Category Archives: Right wing

Muslims = Nazis, Front Page Magazine claims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Muslims can’t stand the thought of Holocaust commemorations, because, with certain honorable exceptions, Islam’s attitudes toward the Jews frequently mirror those of the Nazi killers.” Don Feder offers his insights into the MCB’s proposal that Holocaust Memorial Day should be broadened out into a Genocide Day.

Front Page Magazine, 27 September 2005

In fact, Holocaust Memorial Day is often observed as a more general commemoration of the victims of genocide. The event I attended this year included a gay men’s choir and a speaker on the mass killings in Rwanda as well as a Jewish survivor of the Nazi extermination camps.

It’s also worth remembering that when the idea of a Holocaust Memorial Day was flagged up in the late 1990s, it proved controversial not only among Muslims but also within the Jewish community in Britain. Left-wing Jews criticised it on the basis that it ignored or at least downplayed the existence of non-Jewish victims of genocide. Right-wingers opposed it because they claimed that the history of Jewish suffering under the Nazis was being harnessed to Labour’s “equalities agenda”. And ultra-orthodox Jews rejected it because they argued that the Holocaust was divine retribution on the Jewish people for their sins and that condemning it was to question God’s judgement.

Muslims want Australian PM to stop inciting hatred

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslims rallying in Sydney say the federal government’s proposed anti-terrorism laws would be a major infringement of their rights. Hundreds of members of the Muslim community met at Punchbowl, in Sydney’s south-west, to demonstrate their concerns that the federal government’s actions were inciting hatred towards their culture.

Federation of Australian Muslim Students and Youth (FAMSY) National president Chaaban Omran said Prime Minister John Howard had failed his community by not doing enough to stop anti-Muslim discourse. Mr Omran said the recent London bombings, calls by politicians to ban Muslim headdress in public schools and the media’s negative portrayal of the religion were feeding a growing prejudice. But he described Canberra’s proposed new anti-terror laws as be the largest infringement on the rights of Muslim Australians.

Earlier this month, Mr Howard flagged a new package of security measures, including tighter checks on citizenship applicants, jail terms for inciting violence and police powers to detain suspects without charge for up to a fortnight.

“Instead of coming out with practical steps to address terrorism, these laws will just work to create more intolerance towards Muslims,” Mr Omran told AAP. “As Australians, we just want to be treated like everyone else, we don’t wish to have all these laws set out that will lead to us becoming targets.”

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Teenage punks behind black hijabs

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The unsmiling girl in the black hijab defined her identity thus: ‘I am a Muslim of Arab origin, living within British society.’ Hadil, 18, could not attend a more racially integrated school than Quintin Kynaston in West London where, according to its Ofsted report, ‘the wealth of cultures and faiths is valued, respected and appreciated’.

“Hadil, along with a number of fellow pupils, had taken part in a documentary called ‘Young, British and Muslim’ and here she was up on stage, giving her views to an audience at the National Film Theatre. Yet in reply to the question ‘Do you feel British?’ Hadil shrugged and said: ‘I look at British culture and see no moral values which appeal to me.’

“And it was hard not to bristle, not to think unbecoming, angry thoughts such as: ‘Why endure our repulsive morality a moment longer? Wouldn’t you simply be happier in a Muslim country?'”

Janice Turner in the Times, 24 September 2005

See also Daniel Pipes blog, 24 September 2005

‘Don’t sacrifice free speech to appease the Muslim fanatics’ says McKinstry

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Leo McKinstry in the Express usefully summarises all the lies and distortions promoted by opponents of the religious hatred bill. “It is a scandal that centuries of the right to free expression can be overthrown because of the craven wish to appease Islamic extremism.” You know the sort of thing.

McKinstry claims: “Our laws already provide ample protection against genuine hate crimes. In 2003, for instance, Mark Norwood, a British National party activist in Shropshire, was prosecuted under the Public Order Act for displaying a poster which read: ‘Islam out of Britain’.”

In fact, the successful prosecution of Norwood was not for inciting hatred – he was convicted (in 2002) on the relatively minor charge of causing religiously aggravated “harassment, alarm or distress”. An attempt to convict another BNP member, Dick Warrington, under racial hatred legislation for displaying a poster with the same “Islam Out of Britain” slogan failed because Islam is not a mono-ethnic religion and therefore it is held that Muslims cannot be victims of racial hatred.

