Category Archives: Right wing

Howard and Hanson back Costello

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Prime Minister John Howard has backed his deputy Peter Costello over the treasurer’s call for radical Muslims to assimilate or move to another country.

Mr Costello made a host of radio and television appearances today to hammer home his attack on what he calls “mushy multiculturalism”. He also challenged Muslim leaders to pledge their allegiance to Australia before criticising his views on immigrants and the values they brought to this country.

Mr Costello’s remarks come three days after the publication of comments by Mr Howard, accusing some Muslims of bringing jihadist views and opinions about women that did not fit in Australian society. Last week Liberal backbencher Danna Vale warned that Muslims could be in the majority in Australia within 50 years.

Muslim leaders say they are concerned about a continuing government attack on their religion and called on Mr Howard to censure Mr Costello. Federal Labor politicians accused Mr Costello of playing politics and trying to distract attention from the AWB Iraq wheat bribes scandal.

But NSW Labor Premier Morris Iemma said Mr Costello was right. And former One Nation leader Pauline Hanson said the treasurer had vindicated her own views.

Mr Howard said Mr Costello’s comments were fundamentally accurate and not designed to inflame or divide people. “What Peter was basically saying is that if people don’t like what this country is then they shouldn’t come here,” Mr Howard told Southern Cross Broadcasting. “That is an unexceptionable position to take.”

Sydney Morning Herald, 24 February 2006

Protest to Telegraph over call for Qur’an ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Danish publisher Bookwright has circulated an appeal in response to Patrick Sookhdeo’s interview in last week’s Sunday Telegraph:

Sunday Telegraph article calls for the Qur’an to be Banned

An article by Alasdair Palmer in last week’s Sunday Telegraph (19 Feb 2006) entitled “The day is coming when British Muslims form a state within a state” contains the following paragraph:

“… For example, there is a book, The Noble Koran: a New Rendering of its Meaning in English, which is openly available in Muslim bookshops. It calls for the killing of Jews and Christians, and it sets out a strategy for killing the infidels and for warfare against them. The Government has done nothing whatever to interfere with the sale of that book. Why not? Government ministers have promised to punish religious hatred, to criminalise the glorification of terrorism, yet they do nothing about this book, which blatantly does both.”

You will probably know that the publication referred to is the Bewley translation of the Qur’an which is rapidly being recognised as one of the most accurate and readable translations. Not only does Palmer’s interviewee advocate banning the sale of the Qur’an but describes its contents in such a way as to suggest it is nothing more than a handbook on terrorism. He falsely claims that it “calls for the killing of Jews and Christians”.

The Qur’an does not call for Jews and Christians to be killed. This claim is a malicious lie. Furthermore the interviewee urges that the Qur’an itself be made illegal. It is outrageous that the Sunday Telegraph should promote such a viewpoint, particularly in the context of recent events. We cannot permit Allah’s Book to be traduced in this way in the National Press and allow the Sunday Telegraph to promote such an abhorrent view of the Qur’an.

It is important to note that this article represents a new and more sinister development. Previously, we have had attacks on the person of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, the bearer of the revelation. This attack is on the revelation itself, and thus indicates a new and more dangerous front opened in the war on Islam. Certainly the minimum we can do is send an e-mail to the editor of the Sunday Telegraph expressing our outrage at this unprecedented open attack on the Qur’anic text.

The editor’s e-mail address is:

Sarah Sands: sarah.sands@telegraph.co.uk

Please forward this mail to as many people as possible and urge them to write to the Sunday Telegraph.

Open season on Islam – Salma Yaqoob

Posted on by Bob Pitt

salmayaqoob“The reverberations from Muslim protests offended at the cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) continue to resound. Despite peaceful protests in London by Muslim Association of Britain and Muslim Council of Britain, the organisers still found themselves subject to an attack in the Sunday Express (February 12) for failing to do enough to tackle extremism. On the same theme, the British National Party, fresh from their acquittal of inciting racial hatred, have announced plans to turn the May local elections into a ‘referendum’ on Islam. Other far right groups have made threats of book-burning sessions of the Qur’an. For Muslims, past echoes of Nazi demonisation of the Jews don’t seem so far away.”

