Category Archives: Right wing

Stephen Schwartz on the whingeing Wahhabis

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Stephen SchwartzStephen Schwartz offers his assessment of a recent OSCE conference in Poland.

CBS News, 8 October 2005

In Schwartz’s world-view, of course, virtually all non-Sufi strands of Sunni Islam qualify as “Wahhabism”. Note also that the original version in the Weekly Standard carries the strap: “Extremists get together to worry about intolerance”! CBS evidently baulked at describing an OSCE meeting in such terms.

Schwartz writes: “The OSCE is, to put it bluntly, political correctness personified. Its agenda for combating intolerance and discrimination includes everyone from prostitutes to victims of schoolyard bullying.” After all, why should anyone waste their time worrying about the exploitation of sex workers or the victims of school bullies?

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Jihad Watch on the ‘clash of civilizations’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The phrase ‘clash of civilizations’, made famous by Samuel Huntington, is misleading. In Huntington’s formulation (he owed an unacknowledged good deal to Adda Bozeman, who taught at Sarah Lawrence in the days when Kurt Rausch taught painting to well-bred young women and Randall Jarrell was taking notes for ‘Pictures from an Institution’), there are the Sinic, the Orthodox, the Hindu, the Islamic, the Western, and so on. And these are all potentially clashing. But this is nonsense. There is only one clash that counts: that of Islam with all of non-Islam.”

Hugh Fitzgerald give his take on the “clash of civilisations” thesis.

And what solution does he propose? “… to put a complete stop to Muslim immigration, and to find creative ways to deport all Muslim non-citizens. These two measures would be accompanied by the creation of an environment where the practice of Islam is made not easy but difficult. Meanwhile, authorities would engage in wholesale efforts to explain, both to the population of Europe and to the Muslims in its midst, the real nature of Islam. They would explain why it is encourages despotism … economic paralysis … intellectual failure … and moral failure.”

Jihad Watch, 9 October 2005

More right-wing applause for Trevor Phillips

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The equality watchdog Trevor Phillips used to irritate the hell out of me. To be frank, I never felt he properly engaged with the real issues affecting modern multi-racial Britain. He always seemed to pussyfoot around the edges, indulging himself in the soft option of political correctness. Either I was plumb wrong … or the guy has just awoken from a kind of intellectual torpor and emerged, virtually overnight, as a clear-sighted, acerbic and fearless crusader against the long-held dogmas and obsessions of our traditionally self-serving race-relations industry.

“Phillips has transformed the office of Head of the Commission for Racial Equality into an abattoir for the slaughter of sacred cows. This week he took a series of cherished beliefs held dear for decades and put them to the sword. Some of the principal pillars of multi-culturalism – one of the most pernicious, wrong-headed creeds of modern times – were shaken to their foundations as he actually dared to ask questions that have been long proscribed. Such as, why it is necessarily wrong to describe people as coloured; why town halls should print forms in a variety of different ethnic languages; why Muslim pupils should be excused from wearing full school uniform.

“Another shibboleth to be chucked overboard was the traditional condemnation of the British Empire. Phillips actually praised it for mixing people of different races and religions, and exhumed the long-buried truism that the British people are not, by nature, bigots. ‘We created something called the Empire where we mixed and mingled with people very different from those of these islands,’ he said. This is terrific stuff….”

Richard Madeley (of Richard & Judy) in the Daily Express, 8 October 2005

A Robert Spencer doppelganger writes

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Understanding what motivates the enemy is essential to defeating it. The commander in chief took a major step in that direction with last week’s speech tying terrorism to ‘Islamic radicalism’…. With Thursday’s speech, he also abandoned his mantra that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’…. The president could have gone even further to explain what motivates the terrorists. He left the impression they are all heretics distorting the idea of jihad and defiling their scripture…. The unpleasant truth is, Muslim terrorists are getting all these terrible ideas – from violent jihad to self-immolation to even the beheadings we’ve seen in Pakistan and Iraq – straight out of the text of their holy book.”

