Category Archives: Right wing

‘Multiculturalism – tribalism recycled’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The bombings in London have finally put the multicultural ideal under closer scrutiny…. At its deepest level, multiculturalism represents a denial of all Western claims to truth. The purpose of multiculturalism is to extirpate the truly free cultures by asserting that they are equivalent to primitive, Islamic cultures…. If all cultures and religions are equally worthy of respect, why didn’t the West remain in the age when we burned witches and held slaves? We progressed and left Islam behind because we possessed the ability to criticize ourselves and move on. The only cultures worthy of respect are those who can withstand scrutiny. If yours is too weak to survive this treatment, then you do not belong in a Western society.”

Wolfgang Bruno’s blog, 3 October 2005

Note the approving nod to Kenan Malik.

‘Multiculturalism costs lives’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Multiculturalism is a divisive political doctrine that creates enormous costs, foments racial hatred, and may even have been complicit in cultivating the homegrown suicide bombers of July 7, according to a new report from the independent think-tank Civitas.”

National Secular Society news report, 3 October 2005

And what is this mild-sounding organisation Civitas that the NSS cites so approvingly? Well, actually, it’s a hard right anti-migrant outfit that numbers Anthony (“Islam really does want to conquer the world”) Browne among its leading contributors.

Civitas explains that the message of the report, The Poverty of Multiculturalism by Patrick West, is that “hard” multiculturalism has led “some Western intellectuals, who regard themselves as progressive, into the perverse position of defending cultures that condone the killing of homosexuals and the virtual enslavement of women, whilst denigrating the culture of the free societies of the West, inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment”.

Civitas provides the following quote from Mr West: “State-sponsored multiculturalism has led to cities such as Bradford, Burnley and Oldham fissuring along sectarian lines, and to heightening racial tensions between whites and Asians – with white people feeling ‘the other lot’ are getting favourable treatment from the local council…. The rise of the BNP in the north …  is the result of white people seeing themselves discriminated against by local authorities.”

Civitas press release, 30 September 2005

From Private Eye’s ‘Street of Shame’ column

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The détente following the July bombings between the office of the Mayor of London and his arch enemy, the Evening Standard, was bound to be shortlived.

After the Standard wrongly accused a Muslim bookshop-owner of peddling hatred, Ken’s team used the September issue of The Londoner freesheet to take the Standard to ask, demanding an apology and an article to set the matter straight.

Staff at the Dar Al Taqwa bookshop, near Baker Street, have received threatening and abusive phone calls ever since the Standard published its address and phone number in its “Terror and hatred for sale in central London” article on 28 July.

Dar Al Taqwa, owned by Samir El-Attar, has sold books on the Qur’an, Arabic and travel to Londoners for more than 20 years, but none of the extremist books or videos pictured next to a photo of the shop has ever been sold on the premises. Mr El-Attar even points out that one of the items pictured was actually a DVD of an anti-terrorism lecture by Dr Zakir Naik.

The Standard has so far refused to run an apology, but it did print a clarification that “the videos and books pictured with the article” had never been on sale at Dar Al Taqwa.

Private Eye, 30 September 2005

(For earlier coverage see here, here and here.)

Recent attacks on Ahmad Thomson in the Tory press (see for example here) are perhaps not unconnected with the fact that he has represented Dar Al Taqwa in its dispute with the Standard (see here).

New MCB complaint over Panorama

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Muslim Council of Britain says it is to write to the BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit about an edition of the current affairs programme Panorama. The announcement came after the editor of Panorama rejected an MCB objection that the programme was “deeply unfair”.

Panorama had quoted one of its founders as saying the body was “in denial” about extreme views among its members. The MCB said it was at the “forefront” of criticising extremism and it was “not satisfied” with the response. In its original complaint, the MCB claimed editors “deliberately garbled” interviews with Muslims in the programme.

BBC News, 30 September 2005 

Panorama rejects MCB complaint over Panorama programme

Posted on by Bob Pitt

John WareThe editor of BBC current affairs show Panorama has rejected complaints from the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) who said a programme was “deeply unfair”.

The MCB complained after Panorama quoted one of its founders as saying the body was “in denial” about extreme views that prevail among its members. The group claimed editors “deliberately garbled” interviews with Muslims.

But Panorama editor Mike Robinson has now said it was an “unwarranted and wildly inaccurate attack” on the show. “I have found there to be no truth in your claims that this programme was dishonestly presented, maliciously motivated or Islamophobic,” he wrote to the MCB.

BBC News, 30 September 2005

No doubt the programme’s reporter John Ware was equally innocent of bias when he headed an earlier Panorama Special in 2003, on asylum seekers, which the then home secretary David Blunkett denounced for “pursuing a Powellite anti-immigration agenda”. See here.

Or to go back earlier still, in 1987 Panorama was responsible for a programme entitled “Brent Schools – Hard Left Rules”. As Julian Petley recounts, in the recently published book Culture Wars: “This was introduced by John Ware who once, perhaps significantly, worked for the Sun…. it’s worth noting that this particular edition of Panorama provoked an unusually large number of complaints.”