Salma Yaqoob in the Muslim News, 24 February 2006

Australian politician says: disloyal Jews should go home

Posted on by Bob Pitt

In a controversial speech to the Sydney Institute, Federal Treasurer Peter Costello warned that Jews should pledge allegiance to Australia or go home. Jews who value Halacha (Jewish law) over Australian law “should be refused citizenship if they apply for it. Where they have it they should be stripped of it if they are dual citizens and have some other country that recognises them as citizens.”

“Before entering a synagogue visitors are asked to put a yarmulke on their head,” Mr Costello said. “This is a sign of respect. If you have a strong objection to putting something on your head don’t enter the synagogue.” He warned Jews, “before becoming an Australian you will be asked to subscribe to certain values. If you have strong objection to those values, don’t come to Australia.”

In a rebuke to “mushy multiculturalism” he said “there is one law we are all expected to abide by – it is the law enacted by Parliament under the Australian Constitution.” If Jews, and for that matter Aboriginies, wish to live by a different cultural or religious law then they should move somewhere else. The problem is what to do with the children of disloyal Jews and Aboriginies who were born here.

Dervish weblog, 24 February 2006

Or, for the actual story, see The Age, 24 February 2006

Cartoon furor exposes double standards

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Cartoon furor exposes double standards

By Haroon Siddiqui

Toronto Star, 23 February 2006

Gary Younge, the New York-based black British columnist, has written this about the Danish cartoon controversy in The Nation magazine:

“Muslims have, in effect, been vilified twice: once through the original cartoons and then again for having the gall to protest them. Such logic recalls the words of the late South African black nationalist Steve Biko: `Not only are whites kicking us, they are telling us how to react to being kicked.'”

Confusion continues to mark the Western response to the issue. Some of this is because we are in uncharted waters. But something else is at work — double standards and insidious attempts at delegitimizing the Muslim protests.

Notorious British historian David Irving has just been sentenced in Vienna to three years for denying the Holocaust. Radical British Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al Masri has been jailed, among other things, for inciting hatred. About time.

Yet there’s silence from freedom of speech advocates who were on their pulpits just days ago.

Continue reading →

Another example of religious extremism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tempers are reaching boiling point in the French Jewish community after the torture and murder of a young Jewish man by a suburban gang calling itself “the barbarians”.

Police had said that the gang kidnapped Ilan Halimi, 23 using a beautiful, young, blonde woman as bait to extort money from his family. However, the victim’s family and many other Parisian Jews are convinced the crime was, at least partially, racially motivated.

A Parisian member of parliament, Claude Goasguen, said yesterday the city could face “extremely serious intra-community violence” unless the authorities abandoned their “persistent silence on the real motives for this murder”.

At the weekend, a mainly peaceful protest march by Parisian Jews was marred by a number of violent actions by radical young Jewish men. A black man was beaten up, allegedly for “smiling” at the protest. An Arab-run grocery was attacked. A motorist who was caught up in the march was assaulted and had to be rescued by demonstration marshals.

Tracts were handed out by Jewish radical groups which claimed that Ilan Halimi, a mobile telephone salesman, was a victim of “Islamo-fascism”.

Independent, 21 February 2006

Which only goes to show that there are extremists and thugs within every ethno-religious community. However, in this case, I rather doubt that “clash of civilisations” rhetoric will be wheeled out to explain the actions of an unrepresentative minority of demonstrators or that liberal and right-wing commentators will produce articles asserting that Judaism is incompatible with western values. Islamophobia is so much more acceptable than anti-semitism.

Islam threatens Old Masters shock

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Spencer and PipesOur friend Robert Spencer was over in the Netherlands last week attending the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference at The Hague, along with other sensitive students of all things Islamic such as Daniel Pipes (pictured, with the lovely Robert himself), Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom.

All that was required was the presence of Melanie Phillips and Peter Tatchell to present a complete picture of Islamophobic hell.

It was, Robert tells us, “delightful to be in Holland in the company of so many interesting people”. And he treats us to a little anecdote about visiting the Mauritshuis museum to admire the works of Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer:

“I couldn’t help but notice that while hijabbed women were common on the streets of The Hague – I’d guess that one out of every 5 or so women I saw in the center of the city was wearing one – there were absolutely none inside the museum. Of course, for a pious Muslim the works of the masters are so much jahiliyya – the products of the society of unbelievers – and hence worthless.

