Category Archives: Right wing

Mad Mel and Robert Spencer denounce FO memo on Qaradawi

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Melanie Phillips (“Britain’s Foreign Office fifth column”) has a rant at the Foreign Office memorandum recommending that Yusuf al-Qaradawi should not be banned from Britain, as Mel and her mates have been demanding.

As always when reading Phillips’s tirades, you have the sense of stepping into a parallel universe – one in which Britain’s “own Foreign Office is acting as a kind of appeasement fifth column in the very heart of government”; one in which “there has never been a single authoritative challenge to the veracity or integrity of MEMRI’s authoritative translations, which have opened the eyes of the west to what the Arab and Muslim world is really saying”.

As for Mockbul Ali, the author of the FO’s document, with its accurate characterisation of MEMRI’s role, Mel comments: “when Ali gets to the Jews, his guard slips and he endorses the conspiracy theory which is the signature of the Islamic extremist.”

But Mel does have a good word for one person. Yes, it’s our old friend Nick Cohen, whose “fine polemic in the Observer” receives her enthusiastic endorsement.

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 5 September 2005

Meanwhile over at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer too rallies to the defence of Yigal Carmon and his associates: “What did MEMRI do? It printed what Qaradawi said. And once again doing so has been characterized by jihadist Muslims and their allies as ‘hatred’.” As for the memo’s point that Qaradawi’s view on Palestine and Iraq are not unusual amongst mainstream Muslims, Spencer retorts: “That’s true: they’re not unusual. Neither was Nazism among Germans.”

In the comments section to this post we have the usual paranoid ravings about how the FO’s policy on Qaradawi “will grant the jihadists every single thing that they wish for, without having to fire a shot, and reduce us all to dhimmi servitude” … plus declarations of support for Peter Tatchell and the Worker Communist Party of Iran.

Dhimmi Watch, 5 September 2005

Revealed: the heroin smuggling shame of Islamic leader’s father

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Mail on Sunday makes an issue of the fact that Inayat Bulglawala’s father was convicted of smuggling heroin back in the 1980s. As Inayat patiently explained to them: “We have a principal in Islam that sins are not inherited. It wasn’t me who committed the crime.” Other papers, to their credit, appear to have ignored the Mail‘s crude stitch-up. However, it did strike a chord with the fascists.

See BNP news article, 4 September 2005

Immigration control advocate rallies GOP activists

Posted on by Bob Pitt

US congressman Tom “nuke Mecca” Tancredo continues his anti-migrant campaign, the East Valley Tribune reports.

“Tancredo has … called for a reduction in legal immigration, saying American culture is in danger of being overwhelmed and washed away by a tide of foreign residents who aren’t assimilating quickly enough. And he has actively encouraged the Minuteman Project and other unauthorized civilian groups who claim to be helping the federal government by conducting their own border patrols. ‘The situation on the border is tinderbox with some people armed to the teeth who are racists or affiliated with hate groups and who are being urged on by elected officials such as Tancredo’, said Mark Potok, director of a Southern Poverty Law Center project that tracks hate groups.

“Tancredo added fuel to the criticism in July when he told a Florida radio station the U.S. would have to consider using nuclear weapons against Islamic holy sites such as Mecca if Muslim terrorists ever detonate a nuclear device in an American city. Even many fellow immigration control advocates said Tancredo had gone too far. But Tancredo refused to apologize, as his statements fit into his belief the war on terrorism is fundamentally a fight against a religion that desires the destruction of Western civilization, instead of a battle against a small, radical element at the edges of mainstream Islam.”

Bush aide slams anti-Muslim hatred

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Karen HughesA close aide of US President George Bush told an annual convention of American Muslims that hatred directed at Muslims was no more acceptable than violence done in the name of Islam.

“As we want Muslim voices to speak out against terror and violence and extremism, it is equally important that we be mindful of speaking out against all voices of hate and incitement including those raised against Muslims themselves,” Karen Hughes told the opening of the annual meeting of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) on Friday, September 2.

Hughes, one of Bush’s closest communications advisers, urged people of all faiths to speak out against the “backlash and widespread demonization of Islam and Muslims” that followed the 9/11 attacks and the London bombings, blamed on Muslim extremists.

Islam Online, 3 September 2005

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Telegraph boosts Fallaci

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Reprinting an article that originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Telegraph devotes a whole page to boosting the Italian racist Oriana Fallaci, recently in the news after her “supporters” leaked the information that she had held a private discussion with the pope.

