Category Archives: Right wing

Anti-Muslim hate speech gets sites removed from Google News

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Those of us who use Google News have often been appalled by the inclusion of articles from anti-Muslim hate sites. To their credit, Google have now decided to remove some of the most egregious examples of internet Islamophobia.

The New Media Journal was kicked off Google News after posting an article entitled “How Has Islam Enriched Your Life?” by syndicated columnist Arlen Peck. In it, Peck wrote: “It is common for the men to have multiple wives, and harvest many children with each of his wives to train for martyrdom.” He asked: “Is it really tacky of me to smile at the nightly scenes on TV showing Arab, Afghani and Pakistani Muslims bombing mosques and killing their Muslim brothers, sisters and children at a brisk pace because that’s all they know how to do?”

The Journal said it feels it did nothing wrong by running these stories. “Something frighteningly ominous has been happening on the Internet lately: Google, without any prior explanation or notice, has been terminating its News relationship with conservative e-zines and web journals,” the Journal posted on its site.

eWeek, 23 May 2006

They should be ashamed

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“I was in Warsaw to speak at an OSCE conference on Islamophobia when my office forwarded me an article that had just appeared in the New York Sun, a purveyor of incitement and hate, masquerading as a newspaper. Entitled ‘The Three Myths About Islam‘, the article sets out to demonstrate that because of liberal political correctness, Americans had come to believe a number of falsehoods about Islam: namely that it is a peaceful, tolerant and under attack. In fact, according to the author, the opposite is true. The religion of 1.5 billion, he claims, is, by its nature and history, intolerant, aggressive, and violent….

“While the article was clearly disturbing, I might not have become as upset as I did (since I don’t expect anything more from the Sun), had it not been for the fact that the author of this malevolent attack was identified as a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), one of Washington’s premier think tanks. More troubling is the fact that the article was being distributed to a larger list, via email, by an official at the Washington office of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), one of the US’s mainstream Jewish organizations….

“From Warsaw, I wrote to the AJC demanding an explanation. I noted that if an Arab American or Muslim American group had distributed a piece called ‘The Three Myths of Judaism’, that had similarly grotesquely caricatured the Jewish faith, that group would have been called anti-Semitic – a rebuke they would have rightly deserved.”

James Zogby writes in The American Muslim, 22 May 2006

More on Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Posted on by Bob Pitt

There’s a pretty dreadful article on Ayaan Hirsi Ali in today’sObserver by Jason Burke, who you’d have thought would know better, and a no less one-sided comment piece by Isabella Thompson. Hirsi Ali is described as a “radical liberal” (!) in the headline to Burke’s article and neither he nor Thompson bothers to address the appalling role she has played in stoking up anti-Muslim hysteria in the Netherlands.

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Why the jig is up for Hirsi Ali in Holland

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Why the jig is up for Hirsi Ali in Holland

She catered to the worst prejudices about Muslims, Islam says Haroon Siddiqui

Toronto Star, 21 May 2006

The sudden fall from grace of Dutch Muslim MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali offers a cautionary tale about Western gullibility in these Islamophobic times.

She has been exposed as the equivalent of such Iraqi exiles as Ahmad Chalabi and Iyad Allawi. They told the tall tales the Bush administration wanted to hear to wage war. She told the stories the Dutch, and many Europeans, craved, to confirm their anti-Muslim prejudices.

Like the Iraqi exiles, she knew exactly which buttons to push.

She was an abused wife who had fled a forced marriage and also her vengeful family and clan. An “ex-Muslim,” she was out to liberate Muslim women and tame Islam to her liking and those of her benefactors.

She wrote and narrated the Theo Van Gogh documentary Submission about the subjugation of Muslim women that led to his murder and to death threats against her, placing her under 24-hour guard.

Along the way she let it be known she had lied about her name, age and how she had entered Holland in 1992, not directly from her homeland of Somalia but via Saudi Arabia, Kenya and Germany, a fact that would have undermined her claim, rather than expedited it.

The Dutch didn’t mind. Many refugee claimants embellish their stories. Besides, she was a heroine they had embraced, a “moderate” Muslim waging war against “fanatical” believers.

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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.