Investor’s Business Daily, 7 October 2005

I assumed that the anonymous author was in fact Robert Spencer, but apparently not. See Jihad Watch, 8 October 2005

On second thoughts, perhaps it was Brett Lock.

Danish cartoon controversy

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten is facing accusations that it deliberately provoked and insulted Muslims by publishing twelve cartoons featuring the prophet Mohammed.

The newspaper urged cartoonists to send in drawings of the prophet, after an author complained that nobody dared to illustrate his book on Mohammed. The author claimed that illustrators feared that extremist Muslims would find it sacrilegious to break the Islamic ban on depicting Mohammed. Twelve illustrators heeded the newspaper’s call, and sent in cartoons of the prophet, which were published in the newspaper one week ago.

Daily newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad said one Muslim, at least, had taken offence. “This type of democracy is worthless for Muslims,” Imam Raed Hlayhel wrote in a statement. “Muslims will never accept this kind of humiliation. The article has insulted every Muslim in the world. We demand an apology!”

Jyllands-Posten described the cartoons as a defence for “secular democracy and right to expression”. Hlayhel, however, said the newspaper had abused democracy with the single intention of humiliating Muslims.

Lars Refn, one of the cartoonists who participated in the newspaper’s call to arms, said he actually agreed with Hlayhel. Therefore, his cartoon did not feature the prophet Mohammed, but a normal Danish schoolboy Mohammed, who had written a Persian text on his schoolroom’s blackboard.

“On the blackboard it says in Persian with Arabic letters that ‘Jyllands-Posten‘s journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs’,” Refn said. “Of course we shouldn’t let ourselves be censored by a few extremist Muslims, but Jyllands-Posten‘s only goal is to vent the fires as soon as they get the opportunity. There’s nothing constructive in that.”

Copenhagen Post, 6 October 2005

Islamophobia Watch cruel to Panorama

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yes, it’s true – we were really, really horrible to poor John Ware, the reporter who headed the Panorama witch-hunt of the Muslim Council of Britain (see here). Still, Ware has his admirers. Anthony “The Muslims are coming” Browne is a supporter, and so is Brett Lock of Outrage.

Lock & Load, 3 October 2005

And Lock also finds himself in a bloc with Mad Mel. See Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 3 October 2005

Alliances with Islamophobic right-wingers are par for the course with Mr Lock. See, for example, here.

Islam is the problem – Mark Steyn

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“I found myself behind a car in Vermont, in the US, the other day; it had a one-word bumper sticker with the injunction ‘COEXIST’. It’s one of those sentiments beloved of Western progressives, one designed principally to flatter their sense of moral superiority. The C was the Islamic crescent, the O was the hippie peace sign, the X was the Star of David and the T was the Christian cross. Very nice, hard to argue with. But the reality is, it’s the first of those symbols that has a problem with coexistence. Take the crescent out of the equation and you wouldn’t need a bumper sticker at all.

“Indeed, coexistence is what the Islamists are at war with; or, if you prefer, pluralism, the idea that different groups can rub along together within the same general neighbourhood. There are many trouble spots across the world but, as a general rule, even if one gives no more than a cursory glance at the foreign pages, it’s easy to guess at least one of the sides: Muslims v Jews in Palestine, Muslims v Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims v Christians in Nigeria, Muslims v Buddhists in southern Thailand, Muslims v (your team here). Whatever one’s views of the merits on a case by case basis, the ubiquitousness of one team is a fact.”

Mark Steyn in The Australian, 4 October 2005

EU opens talks on membership for Turkey – Robert Spencer not happy

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Robert Spencer is less than enthusiastic about the possibility of Turkey’s entry into the EU: “there is still some hope that Turkey will be rejected, and Europe saved. But that hope is slim”. He adds: “In a speech last month, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Turkish membership would ‘demonstrate that Western and Islamic cultures can thrive together as partners in the modern world’. Partners? Will the Islamic culture allow for that? What evidence does Jack Straw have that Islam has set aside or will set aside its supremacist imperative? None whatsoever, of course.”

Dhimmi Watch, 4 October 2005