It is nonsense to claim, as McKinstry does, that only Muslim organisations back the proposed new law. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Church of England, the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, the Hindu Council and the Network of Sikh Organisations are among those who support the Bill.

And so on, and so forth.

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Milan Muslim school row escalates

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Members of the Northern League – a key party in Italy’s ruling coalition – are threatening to protest outside a controversial Muslim school in Milan.

The row over the school – closed down by the authorities – is testing Italian attitudes to Muslim immigrants. Parents of the 500 children who attended the school are continuing to demonstrate outside.

Tensions were heightened by the death of a boy, killed by a car as he crossed the road outside the school this week. The Northern League – a regionally-based party that is vitriolic in its criticism of immigrants, especially Muslims – has scuppered a planned prayer meeting for the boy.

It plans to demonstrate against any compromise which gives ground to the parents, who want help to set up a school where their children can learn Arabic and the Koran alongside the normal state curriculum.

The school’s supporters are unfazed – although they say they will keep a low profile if the League protest does materialise.

BBC News, 23 September 2005

‘A brave voice’ – Daily Mail applauds Trevor Phillips

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The language is stark, the message almost apocalyptic. Is Britain really ‘sleepwalking to segregation’, with ‘the walls going up round many of our communities’ and growing barriers to integration in cities where most of the population is non-white?

Not for the first time, the black chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, is venturing into territory where few white politicians would dare to tread.

Didn’t the London bombings in July expose the dangers of a ghetto mentality encouraged by multiculturalism? Isn’t something very wrong when young British-born men are so alienated from the mainstream that they can plan mass murder against their fellow citizens?

If segregation is turning Britain into a ‘breeding ground’ for terrorists, as Mr Phillips argues, it is time to think again.

Should we encourage more Muslim faith schools, if they don’t cater for other religions too, as CofE and Catholic schools do? Can’t we at last find the courage to challenge the woefully misbegotten liberal obsession with multiculturalism?

Trevor Phillips has raised some serious issues. Don’t they demand honest debate?

Leader in the Daily Mail, 23 September 2005

Sheikh Al-Qaradawi welcomes Anglican Church’s initiative

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Qaradawi2Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the leading and world renowned Sunni scholar, has welcomed the initiative of the Bishops of the Church of England calling on Britain’s Christian leaders to apologise to the Muslims because of what the war on Iraq has caused. In a meeting with a delegation of British Muslims visiting him at his residence in Doha, Qatar, the Sheikh said the Bishops clearly denounce the war and seem to tell us that they regret it. It is as if they wish to apologise on behalf of the British government. This, the Sheikh added, is a very positive step although we do not hold the Anglican Church responsible for the policy of the British government which insisted in taking part in the war against the wish of the majority of the British people who have since the very beginning been opposed to it.

MAB press release, 22 September 2005

Melanie Phillips is less impressed: “Is there no limit to the abjectness of the Church of England’s response to Islamic terror?”

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 20 September 2005 

Swedish party urges monitoring Muslim students

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Swedish right-wing Liberal People’s Party has called on school teachers to spy on their Muslim students under the pretext of combating extremism, drawing immediate rebuke from the teachers union.

“We want Swedish teachers to spy on their Muslim students who have extremist tendencies,” the party’s education spokesman, Jan Björklund, said Wednesday, September 21.

Liberal People’s Party MP Lotta Edholm has also proposed cooperation between the teachers and Säpo (intelligence service) to hunt down “Muslim extremists”. “We see for us a form of information exchange: Säpo should inform teachers about these groups but the schools should also give important information to Säpo about how young people think,” she added.

Since 2002 the Liberal People’s Party has been seeking to attract voters by adopting right-wing populist policies. Party leader Lars Leijonborg has proposed tougher rules for immigrants applying for the Swedish citizenship. The party recently hosted controversial Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a vocal critic of Islam.

The proposal of the Liberal People’s Party drew immediate fire from the teachers’ union Lärarförbundet. “If one is going to observe students on a very vague basis and do what Säpo has asked it could have long-term and destructive consequences for the individual student,” Eva-Lis Preisz, the union’s chairwoman, told Aftonbladet newspaper.

In an opinion poll by the Dagens Nyheter newspaper, some 64% of the respondents opposed spying on Muslim school children, while 34% supported the proposal.

Islam Online, 22 September 2005