Category Archives: Right wing

Another plug for Anthony Browne from the fascists

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Anthony Browne,Prat of the YearIn fact the Nazis are so taken with Browne’s anti-PC diatribe The Retreat of Reason that they’re selling it through their online bookshop.

BNP news report, 5 January 2006

Mind you, the BNP’s press officer Phil Edwards is rather less enthusiastic, though he does have a personal axe to grind here:

“When I read Anthony Browne’s earlier book ‘Do we need Mass Immigration?’ (Published by Civitas in 2002) I was struck by how so much of it seemed to be cribbed from my writings, broadcasts and newspaper and radio interviews from around 1997 onwards.”

BNP website, 5 January 2006

Double standards on Israel and Palestine

Posted on by Bob Pitt

IDF“Everyone in a democracy has the right to argue for their views and engage in public debate. But there is no equality when it comes to how the British government treats those who want to give physical support to Israel and those who want to do the same for the Palestinians. Such double standards feed resentment in Britain’s Muslim community at the government’s failure to recognise its legitimate grievances, as highlighted in yesterday’s report by the thinktank Demos.

“In recent months the media have reported on the recruitment of British Jews to fight in the Israeli army, now in its 40th year of occupation of Palestinian territory in defiance of international law and UN resolutions. Some are intending to emigrate; others to return to Britain after serving in the Israeli army. But we have not had a word of concern from the British government.

“In the Muslim community, however, the question is widely raised as to how British citizens can travel to another country and fight in its army of illegal occupation without any repercussions. Would that be the case if, say, a young Muslim or Briton of Palestinian origin travelled to the occupied Palestinian territories – let alone occupied Iraq – to protect his or her homeland or co-religionists? Of course not: such volunteers could expect to be arrested under this government’s anti-terrorism legislation as soon as they returned.”

Ismail Patel in the Guardian, 5 November 2006

No doubt Melanie Phillips will rally to the defence of British citizens who go to Israel to join the IDF and oppress the Palestinians. But then, I was forgetting, Phillips has stated emphatically that “British Jews do not serve in the Israeli army“.

Andy Armitage defends ‘free speech’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Former editor of the now defunct Gay and Lesbian Humanist magazine Andy Armitage replies to the Guardian piece on the split in GALHA. He continues to defend his decision to publish the notorious article by Diesel Balaam. “Neither the writer of that article nor we as editors are racist. We criticise religions and do not care about the racial origin of people who practice them.”

Guardian, 4 January 2006

Needless to say, Robert Spencer is fully behind Andy. Dhimmi Watch, 2 January 2006

Nazis back Anthony Browne

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A message of support from the British National Party: “Well done to Anthony Browne for putting across the case against Political Correctness so well….”

BNP news article, 4 January 2006

The Metro article that the BNP applauds, which plugs Browne’s views on political correctness, in fact features a photograph of Anthony Browne the children’s fiction writer! Hopefully, he’ll sue.

Anthony Browne is coming

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Followers of Islamophobia Watch will be familiar with Anthony Browne of “Islam really does want to conquer the world” notoriety, the man who was paid for an anti-immigration article by a right-wing US website. Well, Anthony has authored a new Civitas pamphlet entitled The Retreat of Reason, which attacks the scourge of political correctness. As you might expect, he repeats the endless right-wing refrain that multiculturalism has produced Muslim “ghettos” which in turn produced the July bombings in London.

See BBC News, 3 January 2006

Among the politically correct “myths” that Browne denounces is the view that anti-semitic attacks are carried out by white skinheads, whereas in reality (according to Browne) the perpetrators are young Muslims.

Civitas press release, 2 January 2006

And what is the source of Browne’s information? If you consult pp.12-13 of his pamphlet, you’ll find that it’s taken from a report entitled Manifestations of Anti-Semitism in the European Union commissioned by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, which the EUMC refused to distribute because of its unreliability. In his recently published book Beyond Chutzpah (p.35), Norman Finkelstein writes:

“the EUMC maintained that the report … was ‘biased’ and ‘lacking in empirical evidence’. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana concurred that ‘it did not meet the criteria of consistency and quality of data’. In fact, the data assembled in the Manifestationsreport, the standards it used to measure anti-Semitism, and the conclusions it reached barely rose above the comical.”

Which hasn’t prevented Browne’s pamphlet being hailed by Melanie Phillips.