Petley writes of Ware’s interview with Brent council leader Merle Amory that “quite clearly, the sole purpose behind Ware’s interviewing techniques was to get Amory to make an incriminating remark about Trotskyist penetration of Labour”. Amory and other councillors “were never allowed freely to put their own or the council’s point of view, unlike those critical of the council’s policies – their function in the programme was simply to stand at the receiving end of criticisms levelled by their opponents and reinforced not only by Ware himself but by the very manner in which they were actually interviewed.”

I imagine Iqbal Sacranie knows exactly how they must have felt.

NUS response to ‘When Students Turn to Terror’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Commenting on the Glees report into extremist groups operating on university campuses, When Students Turn to Terror, NUS National President Kat Fletcher and NUS Black Students’ Officer Pav Akhtar said:

“The paper offers nothing to the serious debate about how to address terrorism in society.

“No evidence is presented to support the view that campus life contributes to students becoming involved in terrorism, other than that some individuals who have been, or are alleged to have been, involved in terrorist activity also attended a UK college at some point.

“The report proposes imposing quotas on the number of ethnic minority students attending any individual university; abolishing the ‘clearing’ system that allows students to find an alternative university if they have not achieved the grades needed for their first choice; forcing all student societies to include dons on their committees; and restricting academic discussion on certain topics.

“NUS fears that the report’s unsubstantiated claims have the potential to endanger Muslim students by inflaming a climate of racism, fear and hostility, and place a cloud over perfectly legitimate student Islamic societies.

“NUS is calling on its members to work together to engage all students and defend the rights of faith and cultural groups to self-organise as societies. Unions are encouraged to support minority student groups including the Islamic society, against any backlash or exclusion. We encourage student officers to meet with their Black and minority ethnic groups on campus at the beginning of term to ensure access to welfare and support provisions is clear and that students report any incidents of hate crime.”

Posted on educationet, 28 September 2005

Mad Mel discovers the barbarism of the slave trade

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“From the early seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, thousands of British men women and children were kidnapped by Arab corsairs and sold into slavery in Morocco where they were kept in conditions of unspeakable barbarism.” Melanie Phillips discovers “a seaborne Islamic jihad against Britain which lasted for no less than two centuries”.

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 27 September 2005

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought that around that time Christian Britain was itself not immune to the barbaric practice of trading slaves. But then, I was forgetting, that was entirely different – the victims were not white people.

No to ‘Islamofascist’ Turkey

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“On Oct. 3, representatives of the European Union and the Turkish government of Islamist Recep Erdogan will meet to determine if Muslim Turkey will be allowed to seek full membership in the EU. It will be best for Turkey, to say nothing of Europe and the West more generally, if the EU answer under present circumstances is: ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ The reason Europe should politely, but firmly, reject Turkey’s bid should be clear: Prime Minister Erdogan is systematically turning his country from a Muslim secular democracy into an Islamofascist state governed by an ideology anathema to European values and freedoms.”

Frank J. Gaffney in the Washington Times, 27 September 2005

‘Have we the stomach to defeat radical Islam?’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Thousands of anti-war protesters (and pro-war counter protesters) marched in Washington, D.C., this past weekend, and emotions ran high. They filled the air with angry questions about everything from how soon we’ll withdraw from Iraq to how many more ‘children’ we’re ‘willing to sacrifice’, as Cindy Sheehan asked the crowd. Good luck finding anyone ready to face the real choice before America and Europe: Namely, will the West decisively confront the threat posed by radical Islam? Or will it ride its fabled ‘tolerance’ into oblivion?”

Rebecca Hagelin at World Net Daily, 27 September 2005

Fears over Christians attending Muslim schools

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Two senior Church leaders have risked reigniting the controversy over faith schools by voicing their reservations about Christian children going to Muslim faith schools.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, welcomed that fact that Jewish and Muslim parents sent their children to Catholic schools because they like the “ethos”. But he said that he would not want large numbers of Catholic children attending Muslim schools because he would not want them to be brought up “in that atmosphere”.

The Cardinal added that, while he welcomed dialogue between the faiths, “fundamentally the creed of Islam is totally diverse from the creed of Christianity.”

His remarks were echoed by the Rt Rev Tom Butler, the Church of England Bishop of Southwark, who said he would not have sent his children to a Muslim school. “Although religion is taken seriously in a Muslim school, I think the particular insight of Islam is… is not mine,” he said.

Both clerics were speaking on the BBC2 programme God and the Politicians, due to be broadcast tomorrow night.

The comments of the Churchmen was greeted with disappointment by Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, who said that he had received his secondary education in a Catholic school.

Reacting to remarks by his fellow faith leaders, he told the programme: “I think this is the difficulty which we have – that what is good for myself and my children should also be seen to be good for others as well. And as much as we are all professing that we have to have that understanding of each other, it is important this should be also put into practice.”

Daily Telegraph, 27 September 2005