“Of course, everyone is free not to go to a museum, but there is more to it than that. The ideological kin of those who blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan have entered the Netherlands in large numbers…. But did the people moving through the Mauritshuis with Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye’or, David Littman and me realize how much that ideology imperils the paintings they were so coolly admiring, and the museum in which we were admiring them? I do not think they did. That ignorance, of course, was what our Conference was trying to address.”

Jihad Watch, 20 February 2006

McKinstry invokes George Orwell

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Why do we insist on being friends with the enemies of freedom?

By Leo McKinstry

Daily Express, 20 February 2006

George Orwell’s epic work 1984 painted a nightmarish picture of Britain under a brutal totalitarian regime. In this grim police state, all dissent had been crushed.

Orwell’s book, published in 1949 shortly before his death, was a powerful warning against the tyranny of socialism. But more than half a century later, with the Berlin Wall having fallen, the greatest threat to our liberty now comes from the potent dogma of radical Islam.

Orwell’s 1984 may have been a work of fiction, yet the soul-destroying oppression he so brilliantly described was all too real, since most of Eastern Europe and all of Russia was under the dictatorship of Stalin.

As a passionate democrat and patriot, Orwell came to despise the refusal of British Left-wingers to challenge the horrors that were being practised in the name of socialism.

He loathed their moral relativism and shameful eagerness to ally themselves with the enemies of freedom.

Today, in the face of Islamic aggression, such cowardice and appeasement is not confined just to the Left but has infected all the civic institutions of Britain.

While they prattle about the joys of multiculturalism, the British authorities, led by the Labour government and the police, cower before militant Muslims. In their mood of continual surrender, they prefer to oppress the ordinary public rather than stand up to the hardliners. So they allow London to be turned into a haven for terrorists and then, in the resultant chaos, tell us that we will all have to carry ID cards.

They allow Abu Hamza to operate with impunity for almost a decade, then impose restrictions on our freedom of speech. So thanks to the outlook of the Government, a climate of genuine fear now prevails in Britain because of Islam. While we are all threatened by terrorism, few dare to speak their minds for fear of being on the receiving end of a bomb – or a visit from the local constabulary for daring to “offend religious sensibilities”.

The July bombings and the Danish cartoon protests have only intensified the efforts of the State to disguise the menace of radical Islam. Even now we are told that we must celebrate diversity, since the vast majority of Muslims are moderate and Islam is really a peace-loving religion. That kind of propaganda always seemed dubious.

If the adherents of Islam are so moderate, then why have they only taken to the streets to wail, often in extreme language, about the Danish cartoons?

Since 9/11 there has not been a single march in Britain to protest about the worldwide atrocities being committed in the name of Allah.

Continue reading →

British Muslims want stoning and amputation, Sun warns

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Nearly half of all Muslims living in Britain want harsh Sharia law in THIS country. The strict Islamic legal system – which in extreme cases involves punishments such as STONING and AMPUTATION – applies in hardline Muslim countries.”

Sun, 20 February 2006

In the same paper, Trevor Kavanagh writes: “Can you imagine women walking the streets of Britain wearing Taliban-style burkas? The stoning of adulterous wives? The amputation of limbs for theft? Of course not. It would be barbaric and unthinkable. Yet a new poll shows that four out of ten British Muslims now favour strict Sharia law for their communities…. Riots and protest marches may still be the work of a ferocious minority. But the new poll shows this minority is growing and it is using the cartoons, conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and images from Abu Ghraib prison as recruiting tools.

“Hardliners have a powerful weapon at their disposal – the Muslim faith itself. Imams in 200 UK mosques hark back to Islam’s 7th-century glory days when small armies of determined men swept out of Arabia, conquering Spain and threatening Europe to the gates of Vienna and Paris. The faith teaches that territory, once Islam, is forever Islam. And Jihad – the call for action to support the faith – is the duty of every Muslim…. this ‘call for action’ is now the driving force of those fanning the flames of protest across the Muslim world. They believe they are under orders, not just from Osama bin Laden, but from the Prophet Muhammad himself. Their goal is to Islamicise the world. And for the first time in centuries they believe they can achieve it.”