday took it a step further in a speech to an American Legion convention in Salt Lake City, accusing critics of the administration’s Iraq and anti-terrorism policies of trying to appease “a new type of fascism”.
The White House on Wednesday announced Bush would elaborate on this theme in a series of speeches beginning Thursday at the American Legion convention in Salt Lake City and running through his address to the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 19. “The key is that all of this violence and all of the threats are part of one single ideological struggle, a struggle between the forces of freedom and moderation, and the forces of tyranny and extremism”, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters traveling with Bush aboard Air Force One.
Conservative commentators have long talked about “Islamo-fascism”, and Bush’s phrase was a slightly toned-down variation on that theme.
‘Boycott stamp depicting Muslim holiday’
The US Postal Service recently decided to introduce a new postage stamp celebrating Eid. One US commentator is not best pleased:
“I am against those who use their extremist beliefs of their religion to attack people, entire families, destroy lives, homes, and countries in order to gain attention to their ’cause’. It is these people, these radical, rebel extremist, terrorists that thought nothing about boarding planes on 9/11 bent on destroying the United States and its people.
“Therefore, I am supporting a boycott of the issuance of this USPS postage stamp, and I urge everyone reading this column to do the same. Using this stamp would be like a slap in the face to those who have lost their lives at the hands of the very people this stamp now honors. Being politically correct can only go so far!”
Britain is ‘a hornets’ nest of Islamic extremists’
The Daily Mail editorialises about the claim in the US magazine New Republic that Britain now presents a greater security threat to the United States than Iran or Iraq:
“Which country poses the greatest threat to America’s homeland security: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea? None of the above, according to a growing body of opinion across the Atlantic. The answer, say many American pundits, is the United Kingdom.
“At first sight, this looks outrageously ungrateful. After all, aren’t British troops dying every week, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, for an American foreign policy slavishly followed by Tony Blair? Yet the more you think about the charge – spelt out in the current New Republic magazine and echoed by American think-tanks of every persuasion – the more truth you can see in it. Hasn’t Britain indeed become, in the words of Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation, ‘a hornets’ nest of Islamic extremists’? How have we let this come about?
“Much of the answer lies in our authorities’ spineless refusal to confront Islamic extremism for fear of being thought anti-Muslim. Americans gape in disbelief when our senior policemen’s first reaction to every terrorist atrocity is to try to appease religious extremists. Or when Ministers employ apologists for terrorism as special advisers to the Foreign Office.”
Hopefully, Mockbul Ali will sue.
Muslim groups in the UK – the New York Times investigates
“The groups have drawn renewed attention since the arrests and charges this month in what the British police contend was a plot by Muslims, all of them British citizens, to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners. Anthony Glees, director of the Brunel University Center for Intelligence and Security Studies in London, said: ‘These groups are essentially Islamist cults, hidden communities, open only to “believers” who exist within open communities.’ … Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain, along with successor groups to Al Muhajiroun (an organization in London that was ostensibly disbanded in 2004) and the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, are engaged in some of the most aggressive activities to recruit followers, British terrorism experts said.”
The “British terrorism experts” include Anthony Glees and Shiraz Maher – who are exactly the people you’d talk to if you wanted to blur the distinctions between Muslim groups with completely different politics and associate them all with terrorism.
MPACUK urges protests against Jon Gaunt’s Islamophobic comments
“Please let’s get the islamophobe Jon Gaunt exposed for what he is. He is not only misrepresenting Islam but also advocating a witch hunt for all Muslims who have links with Pakistan, ‘He should (Mr John Reed) … investigate every young Muslim who has been to Pakistan and immediately stop the farce of airline restrictions for all and replace it with ethnic and religious profiling’. Yes, it is reminiscent of Nazi propaganda that so effectively and repulsively spread the hatred of the racist state against the Jewish people. Let us stop this hate mongering!”
The Muslim Public Affairs Committee urges protests to be sent to the Sun in response to Jon Gaunt’s recent piece in that paper.
‘How right wing the left sounds’ – Rod Liddle on multiculturalism
“Quick, somebody buy a wreath. Last week marked the passing of multiculturalism as official government doctrine. No longer will opponents of this corrosive and divisive creed be silenced simply by the massed Pavlovian ovine accusation: ‘Racist!’ Better still, the very people who foisted multiculturalism upon the country are the ones who have decided that it has now outlived its usefulness — that is, the political left….
“When an ICM poll of Britain’s Muslims in February this year revealed that some 40% (that is, about 800,000 people) wished to see Islamic law introduced in parts of Britain, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality responded by saying that they should therefore pack their bags and clear off. Sir Trevor Phillips’s exact words were these: ‘If you want to have laws decided in another way, you have to live somewhere else.’ …
“Multiculturalism insisted that communities always changed, were in a permanent state of flux and that if you were white and lived in Oldham or Burnley or Tower Hamlets then you had better get used to the idea quickly. This was a doublethink because the same latitude was not extended to the host population; while it was accepted that immigrants would naturally wish to band together and preserve their cultural identity, when the white working-class communities made similar protestations, this was regarded, once again, as evidence of an antediluvian racism. Your fish and chip shop is now a halal butcher? Your daughter’s school now has a majority of Urdu-speaking children? Good! Celebrate the change! Get over it….
“The news that the bombers of July 7 last year and those who allegedly plotted to blow up a whole bunch of aeroplanes were British born apparently came as a shock to the government. Well, it did not come as a shock to those of us who viewed multiculturalism as both dangerous and inherently racist…. In the end, it is not the mad mullahs at whom we should direct our wrath, but the white liberals who enabled them to prosper.”
Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times, 27 August 2006