Sunday Telegraph, 4 September 2005

Given that Brett Lock of Outrage! recently attacked this site for criticising right-wing Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it can only be a matter of time before he and Peter Tatchell declare their solidarity with Fallaci too.

‘Moslems censor American speech’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Recently, the Mohammedans won a coup getting a conservative talk show host, Michael Graham, fired from WMAL-AM, an ABC Radio affiliate…. The Muslims got Graham for telling the truth. It’s going to get a lot worse. More Americans must speak in public with a lot more of the painful truth of Islam. This historical truth is so politically incorrect it shouts down the public pandering from the President down to not dare offend oh-so-sensitive Muslims. Like, Islam is a (or do they insist it is ‘the’?) Religion of Peace. If Islam is a Religion of Peace then Aztec Paganism was the Religion of Mercy…. Muslim armies killed, raped, and destroyed more in their conquests against Christians, Pagans and Hindus than all the Crusades put together…. And Islamic Civilization is 800 years behind Western Civilization. By any measure that you mark Islam is as far behind the West as the Germanic Tribes were behind Rome. Islamic Civilization is barbaric compared to West. Truth isn’t Islamophobia.”

James A. Bowden rallies to the defence of poor victimised Michael Graham. Mind you, on this evidence he probably regards Graham as a bit of a liberal Islamophile.

MichNews.com, 31 August 2005

Mad Mel and Tariq Ramadan

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The government’s desperation to engage with ‘moderate’ Islam appears to mean that it is keen to embrace even those who believe in Islamicising the west, as long as they make ritual noises denouncing the terror that flows from such an agenda. At the root of this is its determination to avoid at all costs being thought to have a problem with the current state of Islam itself as opposed to a few ‘unrepresentative’ terrorists, whose motivation will therefore be ascribed to everything but. Such myopia spells cultural suicide.”

Mad Mel condemns the government’s decision to appoint Tariq Ramadan to a Home Office task force.

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 31 August 2005

As you might anticipate, she parrots accusations from Daniel Pipes’ attack on Professor Ramadan (the same one that provided the basis for the Sun’s recent witch-hunt). For Ramadan’s demolition of Pipes’ slanders, see here

Pope meets racist

Posted on by Bob Pitt

FallaciPope Benedict XVI held a meeting at his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, a strident critic of Islam, Vatican sources confirmed. The 76-year-old writer, who describes herself as an atheist Christian and was sued in Italy for insulting the Muslim faith in one of her books, asked to meet the pope, a source said. The meeting on Saturday between Benedict XVI and the former war correspondent became public only after Fallaci’s associates let slip that the meeting took place.

Based in the United States where she is being treated for cancer, Fallaci once said in a newspaper interview that she was comforted by the writings of German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became pope after the death of John Paul II. “Europe is no longer Europe, it is ‘Eurabia,’ a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense,” Fallaci told The Wall Street Journal on June 23. “Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty,” she said. “I feel less alone when I read Ratzinger’s books,” the journalist added.

But writing in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera three weeks later, she said integrating Muslims in Western society was a “nightmare” and criticised the pope’s call for dialogue with Muslim leaders after the July 7 London suicide bombings.

AFP report, 30 August 2005

Australian politician defends call for headscarf ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

School studentLiberal backbencher Bronwyn Bishop has defended her push to ban Muslim girls from wearing headscarves at public schools, despite widespread condemnation from school groups, Muslim leaders and fellow politicians.

“I think it is because a lot of people are thinking about it and I think it’s time people stood up to be counted,” Ms Bishop told ABC radio. “It has become the icon, the symbol of the clash of cultures, and it runs much deeper than a piece of cloth. The fact of the matter is we’ve got people in our country who are advocating – and I’m talking about extremist Islamist leaders – the overturning of our laws which guarantee freedom.”

Ms Bishop said she had no problem with members of other faiths adorning themselves with religious symbols, such as Christians wearing a cross or Orthodox Jews a yarmulke. “I have no concerns about people who wear a cross or people who wear a skull-cap because I haven’t heard any leaders of those communities stand up and say the very fabric of our society should be overturned,” she said.

Australian Secondary Principals Association president Ted Brierley said it was a non-issue among schools. “I’m not aware of any schools that are making this an issue,” he said.

The Age, 29 August 2005