‘We call it Islamic terrorism because it is terror inspired by Islam’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Another incoherent anti-Muslim diatribe from Nick Cohen in the Observer. He applauds the editor of Die Welt who re-published the Danish cartoons on the grounds that “it is essential to protect freedom of expression because of all the pain we have invested to keep our liberal, secular society”. Somehow, you can’t imagine Cohen offering similar congratulations to an editor promoting “free speech” by printing anti-semitic caricatures. But publish racist illustrations directed against Muslims and Cohen will acclaim you as a defender of secular liberalism.

Cohen also takes exception to an admirable call by the EU to avoid the term “Islamic terrorism”. He objects that “the EU wishes to deny that political Islam inspires terrorists to blow up everything from mosques in Baghdad to tube trains in London, even when Islamist terrorists say explicitly that it does”. Perhaps Cohen would like us to refer to Bush and Blair as “Christian terrorists”, on the basis that they both make it clear that their politics are inspired by their religious beliefs? But then, I was forgetting – Cohen enthusiastically approves of that sort of terrorism, seeing the invasion and occupation of Iraq as a means of bringing liberal secular values to the benighted Muslim masses.

Mind you, Cohen does have one admirer – Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, who pays tribute to this “most welcome anti-dhimmitude from Nick Cohen”. Dhimmi Watch, 14 May 2006

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s lies

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Robert Spencer and Hirsi AliRather untypically, Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch has rallied to the defence of an illegal Muslim migrant: “Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has spoken up repeatedly and heroically, at immense personal risk and loss, against the Islamic jihad ideology – and particularly its inhumanity to women – is being hounded by dhimmis in the Netherlands.”

It turns out that Hirsi Ali (or Hirsi Magan to give her right name), the one-time collaborator of Theo Van Gogh and MP for the right-wing anti-migrant party the VVD, told a lot of porkies to claim asylum back in 1992.

As one critic put it: “To secure for herself a promising career she besmirched her family and the Islamic background that gave her a good education. She deliberately painted a black picture of Islam that she never experienced as such, only to profit from it. The Dutch party she is an MP for, the VVD, knew she had lied. They used her in their anti-Islamist and anti-left campaign. And Ayaan Hirsi ‘Ali’ presented the world with a fancy story it very much liked to hear.”

Hirsi Ali has now been offered a job in the US with the neocon American Enterprise Institute, starting in September. Muslims in the Netherlands will be glad to see the back of her. Nasr Joemman, secretary of the Contact Organisation for Muslims and Government, said that Hirsi Ali’s attacks on Islam had caused “a lot of damage”. He added: “I celebrate that she is leaving the Netherlands. I hope that by her departure we can move forward with building a harmonious society.”

Mad Mel to join BNP?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

madmelMelanie Phillips explains why Britain is under threat from the Muslim hordes:

“Like much of Europe, Britain’s demographic composition is changing radically and very fast. At the most conservative estimate, its population of sixty million will rise over the next three decades by six or seven million, with 83 per cent of that new growth coming from immigration and most of that from the third world. The undesirability of such a drastic – and never debated – development is one of Britain’s great Unmentionables….

“The prevailing culture of non-discriminatory entitlement and minority rights meant the courts came to thwart all government attempts to enforce immigration controls. At root was the judges’ belief that the citizens of the world were entitled to exactly the same rights as the citizens of Britain. The result has been the deconstruction of British citizenship and the loss of sovereignty over national borders, laws and values…. the resulting chaos has made security impossible as the intelligence service has no means of keeping tabs on suspected terrorists.

“This was one of the key drivers behind the creation of what is known derisively as ‘Londonistan’, as Britain became the epicentre of the Islamic jihad in Europe. The country’s homage to freedom of speech, generous welfare entitlements and the fact that immigrants could simply lose themselves in the system turned Britain into a magnet for Islamist terrorists and extremists. But anyone who questioned the desirability of such trends was promptly denounced as a racist. Immigration was held to be an absolute good. Multiculturalism became the driving force of British life, ruthlessly policed by an army of local and national bureaucrats enforcing a doctrine of state-mandated virtue to promote racial, ethnic and cultural difference and stamp out majority values….

“The more the free world defends itself, the more the Islamists claim they are under attack. So the more atrocities there are against the west, the more the Islamists claim they are victims of Islamophobia…. The national identity of Britain is based on a particular culture, history, language, religion, law, customs and values. It cannot still remain recognisably itself if it makes itself home to large numbers of people who cannot or do not wish to assimilate into that identity. That’s not racism. It’s national survival.”

TCS Daily, 11 May 2006

I’m increasingly coming round to the view that the ideal political home for Phillips would be the British National Party.