Postscript
Also worth noting are the following passages from Browne’s pamphlet:

“One of the most successful campaigns for victim status has been by Muslim groups in Britain, notably the Muslim Association of Britain, which increases its clout by inflating the number of Muslims in Britain by a million more than the official census, and by accusing anyone who tackles its extremist Islamist agenda of ‘Islamophobia’. Although it has a thoroughly oppressive agenda (supporting terrorism against innocent civilians, promoting the rights of husbands to beat their wives and the execution of gays), the MAB passes itself off as oppressed so convincingly that it has fooled the PC establishment, notably the Guardian, Independent and BBC, into promoting it unquestioningly” (p.43).

And further on: “Now, one of the biggest issues facing Britain is the rise of radical Islam among Britain’s growing Muslim communities. The politically correct response – and that of the British government – is to pander to Islamic militancy by, for example, curbing the freedom to debate Islam, creating tax-funded Islamic schools and campaigning for Muslim Turkey to be admitted as the biggest member of the European Union” (p.54).

But Browne is prepared to give credit where its due. He applauds “Peter Tatchell, a man of such uncompromising principles that he has infuriated many on the relativist left” – in particular with his hysterical campaign against Yusuf al-Qaradawi (p.25).

Western civilisation succumbs to Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“If a population ‘at odds with the modern world’ is the fastest-breeding group on the planet – if there are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational institutions – how safe a bet is the survival of the ‘modern world’?”

Mark Steyn in the New Criterion, January 2006

Melanie Phillips is impressed (“great piece by Mark Steyn”), but Robert Auster feels that Steyn’s emphasis on demographic changes and the West’s “lack of civilizational confidence” (due to “the progressive agenda – lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism”) underestimates the evils of Muslim immigration.

See Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 2 January 2006 and View From the Right, 1 January 2006

Blogs, threats force Muslim meeting to relocate

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Chantal CarnesChantal Carnes didn’t recognize herself. A friend had e-mailed her a blogger’s article. It described Carnes as a supporter of terrorists, a fan of suicide bombing. Her friend thought the article was a joke. “No, dude,” Carnes said. “This is really serious.”

Carnes, a Chicago resident who converted to Islam 11 years ago, was scheduled to speak at a spiritual retreat for Tampa Muslims this weekend. But after bloggers alleged that the event was a thinly veiled terrorist indoctrination, anonymous callers bombarded the Muslim American Society of Tampa with death threats and curses. The director of the Lithia church camp that was to host the event decided to close the camp for the weekend after she, too, received threats.

On Dec. 27, blogger Joe Kaufman began writing about an event he called “a jihad retreat for children.” Over the course of the week, he wrote that Carnes was “well known in the radical Islamist American community.” He wrote that the retreat’s other speaker, Mazen Mokhtar of New Jersey, was linked to al-Qaida. Other bloggers quickly picked up the theme. “You gotta start your kids on the road to martyrdom early, or there’ll be no one left to murder,” a blogger known as “Ace of Trump” wrote about the retreat.

St Petersburg Times, 1 January 2006

Turning the War on Terror into a War on Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Louay Safi“The Extreme Right has finally found a clever way to arrest America’s march towards asserting its foundational principles of equality, religious freedom, and the rule of law. Their strategy is to transform the war on terror into a war against Islam and use security needs to subvert constitutional protection.”

Louay Safi on the threat posed by the Islamophobic Right in the US. He continues:

“Robert Spencer, a prolific anti-Islam writer and a leading Islamophobe who is bent on distorting Islam and demonizing Muslims, has persistently argued that violence and terrorism employed by Muslim extremists is rooted in the Quran and its message. Spencer calls the Quran, a book sacred to Muslim, ‘the jihadists’ Mein Kampf’, in reference to Hitler’s memoir. He openly blames the Quran for giving impetus to the terrorist open war against the West.”

Media Monitors Network, 29 December 2005

A good article, but I rather doubt that the Bush administration pays much attention to the ravings of Jihad Watch. If they found Daniel Pipes a political embarrassment, what must they make of Robert Spencer? Spencer’s role is rather to whip up anti-Muslim bigotry among the general populace in order to prime public opinion to accept Bush’s imperialist warmongering abroad and suppression of civil liberties at home as a necessary defence against the Islamic hordes.